Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks for Detecting Suicide Notes

Recent statistics in suicide prevention show that people are increasingly posting their last words online and with the unprecedented availability of textual data from social media platforms researchers have the opportunity to analyse such data. Furthermore, psychological studies have shown that our state of mind can manifest itself in the linguistic features we use to communicate. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to automatically identify suicide notes from other types of social media blogs in two document-level classification tasks. The first task aims to identify suicide notes from depressed and blog posts in a balanced dataset, whilst the second experiment looks at how well suicide notes can be classified when there is a vast amount of neutral text data, which makes the task more applicable to real-world scenarios. Furthermore we perform a linguistic analysis using LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). We present a learning model for modelling long sequences in two experiment series. We achieve an f1-score of 88.26% over the baselines of 0.60 in experiment 1 and 96.1% over the baseline in experiment 2. Finally, we show through visualisations which features the learning model identifies, these include emotions such as love and personal pronouns

Exercise and rehabilitation delivered through exergames in older adults: An integrative review of technologies, safety and efficacy

Background: There has been a rapid increase in research on the use of virtual reality (VR) and gaming technology as a complementary tool in exercise and rehabilitation in the elderly population. Although a few recent studies have evaluated their efficacy, there is currently no in-depth description and discussion of different game technologies, physical functions targeted, and safety issues related to older adults playing exergames. Objectives: This integrative review provides an overview of the technologies and games used, progression, safety measurements and associated adverse events, adherence to exergaming, outcome measures used, and their effect on physical function. Methods: We undertook systematic searches of SCOPUS and PubMed databases. Key search terms included “game”, “exercise”, and “aged”, and were adapted to each database. To be included, studies had to involve older adults aged 65 years or above, have a pre-post training or intervention design, include ICT-implemented games with weight-bearing exercises, and have outcome measures that included physical activity variables and/or clinical tests of physical function. Results: Sixty studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The studies had a broad range of aims and intervention designs and mostly focused on community-dwelling healthy older adults. The majority of the studies used commercially available gaming technologies that targeted a number of different physical functions. Most studies reported that they had used some form of safety measure during intervention. None of the studies reported serious adverse events. However, only 21 studies (35%) reported on whether adverse events occurred. Twenty-four studies reported on adherence, but only seven studies (12%) compared adherence to exergaming with other forms of exercise. Clinical measures of balance were the most frequently used outcome measures. PEDro scores indicated that most studies had several methodological problems, with only 4 studies fulfilling 6 or more criteria out of 10. Several studies found positive effects of exergaming on balance and gait, while none reported negative effects. Conclusion: Exergames show promise as an intervention to improve physical function in older adults, with few reported adverse events. As there is large variability between studies in terms of intervention protocols and outcome measures, as well as several methodological limitations, recommendations for both practice and further research are provided in order to successfully establish exergames as an exercise and rehabilitation tool for older adults.© 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until januar 2017-01-01 due to the copyright restrictions

Correction of endothelial dysfunction in chronic heart failure: additional effects of exercise training and oral L-arginine supplementation

AbstractOBJECTIVESThe aim of this study was to analyze whether L-arginine (L-arg.) has comparable or additive effects to physical exercise regarding endothelium-dependent vasodilation in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF).BACKGROUNDEndothelial dysfunction in patients with CHF can be corrected by both dietary supplementation with L-arg. and regular physical exercise.METHODSForty patients with severe CHF (left ventricular ejection fraction 19 ± 9%) were randomized to an L-arg. group (8 g/day), a training group (T) with daily handgrip training, L-arg. and T (L-arg. + T) or an inactive control group (C). The mean internal radial artery diameter was determined at the beginning and after four weeks in response to brachial arterial administration of acetylcholine (ACh) (7.5, 15, 30 μg/min) and nitroglycerin (0.2 mg/min) with a transcutaneous high-resolution 10 MHz A-mode echo tracking system coupled with a Doppler device. The power of the study to detect clinically significant differences in endothelium-dependent vasodilation was 96.6%.RESULTSAt the beginning, the mean endothelium-dependent vasodilation in response to ACh, 30 μg/min was 2.54 ± 0.09% (p = NS between groups). After four weeks, internal radial artery diameter increased by 8.8 ± 0.9% after ACh 30 μg/min in L-arg. (p < 0.001 vs. C), by 8.6 ± 0.9% in T (p < 0.001 vs. C) and by 12.0 ± 0.3% in L-arg. + T (p < 0.005 vs. C, L-arg. and T). Endothelium-independent vasodilation as assessed by infusion of nitroglycerin was similar in all groups at the beginning and at the end of the study.CONCLUSIONSDietary supplementation of L-arg. as well as regular physical exercise improved agonist-mediated, endothelium-dependent vasodilation to a similar extent. Both interventions together seem to produce additive effects with respect to endothelium-dependent vasodilation

A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Neural Natural Language Generation from Structured Data

Current approaches that generate text from linked data for complex real-world domains can face problems including rich and sparse vocabularies as well as learning from examples of long varied sequences. In this article, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer approach that automatically induces a hierarchy of “generation spaces” from a dataset of semantic concepts and texts. Generation spaces are based on a notion of similarity of partial knowledge graphs that represent the domain and feed into a hierarchy of sequence-to-sequence or memory-to-sequence learners for concept-to-text generation. An advantage of our approach is that learning models are exposed to the most relevant examples during training which can avoid bias towards majority samples. We evaluate our approach on two common benchmark datasets and compare our hierarchical approach against a flat learning setup. We also conduct a comparison between sequence-to-sequence and memory-to-sequence learning models. Experiments show that our hierarchical approach overcomes issues of data sparsity and learns robust lexico-syntactic patterns, consistently outperforming flat baselines and previous work by up to 30%. We also find that while memory-to-sequence models can outperform sequence-to-sequence models in some cases, the latter are generally more stable in their performance and represent a safer overall choice

Capsule Endoscopy in a Patient with an Implanted CCM System and an Implantable Defibrillator

Wireless video capsule endoscopy (CE) is a modern diagnostic tool. Because of its use of digital radiofrequency, it is still relatively contraindicated in patients with implanted cardiac devices. We report the case of a patient with an Optimizer III system delivering cardiac contractility modulating signals (CCM) for heart failure therapy and an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) who underwent CE. No interferences between the devices were found

Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks for Detecting Suicide Notes

Recent statistics in suicide prevention show that people are increasingly posting their last words online and with the unprecedented availability of textual data from social media platforms researchers have the opportunity to analyse such data. Furthermore, psychological studies have shown that our state of mind can manifest itself in the linguistic features we use to communicate. In this article, we investigate whether it is possible to automatically identify suicide notes from other types of social media blogs in two document-level classification tasks. The first task aims to identify suicide notes from depressed and blog posts in a balanced dataset, whilst the second experiment looks at how well suicide notes can be classified when there is a vast amount of neutral text data, which makes the task more applicable to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we perform a linguistic analysis using LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). We present a learning model for modelling long sequences in two experiment series. We achieve an f1-score of 88.26 percent over the baselines of 0.60 in experiment 1 and 96.1 percent over the baseline in experiment 2. Finally, we show through visualisations which features the learning model identifies, these include emotions such as love and personal pronouns

Exercise and rehabilitation delivered through exergames in older adults: An integrative review of technologies, safety and efficacy

Background: There has been a rapid increase in research on the use of virtual reality (VR) and gaming technology as a complementary tool in exercise and rehabilitation in the elderly population. Although a few recent studies have evaluated their efficacy, there is currently no in-depth description and discussion of different game technologies, physical functions targeted, and safety issues related to older adults playing exergames. Objectives: This integrative review provides an overview of the technologies and games used, progression, safety measurements and associated adverse events, adherence to exergaming, outcome measures used, and their effect on physical function. Methods: We undertook systematic searches of SCOPUS and PubMed databases. Key search terms included “game”, “exercise”, and “aged”, and were adapted to each database. To be included, studies had to involve older adults aged 65 years or above, have a pre-post training or intervention design, include ICT-implemented games with weight-bearing exercises, and have outcome measures that included physical activity variables and/or clinical tests of physical function. Results: Sixty studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The studies had a broad range of aims and intervention designs and mostly focused on community-dwelling healthy older adults. The majority of the studies used commercially available gaming technologies that targeted a number of different physical functions. Most studies reported that they had used some form of safety measure during intervention. None of the studies reported serious adverse events. However, only 21 studies (35%) reported on whether adverse events occurred. Twenty-four studies reported on adherence, but only seven studies (12%) compared adherence to exergaming with other forms of exercise. Clinical measures of balance were the most frequently used outcome measures. PEDro scores indicated that most studies had several methodological problems, with only 4 studies fulfilling 6 or more criteria out of 10. Several studies found positive effects of exergaming on balance and gait, while none reported negative effects. Conclusion: Exergames show promise as an intervention to improve physical function in older adults, with few reported adverse events. As there is large variability between studies in terms of intervention protocols and outcome measures, as well as several methodological limitations, recommendations for both practice and further research are provided in order to successfully establish exergames as an exercise and rehabilitation tool for older adults