Category: Research Publications

The Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Schizophrenia (AMP®SCZ) is a large-scale study designed to identify biomarkers that predict and explain clinical outcomes in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis. Nearly 2,000 CHR and 640 community participants will be followed for two years, with biomarker assessments at baseline and two months....

In the canonical model of sensory processing, primary sensory cortex initiates a hierarchical transmission of information to higher-order cortices. Here, we identified alternative sensory pathways that bypass the primary auditory cortex and directly activate higher-order cortex within <10 ms, revealing parallel and distributed processing of fast sensory information across cortical...

The concepts set and setting have been thought to be crucial to outcomes from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for 50 years, but they have faced several methodological challenges. Here we highlight an underappreciated challenge: that they have been vaguely defined in a way that limits research advances and clinical guidance. After outlining...

Ovarian steroids, like estrogen and progesterone, affect brain activity, including energy use and serotonin signaling, especially during changes in the female reproductive cycle or menopause. Studies using brain imaging techniques suggest these hormones can influence brain metabolism and might have potential roles in brain protection and inflammation, but more research...

Via usual smartphone use following trauma exposure, this study identified language markers associated with patient-reported severity and change in severity for multiple symptoms. Using language markers as a proxy for the status of and changes in specific symptoms supports efficient remote health status monitoring and can provide clinicians with valuable...

Hyperarousal symptoms such as jumpiness and over-alertness are central features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and are partly explained by hyper-reactivity of the right amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional learning. In the current study, we found that people who showed right amygdala hyper-reactivity shortly after trauma were more...

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.