Category: Research Publications

In a survey of adults with cystic fibrosis attending a large, academic medical center, 32% scored high enough on a standardized screening tool to suggest they probably have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This rate is much higher than the rate in the general population and 2-3 times higher than in other populations...

We developed a Motor Assisted Commutator to Harness Electronics in Tethered Experiments (MACHETE), an open-source device that helps behavioral neuroscientists retain naturalistic behavior during tethered, freely moving experiments in mice. We were particularly interested in freely-moving experiments relevant to studying arousal disorders, including the open field test, splash test, and...

Anxiety disorders arise when the brain’s response to threats become too intense or persists when not needed, leading to maladaptive behaviors and excessive arousal. We found that specialized arousal neurons in a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis activate when mice escape an aversive stimulus, offering...

This paper presents SimNorth, an unsupervised deep learning method for organizing non-standard fetal ultrasound images. By learning feature embeddings using a novel contrastive loss and clustering similar anatomical structures, SimNorth outperforms existing methods like Autoencoders, MoCo, and SimCLR in identifying meaningful image groups.

Xylazine, an adulterant increasingly found in the illicit opioid drug supply, enhances the interoceptive (subjective) effects of lower doses of fentanyl in rats. These results in rats align with reports from people who use drugs and may be used to better understand the mechanism of the effects of xylazine on...

Our newest paper suggests frontoparietal theta synchrony as a promising therapeutic target for attention disorders. We show that top-down theta connectivity stabilizes attentional performance in a freely moving behavioral task under high cognitive demand.

Our newest paper suggests frontoparietal theta synchrony as a promising therapeutic target for attention disorders. We show that top-down theta connectivity stabilizes attentional performance in a freely moving behavioral task under high cognitive demand.

This new study, using data from over 2,500 participants in the AURORA, sheds light on how adverse posttraumatic neuropsychiatric sequelae (APNS) develop and change during the first two months following trauma through latent transition modeling. In this study, APNS symptoms include pain, depressive symptoms, sleep discontinuity, nightmares, somatic symptoms, concentration/thinking/fatigue,...

The North Carolina Healthy Active Living (NC HeAL) program is an innovative clinical service offered to all Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) clients in this state. It offers personalized health and wellness coaching to help clients achieve meaningful health improvements. This paper provides a detailed description of the program’s development, the...

We present a physics-informed deep learning framework that models tau pathology propagation in Alzheimer’s disease as an optimal mass transport (OMT) problem constrained by brain geometry, enabling interpretable and accurate prediction of future PET-based pathology distribution. By learning population-level flow dynamics and forecasting subject-specific spreading trajectories, our approach offers a...