Application of ecological momentary assessment in stress-related diseases

Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors. In these diseases, assessment relies mainly on subjective symptoms in natural settings. Therefore, it is important to assess symptoms and/or relationships between psychosocial factors and symptoms in natural settings. Symptoms are usually assessed by self-report when patients visit their doctors. However, self-report by recall has an intrinsic problem; "recall bias". Recently, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has been proposed as a reliable method to assess and record events and subjective symptoms as well as physiological and behavioral variables in natural settings. Although EMA is a useful method to assess stress-related diseases, it has not been fully acknowledged, especially by clinicians. Therefore, the present brief review introduces the application and future direction of EMA for the assessment and intervention for stress-related diseases

Local Effective Hölder Exponent Estimation on the Wavelet Transform Maxima Tree

We present a robust method of estimating an effective H\"older exponent locally at an arbitrary resolution. The method is motivated by the multiplicative cascade paradigm, and implemented on the hierarchy of singularities revealed with the wavelet transform modulus maxima tree. In addition, we illustrate the possibility of the direct estimation of the scaling spectrum of the effective H\"older exponent, and we link it to the established partition functions based multifractal formalism. We motivate both the local and the global multifractal analysis by showing examples of computer generated and real life time series

Sensitivity Analysis of a Model of Lower Limb Haemodynamics

Post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) has variable clinical presentation with significant treatment costs and gaps in the evidence-base to support clinical decision making. The contribution of variations in venous anatomy to the risk of complications following treatment has yet to be characterized in detail. We report the development of a steady-state, 0D model of venous anatomy of the lower limb and assessments of local sensitivity (10% radius variation) and global sensitivity (50% radius variation) of the resulting flows to variability in venous anatomy. An analysis of orthogonal sensitivity was also performed. Local sensitivity analysis was repeated with four degrees of thrombosis in the left common iliac vein. The largest normalised sensitivities were observed in locations associated with the venous return. Both local and global approaches provided similar ranking of input parameters responsible for the variation of flow in a vessel where thrombosis is typically observed. When a thrombus was included in the model increase in absolute sensitivity was observed in the leg affected by the thrombosis. These results can be used to inform model reduction strategies and to target clinical data collection