A theory of consciousness: computation, algorithm, and neurobiological realization.

The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and the way in which that computation may be realized in the brain's neurobiology.

Peak oxygen uptake reference values for cycle ergometry for the healthy Dutch population: data from the LowLands Fitness Registry.

Peak oxygen uptake (') is recognised as the best expression of aerobic fitness. Therefore, it is essential that ' reference values are accurate for interpreting a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET). These values are country specific and influenced by underlying biological ageing processes.

Changes in cerebral oxygenation and cerebral blood flow during hemodialysis - A simultaneous near-infrared spectroscopy and positron emission tomography study.

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to monitor cerebral tissue oxygenation (rSO) depending on cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume and blood oxygen content. We explored whether NIRS might be a more easy applicable proxy to [O]HO positron emission tomography (PET) for detecting CBF changes during hemodialysis. Furthermore, we compared potential determinants of rSO and CBF.

Effect estimate comparison between the prescription sequence symmetry analysis (PSSA) and parallel group study designs: A systematic review.

Prescription sequence symmetry analysis (PSSA), a case-only design introduced in 1996, has been increasingly used to identify unintentional drug effects, and has potential applications as a hypothesis-testing and a hypothesis-generating method, due to its easy application and effective control of time-invariant confounders. The aim of this study is to systematically compare effect estimates from the PSSA to effect estimates from conventional observational parallel group study designs, to assess the validity and constraints of the PSSA study design. We reviewed the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Web of Science databases until February 2016 to identify studies that compared PSSA to a parallel group design.

Multi-User Low Intrusive Occupancy Detection.

Smart spaces are those that are aware of their state and can act accordingly. Among the central elements of such a state is the presence of humans and their number. For a smart office building, such information can be used for saving energy and safety purposes.

Hemodialysis Induces an Acute Decline in Cerebral Blood Flow in Elderly Patients.

The initiation of hemodialysis is associated with an accelerated decline of cognitive function and an increased incidence of cerebrovascular accidents and white matter lesions. Investigators have hypothesized that the repetitive circulatory stress of hemodialysis induces ischemic cerebral injury, but the mechanism is unclear. We studied the acute effect of conventional hemodialysis on cerebral blood flow (CBF), measured by [O]HO positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT).

Personalized Physical Activity Coaching: A Machine Learning Approach.

Living a sedentary lifestyle is one of the major causes of numerous health problems. To encourage employees to lead a less sedentary life, the Hanze University started a health promotion program. One of the interventions in the program was the use of an activity tracker to record participants' daily step count.

Defect in the Joint Spectrum of Hydrogen due to Monodromy.

In addition to the well-known case of spherical coordinates, the Schrödinger equation of the hydrogen atom separates in three further coordinate systems. Separating in a particular coordinate system defines a system of three commuting operators. We show that the joint spectrum of the Hamilton operator, the z component of the angular momentum, and an operator involving the z component of the quantum Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector obtained from separation in prolate spheroidal coordinates has quantum monodromy for energies sufficiently close to the ionization threshold.

Assessing dynamic postural control during exergaming in older adults: A probabilistic approach.

Digital games controlled by body movements (exergames) have been proposed as a way to improve postural control among older adults. Exergames are meant to be played at home in an unsupervised way. However, only few studies have investigated the effect of unsupervised home-exergaming on postural control.

Exploring the emotional dynamics of subclinically depressed individuals with and without anhedonia: An experience sampling study.

Background: Anhedonia has been linked to worse prognosis of depression. The present study aimed to construct personalized models to elucidate the emotional dynamics of subclinically depressed individuals with versus without symptoms of anhedonia.

Methods: Matched subclinically depressed individuals with and without symptoms of anhedonia (N = 40) of the HowNutsAreTheDutch sample completed three experience sampling methodology assessments per day for 30 days.

A Unifying Theory of Biological Function.

A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological (or selected effects) theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system.

Mixture model with multiple allocations for clustering spatially correlated observations in the analysis of ChIP-Seq data.

Model-based clustering is a technique widely used to group a collection of units into mutually exclusive groups. There are, however, situations in which an observation could in principle belong to more than one cluster. In the context of next-generation sequencing (NGS) experiments, for example, the signal observed in the data might be produced by two (or more) different biological processes operating together and a gene could participate in both (or all) of them.

Two-stage approach for risk estimation of fetal trisomy 21 and other aneuploidies using computational intelligence systems.

Objective: To estimate the risk of fetal trisomy 21 (T21) and other chromosomal abnormalities (OCA) at 11-13 weeks' gestation using computational intelligence classification methods.

Methods: As a first step, a training dataset consisting of 72 054 euploid pregnancies, 295 cases of T21 and 305 cases of OCA was used to train an artificial neural network. Then, a two-stage approach was used for stratification of risk and diagnosis of cases of aneuploidy in the blind set.

Isochronous dynamics in pulse coupled oscillator networks with delay.

We consider a network of identical pulse-coupled oscillators with delay and all-to-all coupling. We demonstrate that the discontinuous nature of the dynamics induces the appearance of isochronous regions-subsets of the phase space filled with periodic orbits having the same period. For each fixed value of the network parameters, such an isochronous region corresponds to a subset of initial states on an appropriate surface of section with non-zero dimensions such that all periodic orbits in this set have qualitatively similar dynamical behaviour.

ICoVeR - an interactive visualization tool for verification and refinement of metagenomic bins.

Background: Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing allow for much deeper exploitation of natural and engineered microbial communities, and to unravel so-called "microbial dark matter" (microbes that until now have evaded cultivation). Metagenomic analyses result in a large number of genomic fragments (contigs) that need to be grouped (binned) in order to reconstruct draft microbial genomes. While several contig binning algorithms have been developed in the past 2 years, they often lack consensus.

Steroid metabolome analysis reveals prevalent glucocorticoid excess in primary aldosteronism.

Background: Adrenal aldosterone excess is the most common cause of secondary hypertension and is associated with increased cardiovascular morbidity. However, adverse metabolic risk in primary aldosteronism extends beyond hypertension, with increased rates of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis, which cannot be easily explained by aldosterone excess.

Methods: We performed mass spectrometry-based analysis of a 24-hour urine steroid metabolome in 174 newly diagnosed patients with primary aldosteronism (103 unilateral adenomas, 71 bilateral adrenal hyperplasias) in comparison to 162 healthy controls, 56 patients with endocrine inactive adrenal adenoma, 104 patients with mild subclinical, and 47 with clinically overt adrenal cortisol excess.

Visual Data Exploration for Balance Quantification in Real-Time During Exergaming.

Unintentional injuries are among the ten leading causes of death in older adults; falls cause 60% of these deaths. Despite their effectiveness to improve balance and reduce the risk of falls, balance training programs have several drawbacks in practice, such as lack of engaging elements, boring exercises, and the effort and cost of travelling, ultimately resulting in low adherence. Exergames, that is, digital games controlled by body movements, have been proposed as an alternative to improve balance.

Dynamics of phase oscillators with generalized frequency-weighted coupling.

Heterogeneous coupling patterns among interacting elements are ubiquitous in real systems ranging from physics, chemistry to biology communities, which have attracted much attention during recent years. In this paper, we extend the Kuramoto model by considering a particular heterogeneous coupling scheme in an ensemble of phase oscillators, where each oscillator pair interacts with different coupling strength that is weighted by a general function of the natural frequency. The Kuramoto theory for the transition to synchronization can be explicitly generalized, such as the expression for the critical coupling strength.

Let's get Physiqual - An intuitive and generic method to combine sensor technology with ecological momentary assessments.

The emergence of wearables and smartwatches is making sensors a ubiquitous technology to measure daily rhythms in physiological measures, such as movement and heart rate. An integration of sensor data from wearables and self-report questionnaire data about cognition, behaviors, and emotions can provide new insights into the interaction of mental and physiological processes in daily life. Hitherto no method existed that enables an easy-to-use integration of sensor and self-report data.

Temporal Dynamics of Health and Well-Being: A Crowdsourcing Approach to Momentary Assessments and Automated Generation of Personalized Feedback.

Objective: Recent developments in research and mobile health enable a quantitative idiographic approach in health research. The present study investigates the potential of an electronic diary crowdsourcing study in the Netherlands for (1) large-scale automated self-assessment for individual-based health promotion and (2) enabling research at both the between-persons and within-persons level. To illustrate the latter, we examined between-persons and within-persons associations between somatic symptoms and quality of life.

Prototype-based models in machine learning.

An overview is given of prototype-based models in machine learning. In this framework, observations, i.e.

Modeling spontaneous activity across an excitable epithelium: Support for a coordination scenario of early neural evolution.

Internal coordination models hold that early nervous systems evolved in the first place to coordinate internal activity at a multicellular level, most notably the use of multicellular contractility as an effector for motility. A recent example of such a model, the skin brain thesis, suggests that excitable epithelia using chemical signaling are a potential candidate as a nervous system precursor. We developed a computational model and a measure for whole body coordination to investigate the coordinative properties of such excitable epithelia.

HowNutsAreTheDutch (HoeGekIsNL): A crowdsourcing study of mental symptoms and strengths.

HowNutsAreTheDutch (Dutch: HoeGekIsNL) is a national crowdsourcing study designed to investigate multiple continuous mental health dimensions in a sample from the general population (n = 12,503). Its main objective is to create an empirically based representation of mental strengths and vulnerabilities, accounting for (i) dimensionality and heterogeneity, (ii) interactivity between symptoms and strengths, and (iii) intra-individual variability. To do so, HowNutsAreTheDutch (HND) makes use of an internet platform that allows participants to (a) compare themselves to other participants via cross-sectional questionnaires and (b) to monitor themselves three times a day for 30 days with an intensive longitudinal diary study via their smartphone.

Quantifying Postural Control during Exergaming Using Multivariate Whole-Body Movement Data: A Self-Organizing Maps Approach.

Background: Exergames are becoming an increasingly popular tool for training balance ability, thereby preventing falls in older adults. Automatic, real time, assessment of the user's balance control offers opportunities in terms of providing targeted feedback and dynamically adjusting the gameplay to the individual user, yet algorithms for quantification of balance control remain to be developed. The aim of the present study was to identify movement patterns, and variability therein, of young and older adults playing a custom-made weight-shifting (ice-skating) exergame.

Classification of Parkinsonian syndromes from FDG-PET brain data using decision trees with SSM/PCA features.

Medical imaging techniques like fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) have been used to aid in the differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative brain diseases. In this study, the objective is to classify FDG-PET brain scans of subjects with Parkinsonian syndromes (Parkinson's disease, multiple system atrophy, and progressive supranuclear palsy) compared to healthy controls. The scaled subprofile model/principal component analysis (SSM/PCA) method was applied to FDG-PET brain image data to obtain covariance patterns and corresponding subject scores.