Faculty Bibliography

This paper presents a novel and fast probabilistic method for white matter fiber tracking from diffusion weighted MRI (DWI). We formulate fiber tracking on a nonlinear state space model which is able to capture both smoothness regularity of fibers and uncertainties of the local fiber orientations due to noise and partial volume effects. The global tracking model is implemented using particle filtering, which allows us to recursively compute the posterior distribution of the potential fibers. The fiber orientation distribution is theoretically formulated for prolate and oblate tensors separately. Fast and efficient sampling is realised using the von Mises-Fisher distribution on unit spheres. Given a seed point, the method is able to rapidly locate the global optimal fiber and also provide a connectivity map. The proposed method is demonstrated on a brain dataset.

An important goal of statistical shape analysis is the discrimination between populations of objects, exploring group differences in morphology not explained by standard volumetric analysis. Certain applications additionally require analysis of objects in their embedding context by joint statistical analysis of sets of interrelated objects. In this paper, we present a framework for discriminant analysis of populations of 3-D multi-object sets. In view of the driving medical applications, a skeletal object parametrization of shape is chosen since it naturally encodes thickening, bending and twisting. In a multi-object setting, we not only consider a joint analysis of sets of shapes but also must take into account differences in pose. Statistics on features of medial descriptions and pose parameters, which include rotational frames and distances, uses a Riemannian symmetric space instead of the standard Euclidean metric. Our choice of discriminant method is the distance weighted discriminant (DWD) because of its generalization ability in high dimensional, low sample size settings. Joint analysis of 10 subcortical brain structures in a pediatric autism study demonstrates that multi-object analysis of shape results in a better group discrimination than pose, and that the combination of pose and shape performs better than shape alone. Finally, given a discriminating axis of shape and pose, we can visualize the differences between the populations.

Reviews the book, The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry by Paul McHugh (see record 2006-01579-000). Paul McHugh does not want to cuddle up with warm and calming notions about psychiatry, as if the field were a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day. Psychiatry has great potential as a science and it has limitations in its practice: McHugh argues that we should be transparent and forthright about both its potential and its practice, and he believes that this can be partly achieved by reconceptualizing how the field is organized. If the author targets "three common medical mistakes--oversimplification, misplaced emphasis, or pure invention" in psychiatry with relentless accuracy and steely calm, he quite willingly indulges in all three when it comes to his polemics. Another example of misplaced emphasis is McHugh's use of "common sense." It may be common, but "common sense" is frequently not good sense; indeed, as an empiricist, McHugh ought to recognize that one of the great triumphs of the empirical approach is its demand that "common sense" be scrutinized and tested.

This review examines empirically based studies of school-based mental health interventions. The review identified 64 out of more than 2,000 articles published between 1990 and 2006 that met methodologically rigorous criteria for inclusion. Of these 64 articles, only 24 examined both mental health and educational outcomes. The majority of school-based mental health intervention studies failed to include even rudimentary measures of school-related outcomes. Analysis of the 24 studies yielded several key findings; The types of mental health outcomes most frequently assessed included self-, peer-, teacher-, or parent-reported measures of social competence, aggression, or problem behaviors. Academic scores and school attendance were the types of educational outcomes most frequently assessed. The majority of interventions focused on elementary students, had a preventive focus, and targeted prosocial, aggressive, and antisocial behaviors. Only 15 of the 24 studies demonstrated a positive impact on both educational and mental health outcomes, 11 of which included intensive interventions targeting both parents and teachers. The studies that had an impact only on mental health outcomes tended to be less intensive with more limited family involvement. This review discusses the implications of these findings for schoolbased mental health services and identifies directions for future research.

Issues of cultural diversity, race, and ethnicity have been profusely addressed in contemporary social work literature. However, the dimension of language experience in the recent immigrant has received minimal attention, and social service workers often overlook the importance of the client's native language in practice. Challenges facing the treatment of immigrants include language barrier and the immigrant's worldview, factors that need to be identified to discover the person within the client. Using the author's own experience and accounts from other immigrants, this article explores the non-English-speaking new immigrant's language subjective experience and its unique implications for self-evaluations. Honest curiosity on the part of the worker is emphasized.

This investigation sought to establish if anger is associated with PTSD among children and adolescents or with trauma exposure in the absence of PTSD. The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) was administered to youth with PTSD (n=24), traumatized youth without PTSD (n=58), and a non-traumatized control group (n=38). In the absence of potentially confounding major comorbid disorders, the PTSD group had significantly higher scores on the STAXI State, Trait, and Angry Temperament scales. Trauma exposure in the absence of PTSD was not associated with higher anger scores.

This article presents the results of a study examining correlates of urban African American youth HIV knowledge. The influence of family level factors (e.g., family communication, parental AIDS knowledge and myths regarding HIV transmission, along with family composition and family income) are examined. In addition, the current study explores the influence of racial socialization processes, specifically the influence of religious/spiritual coping, extended family caring, cultural pride reinforcement and racial awareness teaching (Stevenson, 1994; 1995; 1997) on youth HIV knowledge. Multivariate analyses revealed a significant association between youth HIV knowledge and being reared in a single parent home. Further, in every model, controlling for all types of racial socialization processes, family communication was significantly associated with youth HIV knowledge. Implications are drawn regarding the development of culturally and contextually specific HIV prevention programming for African American youth and their families

This paper addresses issues in the literature regarding the co-occurrence of partner and child physical maltreatment in the United States and in Europe. Design issues including operationalizations, representativeness of samples, data collection methods, and reference periods are discussed in the context of prevalence studies. Next, possible explanations for the pervasiveness of co-occurring maltreatment are explored with an emphasis on theoretical models and mechanisms of co-occurrence. Finally, we offer assessment implications for clinicians and agencies dealing with partner and child maltreatment