Disordered Adrenocorticotropin Secretion in Women with Major Depression

Context: Major depression is accompanied by activation of the hypothalamic pituitary axis and evidence of abnormalities in circadian and ultradian hormone rhythms. In addition, diminished negative feedback of cortisol on adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) has been found. Objective: To compare ACTH and cortisol hormonal patterns in women with major depression to normal control women. Design: Case control study. Setting: General-Clinical Research Center Patients and Other Participants: Healthy, drug free, premenopausal women with major depression and age and menstrual cycle day matched healthy control women. Main Outcome Measure: ACTH and cortisol data measured every 10 minutes for 24H analyzed with approximate entropy and cross-approximate entropy to determine orderliness of hormone secretion and relationship between ACTH and cortisol in terms of feed forward and feedback synchrony. Results: Depressed women manifested increased approximate entropy, indicating more disorderly secretion, of ACTH and elevated forward cross-approximate entropy of ACTH on cortisol, denoting unopposed ACTH drive. Conclusions: These data support other evidence of hormonal rhythm abnormalities in depression and are compatible with accentuated feedforward drive by ACTHNIMH MH 50030 NIDK DK 06717Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/49485/2/YoungandVeldhuis.pd

Identification performance of evidential value estimation for ridge-based biometrics

Law enforcement agencies around the world use ridge-based biometrics, especially fingerprints, to fight crime. Fingermarks that are left at a crime scene and identified as potentially having evidential value (EV) in a court of law are recorded for further forensic analysis. Here, we test our evidential value algorithm (EVA) which uses image features trained on forensic expert decisions for 1428 fingermarks to produce an EV score for an image. First, we study the relationship between whether a fingermark is assessed as having EV, either by a human expert or by EVA, and its correct and confident identification by an automatic identification system. In particular, how often does an automatic system achieve identification when the mark is assessed as not having evidential value? We show that when the marks are captured by a mobile phone, correct and confident automatic matching occurs for 257 of the 1428. Of these, 236 were marked as having sufficient EV by experts and 242 by EVA thresholded on equal error rate. Second, we test four relatively challenging ridge-based biometric databases and show that EVA can be successfully applied to give an EV score to all images. Using EV score as an image quality value, we show that in all databases, thresholding on EV improves performance in closed set identification. Our results suggest an EVA application that filters fingermarks meeting a minimum EV score could aid forensic experts at the point of collection, or by flagging difficult latents objectively, or by pre-filtering specimens before submission to an AFIS