Publications by authors named "Aponte E"

Aortic dissection is a life-threatening acute condition characterized by the separation of the aortic wall's layers. It is caused by a tear in the internal vascular wall (intimal layer and middle layer), which results in bleeding between the layers and causes abrupt and excruciating pain. The appropriate consideration must be given to the condition's dynamic nature, and variations in clinical presentation, without neglecting the urgency for intervention.

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The contributions of this paper are as follows: (a) proposing a two-stage model to study whether an event has temporary or permanent effects on the probability of choosing a good within a market basket that traditional decision theory cannot explain and (b) studying the effects of COVID-19 on consumers' decisions in Colombia. Findings suggest that the pandemic has transitory effects on preferences in the short run. If it lasts longer, it could induce to permanent changes.

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Unlabelled: In generative modeling of neuroimaging data, such as dynamic causal modeling (DCM), one typically considers several alternative models, either to determine the most plausible explanation for observed data (Bayesian model selection) or to account for model uncertainty (Bayesian model averaging). Both procedures rest on estimates of the model evidence, a principled trade-off between model accuracy and complexity. In the context of DCM, the log evidence is usually approximated using variational Bayes.

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The membrane-anchored Src tyrosine kinase is involved in numerous pathways and its deregulation is involved in human cancer. Our knowledge on Src regulation relies on crystallography, which revealed intramolecular interactions to control active Src conformations. However, Src contains a N-terminal intrinsically disordered unique domain (UD) whose function remains unclear.

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Psychiatry faces fundamental challenges with regard to mechanistically guided differential diagnosis, as well as prediction of clinical trajectories and treatment response of individual patients. This has motivated the genesis of two closely intertwined fields: (i) Translational Neuromodeling (TN), which develops "computational assays" for inferring patient-specific disease processes from neuroimaging, electrophysiological, and behavioral data; and (ii) Computational Psychiatry (CP), with the goal of incorporating computational assays into clinical decision making in everyday practice. In order to serve as objective and reliable tools for clinical routine, computational assays require end-to-end pipelines from raw data (input) to clinically useful information (output).

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Background: Patients with schizophrenia make more errors than healthy subjects in the antisaccade task. In this paradigm, participants are required to inhibit a reflexive saccade to a target and to select the correct action (a saccade in the opposite direction). While the precise origin of this deficit is not clear, it has been connected to aberrant dopaminergic and cholinergic neuromodulation.

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Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease (PD) may modulate chronometric and instrumental aspects of choice behaviour, including motor inhibition, decisional slowing, and value sensitivity. However, it is not well known whether subthalamic DBS affects more complex aspects of decision-making, such as the influence of subjective estimates of uncertainty on choices. In this study, 38 participants with PD played a virtual casino prior to subthalamic DBS (whilst 'on' medication) and again, 3-months postoperatively (whilst 'on' stimulation).

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It has been suspected that abnormalities in social inference (e.g., learning others' intentions) play a key role in the formation of persecutory delusions (PD).

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An integral aspect of human cognition is the ability to inhibit stimulus-driven, habitual responses, in favour of complex, voluntary actions. In addition, humans can also alternate between different tasks. This comes at the cost of degraded performance when compared to repeating the same task, a phenomenon called the "task-switch cost.

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In the antisaccade task participants are required to saccade in the opposite direction of a peripheral visual cue (PVC). This paradigm is often used to investigate inhibition of reflexive responses as well as voluntary response generation. However, it is not clear to what extent different versions of this task probe the same underlying processes.

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Background And Purpose: Over half of Americans reports a history of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which have been associated with many chronic health conditions. Yet primary care providers infrequently screen patients for ACEs and fail to consider the relationship between ACEs and adult health. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to test the effectiveness and feasibility of a screening interview for ACEs and to confirm the prevalence of ACEs among individuals with chronic health conditions.

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Despite the success of modern neuroimaging techniques in furthering our understanding of cognitive and pathophysiological processes, translation of these advances into clinically relevant tools has been virtually absent until now. Neuromodeling represents a powerful framework for overcoming this translational deadlock, and the development of computational models to solve clinical problems has become a major scientific goal over the last decade, as reflected by the emergence of clinically oriented neuromodeling fields like Computational Psychiatry, Computational Neurology, and Computational Psychosomatics. Generative models of brain physiology and connectivity in the human brain play a key role in this endeavor, striving for computational assays that can be applied to neuroimaging data from individual patients for differential diagnosis and treatment prediction.

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The antisaccade task is a classic paradigm used to study the voluntary control of eye movements. It requires participants to suppress a reactive eye movement to a visual target and to concurrently initiate a saccade in the opposite direction. Although several models have been proposed to explain error rates and reaction times in this task, no formal model comparison has yet been performed.

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The molecular pathology of sulfur mustard injury is complex, with at least nine inflammation-related enzymes and receptors upregulated in the zone of the insult. A new approach wherein inhibitors of these targets have been linked by hydrolyzable bonds, either one to one or via separate preattachment to a carrier molecule, has been shown to significantly enhance the therapeutic response compared with the individual agents. This article reviews the published work of the authors in this drug development domain over the last 8 years.

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Neuroimaging increasingly exploits machine learning techniques in an attempt to achieve clinically relevant single-subject predictions. An alternative to machine learning, which tries to establish predictive links between features of the observed data and clinical variables, is the deployment of computational models for inferring on the (patho)physiological and cognitive mechanisms that generate behavioural and neuroimaging responses. This paper discusses the rationale behind a computational approach to neuroimaging-based single-subject inference, focusing on its potential for characterising disease mechanisms in individual subjects and mapping these characterisations to clinical predictions.

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Background: Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) for fMRI is an established method for Bayesian system identification and inference on effective brain connectivity. DCM relies on a biophysical model that links hidden neuronal activity to measurable BOLD signals. Currently, biophysical simulations from DCM constitute a serious computational hindrance.

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Over the past decade, computational approaches to neuroimaging have increasingly made use of hierarchical Bayesian models (HBMs), either for inferring on physiological mechanisms underlying fMRI data (e.g., dynamic causal modelling, DCM) or for deriving computational trajectories (from behavioural data) which serve as regressors in general linear models.

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The iridocorneal endothelial syndrome is a rare cause of unilateral glaucoma that is almost never seen in children. We report a case of iridocorneal endothelial in a 14-year-old boy who did not yet have ocular hypertension or glaucoma.

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Background: This paper introduces a new paradigm that allows one to quantify the Bayesian beliefs evidenced by subjects during oculomotor pursuit. Subjects' eye tracking responses to a partially occluded sinusoidal target were recorded non-invasively and averaged. These response averages were then analysed using dynamic causal modelling (DCM).

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Intra-abdominal cystic lymphangiomas are rare, benign congenital tumors that often present with vague symptoms, making diagnosis difficult. We report a case of a 4-year-old patient who presented to the emergency department with nonspecific abdominal pain. Her diagnosis of intra-abdominal cystic lymphangioma was facilitated by point-of-care ultrasonography.

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African American women account for 66% of new HIV infections among U.S. women, and many are not aware of their status.

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Background: Traumatic knee pain is a common complaint in the emergency department (ED). Conventional radiographs are often ordered as the initial screening study, but might not be readily available or always identify significant fractures. Ultrasonography has been shown to be useful in the evaluation of knee fractures not identified by radiography.

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