Abstract
Drowsiness associated with sleep loss and circadian misalignment is a risk factor for accidents and human error. The percentage of time that the eyes are more than 80% closed (PERCLOS) is ...one of the most validated indices used for the passive detection of drowsiness, which is increased with sleep deprivation, after partial sleep restriction, at nighttime, and by other drowsiness manipulations during vigilance tests, simulated driving, and on-road driving. However, some cases have been reported wherein PERCLOS was not affected by drowsiness manipulations, such as in moderate drowsiness conditions, in older adults, and during aviation-related tasks. Additionally, although PERCLOS is one of the most sensitive indices for detecting drowsiness-related performance impairments during the psychomotor vigilance test or behavioral maintenance of wakefulness test, no single index is currently available as an optimal marker for detecting drowsiness during driving or other real-world situations. Based on the current published evidence, this narrative review suggests that future studies should focus on: (1) standardization to minimize differences in the definition of PERCLOS between studies; (2) extensive validation using a single device that utilizes PERCLOS-based technology; (3) development and validation of technologies that integrate PERCLOS with other behavioral and/or physiological indices, because PERCLOS alone may not be sufficiently sensitive for detecting drowsiness caused by factors other than falling asleep, such as inattention or distraction; and (4) further validation studies and field trials targeting sleep disorders and trials in real-world environments. Through such studies, PERCLOS-based technology may contribute to preventing drowsiness-related accidents and human error.
Echocardiography has a central role in the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular disease. Precise and reliable echocardiographic assessment is required for clinical decision-making. Even if the ...development of new technologies (3-dimentional echocardiography, speckle-tracking, semi-automated analysis, etc.), the final decision on analysis is strongly dependent on operator experience. Diagnostic errors are a major unresolved problem. Moreover, not only can cardiologists differ from one another in image interpretation, but also the same observer may come to different findings when a reading is repeated. Daily high workloads in clinical practice may lead to this error, and all cardiologists require precise perception in this field. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve analysis and interpretation of medical images to a new stage compared with previous algorithms. From our comprehensive review, we believe AI has the potential to improve accuracy of diagnosis, clinical management, and patient care. Although there are several concerns about the required large dataset and “black box” algorithm, AI can provide satisfactory results in this field. In the future, it will be necessary for cardiologists to adapt their daily practice to incorporate AI in this new stage of echocardiography.
This study investigated whether a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) could provide improved detection of regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMAs) and differentiate among groups of coronary ...infarction territories from conventional 2-dimensional echocardiographic images compared with that of cardiologists, sonographers, and resident readers.
An effective intervention for reduction of misreading of RWMAs is needed. The hypothesis was that a DCNN trained using echocardiographic images would provide improved detection of RWMAs in the clinical setting.
A total of 300 patients with a history of myocardial infarction were enrolled. From this cohort, 3 groups of 100 patients each had infarctions of the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, the left circumflex (LCX) branch, and the right coronary artery (RCA). A total of 100 age-matched control patients with normal wall motion were selected from a database. Each case contained cardiac ultrasonographs from short-axis views at end-diastolic, mid-systolic, and end-systolic phases. After the DCNN underwent 100 steps of training, diagnostic accuracies were calculated from the test set. Independently, 10 versions of the same model were trained, and ensemble predictions were performed using those versions.
For detection of the presence of WMAs, the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) produced by the deep learning algorithm was similar to that produced by the cardiologists and sonographer readers (0.99 vs. 0.98, respectively; p = 0.15) and significantly higher than the AUC result of the resident readers (0.99 vs. 0.90, respectively; p = 0.002). For detection of territories of WMAs, the AUC by the deep learning algorithm was similar to the AUC by the cardiologist and sonographer readers (0.97 vs. 0.95, respectively; p = 0.61) and significantly higher than the AUC by resident readers (0.97 vs. 0.83, respectively; p = 0.003). From a validation group at an independent site (n = 40), the AUC by the deep learning algorithm was 0.90.
The present results support the possibility of using DCNN for automated diagnosis of RWMAs in the field of echocardiography.
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Dreams experienced during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep have emotional features. Intervention methods for dream affectivity have recently garnered interest; we previously demonstrated that negative ...dreams were induced during REM sleep by exposure to favorable or familiar odors. However, the underlying mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain unclear. Thus, to address this gap, we investigated whether more intense odors could induce negative dreams, as odors tend to be perceived as more intense when they are preferred or familiar. Contrary to our hypothesis, the results of our study indicated that subjective intense odors did not induce negative dreams. We initially anticipated stronger odors to have a greater impact on dream emotionality, as they stimulate the brain more intensely. Notably, during arousal, weak odors tended to evoke a more potent olfactory response, while strong odors tended to produce a weaker response. To investigate whether this difference influenced the effects on dreams, we compared the respiratory activities of the strongly and weakly perceived odor groups; however, no significant differences were observed. Our findings suggest that subjectively perceived strong odors are unlikely to affect dream emotionality and may be processed differently than favorable or familiar odors.
Recently, various multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal detectors based on deep learning have been proposed. Especially, deep unfolding (DU), which involves unrolling of an existing iterative ...algorithm and embedding of trainable parameters, has been applied with remarkable detection performance. In this letter, we attempted to construct a simple DU-based trainable MIMO detector with the simplest structure without using matrix inversion. The proposed detector based on the Hubbard-Stratonovich (HS) transformation and DU is called the trainable HS (THS) detector. It requires a constant number of trainable parameters and only quadratic training and execution costs per iteration. Numerical results show that the detection performance of the THS detector is better than that of existing algorithms of the same complexity and close to that of a DU-based detector, which has higher training and execution costs than the THS detector.
The Rice Annotation Project Database (RAP-DB, http://rapdb.dna.affrc.go.jp/) has been providing a comprehensive set of gene annotations for the genome sequence of rice, Oryza sativa (japonica group) ...cv. Nipponbare. Since the first release in 2005, RAP-DB has been updated several times along with the genome assembly updates. Here, we present our newest RAP-DB based on the latest genome assembly, Os-Nipponbare-Reference-IRGSP-1.0 (IRGSP-1.0), which was released in 2011. We detected 37,869 loci by mapping transcript and protein sequences of 150 monocot species. To provide plant researchers with highly reliable and up to date rice gene annotations, we have been incorporating literature-based manually curated data, and 1,626 loci currently incorporate literature-based annotation data, including commonly used gene names or gene symbols. Transcriptional activities are shown at the nucleotide level by mapping RNA-Seq reads derived from 27 samples. We also mapped the Illumina reads of a Japanese leading japonica cultivar, Koshihikari, and a Chinese indica cultivar, Guangluai-4, to the genome and show alignments together with the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and gene functional annotations through a newly developed browser, Short-Read Assembly Browser (S-RAB). We have developed two satellite databases, Plant Gene Family Database (PGFD) and Integrative Database of Cereal Gene Phylogeny (IDCGP), which display gene family and homologous gene relationships among diverse plant species. RAP-DB and the satellite databases offer simple and user-friendly web interfaces, enabling plant and genome researchers to access the data easily and facilitating a broad range of plant research topics.
The goal of the present study was to examine the effect of listening to self-relevant words (i.e., one's own name) on vigilant attention, arousal, and subjective sleepiness during performance of a ...psychomotor vigilance test (PVT). Twenty-one participants aged 20-26 years (22.2 ± 1.76) performed a PVT in four experimental conditions: one in which their own full name was pronounced every 20 s in the stimuli epochs, one in which their full name was pronounced in inverted form, one in which beeps were played, and a control condition with no stimuli. Listening to personal names reduced attentional lapses during the PVT (i.e., the number of reaction times no less than 500 ms). The results are a first step in applying the name effect to technologies and devices aimed at maintaining arousal levels and preventing accidents during a monotonous task, such as driving.
Background
Atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia (IM) are well known as precancerous lesions of gastric cancer. The present study evaluated the gastric mucosa for 10 years after
H. pylori
...eradication at five points of the stomach as recommended by the updated Sydney system to clarify the relationship between
H. pylori
eradication and gastric cancer prevention.
Methods
Among the comprised 373 patients, 323 were
H. pylori
-positive while 50 patients were
H. pylori
-negative. Patients with successful eradication underwent follow-up endoscopic examination every year. Biopsy specimens were taken from five points of the stomach, as recommended by the updated Sydney system, and were evaluated for the degree of gastritis prospectively.
Results
Two hundred ninety-four out of the 323
H. pylori
-positive patients successfully achieved eradication. Of the 197 patients on whom five-point biopsy was performed, the courses of 30 patients were able to be observed every year for 10 years after successful eradication. Inflammation, activity, and atrophy score at all five points were significantly reduced half a year to 6 years after eradication. IM scores fluctuated intensely up and down during all observation periods; however, IM score of the lesser curvature of the corpus continued decreasing gradually and showed a significant decrease 6 years after (0.97 ± 0.09 to 0.42 ± 0.17,
P
< 0.05).
Conclusion
In 10 years after
H. pylori
eradication, atrophy at all sites and IM in the lesser curvature of the corpus gradually and significantly decreased. These results suggest that the improvement of gastric atrophy and IM might have association with the reduction of gastric cancer occurrence.
To determine the long-term outcomes after colorectal endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), we conducted a large, multicenter, prospective cohort trial with a 5-year observation period.
Between ...February 2013 and January 2015, we consecutively enrolled 1740 patients with 1814 colorectal epithelial neoplasms ≥20 mm who underwent ESD. Patients with noncurative resection (non-CR) lesions underwent additional radical surgery, as needed. After the initial treatment, intensive 5-year follow-up with planned multiple colonoscopies was conducted to identify metastatic and/or local recurrences. Primary outcomes were overall survival, disease-specific survival, and intestinal preservation rates. The rates of local recurrence and metachronous invasive cancer were evaluated as the secondary outcomes.
The 5-year overall survival, disease-specific survival, and intestinal preservation rates were 93.6%, 99.6%, and 88.6%, respectively. Patients with CR lesions had no metastatic occurrence, and patients with non-CR lesions had 4 metastatic occurrences. Kaplan–Meier curves revealed that overall survival and disease-specific survival rates were significantly higher in patients with CR lesions than in those with non-CR lesions (P > .001 and P = .009, respectively). Local recurrence occurred in only 8 lesions (0.5%), which were successfully resected by subsequent endoscopic treatment. Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed that piecemeal resection (hazard ratio, 8.19; 95% CI, 1.47–45.7; P = .02) and margin-positive resection (hazard ratio, 8.06; 95% CI, 1.76–37.0; P = .007) were significant independent predictors of local recurrence after colorectal ESD. Fifteen metachronous invasive cancers (1.0%) were identified during surveillance colonoscopy, most of which required surgical resection.
A favorable long-term prognosis indicates that ESD can be the standard treatment for large colorectal epithelial neoplasms. Clinical Trial Registration Number: UMIN000010136.
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Accurate histologic assessment facilitated by endoscopic submucosal dissection enables stratification of the risk of lymph node metastasis and determines the necessity of additional surgery, which may have led to a good long-term prognosis.