MRI Findings in 77 Children with Non-Syndromic Autistic Disorder

International audienceBACKGROUND: The clinical relevance of MR scanning in children with autism is still an open question and must be considered in light of the evolution of this technology. MRI was judged to be of insufficient value to be included in the standard clinical evaluation of autism according to the guidelines of the American Academy of Neurology and Child Neurology Society in 2000. However, this statement was based on results obtained from small samples of patients and, more importantly, included mostly insufficient MRI sequences. Our main objective was to evaluate the prevalence of brain abnormalities in a large group of children with a non-syndromic autistic disorder (AD) using T1, T2 and FLAIR MRI sequences. METHODOLOGY: MRI inspection of 77 children and adolescents with non-syndromic AD (mean age 7.4+/-3.6) was performed. All met the DSM-IV and ADI -R criteria for autism. Based on recommended clinical and biological screenings, we excluded patients with infectious, metabolic or genetic diseases, seizures or any other neurological symptoms. Identical MRI inspections of 77 children (mean age 7.0+/-4.2) without AD, developmental or neurological disorders were also performed. All MRIs were acquired with a 1.5-T Signa GE (3-D T1-FSPGR, T2, FLAIR coronal and axial sequences). Two neuroradiologists independently inspected cortical and sub-cortical regions. MRIs were reported to be normal, abnormal or uninterpretable. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: MRIs were judged as uninterpretable in 10% (8/77) of the cases. In 48% of the children (33/69 patients), abnormalities were reported. Three predominant abnormalities were observed, including white matter signal abnormalities (19/69), major dilated Virchow-Robin spaces (12/69) and temporal lobe abnormalities (20/69). In all, 52% of the MRIs were interpreted as normal (36/69 patients). CONCLUSIONS: An unexpectedly high rate of MRI abnormalities was found in the first large series of clinical MRI investigations in non-syndromic autism. These results could contribute to further etiopathogenetic research into autism

Antiretroviral Drug Resistance and Routine Therapy, Cameroon

Among 128 patients routinely receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy in an HIV/AIDS outpatient clinic in Cameroon, 16.4% had drug resistance after a median of 10 months. Of these, 12.5% had resistance to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), 10.2% to non-NRTIs, and 2.3% to protease inhibitors

Interactive handwriting recognition with limited user effort

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10032-013-0204-5[EN] Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. Although post-editing automatic recognition of handwritten text is feasible, it is not clearly better than simply ignoring it and transcribing the document from scratch. A more effective approach is to follow an interactive approach in which both the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, in some applications, the user effort available to transcribe documents is limited and fully supervision of the system output is not realistic. To circumvent these problems, we propose a novel interactive approach which efficiently employs user effort to transcribe a document by improving three different aspects. Firstly, the system employs a limited amount of effort to solely supervise recognised words that are likely to be incorrect. Thus, user effort is efficiently focused on the supervision of words for which the system is not confident enough. Secondly, it refines the initial transcription provided to the user by recomputing it constrained to user supervisions. In this way, incorrect words in unsupervised parts can be automatically amended without user supervision. Finally, it improves the underlying system models by retraining the system from partially supervised transcriptions. In order to prove these statements, empirical results are presented on two real databases showing that the proposed approach can notably reduce user effort in the transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No 287755 (transLectures). Also supported by the Spanish Government (MICINN, MITyC, "Plan E", under Grants MIPRCV "Consolider Ingenio 2010", MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01), erudito.com (TSI-020110-2009-439), iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511), and FPU (AP2007-02867), and the Generalitat Valenciana (Grants Prometeo/2009/014 and GV/2010/067).Serrano Martinez Santos, N.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Civera Saiz, J.; Sanchis Navarro, JA.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Interactive handwriting recognition with limited user effort. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. 17(1):47-59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-013-0204-5S4759171Agua, M., Serrano, N., Civera, J., Juan, A.: Character-based handwritten text recognition of multilingual documents. In: Proceedings of Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IBERSPEECH 2012), Madrid (Spain), pp. 187–196 (2012)Ahn, L.V., Maurer, B., Mcmillen, C., Abraham, D., Blum, M.: reCAPTCHA: human-based character recognition via web security measures. 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Process. 3, 1–31 (2006)Kristjannson, T., Culotta, A., Viola, P., McCallum, A.: Interactive information extraction with constrained conditional random fields. In: Proceedings of the 19th Natural Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Jose, CA (USA), pp. 412–418 (2004)Laurence Likforman-Sulem, A.Z., Taconet, B.: Text line segmentation of historical documents: a survey. Int. J. Doc. Anal. Recognit. 9, 123–138 (2007)Le Bourgeois, F., Emptoz, H.: Debora: digital access to books of the renaissance. Int. J. Doc. Anal. Recognit. 9, 193–221 (2007)Levenshtein, V.I.: Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Sov. Phys. Dokl. 10(8), 707–710 (1966)Neal, R.M., Hinton, G.E.: Learning in graphical models. In: A View of the EM Algorithm That Justifies Incremental, Sparse, and Other Variants, Chap. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 355–368 (1999)Pérez, D., Tarazón, L., Serrano, N., Ramos-Terrades, O., Juan, A.: The GERMANA database. 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Mountain maple and balsam fir early response to partial and clear-cut harvesting under aspen stands of northern Quebec

This study is a component of the Sylviculture et am

TIPIT: A randomised controlled trial of thyroxine in preterm infants under 28 weeks gestation: Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Magnetic Resonance Angiography protocol

<p>Abstract </p> <p>Background</p> <p>Infants born at extreme prematurity are at high risk of developmental disability. A major risk factor for disability is having a low level of thyroid hormone described as hypothyroxinaemia, which is recognised to be a frequent phenomenon in these infants. Derangements of critical thyroid function during the sensitive window in prematurity when early development occurs, may have a range of long term effects for brain development. Further research in preterm infants using neuroimaging techniques will increase our understanding of the specificity of the effects of hypothyroxinaemia on the developing foetal brain. This is an explanatory double blinded randomised controlled trial which is aimed to assess the effect of thyroid hormone supplementation on brain size, key brain structures, extent of myelination, white matter integrity and vessel morphology, somatic growth and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The study is a multi-centred double blinded randomised controlled trial of thyroid hormone supplementation in babies born below 28 weeks' gestation. All infants will receive either levothyroxine or placebo until 32 weeks corrected gestational age. The primary outcomes will be width of the sub-arachnoid space measured using cranial ultrasound and head circumference at 36 weeks corrected gestational age. The secondary outcomes will be thyroid hormone concentrations, the hypothalamic pituitary axis status and auxological data between birth and expected date of delivery; thyroid gland volume, brain size, volumes of key brain structures, extent of myelination and brain vessel morphology at expected date of delivery and markers of morbidity which include duration of mechanical ventilation and/or oxygen requirement and chronic lung disease.</p> <p><b>Trial registration</b></p> <p>Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN89493983</p