Using Topic Modelling to Personalise a Digital Self-compassion Training

Young adults that struggle with mental health issues experience barriers to seek help. With our online self-compassion training we try to overcome some of these barriers. To improve our training, we can personalise exercises based on topic modelling. Data from a pilot study is used to analyse and evaluate the algorithm. Overall, the algorithm has an accuracy of 54.1% for predicting the right topic. This accuracy increases to 80.4% when considering an empty prediction to be correct as well. Although this research also shows that our data makes the task of topic modelling difficult, it does prove to be a possibility to personalise the designed training

Red Blood Cell Deformability Is Expressed by a Set of Interrelated Membrane Proteins

Red blood cell (RBC) deformability, expressing their ability to change their shape, allows them to minimize their resistance to flow and optimize oxygen delivery to the tissues. RBC with reduced deformability may lead to increased vascular resistance, capillary occlusion, and impaired perfusion and oxygen delivery. A reduction in deformability, as occurs during RBC physiological aging and under blood storage, is implicated in the pathophysiology of diverse conditions with circulatory disorders and anemias. The change in RBC deformability is associated with metabolic and structural alterations, mostly uncharacterized. To bridge this gap, we analyzed the membrane protein levels, using mass spectroscopy, of RBC with varying deformability determined by image analysis. In total, 752 membrane proteins were identified. However, deformability was positively correlated with the level of only fourteen proteins, with a highly significant inter-correlation between them. These proteins are involved in membrane rafting and/or the membrane–cytoskeleton linkage. These findings suggest that the reduction of deformability is a programmed (not arbitrary) process of remodeling and shedding of membrane fragments, possibly mirroring the formation of extracellular vesicles. The highly significant inter-correlation between the deformability-expressing proteins infers that the cell deformability can be assessed by determining the level of a few, possibly one, of them