Pretraumatic Stress Reactions in Soldiers Deployed to Afghanistan.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is a diagnosis related to the past. Pre-traumatic stress reactions, as measured by intrusive involuntary images of possible future stressful events and their associated avoidance and increased arousal, have been overlooked in the PTSD literature. Here we introduce a scale that measures pre-traumatic stress reactions providing a clear future-oriented parallel to the posttraumatic stress reactions described in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. We apply this pre-traumatic stress reactions checklist (PreCL) to Danish soldiers before, during, and after deployment to Afghanistan. The PreCL has good internal consistency and is highly correlated with a standard measure of PTSD symptoms. The PreCL as answered before the soldiers' deployment significantly predicted level of PTSD symptoms during and after their deployment, while controlling for baseline PTSD symptoms and combat exposure measured during and after deployment. The findings have implications for the conceptualization of PTSD, screening, and treatment.

Frontal eye field neurons assess visual stability across saccades.

The image on the retina may move because the eyes move, or because something in the visual scene moves. The brain is not fooled by this ambiguity. Even as we make saccades, we are able to detect whether visual objects remain stable or move. Here we test whether this ability to assess visual stability across saccades is present at the single-neuron level in the frontal eye field (FEF), an area that receives both visual input and information about imminent saccades. Our hypothesis was that neurons in the FEF report whether a visual stimulus remains stable or moves as a saccade is made. Monkeys made saccades in the presence of a visual stimulus outside of the receptive field. In some trials, the stimulus remained stable, but in other trials, it moved during the saccade. In every trial, the stimulus occupied the center of the receptive field after the saccade, thus evoking a reafferent visual response. We found that many FEF neurons signaled, in the strength and timing of their reafferent response, whether the stimulus had remained stable or moved. Reafferent responses were tuned for the amount of stimulus translation, and, in accordance with human psychophysics, tuning was better (more prevalent, stronger, and quicker) for stimuli that moved perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the saccade. Tuning was sometimes present as well for nonspatial transaccadic changes (in color, size, or both). Our results indicate that FEF neurons evaluate visual stability during saccades and may be general purpose detectors of transaccadic visual change.

Intracardiac acoustic radiation force impulse imaging: a novel imaging method for intraprocedural evaluation of radiofrequency ablation lesions.

BACKGROUND: Arrhythmia recurrence after cardiac radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for atrial fibrillation has been linked to conduction through discontinuous lesion lines. Intraprocedural visualization and corrective ablation of lesion line discontinuities could decrease postprocedure atrial fibrillation recurrence. Intracardiac acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) imaging is a new imaging technique that visualizes RFA lesions by mapping the relative elasticity contrast between compliant-unablated and stiff RFA-treated myocardium. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether intraprocedure ARFI images can identify RFA-treated myocardium in vivo. METHODS: In 8 canines, an electroanatomical mapping-guided intracardiac echo catheter was used to acquire 2-dimensional ARFI images along right atrial ablation lines before and after RFA. ARFI images were acquired during diastole with the myocardium positioned at the ARFI focus (1.5 cm) and parallel to the intracardiac echo transducer for maximal and uniform energy delivery to the tissue. Three reviewers categorized each ARFI image as depicting no lesion, noncontiguous lesion, or contiguous lesion. For comparison, 3 separate reviewers confirmed RFA lesion presence and contiguity on the basis of functional conduction block at the imaging plane location on electroanatomical activation maps. RESULTS: Ten percent of ARFI images were discarded because of motion artifacts. Reviewers of the ARFI images detected RFA-treated sites with high sensitivity (95.7%) and specificity (91.5%). Reviewer identification of contiguous lesions had 75.3% specificity and 47.1% sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS: Intracardiac ARFI imaging was successful in identifying endocardial RFA treatment when specific imaging conditions were maintained. Further advances in ARFI imaging technology would facilitate a wider range of imaging opportunities for clinical lesion evaluation.

Steady flow dynamics during granular impact.

We study experimentally and computationally the dynamics of granular flow during impacts where intruders strike a collection of disks from above. In the regime where granular force dynamics are much more rapid than the intruder motion, we find that the particle flow near the intruder is proportional to the instantaneous intruder speed; it is essentially constant when normalized by that speed. The granular flow is nearly divergence free and remains in balance with the intruder, despite the latter's rapid deceleration. Simulations indicate that this observation is insensitive to grain properties, which can be explained by the separation of time scales between intergrain force dynamics and intruder dynamics. Assuming there is a comparable separation of time scales, we expect that our results are applicable to a broad class of dynamic or transient granular flows. Our results suggest that descriptions of static-in-time granular flows might be extended or modified to describe these dynamic flows. Additionally, we find that accurate grain-grain interactions are not necessary to correctly capture the granular flow in this regime.