52 research outputs found
Learning a second language in adulthood changes subcortical neural encoding
Second language learning has been shown to impact and reshape the central nervous system, anatomically and functionally. Most of the studies on second language learning and neuroplasticity have been focused on cortical areas, whereas the subcortical neural encoding mechanism and its relationship with L2 learning have not been examined extensively. The purpose of this study was to utilize frequency-following response (FFR) to examine if and how learning a tonal language in adulthood changes the subcortical neural encoding in hearing adults. Three groups of subjects were recruited: native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (native speakers (NS)), learners of the language (L2 learners), and those with no experience (native speakers of foreign languages (NSFL)). It is hypothesized that differences would exist in FFRs obtained from the three language experience groups. Results revealed that FFRs obtained from L2 learners were found to be more robust than the NSFL group, yet not on a par with the NS group. Such results may suggest that in human adulthood, subcortical neural encoding ability may be trainable with the acquisition of a new language and that neuroplasticity at the brainstem level can indeed be influenced by L2 learning
Effects of a particular heptapeptide on the IFN-α-sensitive CML cells
Abstract: Using the phage display biopanning technique, we have previously identified a heptapeptide KLWVIPQ which specifically bind to the surface of the IFN-α sensitive but not the IFN-α-resistant CML cells. The effects of this heptapeptide to the IFN-α-sensitive CML cells were investigated in the present study. IFN-α-sensitive KT-1/A3 and IFN-α-resistant KT-1/A3R CML cells were transfected by pEGFP KLWVIPQ expression vector and/or induced by IFN-α. WST-1 cell proliferation assay, flow cytometry and western blotting were performed to determine the effects of this heptapeptide and/or IFN-α on CML cells. The viability of the KT-1/A3 cells w as inhibited and apoptosis was induced by either expression of the heptapeptide KLWVIPQ or IFN-α treatment with concurrent up-regulation of P53 and down-regulation of P210bcr/abl. However, these effects were not observed in the IFN-α-resistant KT-1/A3R cells. These results suggest that the heptapeptide KLWVIPQ shares a similar mechanism w ith IFN-α in the regulat ion of CML cell growth and apoptosis, implying that the heptapeptide KLWVIPQ could be a novel target to go further into mechanisms of IFN-α sensitivity and/or resistance in CML
Federated Uncertainty-Aware Aggregation for Fundus Diabetic Retinopathy Staging
Deep learning models have shown promising performance in the field of
diabetic retinopathy (DR) staging. However, collaboratively training a DR
staging model across multiple institutions remains a challenge due to non-iid
data, client reliability, and confidence evaluation of the prediction. To
address these issues, we propose a novel federated uncertainty-aware
aggregation paradigm (FedUAA), which considers the reliability of each client
and produces a confidence estimation for the DR staging. In our FedUAA, an
aggregated encoder is shared by all clients for learning a global
representation of fundus images, while a novel temperature-warmed uncertainty
head (TWEU) is utilized for each client for local personalized staging
criteria. Our TWEU employs an evidential deep layer to produce the uncertainty
score with the DR staging results for client reliability evaluation.
Furthermore, we developed a novel uncertainty-aware weighting module (UAW) to
dynamically adjust the weights of model aggregation based on the uncertainty
score distribution of each client. In our experiments, we collect five publicly
available datasets from different institutions to conduct a dataset for
federated DR staging to satisfy the real non-iid condition. The experimental
results demonstrate that our FedUAA achieves better DR staging performance with
higher reliability compared to other federated learning methods. Our proposed
FedUAA paradigm effectively addresses the challenges of collaboratively
training DR staging models across multiple institutions, and provides a robust
and reliable solution for the deployment of DR diagnosis models in real-world
clinical scenarios
The relationship between hearing loss and cognitive impairment in a Chinese elderly population : the baseline analysis
OBJECTIVES : The objective of the study was to investigate the association between untreated age-related hearing loss and cognitive impairment in Mandarin-speaking older adults living in China. METHODS : Older adults (293; 111 males, M = 70.33 4.90 years; 182 females, M = 69.02 4.08 years) were recruited. All participants completed a pure tone audiometric hearing assessment, Hearing Impairment-Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (HI-MoCA), and a computerized neuropsychology test battery (CANTAB). The Mandarin version of the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale was used to measure the loneliness, and the Mandarin version of the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21) was used to measure the current severity of a range of symptoms common to depression, stress, and anxiety of the participants. RESULTS : A multiple stepwise regression analysis showed that the average of four mid-frequency thresholds in the better ear was related to CANTAB Paired Associates Learning (b = 0.20, p = 0.002), and the global cognitive function score (HI-MoCA) (b = 0.25, p < 0.001). The average of three high frequencies in the better ear was significantly associated with CANTAB Delayed Matching to Sample (b = 0.16, p = 0.008), and Spatial Working Memory (b = 0.17, p = 0.003). CONCLUSION : The results revealed a significant relationship between age-related hearing loss and cognitive impairment in Mandarin-speaking older adults. These research outcomes have clinical implications specifically for hearing health care professionals in China and other populations that speak a tonal language, especially when providing hearing rehabilitation.The Reform and Development Grant of Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Natural Science Foundation of China.http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroscienceam2022Speech-Language Pathology and Audiolog
The impact of untreated hearing loss on depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness in tonal language-speaking older adults in China
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The original contributions presented in the study are included
in the article/Supplementary material, further inquiries can
be directed to the corresponding authors.BACKGROUND : Age-related hearing loss, mental health conditions, and
loneliness commonly affect older adults. This study aimed to determine
whether untreated hearing loss is independently associated with depression,
anxiety, stress, and loneliness in tonal language-speaking older adults in China.
STUDY DESIGN : Observational, cross-sectional study.
METHODS : 293 older adults (111 males, M = 70.33 ± 4.90 years; 182 females,
M = 69.02 ± 4.08 years) were recruited. All participants completed a pure
tone audiometric hearing assessment, and provided information on living
arrangements, marital status, leisure activities, tobacco and alcohol use, and
medical history. The Mandarin version of the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness
Scale was used to measure loneliness, and the Mandarin version of the 21-
item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21) was used to assess a range of
symptoms common to depression, stress, and anxiety of the participants. The
analysis focused on determining the predictors of depression, anxiety, and
stress, and the predictors of measures of loneliness.
RESULTS : Multiple stepwise regression analyses revealed that the emotional
loneliness (β = 0.303, p < 0.001) and living status (β = 0.110, p = 0.048) significantly
predicted DASS depression scores; emotional loneliness (β = 0.276, p < 0.001)
and a history of vascular disease (β = 0.148, p = 0.009) were significantly related
to DASS anxiety scores; emotional loneliness (β = 0.341, p < 0.001) and a history
of vascular disease (β = 0.129, p = 0.019) significantly predicted DASS stress
scores. Furthermore, multiple stepwise regression analyses showed that DASS stress scores (β = 0.333, p < 0.001), education years (β = −0.126, p = 0.020),
marriage status (β = 0.122, p = 0.024), and a history of vascular disease (β = 0.111,
p = 0.044) significantly predicted emotional loneliness; four-frequency average
hearing loss (β = 0.149, p = 0.010) and DASS stress scores (β = 0.123, p = 0.034)
significantly predicted social loneliness scale; and four-frequency average
hearing loss (β = 0.167, p = 0.003) and DASS stress scores (β = 0.279, p < 0.001) also significantly predicted overall loneliness. There were no significant associations with high-frequency hearing loss.
CONCLUSION : This study revealed that loneliness has a significant relationship both with hearing loss and aspects of mental health in an older adult Mandarin-speaking population. However, mental health was not significantly associated with hearing loss in this population.The Reform and Development Grant of Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Natural Science Foundation of China and National Key Research and Development Program.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychologyam2023Speech-Language Pathology and Audiolog
Medical Phrase Grounding with Region-Phrase Context Contrastive Alignment
Medical phrase grounding (MPG) aims to locate the most relevant region in a
medical image, given a phrase query describing certain medical findings, which
is an important task for medical image analysis and radiological diagnosis.
However, existing visual grounding methods rely on general visual features for
identifying objects in natural images and are not capable of capturing the
subtle and specialized features of medical findings, leading to sub-optimal
performance in MPG. In this paper, we propose MedRPG, an end-to-end approach
for MPG. MedRPG is built on a lightweight vision-language transformer encoder
and directly predicts the box coordinates of mentioned medical findings, which
can be trained with limited medical data, making it a valuable tool in medical
image analysis. To enable MedRPG to locate nuanced medical findings with better
region-phrase correspondences, we further propose Tri-attention Context
contrastive alignment (TaCo). TaCo seeks context alignment to pull both the
features and attention outputs of relevant region-phrase pairs close together
while pushing those of irrelevant regions far away. This ensures that the final
box prediction depends more on its finding-specific regions and phrases.
Experimental results on three MPG datasets demonstrate that our MedRPG
outperforms state-of-the-art visual grounding approaches by a large margin.
Additionally, the proposed TaCo strategy is effective in enhancing finding
localization ability and reducing spurious region-phrase correlations
Reliable Joint Segmentation of Retinal Edema Lesions in OCT Images
Focusing on the complicated pathological features, such as blurred
boundaries, severe scale differences between symptoms, background noise
interference, etc., in the task of retinal edema lesions joint segmentation
from OCT images and enabling the segmentation results more reliable. In this
paper, we propose a novel reliable multi-scale wavelet-enhanced transformer
network, which can provide accurate segmentation results with reliability
assessment. Specifically, aiming at improving the model's ability to learn the
complex pathological features of retinal edema lesions in OCT images, we
develop a novel segmentation backbone that integrates a wavelet-enhanced
feature extractor network and a multi-scale transformer module of our newly
designed. Meanwhile, to make the segmentation results more reliable, a novel
uncertainty segmentation head based on the subjective logical evidential theory
is introduced to generate the final segmentation results with a corresponding
overall uncertainty evaluation score map. We conduct comprehensive experiments
on the public database of AI-Challenge 2018 for retinal edema lesions
segmentation, and the results show that our proposed method achieves better
segmentation accuracy with a high degree of reliability as compared to other
state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. The code will be released on:
https://github.com/LooKing9218/ReliableRESeg
A Combined Theoretical and Photoelectron Spectroscopy Study of Al3Hn- (n=1-9) clusters
Combined photoelectron spectroscopic experiments and computational studies have been performed on Al3Hn- (n=1-9) clusters. Three modes of hydrogen bonding to the Al-3 moiety have been observed: terminal, bridging, and capping. Among various hydrides, Al3H5- and Al3H8- clusters have highest HOMO-LUMO gap and largest electron affinity, respectively. Our studies indicate that as the number of hydrogen atoms increase the presence of AlH2 groups, representing the tetrahedral coordination of the Al atom, which in turn led to the stoichiometric ring structure
High Density Lipoprotein Protects Mesenchymal Stem Cells from Oxidative Stress-Induced Apoptosis via Activation of the PI3K/Akt Pathway and Suppression of Reactive Oxygen Species
The therapeutic effect of transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in myocardial infarction (MI) appears to be limited by poor cell viability in the injured tissue, which is a consequence of oxidative stress and pro-apoptotic factors. High density lipoprotein (HDL) reverses cholesterol transport and has anti-oxidative and anti-apoptotic properties. We, therefore, investigated whether HDL could protect MSCs from oxidative stress-induced apoptosis. MSCs derived from the bone marrow of rats were pre-incubated with or without HDL, and then were exposed to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in vitro, or were transplanted into experimentally infarcted hearts of rats in vivo. Pre-incubation of MSCs with HDL increased cell viability, reduced apoptotic indices and resulted in parallel decreases in reactive oxygen species (ROS) in comparison with control MSCs. Each of the beneficial effects of HDL on MSCs was attenuated by inhibiting the PI3K/Akt pathway. Preconditioning with HDL resulted in higher MSC survival rates, improved cardiac remodeling and better myocardial function than in the MSC control group. Collectively, these results suggest that HDL may protect against H2O2-induced apoptosis in MSCs through activation of a PI3K/Akt pathway, and by suppressing the production of ROS
Uncertainty-inspired Open Set Learning for Retinal Anomaly Identification
Failure to recognize samples from the classes unseen during training is a
major limit of artificial intelligence (AI) in real-world implementation of
retinal anomaly classification. To resolve this obstacle, we propose an
uncertainty-inspired open-set (UIOS) model which was trained with fundus images
of 9 common retinal conditions. Besides the probability of each category, UIOS
also calculates an uncertainty score to express its confidence. Our UIOS model
with thresholding strategy achieved an F1 score of 99.55%, 97.01% and 91.91%
for the internal testing set, external testing set and non-typical testing set,
respectively, compared to the F1 score of 92.20%, 80.69% and 64.74% by the
standard AI model. Furthermore, UIOS correctly predicted high uncertainty
scores, which prompted the need for a manual check, in the datasets of rare
retinal diseases, low-quality fundus images, and non-fundus images. This work
provides a robust method for real-world screening of retinal anomalies
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