Abnormal brain activation during speech perception and production in children and adults with reading difficulty

Published on 24 August 2024Reading difficulty (RD) is associated with phonological deficits; however, it remains unknown whether the phonological deficits are different in children and adults with RD as reflected in foreign speech perception and production. In the current study, using functional Near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we found less difference between Chinese adults and Chinese children in the RD groups than the control groups in the activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during Spanish speech perception, suggesting slowed development in these regions associated with RD. Furthermore, using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), we found that activation patterns in the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), premotor, supplementary motor area (SMA), and IFG could serve as reliable markers of RD. We provide both behavioral and neurological evidence for impaired speech perception and production in RD readers which can serve as markers of RD.This study was supported by Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou, China, Key Area Research and Development Program (202007030011)

Constructing an Interaction Behavior Model for Web Image Search

User interaction behavior is a valuable source of implicit relevance feedback. In Web image search a different type of search result presentation is used than in general Web search, which leads to different interaction mechanisms and user behavior. For example, image search results are self-contained, so that users do not need to click the results to view the landing page as in general Web search, which generates sparse click data. Also, two-dimensional result placement instead of a linear result list makes browsing behaviors more complex. Thus, it is hard to apply standard user behavior models (e.g., click models) developed for general Web search to Web image search. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive image search user behavior analysis using data from a lab-based user study as well as data from a commercial search log. We then propose a novel interaction behavior model, called grid-based user browsing model (GUBM), whose design is motivated by observations from our data analysis. GUBM can both capture users' interaction behavior, including cursor hovering, and alleviate position bias. The advantages of GUBM are two-fold: (1) It is based on an unsupervised learning method and does not need manually annotated data for training. (2) It is based on user interaction features on search engine result pages (SERPs) and is easily transferable to other scenarios that have a grid-based interface such as video search engines. We conduct extensive experiments to test the performance of our model using a large-scale commercial image search log. Experimental results show that in terms of behavior prediction (perplexity), and topical relevance and image quality (normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG)), GUBM outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models as well as the original ranking. We make the implementation of GUBM and related datasets publicly available for future studies.Comment: 10 page

Development of a new stroke scale in an emergency setting

Background: Early identification of stroke is crucial to maximize early management benefits in emergency departments. This study aimed to develop and validate a new stroke recognition instrument for differentiating acute stroke from stroke mimics in an emergency setting. Methods: A prospective observational cohort study among suspected stroke patients presenting to Emergency Department in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University was conducted from May 2012 to March 2013. The symptoms and signs of suspected stroke patients were collected. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify the factors associated with acute stroke. The symptoms and signs closely associated with acute stroke were selected to develop the new stroke scale, Guangzhou Stroke Scale (GZSS). The diagnostic value of GZSS was then compared with ROSIER, FAST and LAPSS. The primary outcome was confirmed stroke by CT within 24 h. Results: Four hundred and sixteen suspected stroke patients (247 ischemia, 107 hemorrhage, 4 transient ischemic attack, 58 non-stroke) were assessed. A new stroke scale, GZSS (total score from −1 to 8.5), was developed and consisted of nine parameters: vertigo (−1), GCS ≤ 8 (+2), facial paralysis (+1), asymmetric arm weakness (+1), asymmetric leg weakness (+1), speech disturbance (+0.5), visual field defect (+1), systolic blood pressure ≥145 mmHg (+1) and diastolic blood pressure ≥95 mmHg (+1). Among the four scales, the discriminatory value (C-statistic) of GZSS was the best (AUC: 0.871 (p < 0.001) when compared to ROSIER (0.772), LAPSS (0.722) and FAST (0.699). At an optimal cut-off score of >1.5 on a scale from −1 to 8.5, the sensitivity and specificity of GZSS were 83.2 and 74.1 %, whilst the sensitivities and specificities of ROSIER were 77.7 and 70.7 %, FAST were 76.0 and 63.8 %, LAPSS were 56.4 and 87.9 %. Conclusion: GZSS had better sensitivity than existing stroke scales in Chinese patients with suspected stroke. Further studies should be conducted to confirm its effectiveness in the initial differentiation of acute stroke from stroke mimics. Keywords: Diagnosis, Stroke, Stroke mimics, ROSIER scale, FAST scale, LAPSS scale, Emergency department, China Abbreviations: AUC, area under the ROC curve; CT, computed tomography; DWI, diffusion weighted imaging; FAST, the face arm speech test; GCS, Glasgow Coma Scale; IQR, inter quartile range; LAPSS, the Los Angeles Prehospital Stroke Screen; MRI, magnetic resonance imaging; NIHSS, National Institute of Health stroke scale; OR, odds ratio; ROC, receiver operating characteristic; ROSIER, the Recognition of Stroke in the Emergency Room scale; TIA, transient ischemic attac

Evaluating Interpolation and Extrapolation Performance of Neural Retrieval Models

A retrieval model should not only interpolate the training data but also extrapolate well to the queries that are different from the training data. While neural retrieval models have demonstrated impressive performance on ad-hoc search benchmarks, we still know little about how they perform in terms of interpolation and extrapolation. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of separately evaluating the two capabilities of neural retrieval models. Firstly, we examine existing ad-hoc search benchmarks from the two perspectives. We investigate the distribution of training and test data and find a considerable overlap in query entities, query intent, and relevance labels. This finding implies that the evaluation on these test sets is biased toward interpolation and cannot accurately reflect the extrapolation capacity. Secondly, we propose a novel evaluation protocol to separately evaluate the interpolation and extrapolation performance on existing benchmark datasets. It resamples the training and test data based on query similarity and utilizes the resampled dataset for training and evaluation. Finally, we leverage the proposed evaluation protocol to comprehensively revisit a number of widely-adopted neural retrieval models. Results show models perform differently when moving from interpolation to extrapolation. For example, representation-based retrieval models perform almost as well as interaction-based retrieval models in terms of interpolation but not extrapolation. Therefore, it is necessary to separately evaluate both interpolation and extrapolation performance and the proposed resampling method serves as a simple yet effective evaluation tool for future IR studies.Comment: CIKM 2022 Full Pape

H∞ filtering for uncertain stochastic time-delay systems with sector-bounded nonlinearities

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link - Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.In this paper, we deal with the robust H∞ filtering problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear time-delay stochastic systems. The system under consideration contains parameter uncertainties, Itô-type stochastic disturbances, time-varying delays, as well as sector-bounded nonlinearities. We aim at designing a full-order filter such that, for all admissible uncertainties, nonlinearities and time delays, the dynamics of the filtering error is guaranteed to be robustly asymptotically stable in the mean square, while achieving the prescribed H∞ disturbance rejection attenuation level. By using the Lyapunov stability theory and Itô’s differential rule, sufficient conditions are first established to ensure the existence of the desired filters, which are expressed in the form of a linear matrix inequality (LMI). Then, the explicit expression of the desired filter gains is also characterized. Finally, a numerical example is exploited to show the usefulness of the results derived.This paper was not presented at any IFAC meeting. This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by Associate Editor Tongwen Chen under the direction of Editor Ian Petersen. This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, an International Joint Project sponsored by the Royal Society of the UK and the NSFC of China, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK2007075, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Education Committee of China under Grant 06KJD110206, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 60774073 and 10671172, and the Scientific Innovation Fund of Yangzhou University of China under Grant 2006CXJ002

Project Overview of the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey

The Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) is a wide-field two-band photometric survey of the Northern Galactic Cap using the 90Prime imager on the 2.3 m Bok telescope at Kitt Peak. It is a four-year collaboration between the National Astronomical Observatory of China and Steward Observatory, the University of Arizona, serving as one of the three imaging surveys to provide photometric input catalogs for target selection of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. BASS will take up to 240 dark/grey nights to cover an area of about 5400 deg$^2$ in the $g$ and $r$ bands. The 5$\sigma$ limiting AB magnitudes for point sources in the two bands, corrected for the Galactic extinction, are 24.0 and 23.4 mag, respectively. BASS, together with other DESI imaging surveys, will provide unique science opportunities that cover a wide range of topics in both Galactic and extragalactic astronomy.Comment: 10 pages, submitted to PAS

Measuring magnetism in the Milky Way with the Square Kilometre Array

Magnetic fields in the Milky Way are present on a wide variety of sizes and strengths, influencing many processes in the Galactic ecosystem such as star formation, gas dynamics, jets, and evolution of supernova remnants or pulsar wind nebulae. Observation methods are complex and indirect; the most used of these are a grid of rotation measures of unresolved polarized extragalactic sources, and broadband polarimetry of diffuse emission. Current studies of magnetic fields in the Milky Way reveal a global spiral magnetic field with a significant turbulent component; the limited sample of magnetic field measurements in discrete objects such as supernova remnants and HII regions shows a wide variety in field configurations; a few detections of magnetic fields in Young Stellar Object jets have been published; and the magnetic field structure in the Galactic Center is still under debate. The SKA will unravel the 3D structure and configurations of magnetic fields in the Milky Way on sub-parsec to galaxy scales, including field structure in the Galactic Center. The global configuration of the Milky Way disk magnetic field, probed through pulsar RMs, will resolve controversy about reversals in the Galactic plane. Characteristics of interstellar turbulence can be determined from the grid of background RMs. We expect to learn to understand magnetic field structures in protostellar jets, supernova remnants, and other discrete sources, due to the vast increase in sample sizes possible with the SKA. This knowledge of magnetic fields in the Milky Way will not only be crucial in understanding of the evolution and interaction of Galactic structures, but will also help to define and remove Galactic foregrounds for a multitude of extragalactic and cosmological studies.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures; to appear as part of 'Cosmic Magnetism' in Proceedings 'Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA (AASKA14)', PoS(AASKA14)09

Incorporating D2D to Current Cellular Communication System

A device-to-device (D2D) group works as relay nodes to aid the information delivery from a source to a destination in cellular communication network. Within this system, we propose a communication mechanism to aid traditional cellular communication and correspondingly borrow some channel resource from traditional cellular communication system for D2D communication. On one side, to aid cellular communication, we propose a modified Alamouti scheme which does not modify the operation at the base station. This makes our proposed scheme consistent with previous cellular communication system. On the other side, there are many competitive D2D groups that want to potentially utilize the borrowed channel resource from traditional cellular system for delivering their own information. We model this competition as a game and utilize game theory technique to solve this competition problem

Metabolism of polyamines and kidney disease: A promising therapeutic target

Background: More than 850 million people worldwide suffer from acute and chronic kidney diseases (CKD) which are tremendous socioeconomic burdens for society. Currently, the treatment choices for CKD are limited. There is a great need to understand the underlying mechanisms of the development of CKD in order to develop potential therapeutic strategies. Summary: The alteration in cellular metabolism has emerged as an important common pathological mechanism in different kidney diseases. Metabolic intervening and reprogramming will yield new insights to prevent and slow the progression of kidney disease. As one essential component of cellular metabolisms in fuel-source preferences (glucose, fatty acids, or ketones), the polyamine compound metabolism comprising the metabolites (spermine, spermidine, and putrescine) and their biosynthetic and catabolic enzymes are an endogenous pathophysiological regulator that is arising as a potential therapeutic object for many diseases. Key Messages: This article aims to review current knowledge on polyamine metabolism and physiological processes, and its potential regulatory and beneficial roles in immunoregulation, mitochondrial homeostasis, autophagy, DNA damage, and kidney diseases, and thus provide a novel therapeutic opportunity for kidney diseases