Neurobiological and Behavioral Underpinnings of Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMADs): A Selective Narrative Review.

Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) profoundly impact maternal and infant health, affecting women worldwide during pregnancy and postpartum. This review synthesizes current research on the neurobiological effects of PMADs, particularly their influence on brain structure, function, and corresponding cognitive, behavioral, and mental health outcomes in mothers. A literature search across PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar yielded studies utilizing neuroimaging (MRI, fMRI) and cognitive assessments to explore brain changes in PMADs.

Autoantibodies against laminin-521 are pathogenic in anti-glomerular basement membrane disease.

Anti-glomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) disease is an organ-specific autoimmune disorder characterized by autoantibodies against GBM components. Evidence from human inherited kidney diseases and animal models suggests that the α, β, and γ chains of laminin-521 are all essential for maintaining the glomerular filtration barrier. We previously demonstrated that laminin-521 is a novel autoantigen within the GBM and that autoantibodies to laminin-521 are present in about one-third of patients.

Adaptive Spatial Transformation Networks for Periocular Recognition.

Periocular recognition has emerged as a particularly valuable biometric identification method in challenging scenarios, such as partially occluded faces due to COVID-19 protective masks masks, in which face recognition might not be applicable. This work presents a periocular recognition framework based on deep learning, which automatically localises and analyses the most important areas in the periocular region. The main idea is to derive several parallel local branches from a neural network architecture, which in a semi-supervised manner learn the most discriminative areas in the feature map and solve the identification problem solely upon the corresponding cues.