Faculty Bibliography

Electrocardiogram (ECG), which is a noninvasive technique, is used generally as a primary diagnostic tool for cardiovascular diseases. In real-time scenario, noises like channel noise, muscle artifacts, electrode motion and baseline wander are often embedded with ECG signals during acquisition and transmission. In this paper, an automatic ECG signal enhancement technique is proposed to remove noise components from time-frequency domain represented noisy ECG signal. Stockwell transform (S-Transform) is used in this work to represent the noisy ECG signal in time-frequency domain. Next, masking and filtering technique is applied to remove unwanted noise components from time-frequency domain. The proposed technique does not require any prior information like R-peak position or reference signal as auxiliary signal. This method is evaluated on ECG signals which are available in MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows better signal to noise ratio (SNR) and lower root means square error (RMSE) compared to earlier reported wavelet transform with soft thresholding (WT-Soft) and wavelet transform with subband dependent threshold (WT-Subband) based technique. To quantify the significant difference among all methods, the performances of different ECG enhancement techniques at 1.25dB input SNR level are compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA) based statistical evaluation technique and it is seen that the proposed method yields superior performance compared to other methods. R-peak detection test is also conducted on enhanced ECG signal in addition to SNR and RMSE to evaluate the quality of biology-related information preserved in the enhanced ECG signal. The performance of R-peak detection for denoised ECG signals, in terms of sensitivity and positive predictivity using proposed enhancement method, is also better than WT-Soft, WT-Subband methods, and validates the superiority of the proposed method.

BACKGROUND: A significant association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obesity has been reported. This study addresses unexplored aspects of this relationship. AIMS: To evaluate the association between adult obesity and: (a) persistent, remitted or lifetime ADHD; (b) number of childhood ADHD symptoms, controlling for socioeconomic status and mood, anxiety and substance use disorders. METHOD: Face-to-face psychiatric interviews in 34 653 US adults from the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Obesity was defined as a body mass index >/=30. RESULTS: Persistent, lifetime or remitted ADHD were not associated with obesity after controlling for confounders. The number of childhood ADHD symptoms was significantly associated with adult obesity, even after adjustment, in women. CONCLUSIONS: Childhood ADHD symptoms are associated with obesity in women even after comorbid psychiatric disorders are accounted for. This provides a rationale for longitudinal studies assessing the impact of the treatment of childhood ADHD symptoms on obesity in women.

OBJECTIVE: Recommendations for fruit and vegetable consumption are largely unmet. Lower socio-economic status (SES), neighbourhood poverty and poor access to retail outlets selling healthy foods are thought to predict lower consumption. The objective of the present study was to assess the interrelationships between these risk factors as predictors of fruit and vegetable consumption. DESIGN: Cross-sectional multilevel analyses of data on fruit and vegetable consumption, socio-demographic characteristics, neighbourhood poverty and access to healthy retail food outlets. SETTING: Survey data from the 2002 and 2004 New York City Community Health Survey, linked by residential zip code to neighbourhood data. SUBJECTS: Adult survey respondents (n 15 634). RESULTS: Overall 9.9 % of respondents reported eating >/=5 servings of fruits or vegetables in the day prior to the survey. The odds of eating >/=5 servings increased with higher income among women and with higher educational attainment among men and women. Compared with women having less than a high-school education, the OR was 1.12 (95 % CI 0.82, 1.55) for high-school graduates, 1.95 (95 % CI 1.43, 2.66) for those with some college education and 2.13 (95 % CI 1.56, 2.91) for college graduates. The association between education and fruit and vegetable consumption was significantly stronger for women living in lower- v. higher-poverty zip codes (P for interaction < 0.05). The density of healthy food outlets did not predict consumption of fruits or vegetables. CONCLUSIONS: Higher SES is associated with higher consumption of produce, an association that, in women, is stronger for those residing in lower-poverty neighbourhoods.

The behavioral and neurobiological connections between play and the development of critical cognitive functions, such as attention, remain largely unknown. We do not yet know how these connections relate to the formation of specific abilities, such as spatial ability, and to learning in formal environments, such as in the classroom. Insights into these issues would be beneficial not only for understanding play, attention, and learning individually, but also for the development of more efficacious systems for learning and for the treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders. Different operational definitions of play can incorporate or exclude varying types of behavior, emphasize varying developmental time points, and motivate different research questions. Relevant questions to be explored in this area include, How do particular kinds of play relate to the development of particular kinds of abilities later in life? How does play vary across societies and species in the context of evolution? Does play facilitate a shift from reactive to predictive timing, and is its connection to timing unique or particularly significant? This report will outline important research steps that need to be taken in order to address these and other questions about play, human activity, and cognitive functions.

The current study investigated whether younger (college-age) and older adults (60+ years) differ in their ability to perceive safe and unsafe motor actions. Participants decided whether to walk through openings varying in width in two penalty conditions: In the doorway condition, if participants attempted to squeeze through impossibly narrow openings, the penalty for error was entrapment. In the ledge condition, if participants attempted to inch along impossibly narrow ledges, the penalty for error was falling. Results showed that across the lifespan, people consider falling to be a more severe penalty than getting stuck: Both younger and older adults made more conservative decisions when the penalty for error was falling, and older women were especially leery of falling. In both age groups, abilities and decisions were based on dynamic properties of the body, such as compressed body size in the doorway condition and balance in the ledge condition. Findings indicate that failure to perceive possibilities for action is unlikely to be the cause of the increased prevalence of falling in older adults.

Analysts have interpreted the concept of neutrality in a variety of ways, beginning with Strachey's use of that word to translate Freud's (1915) term, Indifferenz. In this paper, neutrality is linked to Freud's notions of free association and evenly suspended attention. A history of psychoanalytic attempts to clarify the concept are presented, with special attention to issues of ambiguity and the patient's role in the determination of neutrality. Neutrality is further elaborated in relation to the bipersonal field as described by the Barangers and contemporary field theorists. Understood in terms of the field, neutrality becomes a transpersonal concept, here conceived in terms of alpha-function and a dreaming dyad. Two clinical examples cast in the light of a Bionian perspective are discussed to suggest an alternative understanding of analytic impasses and their relation to alpha-function and neutrality.

BACKGROUND: Acute sleep restriction has been shown to increase blood pressure and sympathetic nervous system activity. METHODS: We investigated the relationships between sleep duration and hypertension among women whose sleep durations were self-reported in 1986 (n = 82,130) and 2000 (n = 71,658) in the Nurses' Health Study I (NHS-I) and in 2001 (n = 84,674) in the Nurses' Health Study II (NHS-II). RESULTS: After controlling for multiple risk factors in logistic regression models, the prevalence of hypertension was significantly higher among women in all 3 groups who slept