Factors Influencing Stream Segregation Based on Interaural Phase Difference Cues.

Interaural time differences are often considered a weak cue for stream segregation. We investigated this claim with headphone-presented pure tones differing in a related form of interaural configuration-interaural phase differences (ΔIPD)-or/and in frequency (ΔF). In experiment 1, sequences comprised 5 × ABA- repetitions (A and B = 80-ms tones, "-" = 160-ms silence), and listeners reported whether integration or segregation was heard.

How auditory processing influences the autistic profile: A review.

We need to combine sensory data from various sources to make sense of the world around us. This sensory data helps us understand our surroundings, influencing our experiences and interactions within our everyday environments. Recent interest in sensory-focused approaches to supporting autistic people has fixed on auditory processing-the sense of hearing and the act of listening-and its crucial role in language, communications, and social domains, as well as non-social autism-specific attributes, to understand better how sensory processing might differ in autistic people.

Echocardiographic Findings in Critically Ill COVID-19 Patients Treated With and Without Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

Objectives: To describe echocardiographic findings among mechanically ventilated patients with COVID-19 acute respiratory distress syndrome, comparing those with and without venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VV ECMO) support.

Design: Single-center, retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Intensive care unit (ICU) of a quaternary academic center.

State LGBTQ policy environments and the cancer burden in sexual and gender minoritized communities in the United States.

Purpose: Our objective was to assess the association between state policies related to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and cancer prevalence and survivorship indicators in a sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) population in the United States.

Methods: Data from the 2017-2021 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System were used to measure cancer diagnosis, physical and mental health, and substance use for SGM adult cancer survivors. A state policy Z-score, ranging from most restrictive to most protective state policies related to SOGI, was computed from data available from the Movement Advancement Project.

Noises on-How the Brain Deals with Acoustic Noise.

What is noise? When does a sound form part of the acoustic background and when might it come to our attention as part of the foreground? Our brain seems to filter out irrelevant sounds in a seemingly effortless process, but how this is achieved remains opaque and, to date, unparalleled by any algorithm. In this review, we discuss how noise can be both background and foreground, depending on what a listener/brain is trying to achieve. We do so by addressing questions concerning the brain's potential bias to interpret certain sounds as part of the background, the extent to which the interpretation of sounds depends on the context in which they are heard, as well as their ethological relevance, task-dependence, and a listener's overall mental state.

Gene Electrotransfer via Conductivity-Clamped Electric Field Focusing Pivots Sensori-Motor DNA Therapeutics: "A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down".

Viral vectors and lipofection-based gene therapies have dispersion-dependent transduction/transfection profiles that thwart precise targeting. The study describes the development of focused close-field gene electrotransfer (GET) technology, refining spatial control of gene expression. Integration of fluidics for precise delivery of "naked" plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in sucrose carrier within the focused electric field enables negative biasing of near-field conductivity ("conductivity-clamping"-CC), increasing the efficiency of plasma membrane molecular translocation.

Modernizing public health communication competencies in Canada: A survey of the Canadian public health workforce.

Objectives: Since the publication of the Core Competencies for Public Health in Canada in 2008, the public health and communication landscape has changed dramatically. Digital media and infodemics have shifted how practitioners must communicate and respond to health information. The age of the current competency framework, which is relied on for workforce development, alongside emerging public health challenges, have prompted calls for modernized competency statements.

Public health communication professional development opportunities and alignment with core competencies: an environmental scan and content analysis.

Introduction: Communication is vital for effective and precise public health practice. The limited formal educational opportunities in health communication render professional development opportunities especially important. Competencies for public health communication describe the integrated knowledge, values, skills and behaviours required for practitioner and organizational performance.

The neural representation of an auditory spatial cue in the primate cortex.

Humans make use of small differences in the timing of sounds at the two ears-interaural time differences (ITDs)-to locate their sources. Despite extensive investigation, however, the neural representation of ITDs in the human brain is contentious, particularly the range of ITDs explicitly represented by dedicated neural detectors. Here, using magneto- and electro-encephalography (MEG and EEG), we demonstrate evidence of a sparse neural representation of ITDs in the human cortex.

fruiting on mammal carcasses in an underground mine.

Fungi are important decomposers of organic material, including animal waste. Ammonia and postputrefaction fungi grow in soil enriched in ammonium and nitrogen from carcasses. In 2014, we observed mushrooms fruiting on the flesh of a dead muskrat () in an abandoned underground copper mine in southeastern New Brunswick, Canada.

Prognostic accuracy of eight triage scores in suspected COVID-19 in an Emergency Department low-income setting: An observational cohort study.

Introduction: Previous studies deriving and validating triage scores for patients with suspected COVID-19 in Emergency Department settings have been conducted in high- or middle-income settings. We assessed eight triage scores' accuracy for death or organ support in patients with suspected COVID-19 in Sudan.

Methods: We conducted an observational cohort study using Covid-19 registry data from eight emergency unit isolation centres in Khartoum State, Sudan.

The Benefits of Cochlear Implantation for Adults: A Systematic Umbrella Review.

Objectives: The uptake of cochlear implants among adults who could benefit (based on pure-tone audiometry) in developed countries is estimated to be less than 10%. Concerns about potential surgical complications, fear of losing residual hearing, and limited awareness about the benefits of this intervention contribute to the low adoption rate. To enhance quality of life and improve the uptake of cochlear implants, it is essential to have a clear understanding of their benefits.

An Evidence Map for Social and Structural Determinants for Maternal Morbidity and Mortality: A Systematic Review.

Objective: To identify the social-structural determinants of health risk factors associated with maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States during the prenatal and postpartum periods.

Data Sources: We searched MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Social Sciences Citation Index through November 2022 for eligible studies that examined exposures related to social and structural determinants of health and at least one health or health care-related outcome for pregnant and birthing people.

Methods Of Study Selection: After screening 8,378 unique references, 118 studies met inclusion criteria.

Insulin secretion in liver transplant recipients following conversion to a prolonged release tacrolimus formulation.

Background: Post liver transplant diabetes mellitus (PLTDM) occurs in 10-40% of liver transplant recipients and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. An important cause of PLTDM is tacrolimus induced, concentration-dependent, inhibition of insulin secretion.

Objective: To determine if a newly licenced formulation of tacrolimus (Envarsus-PA), which achieves peak tacrolimus concentrations 20-30% lower than other tacrolimus formulations has less of an inhibitory effect on insulin secretion.

Evidence That Ultrafast Nonquantal Transmission Underlies Synchronized Vestibular Action Potential Generation.

Amniotes evolved a unique postsynaptic terminal in the inner ear vestibular organs called the calyx that receives both quantal and nonquantal (NQ) synaptic inputs from Type I sensory hair cells. The nonquantal synaptic current includes an ultrafast component that has been hypothesized to underlie the exceptionally high synchronization index (vector strength) of vestibular afferent neurons in response to sound and vibration. Here, we present three lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis that nonquantal transmission is responsible for synchronized vestibular action potentials of short latency in the guinea pig utricle of either sex.

Training and testing of a gradient boosted machine learning model to predict adverse outcome in patients presenting to emergency departments with suspected covid-19 infection in a middle-income setting.

COVID-19 infection rates remain high in South Africa. Clinical prediction models may be helpful for rapid triage, and supporting clinical decision making, for patients with suspected COVID-19 infection. The Western Cape, South Africa, has integrated electronic health care data facilitating large-scale linked routine datasets.

Corrigendum: Listening loops and the adapting auditory brain.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.

LMIC-PRIEST: Derivation and validation of a clinical severity score for acutely ill adults with suspected COVID-19 in a middle-income setting.

Background: Uneven vaccination and less resilient health care systems mean hospitals in LMICs are at risk of being overwhelmed during periods of increased COVID-19 infection. Risk-scores proposed for rapid triage of need for admission from the emergency department (ED) have been developed in higher-income settings during initial waves of the pandemic.

Methods: Routinely collected data for public hospitals in the Western Cape, South Africa from the 27th August 2020 to 11th March 2022 were used to derive a cohort of 446,084 ED patients with suspected COVID-19.

External validation of triage tools for adults with suspected COVID-19 in a middle-income setting: an observational cohort study.

Background: Tools proposed to triage ED acuity in suspected COVID-19 were derived and validated in higher income settings during early waves of the pandemic. We estimated the accuracy of seven risk-stratification tools recommended to predict severe illness in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Methods: An observational cohort study using routinely collected data from EDs across the Western Cape, from 27 August 2020 to 11 March 2022, was conducted to assess the performance of the PRIEST (Pandemic Respiratory Infection Emergency System Triage) tool, NEWS2 (National Early Warning Score, version 2), TEWS (Triage Early Warning Score), the WHO algorithm, CRB-65, Quick COVID-19 Severity Index and PMEWS (Pandemic Medical Early Warning Score) in suspected COVID-19.

Cortical haemodynamic responses predict individual ability to recognise vocal emotions with uninformative pitch cues but do not distinguish different emotions.

We investigated the cortical representation of emotional prosody in normal-hearing listeners using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioural assessments. Consistent with previous reports, listeners relied most heavily on F0 cues when recognizing emotion cues; performance was relatively poor-and highly variable between listeners-when only intensity and speech-rate cues were available. Using fNIRS to image cortical activity to speech utterances containing natural and reduced prosodic cues, we found right superior temporal gyrus (STG) to be most sensitive to emotional prosody, but no emotion-specific cortical activations, suggesting that while fNIRS might be suited to investigating cortical mechanisms supporting speech processing it is less suited to investigating cortical haemodynamic responses to individual vocal emotions.

Functional connectivity learning via Siamese-based SPD matrix representation of brain imaging data.

Measurement of brain functional connectivity has become a dominant approach to explore the interaction dynamics between brain regions of subjects under examination. Conventional functional connectivity measures largely originate from deterministic models on empirical analysis, usually demanding application-specific settings (e.g.

Deep Factor Learning for Accurate Brain Neuroimaging Data Analysis on Discrimination for Structural MRI and Functional MRI.

Analysis of neuroimaging data (e.g., Magnetic Resonance Imaging, structural and functional MRI) plays an important role in monitoring brain dynamics and probing brain structures.

Listening loops and the adapting auditory brain.

Analysing complex auditory scenes depends in part on learning the long-term statistical structure of sounds comprising those scenes. One way in which the listening brain achieves this is by analysing the statistical structure of acoustic environments over multiple time courses and separating background from foreground sounds. A critical component of this statistical learning in the auditory brain is the interplay between feedforward and feedback pathways-"listening loops"-connecting the inner ear to higher cortical regions and back.