Faculty Bibliography

Establishing optimal correspondence across object populations is essential to statistical shape analysis. Minimizing the description length (MDL) is a popular method for finding correspondence. In this work, we extend the MDL method by incorporating various local curvature metrics. Using local curvature can improve performance by ensuring that corresponding points exhibit similar local geometric characteristics that can't always be captured by mere point locations. We illustrate results on a variety of anatomical structures. The MDL method with a combination of point locations and curvature outperforms all the other methods we analyzed, including traditional MDL and spherical harmonics (SPHARM) correspondence, when the analyzed object population exhibits complex structure. When the objects are of simple nature, however, there's no added benefit to using the local curvature. In our experiments, we did not observe a significant difference in the correspondence quality when different curvature metrics (e.g. principal curvatures, mean curvature, Gaussian curvature) were used.

Evidence suggests a relationship between parental depression and phobias in offspring as well as links between childhood fears and risk for major depression. This study examines the relationship between major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders in parents and specific fears and phobias in offspring. Three hundred and eighteen children of parents with lifetime MDD, anxiety disorder, MDD+anxiety disorder, or neither were psychiatrically assessed via parent interview. Rates of specific phobias in offspring did not differ significantly across parental groups. Specific fears were significantly elevated in offspring of parents with MDD+anxiety disorder relative to the other groups (MDD, anxiety disorder, and controls, which did not differ). We failed to find increased phobias in offspring of parents with MDD without anxiety disorder. Elevated rates of specific fears in offspring of parents with MDD+anxiety disorder may be a function of more severe parental psychopathology, increased genetic loading, or unmeasured environmental influences

Reports an error in "Amygdala and nucleus accumbens activation to emotional facial expressions in children and adolescents at risk for major depression" by Christopher S. Monk, Rachel G. Klein, Eva H. Telzer, Elizabeth A. Schroth, Salvatore Mannuzza, John L. Moulton III, Mary Guardino, Carrie L. Masten, McClure-Tone, Stephen Fromm, R. James Blair, Daniel S. Pine and Monique Ernst (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2008[Jan], Vol 165[1], 90-98). In this article, the figure titles and footnotes accompany the wrong images. In the version that was published online in advance of print, the figures appeared as they were intended. In the print edition, the title and footnote text for Figure 1 should accompany Figure 3. The title and footnote text for Figure 2 should accompany Figure 1. The title for Figure 3 should accompany Figure 2. The footnote text for what should have accompanied Figure 1 should have read "Figures 1 and 2 display group-level data..." Production problems at the time the article was being prepared for inclusion in the January issue caused an older draft version to be used. The PDF version that now appears online has been corrected and it indicates that it differs from what appears in print because the figure titles and footnotes have been corrected. The full-text HTML has also been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-00613-018.) Objective: Offspring of parents with major depressive disorder face a threefold higher risk for major depression than offspring without such family histories. Although major depression is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, neural correlates of risk for major depression remain poorly understood. This study compares amygdala and nucleus accumbens activation in children and adolescents at high and low risk for major depression under varying attentional and emotional conditions. Method: Thirty-nine juveniles, 17 offspring of parents with major depression (high-risk group) and 22 offspring of parents without histories of major depression, anxiety, or psychotic disorders (low-risk group) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. During imaging, subjects viewed faces that varied in intensity of emotional expressions across blocks of trials while attention was unconstrained (passive viewing) and constrained (rate nose width on face, rate subjective fear while viewing face). Results: When attention was unconstrained, high-risk subjects showed greater amygdala and nucleus accumbens activation to fearful faces and lower nucleus accumbens activation to happy faces (small volume corrected for the amygdala and nucleus accumbens). No group differences emerged in amygdala or nucleus accumbens activation during constrained attention. Exploratory analysis showed that constraining attention was associated with greater medial prefrontal cortex activation in the high-risk than in the low-risk group. Conclusions: Amygdala and nucleus accumbens responses to affective stimuli may reflect vulnerability for major depression. Constraining attention may normalize emotion-related neural function possibly by engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex; face-viewing with unconstrained attention may engage aberrant processes associated with risk for major depression.