Individual EEG differences in affective valence processing in women with low and high neuroticism

Objective: In this study, individual differences in brain electrophysiology during positive and negative affective valence processing in women with different neuroticism scores are quantified. Methods: Twenty-six women scoring high and low on neuroticism participated on this experiment. A support vector machine (SVM)-based classifier was applied on the EEG single trials elicited by high arousal pictures with negative and positive valence scores. Based on the accuracy values obtained from subject identification tasks, the most distinguishing EEG channels among participants were detected, pointing which scalp regions show more distinct patterns. Results: Significant differences were obtained, in the EEG heterogeneity between positive and negative valence stimuli, yielding higher accuracy in subject identification using negative pictures. Regarding the topographical analysis, significantly higher accuracy values were reached in occipital areas and in the right hemisphere (p < 0:001). Conclusions: Mainly, individual differences in EEG can be located in parietooccipital regions. These differences are likely to be due to the different reactivity and coping strategies to unpleasant stimuli in individuals with high neuroticism. In addition, the right hemisphere shows a greater individual specificity. Significance: An SVM-based classifier asserts the individual specificity and its topographical differences in electrophysiological activity for women with high neuroticism compared to low neuroticism

EEG study on affective valence elicited by novel and familiar pictures using ERD/ERS and SVM-RFE

EEG signals have been widely explored in emotional processing analyses, both in time and frequency domains. However, in such studies, habituation phenomenon is barely considered in the discrimination of different emotional responses. In this work, spectral features of the event-related potentials (ERPs) are studied by means of event-related desynchronization/synchronization computation. In order to determine the most relevant ERP features for distinguishing how positive and negative affective valences are processed within the brain, support vector machine-recursive feature elimination is employed. The proposed approach was applied for investigating in which way the familiarity of stimuli affects the affective valence processing as well as which frequency bands and scalp regions are more involved in this process. In a group composed of young adult women, results prove that parietooccipital region and theta band are especially involved in the processing of novelty in emotional stimuli

Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study

Background Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide.Methods A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study-a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital.Findings Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3.85 [95% CI 2.58-5.75]; p&lt;0.0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63.0% vs 82.7%; OR 0.35 [0.23-0.53]; p&lt;0.0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer.Interpretation Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised