Caregivers in implantable brain-computer interface research: a scoping review.

Introduction: While the ethical significance of caregivers in neurological research has increasingly been recognized, the role of caregivers in brain-computer interface (BCI) research has received relatively less attention.

Objectives: This report investigates the extent to which caregivers are mentioned in publications describing implantable BCI (iBCI) research for individuals with motor dysfunction, communication impairment, and blindness.

Methods: The scoping review was conducted in June 2024 using the PubMed and Web of Science bibliographic databases.

Deep Brain Stimulation for Childhood Treatment-Resistant Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Mental Health Clinician Views on Candidacy Factors.

Introduction: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is approved under a humanitarian device exemption to manage treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (TR-OCD) in adults. It is possible that DBS may be trialed or used clinically off-label in children and adolescents with TR-OCD in the future. DBS is already used to manage treatment-resistant childhood dystonia.

Adolescent OCD Patient and Caregiver Perspectives on Identity, Authenticity, and Normalcy in Potential Deep Brain Stimulation Treatment.

The ongoing debate within neuroethics concerning the degree to which neuromodulation such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) changes the personality, identity, and agency (PIA) of patients has paid relatively little attention to the perspectives of prospective patients. Even less attention has been given to pediatric populations. To understand patients' views about identity changes due to DBS in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the authors conducted and analyzed semistructured interviews with adolescent patients with OCD and their parents/caregivers.

Patients' and physicians' beliefs and attitudes towards integrating personalized risk estimates into patient education about left ventricular assist device therapy.

Background: Personalized risk (PR) estimates may enhance clinical decision making and risk communication by providing individualized estimates of patient outcomes. We explored stakeholder attitudes toward the utility, acceptability, usefulness and best-practices for integrating PR estimates into patient education and decision making about Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD).

Methods And Results: As part of a 5-year multi-institutional AHRQ project, we conducted 40 interviews with stakeholders (physicians, nurse coordinators, patients, and caregivers), analyzed using Thematic Content Analysis.

Hope and Optimism in Pediatric Deep Brain Stimulation: Key Stakeholder Perspectives.

Introduction: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is utilized to treat pediatric refractory dystonia and its use in pediatric patients is expected to grow. One important question concerns the impact of hope and unrealistic optimism on decision-making, especially in "last resort" intervention scenarios such as DBS for refractory conditions.

Objective: This study examined stakeholder experiences and perspectives on hope and unrealistic optimism in the context of decision-making about DBS for childhood dystonia and provides insights for clinicians seeking to implement effective communication strategies.

Clinician Perspectives on Levels of Evidence and Oversight for Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Childhood OCD.

Approximately 10-20% of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have treatment-resistant presentations, and there is likely interest in developing interventions for this patient group, which may include deep brain stimulation (DBS). The World Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery has argued that at least two successful randomized controlled trials should be available before DBS treatment for a psychiatric disorder is considered "established." The FDA approved DBS for adults with treatment-resistant OCD under a humanitarian device exemption (HDE) in 2009, which requires that a device be used to manage or treat a condition impacting 8,000 or fewer patients annually in the United States.

What Do Psychiatrists Think About Caring for Patients Who Have Extremely Treatment-Refractory Illness?

Questions about when to limit unhelpful treatments are often raised in general medicine but are less commonly considered in psychiatry. Here we describe a survey of U.S.

A Call for Behavioral Science in Embedded Bioethics.

Bioethicists today are taking a greater role in the design and implementation of emerging technologies by "embedding" within the development teams and providing their direct guidance and recommendations. Ideally, these collaborations allow ethical considerations to be addressed in an active, iterative, and ongoing process through regular exchanges between ethicists and members of the technological development team. This article discusses a challenge to this embedded ethics approach-namely, that bioethical guidance, even if embraced by the development team in theory, is not easily actionable in situ.

A model for discovering 'containment' relations.

Rapid developments in the fields of learning and object recognition have been obtained by successfully developing and using methods for learning from a large number of labeled image examples. However, such current methods cannot explain infants' learning of new concepts based on their visual experience, in particular, the ability to learn complex concepts without external guidance, as well as the natural order in which related concepts are acquired. A remarkable example of early visual learning is the category of 'containers' and the notion of 'containment'.

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts.

Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes.

Reinforcement active learning in the vibrissae system: optimal object localization.

Rats move their whiskers to acquire information about their environment. It has been observed that they palpate novel objects and objects they are required to localize in space. We analyze whisker-based object localization using two complementary paradigms, namely, active learning and intrinsic-reward reinforcement learning.

They saw a movie: long-term memory for an extended audiovisual narrative.

We measured long-term memory for a narrative film. During the study session, participants watched a 27-min movie episode, without instructions to remember it. During the test session, administered at a delay ranging from 3 h to 9 mo after the study session, long-term memory for the movie was probed using a computerized questionnaire that assessed cued recall, recognition, and metamemory of movie events sampled approximately 20 sec apart.

Amygdalar circuits required for either consolidation or extinction of taste aversion memory are not required for reconsolidation.

Recent reports have revitalized the debate on whether, for each item in memory, consolidation occurs just once, or whether, upon their activation in retrieval, items in memory undergo reconsolidation. Further, it has been recently reported that following retrieval in the absence of reinforcer, the activated memory can either reconsolidate or extinguish, depending on the training history. This raises the question whether consolidation, extinction and reconsolidation share neuronal mechanisms, and moreover, whether reconsolidation recapitulates consolidation.

Two-phase approach for the expression of high-affinity human anti-human immunodeficiency virus immunoglobulin Fab domains in Escherichia coli.

We describe here a two-phase approach for the development of high-affinity human anti-HIV immunoglobulin Fab domains in a bacterial expression system. The first phase of this technique involves the generation of human hybridoma cell lines producing high-affinity antibodies (MAbs). Anti-HIV-1 human MAbs from peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) were prepared from an HIV-1-seropositive patient and from an HIV-1-seronegative volunteer immunized with HIV-1 rgp160.

Development of human monoclonal antibodies to rabies.

A total of nine human monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) to rabies virus were generated from peripheral B lymphocytes of subjects immunized with human diploid cell rabies vaccine by somatic cell hybridization. The MAbs were analyzed for their antigen-binding specificities using ELISA, Western blot, and immunoprecipitation assays. The different assays made it possible to identify MAbs directed to the surface glycoprotein, nucleoprotein, nominal phosphoprotein, and matrix protein.

Molecular mimicry accompanying HIV-1 infection: human monoclonal antibodies that bind to gp41 and to astrocytes.

Monoclonal antibodies that bound to HIV gp41 and cross-reacted with astrocytes were recovered from the blood of three patients infected with HIV-1. Mapping of the specificity of these monoclonal antibodies, using synthetic gp41 peptides, located their epitope to amino acids 644-663 and established their conformation dependence. Six other human monoclonal anti-HIV antibodies were found to bind to HIV gp41 or gp120 but not to reactive astrocytes in brain tissue.

Cutaneous disorders and viral gene expression in HIV-1 transgenic mice.

Patients infected with HIV-1 experience several hyperproliferative skin disorders, including seborrheic dermatitis, ichthyosis, and psoriasis. Transgenic mice carrying a subgenomic HIV-1 proviral construct lacking the gag and pol genes were found to develop proliferative epidermal lesions, manifested as diffuse epidermal hyperplasia in homozygous transgenic mice and benign papillomas in heterozygous transgenic mice. Nonpapillomatous skin from both homozygotes and heterozygotes expressed viral RNA, and the viral envelope protein gp120 was localized to the suprabasal keratinocyte.

Supplement-induced cytotoxic cells (SICC) generated from mouse thymus or spleen cells cultured in the presence of interleukin 2 and/or polyinosinic acid.

Mouse thymocytes and spleen cells from unprimed C57BL/6 donors generate broadly reactive cytotoxic cells during 5 days of culture in vitro with polyinosinic acid (5') (poly(I] and/or supernatant from PMA-treated EL4 leukemia cells which contains interleukin 2 (IL-2) activity. We refer here to such cytotoxic cells as "supplement-induced cytotoxic cells" or SICC. Thymocytes are dependent on the supernatant factor(s), whereas spleen cells are usually stimulated by poly(I) alone.

Broadly reactive murine cytotoxic cells induced in vitro under syngeneic conditions.

Mouse spleen cells became cytotoxic in short-term 51Cr-release assays for a wide variety of target cells after 5 days of culture in vitro with polyinosinic acid in a system that was otherwise entirely syngeneic. This study characterizes these effector cells with respect to target specificity, effect of donor age, time course of their appearance, mouse strain differences, and expression of differentiation antigens Thy-1, Lyt-1, Lyt-2, NK-1, and asialo GM1. The combination of properties of this cytotoxic cell response that make it unique are that a) the broadly reactive cytotoxic activity developed from unprimed spleen cells in the absence of either foreign cells or foreign serum; b) the response did not peak until 4 to 5 days of culture in vitro; c) the broad reactivity pattern included freshly dispersed primary syngeneic sarcoma cells and cultured syngeneic fibroblasts but did not include syngeneic lymphoblast target cells; d) the response was largely monoclonal as defined by target cell binding; and e) cytotoxic cell activity was sensitive in complement-mediated treatments to both anti-NK and anti-theta but not to anti-Lyt-2, anti-Lyt-1, or anti-asialo GM1.

Susceptibility of adherent versus suspension target cells derived from adherent tissue culture lines to cell-mediated cytotoxicity in rapid 51Cr-release assays.

Preparation of target cells from tissue culture lines which grow adherent to tissue culture vessels is often desirable for tests of cell-mediated cytotoxicity (CMC). In the present study we used cells derived from adherent tissue culture lines to compare the merits of suspension vs. adherent target cells in short-term 51Cr-release assays.