scholarly journals Unsupervised deep learning reveals a stimulative effect of dopamine D3 receptor agonists on zebrafish sociality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yijie Geng ◽  
Randall T. Peterson

SUMMARYAlthough some pharmacological agents are known to alter social behaviors, precise description and quantification of such effects have proven difficult. The complexity of brain functions regulating sociality makes it challenging to predict drug effects on social behavior without testing in live animals, and most existing behavioral assays are low-throughput and provide only unidimensional readouts of social function. To achieve richer characterization of drug effects on sociality, we developed a scalable social behavioral assay for zebrafish named ZeChat based on unsupervised deep learning. High-dimensional and dynamic social behavioral phenotypes are automatically classified using this method. By screening a neuroactive compound library, we found that different classes of chemicals evoke distinct patterns of social behavioral fingerprints. By examining these patterns, we discovered that dopamine D3 agonists possess a social stimulative effect on zebrafish. The D3 agonists pramipexole, piribedil, and 7-hydroxy-DPAT-HBr rescued social deficits in a valproic acid-induced zebrafish autism model. The ZeChat platform provides a promising approach for dissecting the pharmacology of social behavior and discovering novel social-modulatory compounds.

Author(s):  
Mohamed Aziz Bhouri ◽  
Francisco Sahli Costabal ◽  
Hanwen Wang ◽  
Kevin Linka ◽  
Mathias Peirlinck ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 3119
Author(s):  
Cristina L. Saratxaga ◽  
Jorge Bote ◽  
Juan F. Ortega-Morán ◽  
Artzai Picón ◽  
Elena Terradillos ◽  
...  

(1) Background: Clinicians demand new tools for early diagnosis and improved detection of colon lesions that are vital for patient prognosis. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) allows microscopical inspection of tissue and might serve as an optical biopsy method that could lead to in-situ diagnosis and treatment decisions; (2) Methods: A database of murine (rat) healthy, hyperplastic and neoplastic colonic samples with more than 94,000 images was acquired. A methodology that includes a data augmentation processing strategy and a deep learning model for automatic classification (benign vs. malignant) of OCT images is presented and validated over this dataset. Comparative evaluation is performed both over individual B-scan images and C-scan volumes; (3) Results: A model was trained and evaluated with the proposed methodology using six different data splits to present statistically significant results. Considering this, 0.9695 (±0.0141) sensitivity and 0.8094 (±0.1524) specificity were obtained when diagnosis was performed over B-scan images. On the other hand, 0.9821 (±0.0197) sensitivity and 0.7865 (±0.205) specificity were achieved when diagnosis was made considering all the images in the whole C-scan volume; (4) Conclusions: The proposed methodology based on deep learning showed great potential for the automatic characterization of colon polyps and future development of the optical biopsy paradigm.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (16) ◽  
pp. 1876
Author(s):  
Ioana Apostol ◽  
Marius Preda ◽  
Constantin Nila ◽  
Ion Bica

The Internet of Things has become a cutting-edge technology that is continuously evolving in size, connectivity, and applicability. This ecosystem makes its presence felt in every aspect of our lives, along with all other emerging technologies. Unfortunately, despite the significant benefits brought by the IoT, the increased attack surface built upon it has become more critical than ever. Devices have limited resources and are not typically created with security features. Lately, a trend of botnet threats transitioning to the IoT environment has been observed, and an army of infected IoT devices can expand quickly and be used for effective attacks. Therefore, identifying proper solutions for securing IoT systems is currently an important and challenging research topic. Machine learning-based approaches are a promising alternative, allowing the identification of abnormal behaviors and the detection of attacks. This paper proposes an anomaly-based detection solution that uses unsupervised deep learning techniques to identify IoT botnet activities. An empirical evaluation of the proposed method is conducted on both balanced and unbalanced datasets to assess its threat detection capability. False-positive rate reduction and its impact on the detection system are also analyzed. Furthermore, a comparison with other unsupervised learning approaches is included. The experimental results reveal the performance of the proposed detection method.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096372142199033
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Storrs ◽  
Roland W. Fleming

One of the deepest insights in neuroscience is that sensory encoding should take advantage of statistical regularities. Humans’ visual experience contains many redundancies: Scenes mostly stay the same from moment to moment, and nearby image locations usually have similar colors. A visual system that knows which regularities shape natural images can exploit them to encode scenes compactly or guess what will happen next. Although these principles have been appreciated for more than 60 years, until recently it has been possible to convert them into explicit models only for the earliest stages of visual processing. But recent advances in unsupervised deep learning have changed that. Neural networks can be taught to compress images or make predictions in space or time. In the process, they learn the statistical regularities that structure images, which in turn often reflect physical objects and processes in the outside world. The astonishing accomplishments of unsupervised deep learning reaffirm the importance of learning statistical regularities for sensory coding and provide a coherent framework for how knowledge of the outside world gets into visual cortex.


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