Repetition Enhancement for Frequency-Modulated but Not Unmodulated Sounds: A Human MEG Study

BACKGROUND: Decoding of frequency-modulated (FM) sounds is essential for phoneme identification. This study investigates selectivity to FM direction in the human auditory system. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Magnetoencephalography was recorded in 10 adults during a two-tone adaptation paradigm with a 200-ms interstimulus-interval. Stimuli were pairs of either same or different frequency modulation direction. To control that FM repetition effects cannot be accounted for by their on- and offset properties, we additionally assessed responses to pairs of unmodulated tones with either same or different frequency composition. For the FM sweeps, N1m event-related magnetic field components were found at 103 and 130 ms after onset of the first (S1) and second stimulus (S2), respectively. This was followed by a sustained component starting at about 200 ms after S2. The sustained response was significantly stronger for stimulation with the same compared to different FM direction. This effect was not observed for the non-modulated control stimuli. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Low-level processing of FM sounds was characterized by repetition enhancement to stimulus pairs with same versus different FM directions. This effect was FM-specific; it did not occur for unmodulated tones. The present findings may reflect specific interactions between frequency separation and temporal distance in the processing of consecutive FM sweeps

cIAP-1 Controls Innate Immunity to C. pneumoniae Pulmonary Infection

The resistance of epithelial cells infected with Chlamydophila pneumoniae for apoptosis has been attributed to the induced expression and increased stability of anti-apoptotic proteins called inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAPs). The significance of cellular inhibitor of apoptosis protein-1 (cIAP-1) in C. pneumoniae pulmonary infection and innate immune response was investigated in cIAP-1 knockout (KO) mice using a novel non-invasive intra-tracheal infection method. In contrast to wildtype, cIAP-1 knockout mice failed to clear the infection from their lungs. Wildtype mice responded to infection with a strong inflammatory response in the lung. In contrast, the recruitment of macrophages was reduced in cIAP-1 KO mice compared to wildtype mice. The concentration of Interferon gamma (IFN-γ) was increased whereas that of Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF-α) was reduced in the lungs of infected cIAP-1 KO mice compared to infected wildtype mice. Ex vivo experiments on mouse peritoneal macrophages and splenocytes revealed that cIAP-1 is required for innate immune responses of these cells. Our findings thus suggest a new immunoregulatory role of cIAP-1 in the course of bacterial infection

Evaluation of the impact of interdisciplinarity in cancer care

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Teamwork is a key component of the health care renewal strategy emphasized in Quebec, elsewhere in Canada and in other countries to enhance the quality of oncology services. While this innovation would appear beneficial in theory, empirical evidences of its impact are limited. Current efforts in Quebec to encourage the development of local interdisciplinary teams in all hospitals offer a unique opportunity to assess the anticipated benefits. These teams working in hospital outpatient clinics are responsible for treatment, follow-up and patient support. The study objective is to assess the impact of interdisciplinarity on cancer patients and health professionals.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>This is a quasi-experimental study with three comparison groups distinguished by intensity of interdisciplinarity: strong, moderate and weak. The study will use a random sample of 12 local teams in Quebec, stratified by intensity of interdisciplinarity. The instrument to measure the intensity of the interdisciplinarity, developed in collaboration with experts, encompasses five dimensions referring to aspects of team structure and process. Self-administered questionnaires will be used to measure the impact of interdisciplinarity on patients (health care utilization, continuity of care and cancer services responsiveness) and on professionals (professional well-being, assessment of teamwork and perception of teamwork climate). Approximately 100 health professionals working on the selected teams and 2000 patients will be recruited. Statistical analyses will include descriptive statistics and comparative analysis of the impact observed according to the strata of interdisciplinarity. Fixed and random multivariate statistical models (multilevel analyses) will also be used.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>This study will pinpoint to what extent interdisciplinarity is linked to quality of care and meets the complex and varied needs of cancer patients. It will ascertain to what extent interdisciplinary teamwork facilitated the work of professionals. Such findings are important given the growing prevalence of cancer and the importance of attracting and retaining health professionals to work with cancer patients.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Mean amplitudes for each timing condition in the time window 450–800 ms.

<p>Mean amplitudes for each timing condition in the time window 450–800 ms.</p

Response accuracy.

<p>Error bars indicate the SD.</p

Stimulus alignment for the three timing conditions.

<p>Critical targets are marked in black. <i>iso-SOA</i> = isochronous physical syllable onsets; <i>iso-PC</i> = isochronous vowel onsets; <i>jit-SOA = </i>jittered physical syllable onsets.</p

Response accuracy.

<p>Response accuracy.</p