CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) board members 'tell Hillary' goals for healthcare I/S. Interview by Carolyn Dunbar

At press time, the details of the Clinton administration's healthcare reform package were not yet public. Some information has been leaked, however, fueling speculation about the plan's exact points. Computers in Healthcare asked three board members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives what they thought the Clinton healthcare team should know about the information piece of the puzzle.     

First evidence of grass carp recruitment in the Great Lakes Basin

We use aging techniques, ploidy analysis, and otolith microchemistry to assess whether four grass carp Ctenopharyngodon idella captured from the Sandusky River, Ohio were the result of natural reproduction within the Lake Erie Basin. All four fish were of age 1 +. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that these fish were not aquaculture-reared and that they were most likely the result of successful reproduction in the Sandusky River. First, at least two of the fish were diploid; diploid grass carp cannot legally be released in the Great Lakes Basin. Second, strontium:calcium (Sr:Ca) ratios were elevated in all four grass carp from the Sandusky River, with elevated Sr:Ca ratios throughout the otolith transect, compared to grass carp from Missouri and Arkansas ponds. This reflects the high Sr:Ca ratio of the Sandusky River, and indicates that these fish lived in a high-strontium environment throughout their entire lives. Third, Sandusky River fish were higher in Sr:Ca ratio variability than fish from ponds, reflecting the high but spatially and temporally variable strontium concentrations of southwestern Lake Erie tributaries, and not the stable environment of pond aquaculture. Fourth, Sr:Ca ratios in the grass carp from the Sandusky River were lower in their 2011 growth increment (a high water year) than the 2012 growth increment (a low water year), reflecting the observed inverse relationship between discharge and strontium concentration in these rivers. We conclude that these four grass carp captured from the Sandusky River are most likely the result of natural reproduction within the Lake Erie Basin.     

Texture analysis of poly-adenylated mRNA staining following global brain ischemia and reperfusion

Texture analysis provides a means to quantify complex changes in microscope images. We previously showed that cytoplasmic poly-adenylated mRNAs form mRNA granules in post-ischemic neurons and that these granules correlated with protein synthesis inhibition and hence cell death. Here we utilized the texture analysis software MaZda to quantify mRNA granules in photomicrographs of the pyramidal cell layer of rat hippocampal region CA3 around 1 h of reperfusion after 10 min of normothermic global cerebral ischemia. At 1 h reperfusion, we observed variations in the texture of mRNA granules amongst samples that were readily quantified by texture analysis. Individual sample variation was consistent with the interpretation that animal-to-animal variations in mRNA granules reflected the time-course of mRNA granule formation. We also used texture analysis to quantify the effect of cycloheximide, given either before or after brain ischemia, on mRNA granules. If administered before ischemia, cycloheximide inhibited mRNA granule formation, but if administered after ischemia did not prevent mRNA granulation, indicating mRNA granule formation is dependent on dissociation of polysomes. We conclude that texture analysis is an effective means for quantifying the complex morphological changes induced in neurons by brain ischemia and reperfusion.     

Serotonin-1B receptor activity and expression modulate the aggression-stimulating effects of adolescent anabolic steroid exposure in hamsters.

Repeated high dose (5.0 mg/kg) anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) exposure during adolescence stimulates offensive aggression in male Syrian hamsters. These studies examined whether AAS-induced aggression was regulated by the activity of serotonin (5HT) type-1B receptors and correlated with altered 5HT1B expression. AAS-treated hamsters were tested for offensive aggression following the administration of the 5HT1B agonist anpirtoline (0.125-0.5 mg/kg). Anpirtoline dose-dependently reduced select components of the AAS-induced aggressive response, with significant reductions observed at 0.25 mg/kg. Aggressive, AAS-treated hamsters showed significant decreases in the area covered by 5HT1B-containing neuronal puncta and increases in the number of 5HT1B-containing neuronal somata in select brain regions implicated in aggression control. Together, these data support a role for site-specific alterations in 5HT1B signaling and expression in adolescent AAS-induced aggression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effectiveness of Early Head Start for 3-Year-Old Children and Their Parents: Lessons for Policy and Programs.

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus Selectivity of Figural Aftereffects for Faces.

Viewing a distorted face induces large aftereffects in the appearance of an undistorted face. The authors examined the processes underlying this adaptation by comparing how selective the aftereffects are for different dimensions of the images including size, spatial frequency content, contrast, and color. Face aftereffects had weaker selectivity for changes in the size, contrast, or color of the images and stronger selectivity for changes in contrast polarity or spatial frequency. This pattern could arise if the adaptation is contingent on the perceived similarity of the stimuli as faces. Consistent with this, changing contrast polarity or spatial frequency had larger effects on the perceived identity of a face, and aftereffects were also selective for different individual faces. These results suggest that part of the sensitivity changes underlying the adaptation may arise at visual levels closely associated with the representation of faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speech-as-data technologies for personal information devices

 For small, portable devices, speech input has the advantages of low-cost and small hardware, can be used on the move or whilst the eyes & hands are busy, and is natural and quick. Rather than rely on imperfect speech recognition we propose that information entered as speech is kept as speech and suitable tools are provided to allow quick and easy access to the speech-as-data records. This paper summarises our work on the technologies needed for these tools – for organising, browsing, searching and compressing the stored speech. These technologies go a long way towards giving stored speech the characteristics of text without the associated input problems. Received: 5 March 2002 / Accepted: 1 September 2002 Nick Haddock Consultant Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the whole HP Labs Gryphon team for their valuable contributions to this work - Mike Collins for the hierarchical chunking algorithm, Erik Geelhoed and David Frohlich for the users perspective, Richard Hull for starting off the compression work, Steve Loughran for productisation, and Dave Reynolds for his consistent advice and support. We would also like to thank our partners at Cambridge University, Steve Young and Tony Robinson, whose expertise and technology formed the foundation for this work, as well as the efforts of Kate Knill on wordspotting, Carl Seymour on compression, James Christie on recognition, and Robin Valenza whose brief excursion into the world of speech technology helped develop a simple and effective summarisation technique. Finally we would like to thank the reviewers for their many helpful comments.     

A Machine Learning Approach for Identification Thesis and Conclusion Statements in Student Essays

This study describes and evaluates twoessay-based discourse analysis systems thatidentify thesis and conclusion statements fromstudent essays written on six different essaytopics. Essays used to train and evaluate thesystems were annotated by two human judges,according to a discourse annotation protocol. Using a machine learning approach, a number ofdiscourse-related features were automaticallyextracted from a set of annotated trainingdata. Using these features, two discourseanalysis models were built using C5.0 withboosting: a topic-dependent and atopic-independent model. Both systemsoutperformed a positional algorithm. While thetopic-dependent system showed somewhat higherperformance, the topic-independent systemshowed similar results, indicating that asystem can generalize to unseen data – thatis, essay responses on topics that the systemhas not seen in training.     

Solution of a Well-Field Design Problem with Implicit Filtering

Problems involving the management of groundwater resources occur routinely, and management decisions based upon optimization approaches offer the potential to save substantial amounts of money. However, this class of application is notoriously difficult to solve due to non-convex objective functions with multiple local minima and both nonlinear models and nonlinear constraints. We solve a subset of community test problems from this application field using MODFLOW, a standard groundwater flow model, and IFFCO, an implicit filtering algorithm that was designed to solve problems similar to those of focus in this work. While sampling methods have received only scant attention in the groundwater optimization literature, we show encouraging results that suggest they are deserving of more widespread consideration for this class of problems. In keeping with our objectives for the community problems, we have packaged the approaches used in this work to facilitate additional work on these problems by others and the application of implicit filtering to other problems in this field. We provide the data for our formulation and solution on the web.     

Noninvasive 3D vital imaging and characterization of notochordal cells of the intervertebral disc by femtosecond near-infrared two-photon laser scanning microscopy and spatial-volume rendering

The central region of the intervertebral disc (IVD) in infant humans is made and maintained by notochordal cells (NCs). These cells disappear during maturation to be replaced by mature chondrocyte-like cells. NCs are completely different morphologically from the mature chondrocyte-like IVD cells and have complex and essential functions but little is known about them. Recently, two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM) using near-infrared (NIR) femtosecond pulsed lasers has emerged as a promising noninvasive optical technique for observing unfixed living 3D biological specimens in situ and in vitro. Several lines of evidence suggest that compared with conventional laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), femtosecond NIR laser-based TPLSM has any number of advantages including 3D resolution without a spatial filter (confocal pinhole), minimal photobleaching, and photodamage above and below the focal plane, and importantly, greater depth penetration. We have thus taken advantage of these unique features of femtosecond laser-based TPLSM for vital 3D imaging in conjunction with advanced spatial-volume rendering modalities to compare morphologies of NCs/clusters from pig caudal discs with chondrocyte-like IVD cells from bovine caudal discs, both in ex vivo tissue and when isolated and grown in vitro within 3D alginate scaffolds. Our results provide evidence that (a) ex vivo notochordal tissue consists of areas with NC clusters, and those dominated by tubular structures of low cell density (b) within 3D in vitro scaffolds the morphology of NC is heterogeneous and the cells contain distinct cytoplasmic vacuole-like structures occasionally including acidic subinclusions (c) a quantitative determination based on 3D spatial and volumetric-rendering reveals an average NC diameter of 22.05 microm (range 11.96-46.63 microm) and NC volume of 9701 microm(3) (2041-36427 microm(3)) whereas chondrocyte-like cells have a mean volume of 3279 microm(3) and diameter of 12.20 microm. Taken together, this study demonstrates that femtosecond TPLSM has unique advantages over other conventional histological and in particular LSCM for high resolution noninvasive vital characterization of notochordal and chondrocyte-like cells of IVD over extended depths beyond 300-500 microm.