julilili42/papers huggingface dataset:
Exposure to attachment narratives dynamically modulates cortical arousal during the resting state in the listener
2018-06-06

Abstract Background Affective stimulation entails changes in brain network patterns at rest, but it is unknown whether exogenous emotional stimulation has a prolonged effect on the temporal dynamics of endogenous cortical arousal. We therefore investigated differences in cortical arousal in the listener following stimulation with different attachment‐related narratives. Methods Resting‐state EEG was recorded from sixteen healthy subjects for ten minutes each with eyes closed: first at baseline and then after passively listening to three affective narratives from strangers about their early childhood experiences (prototypical for insecure‐dismissing, insecure‐preoccupied, and secure attachment). Using the VIGALL 2.1 algorithm, low or high vigilance stages in consecutive EEG segments were classified, and their dynamic profile was analyzed. Questionnaires assessed the listeners’ emotional response to the content of the narrative. Results As a general effect of preceding affective stimulation, vigilance following the stimulation was significantly elevated compared to baseline rest, and carryover effects in dynamic vigilance profiles were observed. A difference between narrative conditions was revealed for the insecure‐dismissing condition, in which the decrease in duration of high vigilance stages was fastest compared to the other two conditions. The behavioral data supported the observation that especially the insecure narratives induced a tendency in the listener to affectively disengage from the narrative content. Discussion This study revealed carryover effects in endogenous cortical arousal evoked by preceding affective stimulation and provides evidence for attachment‐specific dynamic alterations of brain states and individual differences in emotional reactivity.
Gestational Hypothyroxinemia Affects Its Offspring With a Reduced Suppressive Capacity Impairing the Outcome of the Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis
2018-06-06

Hypothyroxinemia (Hpx) is a thyroid hormone deficiency (THD) condition highly frequent during pregnancy, which although asymptomatic for the mother, it can impair the cognitive function of the offspring. Previous studies have shown that maternal hypothyroidism increases the severity of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), an autoimmune disease model for multiple sclerosis (MS). Here, we analyzed the immune response after EAE induction in the adult offspring gestated in Hpx. Mice gestated in Hpx showed an early appearance of EAE symptoms and the increase of all parameters of the disease such as: the pathological score, spinal cord demyelination, and immune cell infiltration in comparison to the adult offspring gestated in euthyroidism. Isolated CD4<sup>+</sup>CD25<sup>+</sup> T cells from spleen of the offspring gestated in Hpx that suffer EAE showed reduced capacity to suppress proliferation of effector T cells (T<sub>Eff</sub>) after being stimulated with anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibodies. Moreover, adoptive transfer experiments of CD4<sup>+</sup>CD25<sup>+</sup> T cells from the offspring gestated in Hpx suffering EAE to mice that were induced with EAE showed that the receptor mice suffer more intense EAE pathological score. Even though, no significant differences were detected in the frequency of T<sub>reg</sub> cells and IL-10 content in the blood, spleen, and brain between mice gestated in Hpx or euthyroidism, T cells CD4<sup>+</sup>CD25<sup>+</sup> from spleen have reduced capacity to differentiate <i>in vitro</i> to T<sub>reg</sub> and to produce IL-10. Thus, our data support the notion that maternal Hpx can imprint the immune response of the offspring suffering EAE probably due to a reduced capacity to trigger suppression. Such "imprints" on the immune system could contribute to explaining as to why adult offspring gestated in Hpx suffer earlier and more intense EAE.
Antihomotypic affinity maturation improves human B cell responses against a repetitive epitope
2018-06-07

Surface antibody maturation Affinity maturation in B cells generates antibodies with increasingly enhanced antigen-binding properties. Imkeller et al. investigated the maturation of human B cells that express protective antibodies against the circumsporozoite protein of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum (PfCSP). The repetitive structure of PfCSP induces mutations in B cells, facilitating direct interactions between two repeat-bound antibodies against PfCSP, which enhance antigen affinity and B cell activation. Such interactions may optimize binding and promote clustering of surface antibodies in general. Science , this issue p. 1358
PuReST
2018-06-07

Pervasive eye-tracking applications such as gaze-based human computer interaction and advanced driver assistance require real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection. However, automated pupil detection has proved to be an intricate task in real-world scenarios due to a large mixture of challenges - for instance, quickly changing illumination and occlusions. In this work, we introduce the <u>Pu</u>pil <u>Re</u>constructor with <u>S</u>ubsequent <u>T</u>racking (PuReST), a novel method for fast and robust pupil tracking. The proposed method was evaluated on over 266,000 realistic and challenging images acquired with three distinct head-mounted eye tracking devices, increasing pupil detection rate by 5.44 and 29.92 percentage points while reducing average run time by a factor of 2.74 and 1.1. w.r.t. state-of-the-art 1) pupil detectors and 2) vendor provided pupil trackers, respectively. Overall, PuReST outperformed other methods in 81.82% of use cases.
Cross-subject workload classification using pupil-related measures
2018-06-07

Real-time evaluation of a person's cognitive load can be desirable in many situations. It can be employed to automatically assess or adjust the difficulty of a task, as a safety measure, or in psychological research. Eye-related measures, such as the pupil diameter or blink rate, provide a non-intrusive way to assess the cognitive load of a subject and have therefore been used in a variety of applications. Usually, workload classifiers trained on these measures are highly subject-dependent and transfer poorly to other subjects. We present a novel method to generalize from a set of trained classifiers to new and unknown subjects. We use normalized features and a similarity function to match a new subject with similar subjects, for which classifiers have been previously trained. These classifiers are then used in a weighted voting system to detect workload for an unknown subject. For real-time workload classification, our methods performs at 70.4% accuracy. Higher accuracy of 76.8% can be achieved in an offline classification setting.
Scanpath comparison in medical image reading skills of dental students
2018-06-07

A popular topic in eye tracking is the difference between novices and experts and their domain-specific eye movement behaviors. However, very little is researched regarding how expertise develops, and more specifically, the developmental stages of eye movement behaviors. Our work compares the scanpaths of five semesters of dental students viewing orthopantomograms (OPTs) with classifiers to distinguish sixth semester through tenth semester students. We used the analysis algorithm SubsMatch 2.0 and the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. Overall, both classifiers were able distinguish the stages of expertise in medical image reading above chance level. Specifically, it was able to accurately determine sixth semester students with no prior training as well as sixth semester students after training. Ultimately, using scanpath models to recognize gaze patterns characteristic of learning stages, we can provide more adaptive, gaze-based training for students.
Optimized DNA sampling of ancient bones using Computed Tomography scans
2018-06-07

Abstract The prevalence of contaminant microbial DNA in ancient bone samples represents the principal limiting factor for palaeogenomic studies, as it may comprise more than 99% of DNA molecules obtained. Efforts to exclude or reduce this contaminant fraction have been numerous but also variable in their success. Here, we present a simple but highly effective method to increase the relative proportion of endogenous molecules obtained from ancient bones. Using computed tomography ( CT ) scanning, we identify the densest region of a bone as optimal for sampling. This approach accurately identifies the densest internal regions of petrous bones, which are known to be a source of high‐purity ancient DNA . For ancient long bones, CT scans reveal a high‐density outermost layer, which has been routinely removed and discarded prior to DNA extraction. For almost all long bones investigated, we find that targeted sampling of this outermost layer provides an increase in endogenous DNA content over that obtained from softer, trabecular bone. This targeted sampling can produce as much as 50‐fold increase in the proportion of endogenous DNA , providing a directly proportional reduction in sequencing costs for shotgun sequencing experiments. The observed increases in endogenous DNA proportion are not associated with any reduction in absolute endogenous molecule recovery. Although sampling the outermost layer can result in higher levels of human contamination, some bones were found to have more contamination associated with the internal bone structures. Our method is highly consistent, reproducible and applicable across a wide range of bone types, ages and species. We predict that this discovery will greatly extend the potential to study ancient populations and species in the genomics era.
Nonequilibrium phase transitions of sheared colloidal microphases: Results from dynamical density functional theory
2018-06-07

By means of classical density functional theory and its dynamical extension, we consider a colloidal fluid with spherically symmetric competing interactions, which are well known to exhibit a rich bulk phase behavior. This includes complex three-dimensional periodically ordered cluster phases such as lamellae, two-dimensional hexagonally packed cylinders, gyroid structures, or spherical micelles. While the bulk phase behavior has been studied extensively in earlier work, in this paper we focus on such structures confined between planar repulsive walls under shear flow. For sufficiently high shear rates, we observe that microphase separation can become fully suppressed. For lower shear rates, however, we find that, e.g., the gyroid structure undergoes a kinetic phase transition to a hexagonally packed cylindrical phase, which is found experimentally and theoretically in amphiphilic block copolymer systems. As such, besides the known similarities between the latter and colloidal systems regarding the equilibrium phase behavior, our work reveals further intriguing nonequilibrium relations between copolymer melts and colloidal fluids with competing interactions.
Implementing innovative gaze analytic methods in clinical psychology
2018-06-07

A variety of psychological disorders like antisocial personality disorder have been linked to impairments in facial emotion recognition. Exploring eye movements during categorization of emotional faces is a promising approach with the potential to reveal possible differences in cognitive processes underlying these deficits. Based on this premise we investigated whether antisocial violent offenders exhibit different scan patterns compared to a matched healthy control group while categorizing emotional faces. Group differences were analyzed in terms of attention to the eyes, extent of exploration behavior and structure of switching patterns between Areas of Interest. While we were not able to show clear group differences, the present study is one of the first that demonstrates the feasibility and utility of incorporating recently developed eye movement metrics such as gaze transition entropy into clinical psychology.
Development and evaluation of a gaze feedback system integrated into eyetrace
2018-06-07

A growing field of studies in eye-tracking is the use of gaze data for realtime feedback to the subject. In this work, we present a software system for such experiments and validate it with a visual search task experiment. This system was integrated into an eye tracking analysis tool. Our aim was to improve subject performance in this task by employing saliency features for gaze guidance. This realtime feedback system can be applicable within many realms, such as learning interventions, computer entertainment, or virtual reality.
An inconspicuous and modular head-mounted eye tracker
2018-06-07

State of the art head mounted eye trackers employ glasses like frames, making their usage uncomfortable or even impossible for prescription eyewear users. Nonetheless, these users represent a notable portion of the population (e.g. the Prevent Blindness America organization reports that about half of the USA population use corrective eyewear for refractive errors alone). Thus, making eye tracking accessible for eyewear users is paramount to not only improve usability, but is also key for the ecological validity of eye tracking studies. In this work, we report on a novel approach for eye tracker design in the form of a modular and inconspicuous device that can be easily attached to glasses; for users without glasses, we also provide a 3D printable frame blueprint. Our prototypes include both low cost Commerical Out of The Shelf (COTS) and more expensive Original Equipment manufacturer (OEM) cameras, with sampling rates ranging between 30 and 120 fps and multiple pixel resolutions.
Eyemic
2018-06-07

The concept of hands free surgical microscope has become increasingly popular in the domain of microsurgery. The higher magnification, the smaller field of view, necessitates frequent interaction with the microscope during an operation. Researchers showed that manual (hand) interactions with a surgical microscope resulted in disruptive and hazardous situations. Previously, we proposed the idea of eye control microscope as a solution to this interaction problem. While gaze contingent applications have been widely studied in HCI and eye tracking domain the lack of ocular based eye trackers for microscope being an important concern in this domain. To solve this critical problem and provide opportunity to capture eye movements in microsurgery in real time we present EyeMic, a binocular eye tracker that can be attached on top of any microscope ocular. Our eye tracker has only 5mm height to grantee same field of view, and it supports up to 120 frame per second eye movement recording.
The World Citizen School – A space for self-organized learning of socially engaged student initiatives
2018-06-07

The civic engagement of students can contribute to all missions of a university: teaching, research, and transfer to society. At the same time, student initiatives are often overlooked in that context. Through the example of the World Citizen School model, which was developed at the University of Tübingen, this workshop report aims to show how civic engagement of student initiatives can be anchored and promoted at universities. The focus is on the description of the model and the interplay of the various constituent aspects. The illustrations draw special attention to the often-overlooked potential of self-organized learning and engagement of student initiatives for university teaching.
Freshwater megafauna diversity: Patterns, status and threats
2018-06-08

Abstract Aim Freshwater megafauna remain underrepresented in research and conservation, despite a disproportionately high risk of extinction due to multiple human threats. Therefore, our aims are threefold; (i) identify global patterns of freshwater megafauna richness and endemism, (ii) assess the conservation status of freshwater megafauna and (iii) demonstrate spatial and temporal patterns of human pressure throughout their distribution ranges. Location Global. Methods We identified 207 extant freshwater megafauna species, based on a 30 kg weight threshold, and mapped their distributions using Hydro BASINS subcatchments (level 8). Information on conservation status and population trends for each species was extracted from the IUCN Red List website. We investigated human impacts on freshwater megafauna in space and time by examining spatial congruence between their distributions and human pressures, described by the Incident Biodiversity Threat Index and Temporal Human Pressure Index. Results Freshwater megafauna occur in 76% of the world’s main river basins (level 3 Hydro BASINS ), with species richness peaking in the Amazon, Congo, Orinoco, Mekong and Ganges‐Brahmaputra basins. Freshwater megafauna are more threatened than their smaller counterparts within the specific taxonomic groups (i.e., fishes, mammals, reptiles and amphibians). Out of the 93 freshwater megafauna species with known population trends, 71% are in decline. Meanwhile, IUCN Red List assessments reported insufficient or outdated data for 43% of all freshwater megafauna species. Since the early 1990s, human pressure has increased throughout 63% of their distribution ranges, with particularly intense impacts occurring in the Mekong and Ganges‐Brahmaputra basins. Main conclusions Freshwater megafauna species are threatened globally, with intense and increasing human pressures occurring in many of their biodiversity hotspots. We call for research and conservation actions for freshwater megafauna, as they are highly sensitive to present and future pressures including a massive boom in hydropower dam construction in their biodiversity hotspots.
The starburst galaxy NGC 253 revisited by H.E.S.S. and Fermi-LAT
2018-06-08

Context. NGC 253 is one of only two starburst galaxies found to emit γ -rays from hundreds of MeV to multi-TeV energies. Accurate measurements of the very-high-energy (VHE; E &gt; 100 GeV) and high-energy (HE; E &gt; 60 MeV) spectra are crucial to study the underlying particle accelerators, probe the dominant emission mechanism(s) and to study cosmic-ray interaction and transport. Aims. The measurement of the VHE γ -ray emission of NGC 253 published in 2012 by H.E.S.S. was limited by large systematic uncertainties. Here, the most up to date measurement of the γ -ray spectrum of NGC 253 is investigated in both HE and VHE γ -rays. Assuming a hadronic origin of the γ -ray emission, the measurement uncertainties are propagated into the interpretation of the accelerated particle population. Methods. The data of H.E.S.S. observations are reanalysed using an updated calibration and analysis chain. The improved Fermi –LAT analysis employs more than 8 yr of data processed using pass 8. The cosmic-ray particle population is evaluated from the combined HE–VHE γ -ray spectrum using NAIMA in the optically thin case. Results. The VHE γ -ray energy spectrum is best fit by a power-law distribution with a flux normalisation of (1.34 ± 0.14 stat ± 0.27 sys ) × 10 −13 cm −2 s −1 TeV 1 at 1 TeV – about 40% above, but compatible with the value obtained in Abramowski et al. (2012). The spectral index Γ = 2.39 ± 0.14 stat ± 0.25 sys is slightly softer than but consistent with the previous measurement within systematic errors. In the Fermi energy range an integral flux of F ( E &gt; 60 MeV) = (1.56 ± 0.28 stat ± 0.15 sys ) × 10 −8 cm −2 s −1 is obtained. At energies above ∼3 GeV the HE spectrum is consistent with a power-law ranging into the VHE part of the spectrum measured by H.E.S.S. with an overall spectral index Γ = 2.22 ± 0.06 stat . Conclusions. Two scenarios for the starburst nucleus are tested, in which the gas in the starburst nucleus acts as either a thin or a thick target for hadronic cosmic rays accelerated by the individual sources in the nucleus. In these two models, the level to which NGC 253 acts as a calorimeter is estimated to a range of f cal = 0.1 to 1 while accounting for the measurement uncertainties. The presented spectrum is likely to remain the most accurate measurements until the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) has collected a substantial set of data towards NGC 253.
Peroxisomal monoubiquitinated PEX5 interacts with the AAA ATPases PEX1 and PEX6 and is unfolded during its dislocation into the cytosol
2018-06-08

PEX1 and PEX6 are two members of the <u>A</u>TPases <u>a</u>ssociated with diverse cellular <u>a</u>ctivities (AAA) family and the core components of the receptor export module of the peroxisomal matrix protein import machinery. Their role is to extract monoubiquitinated PEX5, the peroxisomal protein-shuttling receptor, from the peroxisomal membrane docking/translocation module (DTM), so that a new cycle of protein transportation can start. Recent data have shown that PEX1 and PEX6 form a heterohexameric complex that unfolds substrates by processive threading. However, whether the natural substrate of the PEX1-PEX6 complex is monoubiquitinated PEX5 (Ub-PEX5) itself or some Ub-PEX5-interacting component(s) of the DTM remains unknown. In this work, we used an established cell-free <i>in vitro</i> system coupled with photoaffinity cross-linking and protein PEGylation assays to address this problem. We provide evidence suggesting that DTM-embedded Ub-PEX5 interacts directly with both PEX1 and PEX6 through its ubiquitin moiety and that the PEX5 polypeptide chain is globally unfolded during the ATP-dependent extraction event. These findings strongly suggest that DTM-embedded Ub-PEX5 is a <i>bona fide</i> substrate of the PEX1-PEX6 complex.
Cortical Excitability and Interhemispheric Connectivity in Early Relapsing–Remitting Multiple Sclerosis Studied With TMS-EEG
2018-06-08

Evoked potentials (EPs) are well established in clinical practice for diagnosis and prognosis in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, their value is limited to the assessment of their respective functional systems. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coupled with electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) to investigate cortical excitability and spatiotemporal dynamics of TMS-evoked neural activity in MS patients. Thirteen patients with early relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) with a median Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) of 1.0 (range 0-2.5) and 16 age- and gender-matched healthy controls received single-pulse TMS of left and right primary motor cortex (L-M1 and R-M1), respectively. Resting motor threshold for L-M1 and R-M1 was increased in MS patients. Latencies and amplitudes of N45, P70, N100, P180, and N280 TMS-evoked EEG potentials (TEPs) were not different between groups, except a significantly increased amplitude of the N280 TEP in the MS group, both for L-M1 and R-M1 stimulation. Interhemispheric signal propagation (ISP), estimated from the area under the curve of TEPs in the non-stimulated vs. stimulated M1, also did not differ between groups. In summary, findings show that ISP and TEPs were preserved in early-stage RRMS, except for an exaggerated N280 amplitude. Our findings indicate that TMS-EEG is feasible in testing excitability and connectivity in cortical neural networks in MS patients, complementary to conventional EPs. However, relevance and pathophysiological correlates of the enhanced N280 will need further study.