PLoS ONE最新文献

Introduction: Despite its importance in voice training, comprehensive research into sustained vowel phonation with constant pitch and increasing and decreasing loudness, the so-called Messa di Voce, is lacking. The study examines the laryngeal behavior during Messa di Voce, regarding the impact of the speed of execution on voice stability parameters.

Materials and methods: Nine untrained, healthy subjects (5 female, 4 male) were asked to perform Messa di Voce exercises on the vowel [i:], involving a gradual increase and decrease of volume. During the first task, each phase should take 3 s, whereas in the second task, each phase should take 1 s. Female subjects sang pitch B3 (fundamental frequency fo ≈ 247 Hz), and male subjects pitch B2 (fo ≈ 124 Hz). Throughout phonation, synchronous recordings were captured through high-speed videolaryngoscopy (HSV), electroglottography, and audio signals. Subsequently, the Glottal Area Waveform was extracted from the HSV data. The tasks' duration and calculated parameters (including, e.g., Open Quotient (OQ), Closing Quotient (ClQ), Relative Average Perturbation (RAP)), excluding parts of the signal with stationary sound pressure level (SPL), were analyzed with correlation analysis and statistical analysis (Analysis of Variance and subsequent multiple comparisons).

Results: Subjects shortened the requested task length by factor ≈ 0.5. The fo remained almost stable for most subjects and tasks. There were strong negative correlations between SPL and both OQ and ClQ. The median RAP appears to decrease towards the SPL apex and then increase again. Statistical effects were shown especially for females during the fast task, which may be due to raised SPL.

Conclusion: There was no specific effect on stability found corresponding to the task's speed. Also, no major vocal instabilities at a specific sound pressure level were apparent, indicating no transitions as they exist for fo regions with registration events.

Cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease results from a complex interplay of various pathological processes, including the dysregulation of key enzymes such as acetylcholinesterase (AChE), butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE), and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). This study proposes and designs a series of novel molecules derived from 8-hydroxyquinoline (Azo-8HQ) as potential multi-target lead candidates for treating AD. An exhaustive in silico analysis was conducted, encompassing docking studies, ADMET analysis, density functional theory (DFT) studies, molecular dynamics simulations, and subsequent MM-GBSA calculations to examine the pharmacological potential of these molecules with the specific targets of interest. Out of the 63 Azo-8HQ derivatives analysed, two molecules, 14c and 17c, demonstrated strong affinities for AChE, BuChE, and MAO-B, along with favourable pharmacokinetic profiles and electronic properties. Molecular dynamics simulations confirmed the stability of these molecules within the active sites of the targets, and MM-GBSA calculations revealed low binding energies, indicating robust interactions. These findings identify molecules 14c and 17c as promising multi-target candidates for the treatment of AD, based on an in-depth computational study aimed at minimizing drug development costs and time. Future work will include the synthesis of these molecules followed by in-depth in vitro and in vivo testing to validate their potential therapeutic efficacy.

A medical specialty prediction system for remote diagnosis can reduce the unexpected costs incurred by first-visit patients who visit the wrong hospital department for their symptoms. To develop medical specialty prediction systems, several researchers have explored clinical predictive models using real medical text data. Medical text data include large amounts of information regarding patients, which increases the sequence length. Hence, a few studies have attempted to extract entities from the text as concise features and provide domain-specific knowledge for clinical text classification. However, it is still insufficient to inject them into the model effectively. Thus, we propose Entity-enhanced BERT (E-BERT), which utilizes the structural attributes of BERT for medical specialty prediction. E-BERT has an entity embedding layer and entity-aware attention to inject domain-specific knowledge and focus on relationships between medical-related entities within the sequences. Experimental results on clinical questionnaire data demonstrate the superiority of E-BERT over the other benchmark models, regardless of the input sequence length. Moreover, the visualization results for the effects of entity-aware attention prove that E-BERT effectively incorporate domain-specific knowledge and other information, enabling the capture of contextual information in the text. Finally, the robustness and applicability of the proposed method is explored by applying it to other Pre-trained Language Models. These effective medical specialty predictive model can provide practical information to first-visit patients, resulting in streamlining the diagnostic process and improving the quality of medical consultations.

Balance is crucial for various athletic tasks, and accurately assessing balance ability among elite athletes using simple and accessible measurement methods is a significant challenge in sports science. A common approach to balance assessment involves recording center of pressure (CoP) displacements using force platforms, with various indicators proposed to distinguish subtle balance differences. However, these indicators have not reached a consensus, and it remains unclear whether these analyses alone can fully explain the complex interactions of postural control. In this study, we investigated four parameters related to balance control-anterior-posterior (AP) displacement, medial-lateral (ML) displacement, length, and tilt angle-in 13 elite athletes and 12 freestyle skiing aerial expert athletes. Data were recorded during 30-second trials on both soft and hard support surfaces, with eyes open and closed. We calculated the CMCI and used four machine learning algorithms-Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine(SVM), Naive Bayes, and Ranking Forest-to combine these features and assess each participant's balance ability. A classic train-test split method was applied, and the performance of different classifiers was evaluated using Receiver Operating Characteristic(ROC) analysis. The ROC results showed that traditional time-domain features were insufficient for accurately distinguishing athletes' balance abilities, whereas CMCI performed the best overall. Among all classifiers, the combination of CMCI and Ranking Forest yielded the best performance, with a sensitivity of 0.95 and specificity of 0.35. This nonlinear, multidimensional approach appears to be highly suitable for assessing the complexity of postural control.

Polylactic acid (PLA) has garnered attention for use in interim dental restorations due to its biocompatibility, biodegradability, low cost, ease of fabrication, and moderate strength. However, its performance under intraoral conditions, particularly under heat and moisture, remains underexplored. This study evaluated the mechanical properties of PLA interim crowns compared with those of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and bisphenol crowns under simulated intraoral conditions with thermocycling. Three CAD/CAM polymers-PMMA (milling), PLA (fused deposition), and bisphenol (stereolithography)-were tested for fracture resistance, hardness, and surface roughness. For fracture strength, 25 crowns from each group were cemented onto dies. The Shore D hardness and surface roughness were measured on round discs before and after 10,000 thermocycles (5°C/55°C). The surface topography was assessed via scanning electron microscopy. PMMA exhibited the highest fracture strength (2787.93 N), followed by bisphenol (2165.47 N) and PLA (2088.78 N), with no significant difference between the latter two. PMMA and bisphenol showed vertical fractures and cracks, whereas PLA showed crown tearing or die deformation. Bisphenol had the highest Shore D hardness, followed by PMMA and PLA, with no significant changes after thermocycling. The surface roughness (Ra) was lowest for bisphenol and similar between PMMA and PLA. The roughness (Rz) increased from bisphenol to PMMA to PLA. The roughness of the PMMA remained unchanged after thermocycling, whereas the Ra but not the Rz of the PLA increased. Bisphenol showed a significant increase in both Ra and Rz (p<0.0001). In conclusion, PLA interim crowns demonstrated mechanical properties comparable to those of conventional PMMA and bisphenol crowns after thermocycling.

Objective: To understand the impact of fidelity and perceived realism on virtual reality food choices, and task motivation, engagement, and interest.

Design: Randomized controlled trial.

Setting: Online.

Participants: 84 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Intervention: Participants were randomly assigned to either a high- (n = 43) or a low- (n = 41) visual fidelity environment and were asked to select foods to have a meal with a friend.

Main outcome measures: Food choice, motivation of food choices, engagement, and interest.

Analysis: Simple linear regressions between visual fidelity and perceived realism, and log-linear regressions for visual fidelity or perceived realism on either motivation, interest, or engagement. Poisson models between visual fidelity or perceived realism, and food selections.

Results: Manipulating visual fidelity was not associated with perceived realism, motivation, interest, or engagement in the food selection task. Perceived realism increased motivation by 0.3% (SE 0.056; p = 0.022), interest by 1.4% (SE 0.002; p<0.001), and engagement by 0.9% (SE 0.001; p<0.001) in the food selection task. High visual fidelity decreased the total number of foods selected (B = 0.216; CI (-0.384; -0.047); p = 0.012).

Conclusion and implications: Perceived realism, but not visual fidelity, is important for task related factors like motivation, engagement, and interest. Visual fidelity may influence some food selections.

We aimed to test whether hearing speech in phonetic categories (as opposed to a continuous/gradient fashion) affords benefits to "cocktail party" speech perception. We measured speech perception performance (recognition, localization, and source monitoring) in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (1-4 talkers) and via forward vs. time-reversed maskers, the latter promoting a release from masking. In separate tasks, we measured isolated phoneme categorization using two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and visual analog scaling (VAS) tasks designed to promote more/less categorical hearing and thus test putative links between categorization and real-world speech-in-noise skills. We first show cocktail party speech recognition accuracy and speed decline with additional competing talkers and amidst forward compared to reverse maskers. Dividing listeners into "discrete" vs. "continuous" categorizers based on their VAS labeling (i.e., whether responses were binary or continuous judgments), we then show the degree of release from masking experienced at the cocktail party is predicted by their degree of categoricity in phoneme labeling and not high-frequency audiometric thresholds; more discrete listeners make less effective use of time-reversal and show less release from masking than their gradient responding peers. Our results suggest a link between speech categorization skills and cocktail party processing, with a gradient (rather than discrete) listening strategy benefiting degraded speech perception. These findings suggest that less flexibility in binning sounds into categories may be one factor that contributes to figure-ground deficits.

Within mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), mixed results have been found for the role of childhood trauma as a moderator of depression outcomes. Furthermore, childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms have been identified as possible risk factors for the occurrence of meditation-related adverse effects (MRAE). The present research examined multiple forms of childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms as predictors of depression treatment outcomes and MRAEs. Various forms of childhood trauma (e.g., abuse and neglect) were examined as predictors of depression treatment outcomes and participant attrition using secondary analyses of two MBP clinical trials (N = 52 and 104, respectively). Study 2 also examined meditation-related side effects (MRSE) and MRAE as outcomes and current subclinical and past PTSD symptoms as predictors. Childhood trauma led to worse depression outcomes across both study 1 and study 2, such that total childhood trauma and childhood sexual abuse were significant predictors across both studies. Childhood sexual abuse predicted attrition in study 2. Finally, multiple forms of childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms predicted MRSE, while total childhood trauma, childhood emotional abuse, and subclinical PTSD symptoms predicted lasting MRAE. Childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms may lead to worse outcomes and a greater occurrence of adverse effects within MBPs for active depression. These results call for further trauma-sensitive modifications, safety monitoring, participant screening, and provider education when implementing these programs.

Interleukin-34 (IL-34) was recently reported to be a new biomarker for atherosclerosis diseases, such as coronary artery disease and vascular dementia. IL-34 regulates the expression of proinflammatory cytokines (IL-17A, IL-1 and IL-6), which are classical cytokines involved in myocardial ischemia‒reperfusion (MI/R) injury. However, the exact role of IL-34 in MI/R remains unknown. In this study, a rat MI/R model was used to explore the effect of IL-34 on modulating inflammatory processes during MI/R injury. First, eighteen rats were subjected to 30 min of LAD ligation followed by 0 h, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 8 h or 24 h of reperfusion (n = 3 for each group). The level of IL-34 peaked at 4 h after MI/R in the ischemic myocardium. Next, ischemia for 30min and reperfusion for 4h (I/R) model was used. 24 rats were randomly divided into I/R group (n = 8), IL-34+IR group (n = 8) and IL-34+ab12+IR group (n = 8). We found that IL-34 pretreatment increased the expression of inflammatory cytokines, including high mobility group Box 1 (HMGB1), IL-17A, and IL-6; the expression of the apoptosis protein cleaved caspase-3; and the Bcl-2/Bax ratio within the ischemic myocardium. We also observed increased serum cardiac enzymes and a larger myocardial injury area. Treatment with a Janus kinase (JAK) pathway inhibitor, however, partially reduced the expression of these proteins and attenuated myocardial injury. Together, these results showed that IL-34 aggravates MI/R injury by inducing the expression of the HMGB1-IL-17A-IL-6 axis and apoptosis after MI/R, which is partially dependent on the JAK pathway. Therefore, blocking the JAK signaling pathway or inhibiting IL-34 expression might provide a new idea to reduce MI/R injury, but further researches are needed.