Natural Products: Ray of Hope for Anxiety Disorders

Background: Anxiety, a familiar form of psychiatric disorder, influences numerous persons throughout the world. These psychological disorders frequently need an enduring regime of recommended medicines and impose huge costs on human societies. For the last few decenniums, discovery in the field of natural neurophysiology garnered a lot of recognition because of its least side effects. Objective: Many people find it helpful to discover an effective herbal remedy for anxiety with fewer detrimental repercussions. The purpose of the present article is to report medicinal plant species used as anti-anxiety agents, which in turn, are helpful to develop new anti-anxiety herbal formulations. Method: An unlimited, semantic electronic and manual exploration of PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, ISI, Google Scholar, Elsevier's abstract and citation database, and the database libraries was carried using keywords such as medicinal plants, herbal drugs, traditional medicine, and anxiety for recognizing natural medications in the management of anxiety disorders. Results: Literary review collected the information of potential anti-anxiety plants. Data support the effectiveness of some popular herbal remedies by indicating high-quality scientific studies and support several clinically efficacious natural plants as anxiolytics. Conclusion: Evidence-based studies indicate that natural plant treatment is an efficient way to manage anxiety disorders; the benefits outweigh the risks.

Mapping the evolution of topics published by Education for Information: Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies

The need to map the evolution of trends in any field of activity arises when a large amount of data is available on that activity, thus making impossible a manual exploration of the data in order to understand how the field or the activity is evolving. Topic and trend mapping is a mature field with hundreds of publications on approaches, methods and tools for data collection, analysis, feature extraction and reduction, clustering and visualisation tools and algorithms. Our study aims to map the evolution of topics published by the journal Education for Information. Interdisciplinary Journal on Information Studies (EFI henceforth) which has been in existence since 1983, in order to understand how this journal has evolved and how it is positioned with regard to the field of Library and Information Science to which it belongs. Our study is part of the body of work on topic detection and text mining. Our results showed that the journal displayed a remarkable stability in its editorial policy over more than three decades. With the arrival of its third Editor in Chief in 2018, a shift towards more technologically oriented topics and to specialties from other fields are perceptible such as health information, data science and digital humanities.

Using head-mounted eye tracking to examine visual and manual exploration during naturalistic toy play in children with and without autism spectrum disorder

Multimodal exploration of objects during toy play is important for a child’s development and is suggested to be abnormal in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to either atypical attention or atypical action. However, little is known about how children with ASD coordinate their visual attention and manual actions during toy play. The current study aims to understand if and in what ways children with ASD generate exploratory behaviors to toys in natural, unconstrained contexts by utilizing head-mounted eye tracking to quantify moment-by-moment attention. We found no differences in how 24- to 48-mo children with and without ASD distribute their visual attention, generate manual action, or coordinate their visual and manual behaviors during toy play with a parent. Our findings suggest an intact ability and willingness of children with ASD to explore toys and suggest that context is important when studying child behavior.

Using a robotic teleoperation system for haptic exploration

Introduction When children with physical impairments cannot perform hand movements for haptic exploration, they miss opportunities to learn about object properties. Robotics systems with haptic feedback may better enable object exploration. Methods Twenty-four adults and ten children without physical impairments, and one adult with physical impairments, explored tools to mix substances or transport different sized objects. All participants completed the tasks with both a robotic system and manual exploration. Exploratory procedures used to determine object properties were also observed. Results Adults and children accurately identified appropriate tools for each task using manual exploration, but they were less accurate using the robotic system. The adult with physical impairment identified appropriate tools for transport in both conditions, however had difficulty identifying tools used for mixing substances. A new exploratory procedure was observed, Tapping, when using the robotic system. Conclusions Adults and children could make judgements on tool utility for tasks using both manual exploration and the robotic system, however they experienced limitations in the robotics system that require more study. The adult with disabilities required less assistance to explore tools when using the robotic system. The robotic system may be a feasible way for individuals with physical disabilities to perform haptic exploration.

Fractional ridge regression: a fast, interpretable reparameterization of ridge regression

Background Ridge regression is a regularization technique that penalizes the L2-norm of the coefficients in linear regression. One of the challenges of using ridge regression is the need to set a hyperparameter (α) that controls the amount of regularization. Cross-validation is typically used to select the best α from a set of candidates. However, efficient and appropriate selection of α can be challenging. This becomes prohibitive when large amounts of data are analyzed. Because the selected α depends on the scale of the data and correlations across predictors, it is also not straightforwardly interpretable. Results The present work addresses these challenges through a novel approach to ridge regression. We propose to reparameterize ridge regression in terms of the ratio γ between the L2-norms of the regularized and unregularized coefficients. We provide an algorithm that efficiently implements this approach, called fractional ridge regression, as well as open-source software implementations in Python and matlab (https://github.com/nrdg/fracridge). We show that the proposed method is fast and scalable for large-scale data problems. In brain imaging data, we demonstrate that this approach delivers results that are straightforward to interpret and compare across models and datasets. Conclusion Fractional ridge regression has several benefits: the solutions obtained for different γ are guaranteed to vary, guarding against wasted calculations; and automatically span the relevant range of regularization, avoiding the need for arduous manual exploration. These properties make fractional ridge regression particularly suitable for analysis of large complex datasets.

Modelling Authority: Obstetrical Machines in the Instruction of Midwives and Surgeons in Eighteenth-Century Italy

This article takes the commission of an elaborate and life-like obstetrical machine by the Italian midwifery instructor, Vincenzo Malacarne, in 1791 as a starting point for considering the ways that medical practitioners were renegotiating the relationship between the senses at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it focuses on the cultivation of touch as an authoritative and professionalised source of bodily knowledge. The article argues that Malacarne's obstetrical machine reflects an important moment of transition in the way medical practitioners were trained to interact with female patients, in which the manual exploration of a woman’s genitals was re-contextualised as an expression of scientific rationality and medical authority. A close examination of the use of obstetrical machines in midwifery training suggests, moreover, that women, too, whose touch had often been accused of irrationality and ignorance, had to be taught how to perform manual procedures in a rational and scientific manner.

VATS-US1: Thoracoscopic ultrasonography for the identification of nodules during lung metastasectomy

Open thoracotomy during pulmonary metastasectomy allows lung palpation and may discover unexpected further nodules. We assess the validity of intraoperative lung ultrasonography via thoracoscopy in identifying lung nodules. A first surgeon will perform an ultrasonographic investigation on the deflated lung by thoracoscopy. A second surgeon will then perform a manual exploration of the organ by thoracotomy. Data on number and localization of nodules will be matched and compared with final histology report. Sensitivity and specificity will be assessed. Concordance will be assessed with Cohen K test. Calculated sample size is 89 patients. This study might have an important role in shifting the surgical practice towards a less invasive approach, with consequent benefits for the patient. Protocol is registered on clinicaltrials.gov . Protocol registration number: NCT03864874.