Data and Tools Integration in the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform.

We present the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) portal to answer the research community's need for flexible data sharing resources and provide advanced tools for search and processing infrastructure capacity. This portal differs from previous data sharing projects as it integrates datasets originating from a number of already existing platforms or databases through DataLad, a file level data integrity and access layer. The portal is also an entry point for searching and accessing a large number of standardized and containerized software and links to a computing infrastructure.

Impact of employing primary healthcare professionals in emergency department triage on patient flow outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objectives: To identify, critically appraise and summarise evidence on the impact of employing primary healthcare professionals (PHCPs: family physicians/general practitioners (GPs), nurse practitioners (NP) and nurses with increased authority) in the emergency department (ED) triage, on patient flow outcomes.

Methods: We searched Medline (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), Cochrane Library (Wiley) and CINAHL (EBSCO) (inception to January 2020). Our primary outcome was the time to provider initial assessment (PIA).

Interventions and strategies involving primary healthcare professionals to manage emergency department overcrowding: a scoping review.

Objectives: To conduct a scoping review to identify and summarise the existing literature on interventions involving primary healthcare professionals to manage emergency department (ED) overcrowding.

Design: A scoping review.

Data Sources: A comprehensive database search of Medline (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), Cochrane Library (Wiley) and CINAHL (EBSCO) databases was conducted (inception until January 2020) using peer-reviewed search strategies, complemented by a search of grey literature sources.

Identifying incipient dementia individuals using machine learning and amyloid imaging.

Identifying individuals destined to develop Alzheimer's dementia within time frames acceptable for clinical trials constitutes an important challenge to design studies to test emerging disease-modifying therapies. Although amyloid-β protein is the core pathologic feature of Alzheimer's disease, biomarkers of neuronal degeneration are the only ones believed to provide satisfactory predictions of clinical progression within short time frames. Here, we propose a machine learning-based probabilistic method designed to assess the progression to dementia within 24 months, based on the regional information from a single amyloid positron emission tomography scan.

VoxelStats: A MATLAB Package for Multi-Modal Voxel-Wise Brain Image Analysis.

In healthy individuals, behavioral outcomes are highly associated with the variability on brain regional structure or neurochemical phenotypes. Similarly, in the context of neurodegenerative conditions, neuroimaging reveals that cognitive decline is linked to the magnitude of atrophy, neurochemical declines, or concentrations of abnormal protein aggregates across brain regions. However, modeling the effects of multiple regional abnormalities as determinants of cognitive decline at the voxel level remains largely unexplored by multimodal imaging research, given the high computational cost of estimating regression models for every single voxel from various imaging modalities.

Epistasis analysis links immune cascades and cerebral amyloidosis.

Background: Several lines of evidence suggest the involvement of neuroinflammatory changes in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology such as amyloidosis and neurodegeneration. In fact, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have shown a link between genes involved in neuroinflammation and AD. In order to further investigate whether interactions between candidate genetic variances coding for neuroinflammatory molecules are associated with brain amyloid β (Aβ) fibrillary accumulation, we conducted an epistasis analysis on a pool of genes associated with molecular mediators of inflammation.

Psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in subclinical depression.

Background: Our knowledge with respect to psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in individuals with high vulnerability to developing depression - the subclinically depressed, still remains limited.

Design: The study used a 2 × 2 mixed design.

Methods: Attentional bias toward happy and sad faces in healthy (N = 26) and subclinically depressed individuals (N = 22) was assessed via a neuroimaging dot-probe attention task.

n-back task performance and corresponding brain-activation patterns in women with restrictive and bulimic eating-disorder variants: preliminary findings.

Eating disorder (ED) variants characterized by "binge-eating/purging" symptoms differ from "restricting-only" variants along diverse clinical dimensions, but few studies have compared people with these different eating-disorder phenotypes on measures of neurocognitive function and brain activation. We tested the performances of 19 women with "restricting-only" eating syndromes and 27 with "binge-eating/purging" variants on a modified n-back task, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine task-induced brain activations in frontal regions of interest. When compared with "binge-eating/purging" participants, "restricting-only" participants showed superior performance.

Intraoperative maintenance of normoglycemia with insulin and glucose preserves verbal learning after cardiac surgery.

Objective: The hyperglycemic response to surgery may be a risk factor for cognitive dysfunction. We hypothesize that strict maintenance of normoglycemia during cardiac surgery preserves postoperative cognitive function.

Methods: As part of a larger randomized, single-blind, interventional efficacy study on the effects of hyperinsulinemic glucose control in cardiac surgery (NCT00524472), consenting patients were randomly assigned to receive combined administration of insulin and glucose, titrated to preserve normoglycemia (3.

Psychological, endocrine and neural responses to social evaluation in subclinical depression.

This study aimed to identify vulnerability patterns in psychological, physiological and neural responses to mild psychosocial challenge in a population that is at a direct risk of developing depression, but who has not as yet succumbed to the full clinical syndrome. A group of healthy and a group of subclinically depressed participants underwent a modified Montreal Imaging Stress task (MIST), a mild neuroimaging psychosocial task and completed state self-esteem and mood measures. Cortisol levels were assessed throughout the session.

Neural signature of reconsolidation impairments by propranolol in humans.

Background: The retrieval of consolidated memories may result in their destabilization, requiring a restabilization process called reconsolidation. During reconsolidation, memories become sensitive to psychological and pharmacological modifications again, thus providing an opportunity to alter unwanted memories. Although such reconsolidation manipulations might open the door to novel treatment approaches for psychiatric disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder, the brain mechanisms underlying reconsolidation processes in humans are completely unknown.

Cortisol awakening response and hippocampal volume: vulnerability for major depressive disorder?

Background: Major depressive disorder is associated with dysregulated basal cortisol levels and small hippocampal (HC) volume. However, it is still debated whether these phenomena are a consequence of the illness or whether they may represent a vulnerability marker existing before the illness onset. Here, we aimed to examine this notion of vulnerability by assessing whether abnormalities in basal cortisol secretion and HC volumes are already present in a sample of healthy young adults who showed varying levels of depressive tendencies, but at subclinical levels.

Neural correlates of processing stressful information: an event-related fMRI study.

Recent neuroimaging studies investigating neural correlates of psychological stress employ cognitive paradigms that induce a significant hormonal stress response in the scanner. The Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) is one such task that combines challenging mental arithmetic with negative social evaluative feedback. Due to the block design nature of the MIST, it has not been possible thus far to investigate which brain areas respond specifically to the key components of the MIST (mental arithmetic, failure, negative social evaluation).