MSADCN:Multi-Scale Attentional Densely Connected Network for Automated Bone Age Assessment

Bone age assessment(BAA)helps doctors determine how a child’s bones grow and develop in clinical medicine.Traditional BAA methods rely on clinician expertise,leading to time-consuming predictions and inaccurate results.Most deep learning-based BAA methods feed the extracted critical points of images into the network by providing additional annotations.This operation is costly and subjective.To address these problems,we propose a multi-scale attentional densely connected network(MSADCN)in this paper.MSADCN constructs a multi-scale dense connectivity mechanism,which can avoid overfitting,obtain the local features effectively and prevent gradient vanishing even in limited training data.First,MSADCN designs multi-scale structures in the densely connected network to extract fine-grained features at different scales.Then,coordinate attention is embedded to focus on critical features and automatically locate the regions of interest(ROI)without additional annotation.In addition,to improve the model’s generalization,transfer learning is applied to train the proposed MSADCN on the public dataset IMDB-WIKI,and the obtained pre-trained weights are loaded onto the Radiological Society of North America(RSNA)dataset.Finally,label distribution learning(LDL)and expectation regression techniques are introduced into our model to exploit the correlation between hand bone images of different ages,which can obtain stable age estimates.Extensive experiments confirm that our model can converge more efficiently and obtain a mean absolute error(MAE)of 4.64 months,outperforming some state-of-the-art BAA methods.

Electroencephalogram Signal Correlations between Default Mode Network and Attentional Functioning

Attentional issues may affect acquiring new information, task performance, and learning. Cortical network activities change during different functional brain states, including the default mode network (DMN) and attention network. We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying attentional functions and correlations between DMN connectivity and attentional function using the Trail-Making Test (TMT)-A and -B. Electroencephalography recordings were performed by placing 19 scalp electrodes per the 10 - 20 system. The mean power level was calculated for each rest and task condition. Non-parametric Spearman’s rank correlation was used to examine the correlation in power levels between the rest and TMT conditions. The most significant correlations during TMT-A were observed in the high gamma wave, followed by theta and beta waves, indicating that most correlations were in the parietal lobe, followed by the frontal, central, and temporal lobes. The most significant correlations during TMT-B were observed in the beta wave, followed by the high and low gamma waves, indicating that most correlations were in the temporal lobe, followed by the parietal, frontal, and central lobes. Frontoparietal beta and gamma waves in the DMN may represent attentional functions.

Effectiveness of mindfulness based cognitive therapy on weight loss, improvement of hypertension and attentional bias to eating cues in overweight people

Objectives:Prevalence rates of overweight and obesity are dramatically ever-increasing across the world.Therefore,this study was to evaluate the effect of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy(MBCT)on weight loss,hypertension,and attentional bias towards food cues in a group of women affected with this condition.Methods:A total of 45 participants were selected out of women referring to the Nutrition and Diet Therapy Clinic affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences,Iran,and then randomized into three groups of 15.The first experimental group was subjected to an energy-restricted diet therapy together with MBCT during 8 sessions,the second group took the diet therapy alone,and the third group received no intervention.Body mass index(BMI),hypertension,and attentional bias towards food cues were correspondingly evaluated before,at the end,and four weeks after the completion of the interventions.Results:The results of this study revealed that MBCT,along with diet therapy,had been significantly more effective in weight loss,decrease in BMI,lower systolic blood pressure(SBP),and attentional bias towards food cues compared with the diet therapy alone(P≤0.01).MBCT had no significant impact on the decline in diastolic blood pressure(DBP)in participants in the follow-up phase.Conclusion:This study demonstrated that MBCT along with the conventional diet therapy was more effective in weight loss,decrease in BMI,hypertension control,as well as attentional bias towards food cues than the diet therapy alone.

Residual Feature Attentional Fusion Network for Lightweight Chest CT Image Super-Resolution

The diagnosis of COVID-19 requires chest computed tomography(CT).High-resolution CT images can provide more diagnostic information to help doctors better diagnose the disease,so it is of clinical importance to study super-resolution(SR)algorithms applied to CT images to improve the reso-lution of CT images.However,most of the existing SR algorithms are studied based on natural images,which are not suitable for medical images;and most of these algorithms improve the reconstruction quality by increasing the network depth,which is not suitable for machines with limited resources.To alleviate these issues,we propose a residual feature attentional fusion network for lightweight chest CT image super-resolution(RFAFN).Specifically,we design a contextual feature extraction block(CFEB)that can extract CT image features more efficiently and accurately than ordinary residual blocks.In addition,we propose a feature-weighted cascading strategy(FWCS)based on attentional feature fusion blocks(AFFB)to utilize the high-frequency detail information extracted by CFEB as much as possible via selectively fusing adjacent level feature information.Finally,we suggest a global hierarchical feature fusion strategy(GHFFS),which can utilize the hierarchical features more effectively than dense concatenation by progressively aggregating the feature information at various levels.Numerous experiments show that our method performs better than most of the state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods on the COVID-19 chest CT dataset.In detail,the peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)is 0.11 dB and 0.47 dB higher on CTtest1 and CTtest2 at×3 SR compared to the suboptimal method,but the number of parameters and multi-adds are reduced by 22K and 0.43G,respectively.Our method can better recover chest CT image quality with fewer computational resources and effectively assist in COVID-19.

Cognitive attentional syndrome and metacognitive beliefs as potential treatment targets for metacognitive therapy in bipolar disorder

Most treatment guidelines emphasize the use of psychotropic drugs for both the acute and maintenance treatment of bipolar disorder(BD).However,relying only on psychotropics without adjunctive psychosocial interventions may be insufficient in treating patients with BD.Given its unique view in the explanation of psychopathological states,metacognitive therapy(MCT)might be helpful for BD.Metacognitive theory posits that psychopathology is a result of the cognitive attentional syndrome(CAS)and that it is influenced and maintained by dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs,perseverative thinking,attentional biases,and dysfunctional coping strategies.In this review,literature data regarding these areas in BD are examined.Studies suggest that perseverative thinking might be among the emotion regulation strategies endorsed in individuals with BD.Regarding attentional biases,literature data show that state-dependent,moodchanging attentional biases and a ruminative self-focused attention are present.Studies also suggest that cognitive self-consciousness is higher in BD compared to controls.It is seen that maladaptive coping strategies are frequently reported in BD,and that these strategies are associated with depression severity,negative affect and relapse risk.Studies focusing on dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs in BD reported that individuals with BD had higher scores for negative metacognitive beliefs,self-consciousness,need to control thoughts,and a lack of cognitive confidence.Also,dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs were associated with depressive symptomatology.These findings suggest that the components of CAS and dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs are evident in BD.For a subgroup of patients with BD who fail to respond to evidence-based psychopharmacological and adjunctive psychotherapeutic interventions,MCT might be an alternative way to consider as a treatment option.In conclusion,taken the available data together,we propose a sequential treatment protocol for BD,mainly based on the MCT treatment plan of depressive disorders.

Randomized trial estimating effects of hypnosis versus progressive muscle relaxation on medical students’test anxiety and attentional bias

BACKGROUND Test anxiety is prevalent among medical students and leads to impaired academic performance.Test-related attentional bias has been identified as an important maintaining factor in test-anxious individuals.AIM To evaluate whether hypnosis and progressive muscle relaxation(PMR)could modify medical college students’test anxiety and attentional bias.METHODS A total of 598 medical students were screened.The participants were divided into higher and lower test anxiety groups according to their scores on the test anxiety scale(TAS).Ninety medical college students with high TAS score were randomly assigned to a hypnosis or PMR group.Another 45 students with low TAS score were included,forming a baseline control group.The intervention was conducted weekly for 6 wk,and each session lasted approximately 30 min.The total intervention time and the number of intervention sessions for the hypnosis and PMR groups were equal.Data were collected at the pretest,posttest,and 2-mo follow-up.RESULTS Hypnosis group participants had a significantly lower TAS score at posttest(t=-21.827,P<0.001)and at follow-up(t=-14.824,P<0.001),compared to that at pretest.PMR group participants also had a significantly lower TAS score at posttest(t=-10.777,P<0.001)and at follow-up(t=-7.444,P<0.001),compared to that at pretest.At the posttest level,the hypnosis group had a significantly lower TAS score than the PMR group(t=-3.664,P<0.001).At the follow-up level,the hypnosis group also had a significantly lower TAS score than the PMR group(t=-2.943,P=0.004).Clinically significant improvement was found in both the hypnosis and PMR groups(hypnosis=64.0%;PMR=62.22%).Hypnosis was more effective than PMR in reducing test anxiety among medical college students.Hypnosis could modify attentional bias toward threatening stimuli,but PMR could not.CONCLUSION These results suggest that attentional bias plays an important role in test anxiety treatment.

Attentional Bias in Anxious Youth: Clinical Applications

Over the past decade,the clinical applications of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology methods have increased in popularity,permeating the clinical,education,and public health sectors.At the federal level,NIMH and the Institute of Education Sciences are regarding clinical-translation research as a top priority area for empirical investigation,and several national organizations including APA,the National Academy of Neuropsychology,the Society for Neuroscience,and the Neurocognitive Therapies/Translational Research Special Interest Group are recognizing the important influence of neuroscience and neuropsychology in understanding clinical pathology and guiding intervention plans.This line of inquiry has opened significant avenues for research and innovation in clinical practice,and the study of attentional bias in the etiology,assessment,and treatment of anxiety disorders is one of these important avenues.In recent years,researchers have extended early findings about the neurocognitive processes underpinning threat bias to enhance our understanding of risk factors and mechanisms of anxiety disorders,and inform the development of novel applications for clinical assessment and intervention.However,studies exploring these practical applications of attentional bias and dot probe methodology with anxious children and adolescents lag far behind.The following chapter will briefly review the literature on the clinical implications and direct clinical utility of cognitive psychology methods for measuring attentional threat bias in anxious youth.Applications for enhancing clinical assessment and intervention will be reviewed and discussed.Ultimately,advancing our knowledge of brain-behavior relationships,cognitive mechanisms of therapeutic change,and the efficacy of novel neurocognitive interventions may contribute to a better understanding of emotional and behavior disorders in children and the development of targeted interventions that result in greater treatment efficacy.

Sensory Modality Matters in Attentional Control

Imagine how many times your attention is distracted by the surrounding sounds or sights irrelevant to your work or study.To maintain concentrated,you have to control yourself intentionally,which is called"attentional control"or"cognitive control"in psychology.An interesting question arises:when we successfully direct our attention away from one visual distractor,can we be immune to another

Criss-Cross Attentional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking

Visual object tracking is a hot topic in recent years.In the meanwhile,Siamese networks have attracted extensive attention in this field because of its balanced precision and speed.However,most of the Siamese network methods can only distinguish foreground from the non-semantic background.The fine-tuning and retraining of fully-convolutional Siamese networks for object tracking(SiamFC)can achieve higher precision under interferences,but the tracking accuracy is still not ideal,especially in the environment with more target interferences,dim light,and shadows.In this paper,we propose crisscross attentional Siamese networks for object tracking(SiamCC).To solve the imbalance between foreground and non-semantic background,we use the feature enhancement module of criss-cross attention to greatly improve the accuracy of video object tracking in dim light and shadow environments.Experimental results show that the maximum running speed of SiamCC in the object tracking benchmark dataset is 90 frames/second.In terms of detection accuracy,the accuracy of shadow sequences is greatly improved,especially the accuracy score of sequence HUMAN8 is improved from 0.09 to 0.89 compared with the original SiamFC,and the success rate score is improved from 0.07 to 0.55.

Age Related Changes in Attentional Bias Triggered by Gaze Cues

We investigated if attentional bias directed to the right increased with age. We assessed the characteristics of the following types of eye-gaze by using the Posner cueing paradigm. Younger (n =16) and older (n = 20) adults participated in this study. First of all, a face which looked straight ahead was presented at the center of screen, followed by a gaze cue that looked left or right. Immediately after this informative cue, a target stimulus (“*”) appeared to the left or right of the face. The stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between the cue and the target was selected from 300, 700, and 1100 ms. Participants were required to judge whether the target appeared to the left or the right of the gaze cue as quickly and accurately as possible. Results showed that older adults indicate a larger positive gaze-cueing effect when the eye-gaze shifted rightward, whereas this effect was not observed for a leftward shift. Moreover, a negative gaze-cueing effect (inhibition of return) was observed when the SOA was longer only for the leftward eye-gaze shift of older adults. These modulations of the cueing effect did not appear in younger adults. These findings demonstrate that the rightward attentional bias in older adults is more robust than the leftward bias.

Improved Attentional Performance Following Citicoline Administration in Healthy Adult Women

Objectives: The present study assessed the potential cognitive-enhancing effects of citicoline, a dietary supplement, in healthy adult women. Specifically, it was hypothesized that citicoline supplementation would be associated with improved attention compared to placebo. Methods: The investigation was a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled three-arm study. Sixty healthy adult women ages 40 - 60 completed a clinical screening visit, including a medical exam. After study enrollment each subject was randomly assigned to one of three groups: a daily oral dose of 250 mg citicoline, 500 mg citicoline, or placebo for 28 days. Participants were evaluated with the Continuous Performance Test II (CPT-II), a measure sensitive to attentional function, during a baseline visit and 28 days after baseline. Results: All 60 participants were included in the analyses, which included an ANOVA with Tukey’s post-hoc tests and t-tests. After 28 days of supplementation, individuals in the 250 mg group made fewer omission (p = 0.04) and commission (p = 0.03) errors compared to those in the placebo group. Individuals in the 500 mg group made significantly fewer commission errors compared to those in the placebo group (p = 0.03) and trended toward making fewer omission errors (p = 0.07). Conclusion: After 28 days of daily citicoline supplementation, participants who were administered either the 250 mg or the 500 mg citicoline doses showed significantly better ability to produce correct responses on the CPT-II, likely due to improved cognitive inhibition. Our findings suggest that citicoline may improve attentional performance in middle-aged women and may ameliorate attentional deficits associated with central nervous system disorders.

Roles of cholinergic receptors during attentional modulation of cue detection

Basal forebrain corticopetal cholinergic neurons are known to be necessary for normal attentional process-ing. Alterations of cholinergic system functioning have been associated with several neuropsychiatric diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia, in which attentional dysfunction is thought to be a key contrib-uting factor. Loss of cortical cholinergic inputs impairs performance in attention-demanding tasks. Moreover, measures of acetylcholine with microdialysis and, more recently, of choline with enzyme-coated microelectrodes have begun to elucidate the precise cognitive demands that activate the cholinergic system on distinct time scales. However, the receptor actions following acetyl-choline release under attentionally-challenging condi-tions are only beginning to be understood. The present review is designed to summarize the evidence regarding the actions of acetylcholine at muscarinic and nicotinic receptors under cognitively challenging conditions in order to evaluate the functions mediated by these two different cholinergic receptor classes. Moreover, evi-dence that supports beneficial effects of muscarinic muscarinic-1 receptor agonists and selective nicotinic receptor subtype agonists for cognitive processing will be discussed. Finally, some challenges and limitations of targeting the cholinergic system for treating cognitive defcits along with future research directions will be mentioned. In conclusion, multiple aspects of cholinergic neurotransmission must be considered when attempting to restore function of this neuromodulatory system.

AB060.Peripheral attentional allocation during visual search in the presence of an artificial scotoma in younger and older adults

Background:Age related macular degeneration(AMD)is one of the main causes of vision loss in older adults,generating,in most cases,a central scotoma that reduces central visual acuity(Noble&Chaudhary,2010).People affected by AMD have to rely on peripheral visual information and would highly benefit from efficiently allocating their attention to the periphery.Indeed,attention can improve peripheral spatial resolution(Carrasco,Ling&Read,2004)and can be allocated to a certain expanse of space outside of the central visual span,known as the attentional span.Attentional span has been shown to be decreased in people with AMD with less attention allocated to the periphery and more to the central visual field(Cheong et al.,2008),however it remains unknown whether aging is also a contributing factor.Methods:Fourteen healthy younger(mean age=21.8 years,SD=1.5)and 8 older adults(mean age=69.6 years,SD=7.3)performed a pop-out and a serial version of a visual search task,in the presence of different sized gaze-contingent invisible and visible artificial central scotomata(no scotoma,3°diameter,5°and 7°).Participants were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether a target was present or not among distractors whose number varied(16,32 or 64 objects).We wished to determine whether the size of the scotoma,occluding different degrees of central vision,affected visual search differently for younger vs.older participants.Results:Both the younger and older participants showed higher reaction times(RTs)to find the target for the serial version(M=2,074 ms for younger adults,M=3,853 ms for older adults)compared to the pop-out version(M=866 ms,M=1,475 ms,P<0.001)and for more distractors(32 distractors compared to 16,and 64 compared to 32,P<0.01).Older adults showed longer RTs than younger adults for both versions of the task(P<0.01).We found a significant effect of scotoma size on older adults(3°scotoma M=3,276 ms;7°scotoma M=3,877 ms,P<0.05),however,accurate performance was higher with no scotoma(96%vs.92%,P<0.05)in the pop-out search task.This suggests that older participants privileged a fast decision at the expense of performance in those cases.For the younger adults,RTs were higher in the serial search task in the presence of a scotoma(M=2,074 ms)compared to the control condition(M=1,665 ms,P>0.05).Conclusions:These results suggest that older adults take longer to perform visual search compared to younger adults and tend to use peripheral visual less than younger adults;larger central scotomas disrupted their performance but not that of younger participants,who performed equally well with different central scotoma sizes.These findings suggest that aging is a contributing factor in the decrease of the peripheral attentional span.

Neurological Insights into Attentional Deficits in High Trait Anxiety: a Commentary on Hu et al.’s Paper in Cerebral Cortex (2023)

In a recent publication,Hu et al.(2023)have reported that individuals with high trait anxiety exhibit attentional deficits characterized by reduced inhibition of distractors and delayed attentional selection of targets,indicating impaired top-down attentional control.This commentary underscores their significant contributions to the cognitive theory of anxiety.Based on their findings,we propose a novel training approach called attentional inhibition training(AIT),aimed at improving top-down attentional control to alleviate symptoms of anxiety.Furthermore,we explore the potential application of non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS)for rapidly enhancing attentional control function.

Gender differences associated with orienting attentional networks in healthy subjects

Background Selective attention is considered one of the main components of cognitive functioning.A number of studies have demonstrated gender differences in cognition.This study aimed to investigate the gender differences in selective attention in healthy subjects.Methods The present experiment examined the gender differences associated with the efficiency of three attentional networks：alerting,orienting,and executive control attention in 73 healthy subjects （38 males）.All participants performed a modified version of the Attention Network Test （ANT）.Results Females had higher orienting scores than males （t=2.172,P 〈0.05）.Specifically,females were faster at covert orienting of attention to a spatially cued location.There were no gender differences between males and females in alerting （t=0.813,P 〉0.05） and executive control （t=0.945,P 〉0.05） attention networks.Conclusions There was a significant gender difference between males and females associated with the orienting network.Enhanced orienting attention in females may function to motivate females to direct their attention to a spatially cued location.

Modulation of Spike Count Correlations Between Macaque Primary Visual Cortex Neurons by Difficulty of Attentional Task

Studies have shown that spatial attention remarkably affects the trial-to-trial response variability shared between neurons.Difficulty in the attentional task adjusts how much concentration we maintain on what is currently important and what is filtered as irrelevant sensory information.However,how task difficulty mediates the interactions between neurons with separated receptive fields(RFs)that are attended to or attended away is still not clear.We examined spike count correlations between single-unit activities recorded simultaneously in the primary visual cortex(V1)while monkeys performed a spatial attention task with two levels of difficulty.Moreover,the RFs of the two neurons recorded were non-overlapping to allow us to study fluctuations in the correlated responses between competing visual inputs when the focus of attention was allocated to the RF of one neuron.While increasing difficulty in the spatial attention task,spike count correlations were either decreased to become negative between neuronal pairs,implying competition among them,with one neuron(or none)exhibiting attentional enhancement of firing rate,or increased to become positive,suggesting inter-neuronal cooperation,with one of the pair showing attentional suppression of spiking responses.Besides,the modulation of spike count correlations by task difficulty was independent of the attended locations.These findings provide evidence that task difficulty affects the functional interactions between different neuronal pools in V1 when selective attention resolves the spatial competition.

Dissociated deficits in attentional networks in social anxiety and depression

A critical cognitive symptom that is commonly involved in social anxiety and depression is attentional deficit. However, the functional relationship between attentional deficit and these two disorders remains poorly understood. Here, we behaviorally disentangled the three key attentional components(alerting, orienting, and executive control) using the established attentional network task(ANT) to investigate how social anxiety and depression are related to deficits in these attention components. We identified a double dissociation between the symptoms of social anxiety and depression and the attentional component deficits when processing non-emotional stimuli. While individuals vulnerable to social anxiety exhibited deficits in the orienting component, individuals vulnerable to depression were impaired in the executive control component. Our findings showed that social anxiety and depression were associated with deficits in different attentional components, which are not specific to emotional information.

Attentional orienting and response inhibition: insights from spatial-temporal neuroimaging

Attentional orienting and response inhibition have largely been studied separately. Each has yielded important findings, but controversy remains concerning whether they share any neurocognitive processes. These conflicting findings may originate from two issues： （1） at the cognitive level, attentional orienting and response inhibition are typically studied in isolation; and （2） at the technological level, a single neuroimaging method is typically used to study these processes. This article reviews recent achievements in both spatial and temporal neuroimaging, emphasizing the relationship between attentional orienting and response inhibition. We suggest that coordinated engagement, both top-down and bottom-up, serves as a common neural mechanism underlying these two cognitive processes. In addition, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may play a major role in their harmonious operation.

ATLRec:An Attentional Adversarial Transfer Learning Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Entity linking is a new technique in recommender systems to link users'interaction behaviors in different domains,for the purpose of improving the performance of the recommendation task.Linking-based cross-domain recom-mendation aims to alleviate the data sparse problem by utilizing the domain-sharable knowledge from auxiliary domains.However,existing methods fail to prevent domain-specific features to be transferred,resulting in suboptimal results.In this paper,we aim to address this issue by proposing an adversarial transfer learning based model ATLRec,which effec-tively captures domain-sharable features for cross-domain recommendation.In ATLRec,we leverage adversarial learning to generate representations of user-item interactions in both the source and the target domains,such that the discrimina-tor cannot identify which domain they belong to,for the purpose of obtaining domain-sharable features.Meanwhile each domain learns its domain-specific features by a private feature extractor.The recommendation of each domain considers both domain-specific and domain-sharable features.We further adopt an attention mechanism to learn item latent factors of both domains by utilizing the shared users with interaction history,so that the representations of all items can be learned sufficiently in a shared space,even when few or even no items are shared by different domains.By this method,we can represent all items from the source and the target domains in a shared space,for the purpose of better linking items in different domains and capturing cross-domain item-item relatedness to facilitate the learning of domain-sharable knowledge.The proposed model is evaluated on various real-world datasets and demonstrated to outperform several state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain recommendation methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.

引入上下文信息和Attention Gate的GUS-YOLO遥感目标检测算法

目前基于通用YOLO系列的遥感目标检测算法存在并未充分利用图像的全局上下文信息,在特征融合金字塔部分并未充分考虑缩小融合特征之间的语义鸿沟、抑制冗余信息干扰的缺点。在结合YOLO算法优点的基础上提出GUS-YOLO算法,其拥有一个能够充分利用全局上下文信息的骨干网络Global Backbone。除此之外,该算法在融合特征金字塔自顶向下的结构中引入Attention Gate模块,可以突出必要的特征信息,抑制冗余信息。另外,为Attention Gate模块设计了最佳的网络结构,提出了网络的特征融合结构U-Net。最后,为克服ReLU函数可能导致模型梯度不再更新的问题,该算法将Attention Gate模块的激活函数升级为可学习的SMU激活函数,提高模型鲁棒性。在NWPU VHR-10遥感数据集上,该算法相较于YOLOV7算法取得宽松指标mAP^(0.50)1.64个百分点和严格指标mAP^(0.75)9.39个百分点的性能提升。相较于目前主流的七种检测算法,该算法取得较好的检测性能。