scholarly journals Genetic Contributions to Multivariate Data-Driven Brain Networks Constructed via Source-Based Morphometry

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (9) ◽  
pp. 4899-4913
Author(s):  
Amanda L Rodrigue ◽  
Aaron F Alexander-Bloch ◽  
Emma E M Knowles ◽  
Samuel R Mathias ◽  
Josephine Mollon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Additional Insight ◽  
Genetic Overlap ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Genetic Contributions ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Identifying genetic factors underlying neuroanatomical variation has been difficult. Traditional methods have used brain regions from predetermined parcellation schemes as phenotypes for genetic analyses, although these parcellations often do not reflect brain function and/or do not account for covariance between regions. We proposed that network-based phenotypes derived via source-based morphometry (SBM) may provide additional insight into the genetic architecture of neuroanatomy given its data-driven approach and consideration of covariance between voxels. We found that anatomical SBM networks constructed on ~ 20 000 individuals from the UK Biobank were heritable and shared functionally meaningful genetic overlap with each other. We additionally identified 27 unique genetic loci that contributed to one or more SBM networks. Both GWA and genetic correlation results indicated complex patterns of pleiotropy and polygenicity similar to other complex traits. Lastly, we found genetic overlap between a network related to the default mode and schizophrenia, a disorder commonly associated with neuroanatomic alterations.

What do adolescents want from their ED? An evaluation on the preferences and opinions of adolescents attending local EDs

2018 ◽  
pp. emermed-2017-207249
Author(s):  
Anna Bryans ◽  
Julian Camilleri-Brennan ◽  
Lei Hua ◽  
Nandesh Patel ◽  
Rebecca Price ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Likert Scale ◽  
Young Person ◽  
Additional Insight ◽  
Adolescent Population ◽  
Clear Explanation ◽  
Adolescent Patients ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Insight Into

IntroductionThe adolescent population comprises a significant proportion of attendances to the ED. Despite adolescent patients reporting lower levels of healthcare satisfaction compared with other age groups, their opinions are under-represented in existing literature. This prospective study investigated adolescents’ expectations and preferences regarding the ED service.MethodsA questionnaire designed by the investigators was distributed to children aged 12–16 years over a 6-month period in 2015 at two EDs in the UK. The questionnaire explored themes such as same-sex and similar-age areas, staff communication and environment. Interviews based on the questionnaire template were also conducted and guardians were permitted to accompany the participant. Verbal informed consent was obtained from both the young person and their guardian to participate in the study.ResultsThere were 254 respondents, which represented 8.8% of adolescent attendances in the study period. ‘Cleanliness’ was rated the most important factor within the ED setting with 94.8% of respondents selecting 4 or 5 on a 5-point Likert scale. This was followed by ‘feeling comfortable’, ‘clear explanation’ and ‘staff communication’ (91.2%, 90.8% and 90.4% rating these 4 or 5, respectively). However, when participants were asked to select a single most important factor, being ‘seen quickly’ was selected most frequently (95/206, 46.1%). ‘Entertainment’ was regarded the least important with only 17.0% selecting 4 or 5 on the Likert scale. Preference for being treated in an adult ED compared with a child ED increased with age.ConclusionsBeing ‘seen quickly’ was considered the single most important factor by adolescent patients in the ED. Notably, ‘cleanliness’ and aspects of communication also rated highly, with ‘entertainment’ regarded as least important. The additional insight into the healthcare preferences of the adolescent population provides a platform on which the future ED services can be tailored to the needs of young people.

Formulating Industrial Policy

2019 ◽  
Vol 250 ◽  
pp. R47-R53
Author(s):  
Tim Besley ◽  
Richard Davies
Keyword(s):  
Market Failure ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Executive Summary ◽  
Structural Weakness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
Economic Contribution ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk

Executive SummaryAlongside the challenge of maintaining economic competitiveness in the face of great uncertainty, Brexit brings an opportunity for the government to set out a new industrial strategy. The case for doing so rests on the need to address areas of persistent structural weakness in the UK economy, including low productivity. But it is important that any new industrial strategy be based on appropriately granular data reflecting the real structure of the UK corporate sector: the overwhelmingly preponderant role of services as opposed to manufacturing, for example; the importance of young, fast-growing firms as opposed to SMEs; the relatively high failure rate of companies in the UK; and the relative lack of successful mid-sized firms. Such a data-driven approach might spawn an industrial strategy quite different from the piecemeal programmes of recent years.Internationally, the UK is a laggard in this area, and the recently-created Industrial Strategy Council does not look strong enough to change that position. To move forward, the government needs to make industrial strategy a central plank of economic policy, embedded at the heart of the administration with its own staff and funding, and operations based on a comprehensive review of the economic contribution and potential of various types of firm. Needless to say, it cannot be a substitute for a continuing commitment to competition and markets, or a stalking horse for protectionism: interventions should be justified by carefully-argued market failure arguments, be time-limited, and transparently evaluated.

scholarly journals GWAS in 446,118 European adults identifies 78 genetic loci for self-reported habitual sleep duration supported by accelerometer-derived estimates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan S Dashti ◽  
Samuel E Jones ◽  
Andrew R Wood ◽  
Jacqueline M Lane ◽  
Vincent T. van Hees ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sleep Duration ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
European Ancestry ◽  
Association Analyses ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
Synaptic Neurotransmission ◽  
Impact Accelerometer ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Genetic Contributions

AbstractSleep is an essential homeostatically-regulated state of decreased activity and alertness conserved across animal species, and both short and long sleep duration associate with chronic disease and all-cause mortality1,2. Defining genetic contributions to sleep duration could point to regulatory mechanisms and clarify causal disease relationships. Through genome-wide association analyses in 446,118 participants of European ancestry from the UK Biobank, we discover 78 loci for self-reported sleep duration that further impact accelerometer-derived measures of sleep duration, daytime inactivity duration, sleep efficiency and number of sleep bouts in a subgroup (n=85,499) with up to 7-day accelerometry. Associations are enriched for genes expressed in several brain regions, and for pathways including striatum and subpallium development, mechanosensory response, dopamine binding, synaptic neurotransmission, catecholamine production, synaptic plasticity, and unsaturated fatty acid metabolism. Genetic correlation analysis indicates shared biological links between sleep duration and psychiatric, cognitive, anthropometric and metabolic traits and Mendelian randomization highlights a causal link of longer sleep with schizophrenia.

Automatic Detection and Analysis of the “Game Hack” Scam

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emad Badawi ◽  
Guy-Vincent Jourdan ◽  
Gregor Bochmann ◽  
Iosif-Viorel Onut
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Market Research ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Search Queries ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
Insight Into

The “Game Hack” Scam (GHS) is a mostly unreported cyberattack in which attackers attempt to convince victims that they will be provided with free, unlimited “resources” or other advantages for their favorite game. The endgame of the scammers ranges from monetizing for themselves the victims time and resources by having them click through endless “surveys”, filing out “market research” forms, etc., to collecting personal information, getting the victims to subscribe to questionable services, up to installing questionable executable files on their machines. Other scams such as the “Technical Support Scam”, the “Survey Scam”, and the “Romance Scam” have been analyzed before but to the best of our knowledge, GHS has not been well studied so far and is indeed mostly unknown. In this paper, our aim is to investigate and gain more knowledge on this type of scam by following a data-driven approach; we formulate GHS-related search queries, and used multiple search engines to collect data about the websites to which GHS victims are directed when they search online for various game hacks and tricks. We analyze the collected data to provide new insight into GHS and research the extent of this scam. We show that despite its low profile, the click traffic generated by the scam is in the hundreds of millions. We also show that GHS attackers use social media, streaming sites, blogs, and even unrelated sites such as change.org or jeuxvideo.com to carry out their attacks and reach a large number of victims. Our data collection spans a year; in that time, we uncovered 65,905 different GHS URLs, mapped onto over 5,900 unique domains.We were able to link attacks to attackers and found that they routinely target a vast array of games. Furthermore, we find that GHS instances are on the rise, and so is the number of victims. Our low-end estimation is that these attacks have been clicked at least 150 million times in the last five years. Finally, in keeping with similar large-scale scam studies, we find that the current public blacklists are inadequate and suggest that our method is more effective at detecting these attacks.

Reason for optimism: How a shifting focus on neural population codes is moving cognitive neuroscience beyond phrenology

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Parkinson ◽  
Thalia Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Pattern Analysis ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Population ◽  
Multivariate Pattern Analysis ◽  
Population Responses ◽  
Population Codes ◽  
Multivariate Pattern ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractMultivariate pattern analysis can address many of the challenges for cognitive neuroscience highlighted in After Phrenology (Anderson 2014) by illuminating the information content of brain regions and by providing insight into whether functional overlap reflects the recruitment of common or distinct computational mechanisms. Further, failing to consider submaximal but reliable population responses can lead to an overly modular account of brain function.

scholarly journals A data-driven test for cross-cultural differences in face preferences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lingshan Zhang ◽  
Iris Jasmin Holzleitner ◽  
Anthony J Lee ◽  
Vanessa Fasolt ◽  
Hongyi Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Principal Components ◽  
Facial Attractiveness ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Data Driven Test

Previous research has shown strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness judgments. However, these studies all used a theory-driven approach in which responses to specific facial characteristics are compared between cultures. This approach is constrained by the predictions that can be derived from existing theories and can therefore bias impressions of the extent of cross-cultural agreement in face preferences. We directly addressed this problem by using a data-driven, rather than theory-driven, approach to compare facial attractiveness judgments made by Chinese-born participants who were resident in China, Chinese-born participants currently resident in the UK, and UK-born and -resident White participants. Analyses of the principal components along which faces naturally varied suggested that Chinese and White UK participants used face information in different ways, at least when judging women’s facial attractiveness. In other words, the data-driven approach used in the current study revealed some cross-cultural differences in face preferences that were not apparent in studies using theory-driven approaches.

scholarly journals Inferring simple but precise quantitative models of human oocyte and early embryo development

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (182) ◽  
pp. 20210475
Author(s):  
Brian D. Leahy ◽  
Catherine Racowsky ◽  
Daniel Needleman
Keyword(s):  
Embryo Development ◽  
Oocyte Maturation ◽  
Statistical Physics ◽  
Early Embryo ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Human Oocyte ◽  
Early Embryo Development ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
Insight Into

Macroscopic, phenomenological models are useful as concise framings of our understandings in fields from statistical physics to finance to biology. Constructing a phenomenological model for development would provide a framework for understanding the complicated, regulatory nature of oogenesis and embryogenesis. Here, we use a data-driven approach to infer quantitative, precise models of human oocyte maturation and pre-implantation embryo development, by analysing clinical in-vitro fertilization (IVF) data on 7399 IVF cycles resulting in 57 827 embryos. Surprisingly, we find that both oocyte maturation and early embryo development are quantitatively described by simple models with minimal interactions. This simplicity suggests that oogenesis and embryogenesis are composed of modular processes that are relatively siloed from one another. In particular, our analysis provides strong evidence that (i) pre-antral follicles produce anti-Müllerian hormone independently of effects from other follicles, (ii) oocytes mature to metaphase-II independently of the woman’s age, her BMI and other factors, (iii) early embryo development is memoryless for the variables assessed here, in that the probability of an embryo transitioning from its current developmental stage to the next is independent of its previous stage. Our results both provide insight into the fundamentals of oogenesis and embryogenesis and have implications for the clinical IVF.

scholarly journals Emergence and organization of adult brain function throughout child development

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan S. Yates ◽  
Cameron T. Ellis ◽  
Nicholas B. Turk-Browne
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Adult Brain ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
The Brain

AbstractAdult cognitive neuroscience has guided the study of human brain development by identifying regions associated with cognitive functions at maturity. The activity, connectivity, and structure of a region can be compared across ages to characterize the developmental trajectory of the corresponding function. However, observed developmental differences may not only reflect the maturation of the function but also its organization across the brain. That is, a function may be mature in children but supported by different brain regions and thus underestimated by focusing on adult regions. To test these possibilities, we investigated the presence, maturity, and localization of adult functions in children using probabilistic shared response modeling, a machine learning approach for functional alignment. After learning a lower-dimensional feature space from fMRI activity as adults watched a movie, we translated these shared features into the anatomical brain space of children 3–12 years old. To evaluate functional maturity, we correlated this reconstructed activity with the children’s actual fMRI activity as they watched the same movie. We found reliable correlations throughout cortex, even in the youngest children. The strength of the correlation in the precuneus, inferior frontal gyrus, and lateral occipital cortex increased over development and predicted chronological age. These age-related changes were driven by three types of developmental trajectories across distinct features of adult function: emergence from absence to presence, consistency in anatomical expression, and reorganization from one anatomical region to another. This data-driven approach to studying brain-wide function during naturalistic perception provides an abstract description of cognitive development throughout childhood.Significance StatementWhen watching a movie, your brain processes many types of information—plotlines, characters, locations, etc. A child watching this movie receives the same input, but some of their cognitive abilities (e.g., motion detection) are more developed than others (e.g., emotional reasoning). Beyond anatomical differences, when does the child brain begin to function like an adult brain? We used a data-driven approach to extract different aspects of brain activity from adults while they watched a movie during fMRI. We then predicted what the brain activity of a child would look like if they had processed the movie the same way. Comparing this prediction with actual brain activity from children allowed us to track the development of human brain function.

scholarly journals Retrieving the solar EUV spectrum from a reduced set of spectral lines

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 3055-3069 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Dudok de Wit ◽  
J. Lilensten ◽  
J. Aboudarham ◽  
P.-O. Amblard ◽  
M. Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Variability ◽  
Spectral Lines ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Spectral Variability ◽  
Ionospheric Models ◽  
Basic Set ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
Euv Spectrum ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract. The solar EUV irradiance is a key input for thermospheric and ionospheric models. Difficulties in continuously measuring the calibrated spectrum has prompted the use of various surrogate quantities. Although most proxies correlate quite well with the spectral variability, their use for modelling purposes becomes increasingly unsatisfactory. A different and data-driven approach is considered here, in which the EUV spectrum is reconstructed from a linear combination of a few, calibrated and carefully selected spectral lines. This approach is based on a statistical analysis of the temporal variability of EUV spectra, as recorded by the TIMED satellite. A basic set of lines is extracted, from which the salient features of the spectral variability can be reconstructed. The best results are achieved with a selection of 5 to 8 of these lines. This study focuses on the methodology for selecting these lines, which can also be used for instrument specification and provides new insight into the comparison of solar proxies against the EUV irradiance.

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