Putting robots through their paces, opening up the "black box" of AI, accelerating MRI scans and more: USC at NeurIPS 2022

USC research is advancing the state-of-the-art in machine learning at NeurIPS 2022

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

 

IMAGE: FROM MORE TRANSPARENT AI TO BETTER MRI TECHNOLOGY AND SAFER ROBOTS, USC RESEARCH IS ADVANCING THE STATE-OF-THE-ART IN MACHINE LEARNING AT NEURIPS 2022. view more 

CREDIT: ISTOCK

Opening up the "black box" of AI 

Sparse Interaction Additive Networks via Feature Interaction Detection and Sparse Selection 

James Enouen (University of Southern California); Yan Liu (University of Southern California) 

What is your paper about? The paper focuses on making AI systems more interpretable and trustworthy. Currently, we feed these algorithms a lot of data and hope that they learn the right thing. Unfortunately, they can pick up the wrong things (biases, correlations, etc.) and we might have no way of knowing. Therefore, this work is one step towards making these AI insights more interpretable and digestible to allow a human to check in with the algorithm.

Who could benefit from this research? People who want to understand “the algorithm” or “black box”; doctors who want to understand the AI systems making predictions on their patients; credit auditors; people with stakeholders who are required to explain their decisions. 

Putting robots to the test 

Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments 

Varun Bhatt (University of Southern California); Bryon Tjanaka (University of Southern California); Matthew Christopher Fontaine (University of Southern California); Stefanos Nikolaidis (University of Southern California) 

What is your paper about? In July 2022, a chess-playing robot grabbed and broke the finger of a seven-year-old boy since it mistook the finger to be a chess piece. It seems like the robot assumed the human opponent to always wait in between moves and was not tested in situations where the human made the moves quickly. This accident could have been avoided if such a scenario was found during testing. Accidents like these are why we wanted to create a method of efficiently finding corner cases involving robots or other intelligent agents. In this paper, we use machine learning to predict how our robot will behave in a given scenario and greatly speed up the process of finding failure scenarios. This allows us to find very complex scenarios relatively quickly that break complex agents. 

Who could benefit from this research? Manufacturers of robots, self-driving cars, etc. to better test the agents before deploying them in the real world. Better testing leads to safer robots, which also benefits the end-users.

Understanding the impact of fake news and rumors

Counterfactual Neural Temporal Point Process for Estimating Causal Influence of Misinformation on Social Media 

Yizhou Zhang (University of Southern California); Defu Cao (University of Southern California); Yan Liu (University of Southern California) 

What is your paper about? The research helps us better understand how fake news and rumors change people’s ideas. We apply our model to a real-world dataset of social media posts and engagements about COVID-19 vaccines. The experimental results indicate that our model recognized an identifiable causal effect of misinformation that hurts people’s subjective emotions toward vaccines.

Who could benefit from this research? Journalists can use our models to understand how fake news and rumors change people’s ideas and then find better ways to clarify the misleading content. 

Accelerating MRI scans

HUMUS-Net: Hybrid Unrolled Multi-scale Network Architecture for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction 

Zalan Fabian (University of Southern California); Berk Tinaz (University of Southern California); Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (University of Southern California) 

What is this paper about? In this work, the team proposes a deep learning algorithm that can reconstruct very high-quality MRI images from accelerated scans. MRI is one of the most popular and powerful medical imaging modalities. However, scans can take significantly longer than other diagnostic methods such as CT scans. Existing methods to accelerate MRI scans take fewer measurements of the body, which leads to degraded image quality. Modern data-driven AI techniques have been successfully deployed to reconstruct MR images from accelerated measurements, but their performance has plateaued in recent years. The team’s novel method combines the efficiency of traditional convolutional neural networks with the power of transformer-based architectures recently proposed for vision applications, establishing a new state-of-the-art in accelerated MRI reconstruction.

Who could benefit from this research? This method can aid radiologists and other medical doctors in two ways. First, it enables the reconstruction of very fine details on medical images that are potentially missed by other techniques, greatly improving the diagnostic value of such images. Second, as this method can recover high-quality images from accelerated measurements, the duration of MR scans can be greatly reduced. This may lead to more efficient utilization of the scanners and can bring down their high cost. Overall, the goal is to make MRI more reliable and efficient for everyone.

Training autonomous cars in changing environments

Near-Optimal Goal-Oriented Reinforcement Learning in Non-Stationary Environments 

Liyu Chen (University of Southern California); Haipeng Luo (University of Southern California) 

What is your paper about? This paper is about how an agent can learn to behave optimally in a changing environment. Recently Waymo launched an autonomous ride service to Phoenix airport. Training an autonomous driving car can be framed as a goal-oriented reinforcement learning problem, which falls into the framework studied in this paper. Moreover, this paper studied a non-stationary changing environment, which is suitable for capturing changing traffic conditions. 

Learning about the world through language and vision

CLiMB: A Continual Learning Benchmark for Vision-and-Language Tasks 

Tejas Srinivasan (University of Southern California), Ting-Yun Chang (University of Southern California), Leticia Leonor Pinto Alva (University of Southern California), Georgios Chochlakis (University of Southern California, ISI), Mohammad Rostami (University of Southern California), Jesse Thomason (University of Southern California)

What is your paper about? We establish a benchmark to study how models that consider both language and vision can learn tasks in sequence, such as answering open-ended questions about pictures versus answering yes/no questions about pairs of pictures. This benchmark also enables studying what happens when language or vision disappears, such as tasks like classifying whether movie reviews are positive or negative or identifying the salient object in an image. 

All papers

Navigating Memory Construction by Global Pseudo-Task Simulation for Continual Learning 

Yejia Liu (University of California, Riverside); Wang Zhu (University of Southern California); Shaolei Ren (University of California, Riverside)

Near-Optimal No-Regret Learning Dynamics for General Convex Games 

Gabriele Farina (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University); Ioannis Anagnostides (Carnegie Mellon University); Haipeng Luo (University of Southern California); Chung-Wei Lee (University of Southern California); Christian Kroer (Columbia University); Tuomas Sandholm (Carnegie Mellon University) 

Near-Optimal Regret for Adversarial MDP with Delayed Bandit Feedback 

Tiancheng Jin (University of Southern California); Tal Lancewicki (Tel Aviv University); Haipeng Luo (University of Southern California); Yishay Mansour (School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University); Aviv Rosenberg (Amazon) 

Uncoupled Learning Dynamics with O(\log T) Swap Regret in Multiplayer Games 

Ioannis Anagnostides (Carnegie Mellon University); Gabriele Farina (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University); Christian Kroer (Columbia University); Chung-Wei Lee (University of Southern California); Haipeng Luo (University of Southern California); Tuomas Sandholm (Carnegie Mellon University) 

HUMUS-Net: Hybrid Unrolled Multi-scale Network Architecture for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction 

Zalan Fabian (University of Southern California); Berk Tinaz (University of Southern California); Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (University of Southern California) 

Outlier-Robust Sparse Estimation via Non-Convex Optimization 

Yu Cheng (Brown University); Ilias Diakonikolas (University of Wisconsin, Madison); Rong Ge (Duke University); Shivam Gupta (University of Texas, Austin); Daniel Kane (University of California-San Diego); Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (University of Southern California) 

Self-Aware Personalized Federated Learning 

Huili Chen (University of California, San Diego); Jie Ding (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis); Eric William Tramel (Amazon); Shuang Wu (Amazon); Anit Kumar Sahu (Amazon Alexa AI); Salman Avestimehr (University of Southern California); Tao Zhang 

NS3: Neuro-symbolic Semantic Code Search 

Shushan Arakelyan (University of Southern California); Anna Hakhverdyan (National Polytechnic University of Armenia); Miltiadis Allamanis (Google); Luis Antonio Garcia (USC ISI); Christophe Hauser (USC/ISI); Xiang Ren (University of Southern California) 

Training Uncertainty-Aware Classifiers with Conformalized Deep Learning 

Bat-Sheva Einbinder (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology); Yaniv Romano (Technion, Technion); Matteo Sesia (University of Southern California); Yanfei Zhou (University of Southern California) 

Conformal Frequency Estimation with Sketched Data 

Matteo Sesia (University of Southern California); Stefano Favaro (University of Torino) 

Why do We Need Large Batchsizes in Contrastive Learning? A Gradient-Bias Perspective 

Changyou Chen (State University of New York, Buffalo); Jianyi Zhang (Duke University); Yi Xu (Amazon); Liqun Chen (Duke University); Jiali Duan (University of Southern California); Yiran Chen (Duke University); Son Dinh Tran (University of Maryland, College Park); Belinda Zeng (Amazon); Trishul Chilimbi (Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin – Madison) 

Off-Policy Evaluation with Policy-Dependent Optimization Response 

Wenshuo Guo (University of California Berkeley); Michael Jordan (University of California, Berkeley); Angela Zhou (University of Southern California) 

ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks 

Shariq Iqbal (DeepMind); Robby Costales (University of Southern California); Fei Sha (University of Southern California) 

Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Maps 

Yue Hu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University); Shaoheng Fang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University); Zixing Lei (Shanghai Jiaotong University); Yiqi Zhong (University of Southern California); Siheng Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) 

Empirical Gateaux Derivatives for Causal Inference 

Michael Jordan (University of California, Berkeley); Yixin Wang (University of California Berkeley); Angela Zhou (University of Southern California) 

Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis: A Reality Check 

Hang Gao (University of California Berkeley); Ruilong Li (University of Southern California); Shubham Tulsiani (Carnegie Mellon University); Bryan Russell (Adobe Research); Angjoo Kanazawa (University of California, Berkeley) 

Unsupervised Cross-Task Generalization via Retrieval Augmentation

Bill Yuchen Lin (University of Southern California); Kangmin Tan (University of Southern California); Chris Scott Miller (Dartmouth College); Beiwen Tian (Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University); Xiang Ren (University of Southern California)

Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader for Adversarial Markov Decision Processes with Bandit Feedback

Yan Dai (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University); Haipeng Luo (University of Southern California); Liyu Chen (University of Southern California)

Why housing alone is not enough for some homeless moms

Study finds women struggling with substance use need more help

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Giving some homeless mothers with young children a place to live may do little to help them if it is not combined with support services, a first-of-its-kind study showed.

Researchers found that young moms with a substance use disorder showed less improvement if they were given only housing when compared with similar moms who were given housing and supportive services, or even mothers who were only given a list of community services available to them.

That’s an important finding for organizations and policymakers who have advocated a “housing first” policy that aims to get the homeless into permanent housing as quickly as possible, said Natasha Slesnick, lead author of the study and professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Housing is still very important, but it is not enough,” Slesnick said.

“These young homeless moms need help accessing services and meeting their daily life needs or they may not be able to overcome their substance use.”

Findings were published online recently in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment.

Families with children are one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population, now accounting for nearly one-third of those experiencing homelessness.

The study is the first in this area to use what is considered the “gold standard” in research: a randomized controlled trial.

Young homeless moms (age 18-24) with one or more children under the age of 6 who had a substance use disorder were randomly assigned to receive one of three treatments: the usual support services given in the community, housing only, or housing with support services.

The researchers recruited 240 women in Columbus from shelters, a drop-in center and other agencies serving homeless youth.

The one-third of participants who received housing and supportive services were given a voucher for independent housing and six months of supportive services, including strengths-based outreach and advocacy, HIV prevention, and substance use and mental health counseling.

Another third were only provided housing, while the remaining third were given “services as usual” – they received a referral sheet of all services available to them in the community, but where not offered housing or support services through the study.

At the beginning of the study – and every 3 months for one year– the participants completed measures of their substance use (including alcohol and illicit drugs) and their levels of self-efficacy – how much they felt they were in control of what happens in their life.

Overall, those in the housing and supportive services group fared the best and were most likely of all three groups to have low substance use and increasing self-efficacy by the end of the study, Slesnick said.

“It was encouraging that housing plus supportive services reduced substance use and helped them develop confidence in their ability to solve problems and address the daily hassles of life,” she said.

Women in the other two groups did show some improvements in lowering substance use and improving self-efficacy.  But more mothers receiving only housing increased their substance use over time compared to those receiving services-as-usual or housing and support services.

“For those young mothers just given housing, they still have a lot of stress in their lives with a child under 6.  And that stress is often going to lead them to cope how they typically do, which is often with substance use,” Slesnick said.

One reason that this study is so important is that mothers dealing with substance use disorders and homelessness are often difficult to help.  In an earlier study that included focus groups with homeless mothers, Slesnick and her colleagues found that many of these women were reluctant to seek help, especially in shelters, because they feared their children would be taken away from them.

That’s a key reason why a “housing first” policy that keeps mothers with their children is important, but only if it provides help to deal with substance abuse and mental health issues and gives them other assistance to get their lives on track, Slesnick said.

“The conclusion is that we just can’t put these families into housing without supports. We need to provide services that will give them better ways to cope and offer a sense of self-efficacy to manage the daily stress of life without resorting to substance use.”

Co-authors on the study came from Ohio State, Kent State University, Florida State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment

DOI

10.1016/j.jsat.2022.108917 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Housing and supportive services for substance use and self-efficacy among young mothers experiencing homelessness: A randomized controlled trial

Dr. Fauci reflects on the perpetual challenge of infectious diseases

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NIH/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES

 

IMAGE: DR. ANTHONY FAUCI IN HIS OFFICE, 1984. view more 

CREDIT: NIAID

Once considered a potentially static field of medicine, the discipline of studying infectious diseases has proven to be dynamic as emerging and reemerging infectious diseases present continuous challenges, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., writes in a perspective in The New England Journal of Medicine. In the piece, Dr. Fauci, who since 1984 has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, reflects on his career responding to infectious disease threats. Dr. Fauci will step down from his positions as NIAID director, chief of NIAID’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden in December 2022.

In the perspective, Dr. Fauci notes that the emergence of HIV/AIDS in 1981 led to a sharp increase in interest in infectious diseases among people entering the field of medicine. Since then, infectious disease specialists have faced numerous medical challenges, including the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, Ebola, Zika, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and COVID-19, he writes. 

Although COVID-19 was “the loudest wake-up call in more than a century to our vulnerability to outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases,” Dr. Fauci notes that one success of the response was the rapid development, testing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines thanks to years of research and investment in new and highly adaptable vaccine platforms and structural biology tools to design vaccine immunogens. These technological advances, among others, will greatly benefit the field of infectious diseases, he writes. He concludes by stressing the importance of improving capabilities to respond to established infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis while also responding to emerging threats.

ARTICLE: 
AS Fauci. It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over…but It’s Never Over—Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases. The New England Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2213814 (2022).

WHO: 
Dr. Fauci is available for interviews.

CONTACT:
To schedule interviews, please contact the NIAID News & Science Writing Branch, (301) 402-1663, niaidnews@niaid.nih.gov.

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NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website.  

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit https://www.nih.gov/. 

NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health
 

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JOURNAL

New England Journal of Medicine

DOI

10.1056/NEJMp2213814 

ARTICLE TITLE

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over…but It’s Never Over—Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases

Meta-analysis informed the updated WHO guidelines for treatment of uncomplicated malaria in the first trimester of pregnancy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INFECTIOUS DISEASES DATA OBSERVATORY

A new WWARN meta-analysis commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) which informed a change to its treatment guidelines* has been published in The Lancet. The study provides compelling evidence that artemether-lumefantrine should now replace quinine as the treatment of choice in the first trimester. Although there is limited data on specific artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) other than artemether-lumefantrine, the other ACTs (including artesunate-amodiaquine, artesunate-mefloquine and dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine but not artesunate–sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine) may be considered for use where artemether-lumefantrine is not available, given the demonstrated poorer outcomes of quinine treatment, along with the challenges of adherence to a seven-day course of treatment. 

 ACTs are already recommended for treatment in second and third trimesters. This study, the largest of its kind, was a collaborative effort between over 20 research groups with data from over 34,000 pregnancies from 12 cohort studies in ten countries collected over more than 20 years.

Malaria in pregnancy has devastating consequences for both mother and fetus, requiring prompt and effective treatment. The risk of infection is highest in the first trimester when many pregnancies are yet to be protected by chemoprevention with intermittent preventive treatment (IPTp) which begins in the second trimester. Up until now, ACTs were recommended by the WHO as first-line treatment in all patient groups, except in first-trimester women, for whom quinine with clindamycin has been recommended due to concerns about the potential embryotoxicity of artemisinins.

The meta-analysis results suggest that first-trimester treatment with artemisinin-based treatment is as safe and possibly more effective than non-artemisinin-based treatments, including quinine-based regimens. Importantly, artemether-lumefantrine, the ACT with the most safety data, was associated with 42% fewer adverse pregnancy outcomes (pregnancy loss or major congenital malformations) than oral quinine in the first trimester.

Dr Stephanie Dellicour, Principal Research Associate at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said: “The results of this meta-analysis are very reassuring as studies have shown that many women are already being exposed to first-line ACT treatment in early pregnancy in malaria-endemic countries. This is partly due to a lack of awareness of pregnancy status by the patients or healthcare providers at the time of treatment and the fact that quinine and clindamycin are largely unavailable in health facilities in eastern and southern Africa.“

Dr Makoto Saito, Assistant Professor at The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo and part of the WorldWide Antimalarial Research Network, said: “At WWARN, we have previously shown that ACTs have a superior efficacy and much better tolerability and lower transmission risk after treatment than quinine. This new study provides an update on a previous study, confirming the evidence on safety in the first trimester using all the currently available clinical data.

“This study provides strong evidence to policy makers that ACTs should replace quinine-based regimens as the preferred treatment for uncomplicated falciparum malaria for everybody, including pregnant women in their first trimester.”

All participating research groups kindly agreed to share their individual patient data (IPD) of 34,178 pregnancies with WWARN. The data included 737 pregnancies with confirmed first-trimester exposure to artemisinin-based treatment and 1,076 with confirmed exposure to other antimalarials. It has taken over 20 years to collect these data, illustrating the difficulty of obtaining quality data on the safety of antimalarials in pregnancy.

Dr Dellicour added: “Going forward, innovative strategies are needed to fast-track robust evidence generation to support informed decisions on treatment in pregnant women by policy makers, healthcare providers and patients and ensure that this high-risk group has access to the best antimalarial treatment in a timely manner.”

This research was funded by the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), the World Health Organization, and the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Read the full paper, Pregnancy outcomes after first-trimester treatment with artemisinin derivatives versus non-artemisinin antimalarials: A systematic review and individual patient data meta-analysis, here.

Notes

* The WHO has updated their guidelines on the treatment of uncomplicated malaria in the first trimester (MagicApp link see section 5.2.1.4.1 Pregnant and lactating women):

About WWARN

Since 2009, the WorldWide Antimalarial Research Network (WWARN) has generated innovative tools and reliable evidence to inform the malaria community on the factors affecting the efficacy of antimalarial medicines. In the field of poverty-related infectious diseases, data are scarce and scattered across institutions around the world. WWARN collates and standardises anonymised individual patient data (IPD) from many trials and studies conducted across endemic regions so that they can then be harmonised and analysed as a single dataset, increasing the statistical power needed to answer key questions in malaria research.

Part of the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO), WWARN’s repository holds over 200k IPD and shares the resulting evidence widely to inform both policymakers and future researchers globally to continually advance knowledge and build capacity for evidence-based practice. Find out more at info@wwarn.org.

 

About LSTM

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) is a higher education institution with degree awarding powers and a registered charity in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Established in 1898, it was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and teaching tropical medicine. LSTM is a leading global research institute with well-established African networks and leads numerous international consortia and product development partnerships aimed at reducing or eliminating the impact of diseases upon the world's poorest people.

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JOURNAL

The Lancet

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01881-5 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Systematic review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Pregnancy outcomes after first-trimester treatment with artemisinin derivatives versus non-artemisinin antimalarials: a systematic review and individual patient data meta-analysis

The Green Mediterranean diet reduces twice as much visceral fat as the Mediterranean diet and 10% more than a healthy diet

Reducing visceral fat is the true goal of weight loss

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, November 28, 2022 – The green Mediterranean diet (MED) significantly reduces visceral adipose tissue, a type of fat around internal organs that is much more dangerous than the extra "tire" around your waist. The green Mediterranean diet was pitted against the Mediterranean diet and a healthy diet in a large-scale clinical interventional trial- the DIRECT PLUS. Subsequent analysis found that the green Med diet reduced visceral fat by 14%, the Med diet by 7% and the healthy diet by 4.5%. The study was published in BMC Medicine.

Reducing visceral fat is considered the true goal of weight loss as it is a more important indicator than a person's weight or the circumference of their waist. Visceral fat aggregates over time between organs and produces hormones and poisons linked to heart disease, diabetes, dementia and premature death.

The research was led by Prof. Iris Shai of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, an adjunct Professor from the Harvard School of Public Health, and an Honorary Professor, University of Leipzig, Germany, together with her doctoral student Dr. Hila Zelicha and Italian, German, and American colleagues.

The DIRECT-PLUS trial research team was the first to introduce the concept of the green-Mediterranean diet. This modified MED diet is further enriched with dietary polyphenols and lower in red/processed meat than the traditional healthy MED diet. On top of a daily intake of walnuts (28 grams), the participants consumed 3-4 cups of green tea/day and 100 grams (frozen cubes) of duckweed green shake/day. The aquatic green plant duckweed is high in bioavailable protein, iron, B12, vitamins, minerals, and polyphenols and substituted meat intake.

The team has shown in previous studies that the green MED diet has a variety of salutary effects ranging from the microbiome to age-related degenerative diseases.

Two hundred and ninety four participants took part in the 18-month long trial.

"A healthy lifestyle is a strong basis for any weight loss program. We learned from the results of our experiment that the quality of food is no less important than the number of calories consumed and the goal today is to understand the mechanisms of various nutrients, for example, positive ones such as the polyphenols, and negative ones such as empty carbohydrates and processed red meat, on the pace of fat cell differentiation and their aggregation in the viscera," says Prof. Shai.

"A 14% reduction in visceral fat is a dramatic achievement for making simple changes to your diet and lifestyle. Weight loss is an important goal only if it is accompanied by impressive results in reducing adipose tissue," notes Dr. Hila Zelicha.

This work was funded by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project number 209933838- SFB 1052; the Rosetrees trust (grant A2623); Israel Ministry of Health grant 87472511; Israel Ministry of Science and Technology grant 3-13604; and the California Walnuts Commission.

None of the funding providers was involved in any stage of the design, conduct, or analysis of the study and they had no access to the study results before publication.

The effect of high‑polyphenol Mediterranean diet on visceral adiposity: the DIRECT PLUS randomized controlled trial

Hila Zelicha1, Nora Kloting2, Alon Kaplan1, Anat Yaskolka Meir1, Ehud Rinott1, Gal Tsaban1, Yoash Chassidim3, Matthias Bluher4, Uta Ceglarek2, Berend Isermann2, Michael Stumvoll2, Rita Nana Quayson2, Martin von Bergen2, Beatrice Engelmann2, Ulrike E. Rolle‑Kampczyk2, Sven‑Bastiaan Haange2, Kieran M. Tuohy5, Camilla Diotallevi5, Ilan Shelef6, Frank B. Hu7,8,9, Meir J. Stampfer7,8,9 and Iris Shai1,9*

1. Faculty of Health Sciences, The Health & Nutrition Innovative International

Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105 Be’er

Sheva, Israel.

2. Department of Medicine, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

3. Department of Engineering, Sapir Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel.

4. Helmholtz Institute for Metabolic, Obesity and Vascular Research (HI-MAG)

of the Helmholtz Zentrum München at the University of Leipzig and University

Hospital Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

5. Department of Food Quality and Nutrition, Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele all’Adige, Trentino, Italy.

6. Soroka University Medical Center, Be’er Sheva, Israel.

7. Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston,

MA, USA.

8. Harvard Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.

9. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.

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JOURNAL

BMC Medicine

DOI

10.1186/s12916-022-02525-8 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The effect of high-polyphenol Mediterranean diet on visceral adiposity: the DIRECT PLUS randomized controlled trial.

Geisinger to study genomics and opioid use disorder

Team awarded $973,000 from National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse

Grant and Award Announcement

GEISINGER HEALTH SYSTEM

DANVILLE, Pa. – Geisinger has been awarded $973,000 from the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to study the association between genomics and opioid use disorder (OUD).

Drug overdose continues to be a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States, and approximately 2.7 million people have an OUD, according to NIDA. Evidence suggests that substance use disorders can be hereditary, although the specific genes that contribute to OUD risk are not known.

The project, led by Vanessa Troiani, Ph.D., will develop phenotypes, or profiles of observable characteristics, using prescription data, clinical diagnoses and other features that can be extracted from health system data. These profiles will be analyzed to identify genes that are associated with risk for OUD. The study will use data from two major biobanks, Geisinger’s MyCode Community Health Initiative and Vanderbilt University’s BioVU.

“To date, electronic health record data has not been widely used for studying the genetics of substance use disorders or even psychiatric disorders, more generally,” Dr. Troiani said. “Data from existing health system records with large biobanks offer a powerful opportunity to improve our understanding of the genetic factors that may increase risk for developing opioid addiction.”

This project is part of the Integrative Omics Center for Accelerating Neurobiological Understanding of Opioid Addiction (ICAN), a multi-site opioid research network. Findings from this study will be combined with those of other ICAN projects, including studies on mouse models of OUD and genetic expression studies from the brains of individuals who have died from opioid overdose, to identify novel gene networks that will inform future research into the neurobiology of OUD.

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About Geisinger
Geisinger is committed to making better health easier for the more than 1 million people it serves. Founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger, the system now includes 10 hospital campuses, a health plan with more than half a million members, a Research Institute and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. With nearly 24,000 employees and more than 1,700 employed physicians, Geisinger boosts its hometown economies in Pennsylvania by billions of dollars annually. Learn more at www.geisinger.org, or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
 

Scale of impact of maternal Zika virus infection on offspring in early life

Approximately one third of children born to mothers infected with Zika virus whilst pregnant presented with abnormalities consistent with Congenital Zika Syndrome in the first years of life.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE

Approximately one third of children born to mothers infected with Zika virus during their pregnancy present with at least one abnormality consistent with Congenital Zika Syndrome in the first years of their life, according to new research. 

The findings — based on the pooled analysis of 13 studies investigating paediatric outcomes among over 1,500 pregnancies affected by Zika virus during the 2015–2017 epidemic in Brazil — improve our understanding of the risks associated with prenatal Zika virus infections, with important public health implications.

Following the emergence of a microcephaly epidemic in Brazil in 2015, the possibility of an association between increased transmission of Zika virus and potential birth defects emerged.

Although studies have investigated potential adverse pregnancy outcomes following infection, small sample sizes, high variability between estimates and reliance on routine surveillance data have limited our understanding of the true extent of this risk.

In this study, the team — comprised of researchers from 26 institutions in Brazil in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the University of California at Los Angeles — analysed data on the offspring of 1,548 pregnant women from 13 cohort studies in the Zika Brazilian Cohorts Consortium. These data comprise all four regions in Brazil affected by the epidemic between 2015 and 2017, with prenatal infection confirmed in the laboratory using genetic testing and potential adverse outcomes assessed at the individual level and harmonised across studies. 

Overall, the most frequently observed manifestations of Congenital Zika Syndrome among the children included functional neurological impairments, neuroimaging abnormalities, alterations in hearing and vision, and microcephaly.  The results provide evidence that the congenital abnormalities were more likely to present in isolation, with less than 0.1% of exposed offspring experiencing two abnormalities simultaneously.

Risk of offspring presenting with microcephaly — a neurological condition whereby the baby’s head is smaller than expected for their age and sex— was found to be approximately 2.6% at birth or when first evaluated, increasing to 4.0% across the early preschool years. This risk remained relatively consistent across study sites, with no apparent variation according to socioeconomic conditions.

The research is published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.

Lead author Professor Ricardo Arraes de Alencar Ximenes, from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil commented: “These results highlight the importance of having multi-disciplinary health teams available near the time of birth to evaluate children with prenatal exposure to Zika virus exposure and to refer them, as needed, to specialized follow-up care that can provide support for known disabilities and diagnosis of late manifestations.”

Co-author on the study and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at LSHTM, Dr Elizabeth Brickley,  also said: “These findings underscore the continued need to develop a safe and effective vaccine for preventing Zika virus infections during pregnancy.  While gaps in population level immunity to the virus persist, the threat of a Zika virus re-emergence remains a concern for public health.”

Looking forward, the researchers emphasize that additional studies with longer follow-up times will be needed. Potential avenues for investigation include assessing the risk of hospitalization and death for children with microcephaly as they age, and in those without microcephaly, examining risks of other complications, such as those linked to behavioural or neuropsychomotor development. 

 

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JOURNAL

The Lancet Regional Health - Americas

ARTICLE TITLE

Risk of adverse outcomes in offspring with RT-PCR confirmed prenatal Zika virus exposure: An individual participant data meta-analysis of 13 cohorts in the Zika Brazilian Cohorts Consortium

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Nov-2022

Cracking open a fossil bone reveals rapid juvenile growth in early tetrapods

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF ORGANISMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

 

IMAGE: A SKELETAL RECONSTRUCTION OF WHATCHEERIA DELTAE (CREDIT B. OTOO). THIS STUDY MADE THIN-SECTIONS OF WHATCHEERIA THIGH BONES (FEMORA) INCLUDING A JUVENILE FEMUR THAT REVEALED A TYPE OF BONE THAT IS ASSOCIATED WITH ELEVATED GROWTH RATES. IN HISTOLOGICAL SECTION AND UNDER POLARIZED LIGHT, THIS DISORGANIZED TISSUE IN JUVENILE WHATCHEERIA FEMORA SUGGEST THAT THIS ANIMAL GREW QUICKLY EARLY IN ITS LIFETIME. view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: B. OTOO

The rise of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) is one of the iconic evolutionary transitions preserved in the fossil record. These animals, which lived about 385 to 320 million years ago during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods of Earth’s history, set the stage for the evolution and diversification of all other terrestrial vertebrates as we know them today, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals like humans.

It was long thought that these early animals grew very slowly throughout their lifetime, gradually getting bigger and bigger, similar to a modern salamander. However, in a new study in Communications Biology researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) at Harvard University, the Committee on Evolutionary Biology (CEB) at the University of Chicago, and the Field Museum of Natural History cracked open the fossil femora (thigh) bone of a range of growth stages in the early tetrapod, Whatcheeria deltae, and found evidence that the animal grew quickly into adulthood, calling into question conventional wisdom on tetrapod growth.

Lead author Megan R. Whitney, former postdoctoral researcher in OEB, and senior author Professor Stephanie E. Pierce (OEB), Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, have been studying early tetrapods to better understand how they grew, which helps to provide more clarity into the life histories of the animals. “Examining these fossils is like reading a storybook and we are trying to read as many chapters as possible by looking at how juveniles grow building up to adulthood,” said Whitney, “because of where Whatcheeria sits in the early tetrapod family tree we wanted to target this animal and look at its storybook at different stages of life.”

The rarity of early tetrapod samples in the fossil record is a challenge for scientists who are often working from incomplete fossil bodies or species groups. Whatcheeria, however, is a unique exception because it is represented by hundreds of bones from several individuals of different sizes that were all preserved in one locality in Iowa. “Whatcheeria is one of the stars of our paleontology collection,” said co-author Dr. Ken Angielczyk, MacArthur Curator of Paleomammology at the Field Museum. “It is one of the best represented early tetrapods in the fossil record, and the abundance of material lets us ask questions about its biology that are impossible for nearly all of its contemporaries.”

Whatcheeria resembled an over-sized salamander with robust legs and arms that supported its weight on land, yet had other anatomical features that suggest it was still bound to water. Whatcheeria lived on the margins of a lowland terrestrial lake at the interface of water and land between about 331 and 326 million years ago, suggesting these animals spent time in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats.

Co-author Benjamin K.A. Otoo (CEB) and Angielczyk provided nine representative samples spanning the known size classes of Whatcheeria from juvenile to adult. Whitney and Pierce then made wafer thin slices of the fossil to examine the microscopic structure of the bone tissues in the thigh bones (femora) by placing the wafers under a polarized light microscope. When they cracked open and examined the juvenile bone sample they found evidence of fibrolamellar bone, which is primary bone tissue associated with fast growth.

“I have a very distinct memory of jumping on slack with Stephanie [Pierce] and saying this breaks all of the rules that we thought of for how growth is evolving in these early tetrapods,” said Whitney.

Pierce and Whitney recalled one of their earlier studies on the tetrapod Greererpeton, a slightly younger Carboniferous early tetrapod, which showed a very different growth strategy of moderate growth with a period of no growth for a long period of time. They hypothesized this could be due to migration of the animal between bodies of water.

“We saw this in multiple individuals of Greererpeton, so when we looked at the bones of Whatcheeria and found something completely different again, we knew these animals and their life histories must be affected by their interactions with their environment and their places in their ancient ecosystems,” said Pierce.

Whatcheeria is one of the largest animals recovered from the fossil site in Iowa. The large size combined with the evidence of fibrolamellar bone led researchers to hypothesize that Whatcheeria may have grown fast to quickly reach the large size necessary to be a top predator in its environment.

“If you’re going to be a top predator, a very large animal, it can be a competitive advantage to get big quickly as it makes it easier to hunt other animals, and harder for other predators to hunt you,” said Pierce. “It can also be a beneficial survival strategy when living in unpredictable environments, such as the lake system Whatcheeria inhabited, which went through seasonal dying periods.”

The assumption has always been that only amniotes (reptiles, birds and mammals) deposited fibrolamellar bone consistent with fast growth and that slow growth was ancestral for tetrapods. But as Whitney and Pierce discovered, this bone tissue type evolved close to the origin of the first tetrapods, much earlier than anybody ever expected.

“Whatcheeria’s elevated growth rates as a juvenile shows us that maybe slow and steady growth throughout a lifetime is not actually the ancestral condition for all tetrapods,” said Whitney, “and this finding contributes to the diversity of patterns we see as we continue to sample more and more early tetrapods. We’re seeing they are not all slow, sluggish animals, but are incredibly diverse in their own right.”

Whitney, currently Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago, and Pierce plan to continue investigating the bone tissue microstructure of early tetrapods to reveal their life histories and how they relate to their ecological niche, specifically targeting animals found earlier in the fossil record than Whatcheeria. “We recently gathered bone histology data on a relative of Whatcheeria using advanced synchrotron technology,” said Pierce, “and our exciting preliminary results point to yet another unexpected growth strategy.”

The growth of Whatcheeria at four different stages of life were studied by examining the kind of bone present at specimen representatives from each stage. Bone organization can be used as a proxy for growth rate and this study reports disorganized, fibrolamellar bone in juvenile specimens and more organized bone in adult specimens. This pattern of fast rapid growth early in the life of Whatcheeria, followed by slow and reduced growth in the adults is a new finding in early tetrapods. This finding suggests that rather than growing slow-and-steady throughout their lives, at least some early tetrapods were growing rapidly to reach their adult size.

CREDIT

Skeletal reconstruction by B. Otoo.

Under polarized light, an image of the fibrolamellar bone described in the youngest specimens sampled in this study. The vascular spaces (porous, purple spaces) and bone tissue (pink) are haphazardly organized suggesting rapid overall growth of the animal.

 

Under polarized light, an image of the fibrolamellar bone at the outer surface of the femur of the youngest specimens sampled in this study. The vascular spaces (porous, purple spaces) and bone tissue (pink) are haphazardly organized suggesting rapid overall growth of the animal.

CREDIT

Credit: M. Whitney

JOURNAL

Communications Biology

ARTICLE TITLE

Fossil bone histology reveals ancient origins for rapid juvenile growth in tetrapods