Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and lung cancer: future directions and challenges.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive disease of pulmonary scarring. New treatments slow disease progression and allow pulmonary fibrosis patients to live longer. Persistent pulmonary fibrosis increases a patient's risk of developing lung cancer.

Pupillometry to Assess Auditory Sensation in Guinea Pigs.

Noise exposure is a leading cause of sensorineural hearing loss. Animal models of noise-induced hearing loss have generated mechanistic insight into the underlying anatomical and physiological pathologies of hearing loss. However, relating behavioral deficits observed in humans with hearing loss to behavioral deficits in animal models remains challenging.

Vocalization categorization behavior explained by a feature-based auditory categorization model.

Vocal animals produce multiple categories of calls with high between- and within-subject variability, over which listeners must generalize to accomplish call categorization. The behavioral strategies and neural mechanisms that support this ability to generalize are largely unexplored. We previously proposed a theoretical model that accomplished call categorization by detecting features of intermediate complexity that best contrasted each call category from all other categories.

Updates to the guinea pig animal model for in-vivo auditory neuroscience in the low-frequency hearing range.

For gaining insight into general principles of auditory processing, it is critical to choose model organisms whose set of natural behaviors encompasses the processes being investigated. This reasoning has led to the development of a variety of animal models for auditory neuroscience research, such as guinea pigs, gerbils, chinchillas, rabbits, and ferrets; but in recent years, the availability of cutting-edge molecular tools and other methodologies in the mouse model have led to waning interest in these unique model species. As laboratories increasingly look to include in-vivo components in their research programs, a comprehensive description of procedures and techniques for applying some of these modern neuroscience tools to a non-mouse small animal model would enable researchers to leverage unique model species that may be best suited for testing their specific hypotheses.

Frequency-Following Responses to Speech Sounds Are Highly Conserved across Species and Contain Cortical Contributions.

Time-varying pitch is a vital cue for human speech perception. Neural processing of time-varying pitch has been extensively assayed using scalp-recorded frequency-following responses (FFRs), an electrophysiological signal thought to reflect integrated phase-locked neural ensemble activity from subcortical auditory areas. Emerging evidence increasingly points to a putative contribution of auditory cortical ensembles to the scalp-recorded FFRs.