Familiarity-based stimulus generalization of conditioned suppression

We report that stimulus novelty/familiarity is able to modulate stimulus generalization and discuss the theoretical implications of novelty/familiarity coding. Rats in Skinner boxes received clicker → shock pairings before generalization testing to a tone. Before clicker training, different groups of rats received preexposure treatments designed to systematically modulate the clicker and the tone's novelty and familiarity. Rats whose preexposure matched novelty/familiarity (i.e., either both or neither clicker and tone were pre-exposed) showed enhanced suppression to the tone relative to rats whose preexposure mixed novelty/familiarity (i.e., only clicker or tone was pre-exposed). This was not the result of sensory preconditioning to clicker and tone

Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment, Impact on Engagement and Behaviour of People Who Inject Drugs, a service evaluation, the Hooked C project

There is emerging evidence that Hepatitis C (HCV) treatment engagement is associated with change in drug behaviours and reduced drug-related death rates among people who inject drugs (PWID). The project aims to investigate whether HCV diagnosis and treatment engagement reduces all-cause mortality and drug-related death, and whether any effect is dependent on treatment regimen and intensity of engagement with staff. Case-control studies comparing: PWID with active HCV infection (PCR positive) to PWID HCV infected but spontaneously resolved (PCR negative); PCR-positive patients who engaged with treatment services to nonengagers; and patients who received interferon vs direct-acting antiviral (DAA) based treatment. No differences in risk of all-cause mortality or drug-related death between PCR-negative controls and PCR-positive cases were detected. The odds of all-cause mortality was 12.2 times higher in nonengaging persons compared to treatment engaging cases (aOR 12.15, 95% CI 7.03-20.99, P < .001). The odds of a drug-related death were 5.5 times higher in nonengaging persons compared with treatment engaging cases (aOR 5.52, 95% CI 2.67- 11.44, P < .001). No differences in risk of all-cause mortality or drug-related death between interferon-treated cases and DAA-treated controls were detected. HCV treatment engagement is significantly protective against all-cause mortality and drug-related death. This engagement effect is independent of treatment regimen, with the introduction of DAA therapies not increasing risk of drug-related death, suggesting intensity of HCV therapy provider interaction is not an important factor

Trends in evapotranspiration and its drivers in Great Britain: 1961 to 2015

In a warming climate, the water budget of the land is subject to varying forces such as increasing evaporative demand, mainly through the increased temperature, and changes to the precipitation, which might go up or down. Using a verified, physically based model with 55 years of observation-based meteorological forcing, an analysis of the water budget demonstrates that Great Britain is getting warmer and wetter. Increases in precipitation (2.96.0 ± 2.03 mm yr–1 yr–1) and air temperature (0.20 ± 0.13 K decade–1) are driving increases in runoff (2.18 ± 1.84 mm yr–1 yr–1) and evapotranspiration (0.87 ± 0.55 mm yr–1 yr–1), with no significant trend in the soil moisture. The change in evapotranspiration is roughly constant across the regions, whereas runoff varies greatly between regions: the biggest change is seen in Scotland (4.56 ± 2.82 mm yr–1 yr–1), where precipitation increases were also the greatest (5.4 ± 3.0 mm yr–1 yr–1), and the smallest trend (0.33 ± 1.50 mm yr–1 yr–1, not statistically significant) is seen in the English Lowlands (East Anglia and Midlands), where the increase in rainfall is not statistically significant (1.07 ± 1.76 mm yr–1 yr–1). Relative to its contribution to the evapotranspiration budget, the increase in interception is higher than the other components. This is due to the fact that it correlates strongly with precipitation, which is seeing a greater increase than the potential evapotranspiration. This leads to a higher increase in actual evapotranspiration than the potential evapotranspiration, and a negligible increase in soil moisture or groundwater store

Testing self-report time-use diaries against objective instruments in real time

This study provides a new test of time-use diary methodology, comparing diaries with a pair of objective criterion measures: wearable cameras and accelerometers. A volunteer sample of respondents (n = 148) completed conventional self-report paper time-use diaries using the standard UK Harmonised European Time Use Study (HETUS) instrument. On the diary day, respondents wore a camera that continuously recorded images of their activities during waking hours (approximately 1,500–2,000 images/day) and also an accelerometer that tracked their physical activity continuously throughout the 24-hour period covered by the diary. Of the initial 148 participants recruited, 131 returned usable diary and camera records, of whom 124 also provided a usable whole-day accelerometer record. The comparison of the diary data with the camera and accelerometer records strongly supports the use of diary methodology at both the aggregate (sample) and individual levels. It provides evidence that time-use data could be used to complement physical activity questionnaires for providing population-level estimates of physical activity. It also implies new opportunities for investigating techniques for calibrating metabolic equivalent of task (MET) attributions to daily activities using large-scale, population-representative time-use diary studies

Commissioning care for people with dementia at the end of life: a mixed methods study.

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ The version of record, Zoe M Gotts, Nicole Baur, Emma McLellan, Claire Goodman, Louise Robinson and Richard P Lee, ‘Commissioning care for people with dementia at the end of life: a mixed methods study’, BMJ Open, 2016,; 6: e013554, is available online at doi: 10.1136/ bmjopen-2016-013554Objectives To understand how end of life care for people with dementia is currently commissioned (.e contracted)and organised, with a view to informing the development of commissioning guidance for good quality community-based end of life care in dementia. Design Mixed-methods study; narrative review and qualitative interviews. Setting 8 NHS clinical commissioning groups and 5 Adult Services across England. Methods Narrative review of evidence; 20 semi structured interviews (telephone and face-to-face) with professionals involved in commissioning end of life care for people with dementia. Main outcome measures Summary of the existing evidence base for commissioning, commissioners’ approaches to the commissioning process for end of life care for people with dementia in England. Results In the context of commissioning end of life care for people with dementia, the literature review generated three key themes; (1) importance of joint commissioning; (2) lack of clarity for the process; and (3) factors influencing commissioning. In exploring health professionals’ perceptions of the commissioning process, ‘uncertainty’ was elicited as an overarching theme across the CCGs interviewed. Organisation of the process, lack of expertise, issues surrounding integration and the art of specification were considered important factors that contribute to the uncertainty surrounding the commissioning process. Conclusions The current evidence base for commissioning end of life care is limited with considerable uncertainty as how clinical commissioners in England undertake the process to ensure future services are evidence-based. Strengths and limitations of this study • The use of a multimethod approach (narrative review, qualitative interviews) allowed for triangulation of our findings. • The evidence indentified in the review may be limited given that ‘commissioning’ is a relatively new term in England. • The review presented is a narrative review; the manuscripts were not subject to a quality assessment process. • Generalisability of findings might be affected by the small number of published studies, their heterogeneity in methodologies, and small sample sizes. • The study highlights that information on commissioning specifically for health and social care in England is limited; this is mirrored in commissioners’ accounts.Peer reviewe

Cortical Surface Diffusion Generative Models

Cortical surface analysis has gained increased prominence, given its potential implications for neurological and developmental disorders. Traditional vision diffusion models, while effective in generating natural images, present limitations in capturing intricate development patterns in neuroimaging due to limited datasets. This is particularly true for generating cortical surfaces where individual variability in cortical morphology is high, leading to an urgent need for better methods to model brain development and diverse variability inherent across different individuals. In this work, we proposed a novel diffusion model for the generation of cortical surface metrics, using modified surface vision transformers as the principal architecture. We validate our method in the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), the results suggest our model demonstrates superior performance in capturing the intricate details of evolving cortical surfaces. Furthermore, our model can generate high-quality realistic samples of cortical surfaces conditioned on postmenstrual age(PMA) at scan.Comment: 4 page

Trends in atmospheric evaporative demand in Great Britain using high-resolution meteorological data

Observations of climate are often available on very different spatial scales from observations of the natural environments and resources that are affected by climate change. In order to help bridge the gap between these scales using modelling, a new dataset of daily meteorological variables was created at 1 km resolution over Great Britain for the years 1961–2012, by interpolating coarser resolution climate data and including the effects of local topography. These variables were used to calculate atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) at the same spatial and temporal resolution. Two functions that represent AED were chosen: one is a standard form of potential evapotranspiration (PET) and the other is a derived PET measure used by hydrologists that includes the effect of water intercepted by the canopy (PETI). Temporal trends in these functions were calculated, with PET found to be increasing in all regions, and at an overall rate of 0.021 ± 0.021 mm day−1 decade−1 in Great Britain. PETI was found to be increasing at a rate of 0.019 ± 0.020 mm day−1 decade−1 in Great Britain, but this was not statistically significant. However, there was a trend in PETI in England of 0.023 ± 0.023 mm day−1 decade−1. The trends were found to vary by season, with spring PET increasing by 0.043 ± 0.019 mm day−1 decade−1 (0.038 ± 0.018 mm day−1 decade−1 when the interception correction is included) in Great Britain, while there is no statistically significant trend in other seasons. The trends were attributed analytically to trends in the climate variables; the overall positive trend was predominantly driven by rising air temperature, although rising specific humidity had a negative effect on the trend. Recasting the analysis in terms of relative humidity revealed that the overall effect is that falling relative humidity causes the PET to rise. Increasing downward short- and longwave radiation made an overall positive contribution to the PET trend, while decreasing wind speed made a negative contribution to the trend in PET. The trend in spring PET was particularly strong due to a strong decrease in relative humidity and increase in downward shortwave radiation in the spring

ICAM: Interpretable Classification via Disentangled Representations and Feature Attribution Mapping

Feature attribution (FA), or the assignment of class-relevance to different locations in an image, is important for many classification problems but is particularly crucial within the neuroscience domain, where accurate mechanistic models of behaviours, or disease, require knowledge of all features discriminative of a trait. At the same time, predicting class relevance from brain images is challenging as phenotypes are typically heterogeneous, and changes occur against a background of significant natural variation. Here, we present a novel framework for creating class specific FA maps through image-to-image translation. We propose the use of a VAE-GAN to explicitly disentangle class relevance from background features for improved interpretability properties, which results in meaningful FA maps. We validate our method on 2D and 3D brain image datasets of dementia (ADNI dataset), ageing (UK Biobank), and (simulated) lesion detection. We show that FA maps generated by our method outperform baseline FA methods when validated against ground truth. More significantly, our approach is the first to use latent space sampling to support exploration of phenotype variation. Our code will be available online at https://github.com/CherBass/ICAM.Comment: Submitted to NeurIPS 2020: Neural Information Processing Systems. Keywords: interpretable, classification, feature attribution, domain translation, variational autoencoder, generative adversarial network, neuroimagin