Scientists in Cambridge have found hidden signatures in the brains of people in a vegetative state, which point to networks that could support consciousness even when a patient appears to be unconscious and unresponsive. The study could help doctors identify patients who are aware despite being unable to communicate.
There has been a great deal of interest recently in how much patients in a vegetative state following severe brain injury are aware of their surroundings. Although unable to move and respond, some of these patients are able to carry out tasks such as imagining playing a game of tennis. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity, researchers have previously been able to record activity in the pre-motor cortex, the part of the brain which deals with movement, in apparently unconscious patients asked to imagine playing tennis.
Now, a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, have used high-density electroencephalographs (EEG) and a branch of mathematics known as

Using a tablet screening app could prove to be an effective method to aid in the effort to reduce the incidence of avoidable blindness in populations at high-risk for glaucoma with limited access to health care, according to a study released today at AAO 2014, the 118th annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. In this study, researchers from the University of Iowa, the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan and the Tilganga Eye Institute in Nepal used a free peripheral vision assessment app to screen approximately 200 patients in Nepal for glaucoma using an iPad. The results show promise for screening populations that have limited or no access to traditional eye care and certain ethnic groups that have a high risk of developing the disease.
Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, affecting more than 60.5 million people. The disease can be effectively treated; however, it generally does not present symptoms in its early stages, resulting in many patients being unaware that they suffer from the condition until it progresses to later stages. Early diagnosis can easily be achieved through a routine examination from an ophthalmologist or an optometrist.
In order to determine if a screening test using mobile technology could be effectively administered to communities outside of a traditional clinical setting, the research team used the Visual Fields Easy app, which simulates a visual field test on an iPad (1st Generation), to screen more than 400 eyes for glaucoma.
Approximately half of the eyes screened were healthy

Imagine this scenario: You’ve been feeling persistently blue lately, so you pull out your phone. Instead of asking Siri to tell you a joke, though, you open an app that records you simply talking about your day. A few hours later, your therapist sends you a message asking if you’d like to meet.

A program like this one that analyses your speech and uses it to gain information about your mental health could soon be feasible, thanks in part to research from the University of Maryland showing that certain vocal features change as patients’ feelings of depression worsen.

The research is part of an interdisciplinary initiative at the University of Maryland to engineer patient-focused mental health monitoring systems. Rather than relying solely on patients’ self-reports, these systems could monitor both physical and psychological symptoms of mental illness on a regular basis and provide both patients and their mental health providers with feedback about their status.

To conduct a quantitative experiment on the vocal characteristics of depression acoustician Carol Espy-Wilson and her colleagues repurposed a dataset collected from a 2007 study from an unaffiliated lab also investigating the relationship between depression and speech patterns. The earlier study assessed patients’ depression levels each week using the Hamilton Depression Scale (a standard clinical evaluation tool to measure the severity of depression) and then recorded them speaking freely about their day.

The University of Maryland researchers used data from six patients who, over the six-week course of the previous study, had registered as depressed some weeks and not depressed other weeks. They compared these patients’ Hamilton scores with their speech patterns each week, and found a correlation between depression and certain acoustic properties.

When patients’ feelings of depression were worst, their speech tended to be breathier and slower. The team also found increases in jitter and shimmer, two measures of acoustic disturbance that measure the frequency and amplitude variation of the sound, respectively. Speech high in jitter and shimmer tends to sound hoarse or rough.

The researchers plan to repeat the study in a larger population, this time comparing speech patterns in individuals with no history of mental illness to those with depression to create an acoustic profile of depression-typical speech. A phone app could use this information to analyse patients’ speech, identify acoustic signatures of depression and provide feedback and support.

Espy-Wilson hopes the interactive technology will appeal to teens and young adults, a particularly vulnerable group for mental health problems. ‘Their emotions are all over the place during this time, and that’s when they’re really at risk for depression. We have to reach out and figure out a way to help kids in that stage,’ she said. EurekAlert

Rice University scientists have found the balance necessary to aid healing with high-tech hydrogel.

Rice chemist Jeffrey Hartgerink, lead author Vivek Kumar and their colleagues have created a new version of the hydrogel that can be injected into an internal wound and help it heal while slowly degrading as it is replaced by natural tissue.

Hydrogels are used as a scaffold upon which cells can build tissue. The new hydrogel overcomes a host of issues that have kept them from reaching their potential to treat injuries and forming new vasculature to treat heart attack, stroke and ischemic tissue diseases.

The Rice lab

Undescended testis is commonly found in new-born boys and usually normalizes spontaneously by the age of six months. In one in a hundred boys, however, at least one testis remains undescended