HB 1013: Georgia Mental Health Parity Act

The Act overhauls Georgia’s mental health system by enforcing compliance with federal mental health parity law. Most notably, the Act requires health insurers to provide coverage for mental health and substance use disorders equitably with physical health and defines generally accepted standards of care. The Act requires insurers to submit annual parity compliance reports and requires the Commissioner to make annual data calls and submit annual reports. The Act requires compliance with a minimum 85% medical loss ratio. The Act provides for cancelable loans to Georgia residents enrolled in related educational programs and creates grant programs for accountability courts. The Act conditionally authorizes peace officers to involuntarily commit persons to emergency receiving facilities. Finally, the Act creates a multi-agency treatment for children team (MATCH) to facilitate collaboration across state agencies

Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry

Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate. We investigate the economic viability of content in a major content industry—commercial music—using a novel longitudinal dataset of weekly sales and streaming counts. We find that the typical sound recording has an extremely short commercial half-life—on the order of months, rather than years or decades—but also see evidence that subscription streaming services are extending this period of economic viability. Strikingly, though, we find that decay rates are sharp even for blockbuster songs, and that the patterns persist when we approximate weekly revenue. Although our results do not provide an estimate of the causal effect of copyright on incentives, they do put bounds on the problem, suggesting a misalignment between the economic realities of the music industry and the current life-plus-70 copyright term

Copyright and Economic Viability: Evidence from the Music Industry

Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate. We investigate the economic viability of content in a major content industry—commercial music—using a novel longitudinal dataset of weekly sales and streaming counts. We find that the typical sound recording has an extremely short commercial half-life—on the order of months, rather than years or decades—but also see evidence that subscription streaming services are extending this period of economic viability. Strikingly, though, we find that decay rates are sharp even for blockbuster songs, and that the patterns persist when we approximate weekly revenue. Although our results do not provide an estimate of the causal effect of copyright on incentives, they do put bounds on the problem, suggesting a misalignment between the economic realities of the music industry and the current life-plus-70 copyright term

PET and MRI measurements of neuroinflammation and brain plasticity after a stroke

We are going to assess brain structure and function using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to study white matter inflammation and the density of synapses over time, alongside a behavioural assessment of motor and executive function. This kind of comprehensive assessment, especially using PET to measure synaptic density, has not been done before.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1027/thumbnail.jp

eTBLAST: a web server to identify expert reviewers, appropriate journals and similar publications

Authors, editors and reviewers alike use the biomedical literature to identify appropriate journals in which to publish, potential reviewers for papers or grants, and collaborators (or competitors) with similar interests. Traditionally, this process has either relied upon personal expertise and knowledge or upon a somewhat unsystematic and laborious process of manually searching through the literature for trends. To help with these tasks, we report three utilities that parse and summarize the results of an abstract similarity search to find appropriate journals for publication, authors with expertise in a given field, and documents similar to a submitted query. The utilities are based upon a program, eTBLAST, designed to identify similar documents within literature databases such as (but not limited to) MEDLINE. These services are freely accessible through the Internet at http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml, where users can upload a file or paste text such as an abstract into the browser interface

Relating functional and structural signatures of Parkinson’s disease to changes in dopamine signalling: A PET/fMRI study

Cognitive impairments in early Parkinson\u27s disease are known to be linked to complex changes in the dopamine system within the brain. For example, dopamine-producing neurons in one key region of the brain are significantly degenerated, but those in another are spared. Dopamine-replacement therapy (DRT) has been pursued and it has produced significant improvements in certain cognitive functions - unfortunately it also produced significant impairments in others.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1019/thumbnail.jp

Another Sacrificed Lamb: Process of Making a Short Film

This presentation documents the process of making the short film Another Sacrificed Lamb.https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/aha_2015/1004/thumbnail.jp

A Human-derived Dual MRI/PET Reporter Gene System with High Translational Potential for Cell Tracking

Purpose: Reporter gene imaging has been extensively used to longitudinally report on whole-body distribution and viability of transplanted engineered cells. Multi-modal cell tracking can provide complementary information on cell fate. Typical multi-modal reporter gene systems often combine clinical and preclinical modalities. A multi-modal reporter gene system for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), two clinical modalities, would be advantageous by combining the sensitivity of PET with the high-resolution morphology and non-ionizing nature of MRI. Procedures: We developed and evaluated a dual MRI/PET reporter gene system composed of two human-derived reporter genes that utilize clinical reporter probes for engineered cell detection. As a proof-of-concept, breast cancer cells were engineered to co-express the human organic anion transporter polypeptide 1B3 (OATP1B3) that uptakes the clinical MRI contrast agent gadolinium ethoxybenzyl-diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (Gd-EOB-DTPA), and the human sodium iodide symporter (NIS) which uptakes the PET tracer, [18F] tetrafluoroborate ([18F] TFB). Results: T1-weighted MRI results in mice exhibited significantly higher MRI signals in reporter-gene-engineered mammary fat pad tumors versus contralateral naïve tumors (p \u3c 0.05). No differences in contrast enhancement were observed at 5 h after Gd-EOB-DTPA administration using either intravenous or intraperitoneal injection. We also found significantly higher standard uptake values (SUV) in engineered tumors in comparison to the naïve tumors in [18F]TFB PET images (p \u3c 0.001). Intratumoral heterogeneity in signal enhancement was more conspicuous in relatively higher resolution MR images compared to PET images. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates the ability to noninvasively track cells engineered with our human-derived dual MRI/PET reporter system, enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of transplanted cells. Future work is focused on applying this tool to track therapeutic cells, which may one day enable the broader application of cell tracking within the healthcare system