ABSTRACT
Objective: Unstructured group support (UGS) has been shown to improve the prognosis of patients with bipolar disorder (BP). However, objective evidence is needed to support implementation of UGS intervention. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of UGS intervention and the associated alterations in the objective indexes, mainly global function connectivity density (gFCD), in BP patients. Methods: Remitted BP patients were enrolled and randomly assigned into a UGS group (received UGS intervention for 26 weekly UGS sessions, and a sham group (received sham intervention). The effects of UGS on adherence to the prescribed medications, social cognition, and quality of life were examined and compared between these 2 groups. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed to determine the functional index and gFCD values, as an objective measurement of functional alterations in the brain. Results: The compliance rate was significantly greater in the UGS group than in the sham group at the 2-year follow-up, after 26 weekly intervention sessions. The proportion of patients with increased levels of compliance to pharmacological treatment, improved social cognition, and improved quality of life were significantly higher in the UGS group than in the sham group. Furthermore, consistent with these subjective measurements, the fMRI study revealed that gFCD values significantly increased in the regions of the brain that are related to social cognition, in patients with UGS intervention. Conclusion: UGS improves the compliance to pharmacological treatment, quality of life, and social cognition of remitted BP patients. Notably, these findings offer the first objective evidence that UGS enhances gFCD in BP patients. Thus, UGS implementation can help improve the psychiatric care for BP patients.
ABSTRACT
Positron emission tomography (PET) has a wide range of applications in the treatment and prevention of major diseases owing to its high sensitivity and excellent resolution. However, there is still much room for optimization in the readout circuit and fast pulse sampling to further improve the performance of the PET scanner. In this work, a LIGHTENING® PET detector using a 13 × 13 lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) crystal array read out by a 6 × 6 silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) array was developed. A novel sampling method, referred to as the dual time interval (DTI) method, is therefore proposed to realize digital acquisition of fast scintillation pulse. A semi-cut light guide was designed, which greatly improves the resolution of the edge region of the crystal array. The obtained flood histogram shown that all the 13 × 13 crystal pixels can be clearly discriminated. The optimum operating conditions for the detector were obtained by comparing the flood histogram quality under different experimental conditions. An average energy resolution (FWHM) of 14.3% and coincidence timing resolution (FWHM) of 972 ps were measured. The experimental results demonstrated that the LIGHTENING® PET detector achieves extremely high resolution which is suitable for the development of a high performance time-of-flight PET scanner.
