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Bitemporal hypoperfusion in transient global amnesia: 99m-Tc-HM-PAO SPECT and neuropsychological findings during and after an attack.

We report a patient who was evaluated neuropsychologically and with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) during and after an episode of transient global amnesia. During the attack, there was patchy retrograde amnesia and an inability to learn both verbal and non-verbal material. SPECT showed severe bitemporal hypoperfusion. Serial neuro-psychological testing documented a rapid recovery of recognition, but delayed recovery in reproduction of learned information. Recovery of spontaneous verbal and figural fluency was even further delayed. Follow up SPECT examination showed a recovered cerebral perfusion. This case supports the hypothesis that TGA is associated with transient hypoperfusion of bilateral medial-temporal brain structures and suggests an additional involvement of structures responsible for drive and initiation.

Aged↗

DNA methylation and machine learning: challenges and perspective toward enhanced clinical diagnostics.

DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression by adding methyl groups to DNA, affecting cellular function and disease development. Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, analyzes large datasets to identify patterns and make predictions. Over the past two decades, advances in bioinformatics technologies for arrays and sequencing have generated vast amounts of data, leading to the widespread adoption of machine learning methods for analyzing complex biological information for medical problems. This review explores recent advancements in DNA methylation studies that leverage emerging machine learning techniques for more precise, comprehensive, and rapid patient diagnostics based on DNA methylation markers. We present a general workflow for researchers, from clinical research questions to result interpretation and monitoring. Additionally, we showcase successful examples in diagnosing cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders, and multifactorial diseases. Some of these studies have led to the development of diagnostic platforms that have entered the global healthcare market, highlighting the promising future of this field.

Humans↗

Outline of a medical genetics curriculum for internal medicine residency training programs.

To keep pace with the rapid advances in medical genetics, internal medicine residency training programs need to train internists to develop new attitudes, knowledge bases, and skill sets. Currently, such programs have no medical genetics curriculum. Thus, to set a minimum standard for genetics education in the context of training in internal medicine, the Internal Medicine Residency Training Program Genetics Curriculum Committee was formed, with members representing professional organizations of medical geneticists, internists, genetic counselors, internal medicine and genetics residency program directors, and internal medicine residents. The committee's task was to develop a concise outline of a medical genetics curriculum for residents in internal medicine in accordance with requirements of the Residency Review Committee for Internal Medicine of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The curriculum outline was drafted and circulated for comment. Before publication, the final document was approved by those member organizations that had a policy of approving curricula. Key learning objectives of the curriculum include appreciation of the rapid advances in genetics, the need for lifelong learning, the need for referral, and the role of genetic counselors and medical geneticists, as well as developing the ability to construct and analyze a three-generation pedigree. A wide variety of teaching methods can be useful in these regards, including didactic lectures, multimedia CD- ROMs, and clinical experience. Teaching should be related to clinical experiences whenever possible. The curriculum developed by the committee and presented in this article will assist in teaching residents the attitudes, knowledge, and skills they will require.

Accreditation↗

Plasticity, hippocampal place cells, and cognitive maps.

Memory of even the briefest event can last a lifetime. Thus, learning and memory require neuronal mechanisms that allow rapid, yet persistent, changes to brain circuits. Hippocampal neuropsychology, synaptic and cellular electrophysiology, pharmacology, and molecular genetics converge and begin to reveal these mechanisms. Lesions of the hippocampus profoundly impair memory for recent events in humans and rodents. Circuits within the hippocampus are remarkably plastic, and this plasticity is mediated in part through changes in synaptic strength and revealed by long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, a subtype of glutamate receptor, are crucial for inducing these plastic changes, and blocking these receptors reduces plasticity and impairs learning in tasks that require the hippocampus. Molecular genetic alterations that disrupt signaling mechanisms downstream of the NMDA receptor also prevent LTP induction and impair hippocampus-dependent learning. N-methyl D-aspartate receptor mechanisms have also been linked to information coding by hippocampal neurons. Hippocampal cells fire selectively in specific and restricted locations (place fields) as rodents move through open environments. Place fields form within minutes and persist for months. N-methyl D-aspartate receptor antagonists prevent the establishment of stable place fields. The same molecular genetic manipulations that interfere with hippocampal NMDA receptor function, prevent LTP induction, and impair spatial learning also disrupt the formation of stable hippocampal place fields. Finally, learning has been improved in mice with genetically modified NMDA receptors that enhance LTP induction. Thus, hippocampal cells "learn" to encode the salient features of experience through NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity mechanisms, and this rapid and persistent neuronal encoding is a crucial step toward the formation of long-term memory. Disruption of these plasticity mechanisms may underlie age-related memory deficits.

Amnesia↗

Instrumental learning within the spinal cord: I. Behavioral properties.

Four experiments are reported that explore whether spinal neurons can support instrumental learning. During training, one group of spinal rats (master) received legshock whenever one hindlimb was extended. Another group (yoked) received legshock independent of leg position. Master, but not yoked, rats learned to maintain their leg in a flexed position, exhibiting progressively longer flexions as a function of training (Experiment 1). All subjects were then tested by applying controllable shock to the same leg (Experiment 2). Master rats reacquired the instrumental response more rapidly (positive transfer), whereas yoked rats failed to learn (a learned helplessness-like effect). Disrupting response-outcome contiguity by delaying the onset and offset of shock by 100 ms eliminated learning (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that shock onset contributes more to learning than does shock offset.

Animals↗

Accreditation of prior learning: andragogy in action or a 'cut price' approach to education?

The rapid changes in nurse education are proceeding within the wider context of developments in adjacent educational fields, which are themselves subject to external influences, and one such development is the accreditation of prior experiential learning (APEL). In order to be critically aware of the potential involved in embracing this concept, it is necessary to clarify and examine the influencing factors which guide the current andragogical climate of nurse education, and those which predispose to the recognition of APEL. Utilizing a case-study approach, this paper will examine the relevant issues as they relate to experienced students pursuing the learning outcomes of Project 2000, and will address the question of value for all parties concerned.

Accreditation↗

Learning, remembering and applying an arbitrary non-matching to position rule in mice.

We describe maze-based behavioural methodologies to assay aspects of arbitrary rule learning in mice. The methods allow for rapid acquisition of a non-matching to position (NMTP) rule that is relatively uninfluenced by innate behavioural strategies, and which give rise to stable baseline performance. Use of the NMTP rule under baseline conditions did not appear to be influenced by extra-maze cues nor intra-maze cues based on olfactory information. Hence the information used to guide performance at test was probably a visual and/or a kinaesthetic representation of the sample. Whatever the precise nature of the trace, its availability to guide behaviour was degraded by introducing delays between sample and test run components of the task. The characteristics of the so-called "forgetting curve" produced did not seem to be influenced by mediating strategies, whereby performance could be maintained following a delay by use of persistent olfactory cues or rehearsal of the correct response using body position, suggesting that, to some degree the degraded performance following delays was indexing effects on short term memory processes. We then went on to obtain behavioural indices that may be of use in dissociating, within-subjects, between learning the basic NMTP rule and being able to apply it in a choice situation, using single and simultaneous discrimination conditions, respectively. The data are discussed in terms of the utility of the behavioural methods to assay different psychological functions underlying the ability to learn, remember and apply non-matching to position rules in mice and their particular use in examining age-related deficits in cognitive functioning.

Animals↗

Development of theory-based, online health learning modules for older adults: Lessons learned.

Recently, the number of older adult online users has increased rapidly. In 2004, 22% of Americans aged 65 years or older (about 8 million) used the Internet, and 66% of them performed online searches for health information. The Web, therefore, can serve as a useful medium to educate older adults on selected health topics. In this study, the researchers developed four Web-based learning modules related to hip fracture prevention and tested the usability of these modules employing eight older adult online users. The findings from the usability tests demonstrated that the online learning modules were usable to the older adult participants. Additionally, these individuals could acquire health knowledge using these online modules. The important lessons learned through the research process will assist the researchers in conducting further studies in using health Web learning modules for older adults. A further study will be conducted to test the effects of these modules on preventing hip fractures.

Aged↗

ProMeta: a meta-learning framework for robust disease diagnosis and prediction from plasma proteomics.

MOTIVATION: The plasma proteome offers a dynamic window of human health, capturing the real-time intersections between genetics and physiology. However, the application of deep learning to proteomics is currently hindered by a reliance on large-scale labeled datasets, rendering standard models ineffective for rare or novel diseases where patient samples are inherently scarce. RESULTS: Here, we present ProMeta, a meta-learning framework designed to enable robust disease modeling under extreme data restrictions. By integrating knowledge-guided pathway encoding with bi-level meta-optimization, ProMeta projects unstructured proteomic profiles into biologically interpretable functional tokens. This architecture allows the model to learn a global initialization containing transferable biological priors from biobank-scale data, facilitating rapid adaptation to novel tasks. Through comprehensive benchmark experiments, ProMeta consistently outperformed transfer learning and traditional machine learning baselines in both disease diagnosis and prediction tasks. In the most challenging 4-shot scenarios (utilizing only 2 cases and 2 controls), the model achieved robust generalization with an average AUROC of ∼0.69, representing a 24.6% relative improvement over the best-performing baseline methods. Mechanistic investigation revealed that ProMeta disentangles cases from controls in the latent space prior to task-specific adaptation, confirming the acquisition of universal biological rules rather than rote memorization. Furthermore, gradient-based interpretation identified disease-specific protein biomarkers and functional pathways consistent with known pathophysiology. Collectively, ProMeta overcomes the data-scarcity bottleneck in precision medicine, providing a scalable, interpretable framework for characterizing the full spectrum of human diseases, particularly for rare conditions lacking extensive clinical cohorts. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code of ProMeta is available at GitHub (https://github.com/lihan97/ProMeta).

Proteomics↗

Academic confessions of high school students: an analysis of adolescents' developmental concerns.

30 normally achieving and 24 high school students with learning disabilities from one public high school were enrolled in an exploratory study of adolescents' perceptions of their learning difficulties. Adolescents completed a structured interview based on metacognitive and information-processing theories. Items on which subjects reported the most substantial problems related mainly to attention and organization. Comparison of the frequencies of endorsement of items for each group showed adolescents with learning disabilities most commonly reported problems with use of strategies, retrieval memory, and rapid processing. Current assessment methods and instructional approaches often ignore these crucial aspects of learning and productivity by high school students.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Dynamics of the vocal imitation process: how a zebra finch learns its song.

Song imitation in birds provides good material for studying the basic biology of vocal learning. Techniques were developed for inducing the rapid onset of song imitation in young zebra finches and for tracking trajectories of vocal change over a 7-week period until a match to a model song was achieved. Exposure to a model song induced the prompt generation of repeated structured sounds (prototypes) followed by a slow transition from repetitive to serial delivery of syllables. Tracking this transition revealed two phenomena: (i) Imitations of dissimilar sounds can emerge from successive renditions of the same prototype, and (ii) developmental trajectories for some sounds followed paths of increasing acoustic mismatch until an abrupt correction occurred by period doubling. These dynamics are likely to reflect underlying neural and articulatory constraints on the production and imitation of sounds.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Increasing the naming speed of poor readers: representations formed across repetitions.

In three experiments we examined the effect of repetition practice on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of children's skill in rapidly naming visually presented words. Experiment 1 showed that naming times decrease rapidly with practice. Retention of this newly acquired skill in rapid naming was a function of the degree of learning during training. "Overlearning" was necessary to prevent forgetting of the skill. Experiment 2 indicated that the rate at which the naming gains were acquired, and the amount of forgetting, was unrelated to the specific orthographic to phonological correspondences among the trained words. Experiment 3 suggested that even when the spelling/sound regularities were used to facilitate learning, there was no generalization of the naming time skill to new words that share the same spelling/sound relations. The results were discussed in terms of the nature of the representation that underlies rapid naming.

Child↗

Selective enhancement of associative learning by microstimulation of the anterior caudate.

Primates have the remarkable ability to rapidly adjust or modify associations between visual cues and specific motor responses. Whereas little is known as to how such adjustments in behavioral policy are implemented, recent learning models suggest that the anterior striatum is optimally positioned to have a role in this process. We recorded from single units and delivered microstimulation in the striatum of rhesus monkeys performing an associative learning task. Caudate activity during reinforcement was closely correlated with the rate of learning and peaked during the steepest portion of the learning curve when new associations were being acquired. Moreover, delivering microstimulation in the caudate during the reinforcement period significantly increased the rate of learning without altering the monkeys' ultimate performance. These findings suggest that the caudate is responsible for implementing selective adjustments to the 'associative weights' between sensory cues and motor responses during learning, thus enhancing the likelihood of selecting profitable actions.

Animals↗

Plasticity, synaptic strength, and epilepsy: what can we learn from ultrastructural data?

Central nervous system synapses have an intrinsic plastic capacity to adapt to new conditions with rapid changes in their structure. Such activity-dependent refinement occurs during development and learning, and shares features with diseases such as epilepsy. Quantitative ultrastructural studies based on serial sectioning and reconstructions have shown various structural changes associated with synaptic strength involving both dendritic spines and postsynaptic densities (PSDs) during long-term potentiation (LTP). In this review, we focus on experimental studies that have analyzed at the ultrastructural level the consequences of LTP in rodents, and plastic changes in the hippocampus of experimental models of epilepsy and human tissue obtained during surgeries for intractable temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Modifications in spine morphology, increases in the proportion of synapses with perforated PSDs, and formation of multiple spine boutons arising from the same dendrite are the possible sequence of events that accompany hippocampal LTP. Structural remodeling of mossy fiber synapses and formation of aberrant synaptic contacts in the dentate gyrus are common features in experimental models of epilepsy and in human TLE. Combined electrophysiological and ultrastructural studies in kindled rats and chronic epileptic animals have indicated the occurrence of seizure- and neuron loss-induced changes in the hippocampal network. In these experiments, the synaptic contacts on granule cells are similar to those described for LTP. Such changes could be associated with enhancement of synaptic efficiency and may be important in epileptogenesis.

Animals↗

The role of attention shifts in the categorization of continuous dimensioned stimuli.

Results of human category learning experiments, using stimulus dimensions with binary values, have implicated a rapidly acting mechanism of attention shifts. Theories of categorization desire that stimuli with binary, discrete and continuous valued dimensions should all be treated similarly. Theoretical analyses of attention shifting, however, have up to now only been developed for shifts between features, or shifts between entire dimensions, not shifts within dimensions. Here we present a model of how people learn to discriminate categories made up of stimuli with continuous-valued dimensions. The model uses rapid shifts in attention within stimulus dimensions to reduce errors during learning; the model generalizes J. K. Kruschke's (Psychological Review, 99, 22-44, 1992) ADIT model. In an experiment in category learning, subjects were trained to discriminate four bivariate normal distributions that are presented with differential base rates. The base-rate manipulation produces several qualitative effects, for which the model accounts very well. With attention shifting turned off, the model fails to account for some aspects of the data, suggesting that attentions shifts are an important mechanism in the model.

Association↗

Using problem-based learning as a strategy for cross-discipline emergency preparedness training.

The rapid and effective response to a bioterrorist event requires the coordinated efforts of trained personnel from different agencies. This article describes the design and implementation of a 1-week cross-disciplinary course employing problem-based learning (PBL) for professionals with backgrounds in public health, fire/emergency medical services (EMS), law enforcement, emergency management, and hospital administration. The curriculum provided opportunities for professionals from different disciplines to meet and learn the priorities and resources of partner agencies. In course evaluations, participants rated the training highly and found it applicable to their work and a good use of time and training resources. PBL techniques were successful in fostering cross-agency communication, thereby showing promise as an effective training method for meeting local and national emergency preparedness objectives.

Bioterrorism↗

E-learning in sexuality education.

The use of computers in learning and communication is not new to health professional education. However, the rapid developments in technology and the increasing competence of students in computer- and web-based learning make the need for health professional education to take the next step to e-learning a necessity rather than a choice. This paper describes an e-learning unit in sexuality developed in response to a felt need for a flexible online unit in the topic. The use of online tools for e-learning in sexuality are discussed and course evaluation presented. The need for a strong pedagogic model and the careful development of learning activities to utilize the facilities available for assessment, feedback and especially synchronous and asynchronous communication are discussed as they apply to the sexuality unit.

Education, Distance↗

ALPAR: automated learning pipeline for antimicrobial resistance.

SUMMARY: The field of machine learning in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research has experienced rapid growth, fueled by advancements in high-throughput genome sequencing and the growing capacity of computational resources. However, the complexity and lack of standardized data preparation and bioinformatic analyses present significant challenges, especially for newcomers to the domain. In response to these challenges, we introduce ALPAR (Automated Learning Pipeline for Antimicrobial Resistance), a comprehensive AMR data analysis tool covering the entire process from processing of raw genomic data to training machine learning models to interpretation of results. Our method relies on a reproducible pipeline that integrates widely used bioinformatics tools, presenting a simplified, automatic workflow specifically tailored for single-reference AMR analysis. Accepting genomic data in the form of FASTA files as input, ALPAR facilitates the generation of machine learning-ready data tables and both the training of machine learning and the execution of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) experiments. Additionally, our tool offers supplementary functionalities such as phylogeny-based analysis of the distribution of mutations, enhancing its utility for researchers. The tool has also proven its performance in competitive benchmarks, winning the 2024 CAMDA Anti-Microbial Resistance Prediction Challenge and placing third in the 2025 edition. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ALPAR is open-source and freely accessible via GitHub (https://github.com/kalininalab/ALPAR). The pipeline is fully reproducible and can be easily installed as a Conda package (https://anaconda.org/kalininalab/ALPAR).

Machine Learning↗