Robust microbial cell segmentation by optical-phase thresholding with minimal processing requirements.

High-throughput imaging with single-cell resolution has enabled remarkable discoveries in cell physiology and Systems Biology investigations. A common, and often the most challenging step in all such imaging implementations, is the ability to segment multiple images to regions that correspond to individual cells. Here, a robust segmentation strategy for microbial cells using Quantitative Phase Imaging is reported. The proposed method enables a greater than 99% yeast cell segmentation success rate, without any computationally-intensive, post-acquisition processing. We also detail how the method can be expanded to bacterial cell segmentation with 98% success rates with substantially reduced processing requirements in comparison to existing methods. We attribute this improved performance to the remarkably uniform background, elimination of cell-to-cell and intracellular optical artifacts, and enhanced signal-to-background ratio-all innate properties of imaging in the optical-phase domain. © 2017 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.

Transformational and transactional leadership skills for mental health teams.

Many treatments for persons with severe mental illness are provided by mental health teams. Team members work better when led by effective leaders. Research conducted by organizational psychologists, and validated on mental health teams, have identified a variety of skills that are useful for these leaders. Bass (1990, 1997) identified two sets of especially important skills related to transformational and transactional leadership. Leaders using transformational skills help team members to view their work from more elevated perspectives and develop innovative ways to deal with work-related problems. Skills related to transformational leadership promote inspiration, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration, participative decision making, and elective delegation. Mental health and rehabilitation teams must not only develop creative and innovative programs, they must maintain them over time as a series of leader-team member transactions. Transactional leadership skills include goal-setting, feedback, and reinforcement strategies which help team members maintain effective programs.

Management coursework in graduate behavioral health programs.

Many behavioral health professionals eventually assume managerial roles; therefore the extent to which graduate behavioral health programs adequately prepare them for these roles is of concern. To examine this issue, directors from graduate behavioral health training programs were surveyed about whether organizational behavior coursework was routinely provided to their students. Results indicated that while this coursework was provided in most social work and psychiatric nursing programs, only a minority of clinical psychology and psychiatry residency programs offered it. These findings suggest that psychiatrists and psychologists may need more preparation than their non-doctoral-level colleagues to assume administrative positions, and that health administration programs may do well to develop continuing education programs geared specifically toward these groups.

Developing effective team leaders.

For most staff, the most challenging leadership role they will play is their first. This chapter describes a research-based training program being developed to help these leaders increase their effectiveness in this first role.

Results of a job analysis of psychologists working in state hospitals.

The graduate training of psychologists should prepare them for central roles in state hospitals, especially roles involving direct patient care and supervision of colleagues. To what extent do actual job practices match graduate preparation? To find out, 55 psychologists from 12 state hospitals in the Midwest were surveyed regarding their educational backgrounds and time currently spent in various job activities. Results indicated that paperwork consumes more time than any other activity, followed by therapeutic services, psychological assessment, supervision, and case management. Almost 50% of the sample was trained under a cognitive-behavioral orientation; however, more than 60% of survey participants now practice according to eclectic models. These results imply that psychologists in these settings may not be utilized to their full potential because of a variety of organizational constraints.

What mental health teams want in their leaders.

The authors present the findings of the first phase of a 3-year study developing a skills training curriculum for mental health team leaders. A factor model empirically generated from clinical team members was compared to Bass' (1990) Multifactor Model of Leadership. Members of mental health teams generated individual responses to questions about effective leaders. Results from this survey were subsequently administered to a sample of mental health team members. Analysis of these data yielded six factors: Autocratic Leadership, Clear Roles and Goals, Reluctant Leadership, Vision, Diversity Issues, and Supervision. Additional analyses suggest Bass' Multifactor Model offers a useful paradigm for developing a curriculum specific to the needs of mental health team leaders.

Collegial support and barriers to behavioral programs for severe mental illness.

Previous investigations have identified staff beliefs about barriers to implementing behavioral interventions in programs for persons with severe mental illness. One of these barriers, institutional constraints, was found to be associated with collegial support; i.e., staff who report more collegial support were less likely to endorse institutional constraints. The purpose of this study was to determine how the components of collegial support were associated with beliefs about institutional constraints. Fifty-six staff members completed measures of staff opinions about barriers to implementing behavior therapy, satisfaction with collegial support, source of support, and functions of support. Results suggested that collegial support is significantly associated with co-worker and supervisor support, but not the support of family and friends. Endorsing institutional constraints was inversely associated with the support of co-workers and supervisors; institutional constraints were positively associated with the support of family and friends. Endorsing institutional constraints was also inversely associated with the sense that others rely upon the individual for their well-being. Implications of these findings for diminishing barriers to behavioral interventions are discussed.

How mental health and developmental disabilities staff prioritize training and development needs.

This paper contrasts a staff training needs assessment distributed to three groups: staff serving persons with mental health needs in the community, staff serving persons with mental health needs in state hospitals, and staff serving persons with developmental disabilities in the community. Analyses revealed that all three groups rated team-related training as the area in greatest need of development. Further analyses suggested that community staff serving persons with developmental disabilities reported significantly less need for training on direct client care compared to community and inpatient staff who serve persons with mental health needs. The community staff serving persons with mental health needs did not differ significantly from the inpatient staff on any of the surveyed training areas. Results suggest that future development efforts should begin with team building skills.

Considerations for research on consumer empowerment and psychosocial interventions.

Consumer empowerment is a political movement that, among many goals, seeks to diminish the stigma and discrimination experienced by people with severe and persistent psychiatric disorders. This paper reviews research strategies that address the methodological problems of studying consumer empowerment. Key issues include defining the subject of investigation, describing consumer-developed treatments using discovery-oriented research strategies, and sorting out the diverse roles of consumers in contemporary psychosocial programs. Consumer empowerment introduces a political paradigm into the understanding of severe mental illness, a paradigm that can be difficult to integrate with the goals of empirical research.

Situational feature recognition in schizophrenic outpatients.

Previous research has suggested that patients with schizophrenia are significantly better at identifying relatively concrete features that describe social situations (e.g., actions and roles) than more abstract features (e.g., rules and goals). Because participants in the earlier research were all inpatients, the results may have been confounded by various factors that are commensurate with a hospital stay. Thirty-one patients with DSM-III-R diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 39 normal volunteers completed the Situational Feature Recognition Test to determine whether they also showed the differential deficit. Results showed that the outpatient group was, indeed, less symptomatic than the inpatient group; outpatients also showed better overall feature recognition than inpatients. Schizophrenic outpatients and normal volunteers are significantly better at identifying concrete features than abstract features. Additional analyses suggested that the differential deficit in outpatients is due, in part, to their disorder. Implications for the remediation of social functioning deficits are discussed.

Reagents for the preparation of two oligonucleotides per synthesis (TOPS).

In order to increase the efficiency of use of automated DNA synthesizers (i.e. the number of oligomers prepared per day), we have devised and prepared novel phosphoramidite reagents that contain a linking group which, while stable under the normal synthesis conditions, is cleaved under basic conditions. When one of these linkers is introduced at the desired position in the synthesis of an oligonucleotide, subsequent detritylation enables the synthesis of a second oligonucleotides sequence upon the first. During deprotection of the oligonucleotide with ammonium hydroxide, the chain is cleaved at either side of the points of introduction of the novel reagent, generating two oligonucleotides free in solution. These reagents are of particular use in applications where oligomers are used in pairs (such as PCR, chemical synthesis of genes etc.) and means that an automated synthesis facility can be used more efficiently, without the need for operator intervention, after the working day is over.

The first seizure in adult life. Value of clinical features, electroencephalography, and computerised tomographic scanning in prediction of seizure recurrence.

408 adults (age 16 and over) were followed up after their initial seizure. The actuarial risk of recurrence was highest in the early weeks. For those seen within the first week, the risk of recurrence was 52% by the end of 3 years. In univariate analysis, the only clinical variable that was associated with recurrence was the time of day at which the initial seizure occurred. There was a tendency, that did not reach statistical significance, for younger age (less than 50 years) and a family history of seizures of any type, including febrile convulsions, to be associated with recurrence. Such risk factors appear to be additive, so that the risk of recurrence at 1 year for a subject with all three factors is about three times that of a subject with none of them. Sex, type of seizure, and features of the electroencephalogram were not of predictive value. Computerised tomographic scanning revealed tumours in 3% of subjects, and these individuals were particularly likely to have recurrent seizures.

The preparation and properties of novel reversible polymer-protein conjugates. 2-omega-Methoxypolyethylene (5000) glycoxymethylene-3-methylmaleyl conjugates of plasminogen activators.

The preparation of a reagent capable of reversibly attaching polyethylene glycol to proteins and the use of this material in modifying the plasminogen activators urokinase- and tissue-type plasminogen activator are described. The characterisation and the reversible nature of these protein-polymer conjugates are discussed, and some of the in vitro properties of these modified enzymes are explored.

Suppression of murine IgE responses with amino acid polymer/allergen conjugates. II. Suppressive activities in adjuvant-induced IgE responses.

Treatment with conjugates of polysarcosine and grass pollen allergen extracts efficiently suppressed the induction of IgE responses in mice. The suppressive activity was shown to be allergen-specific and required covalent linking of the polysarcosine. Inhibitory effects could be overcome by booster injections of native allergen when these were given 3-4 weeks after treatment with conjugates. Administration of conjugates had only marginal effects on established IgE responses. The variance of these results with those of other studies on IgE suppression and the suitability of murine models for investigating reaginic antibody suppression are discussed.

The binding of plasminogen to fibrin: evidence for plasminogen-bridging.

The ability of plasminogen to cause precipitation of soluble fibrin oligomers has been observed and certain features of the phenomenon investigated. The process is mediated by the lysine-binding sites and it appears that at least two such sites are required. Studies using radiolabelled plasminogen revealed that the precipitated material contained fibrin and plasminogen in a 2:1 molar ratio. Further plasminogen molecules are able to bind to the aggregate. The clotting of fibrinogen in the presence of plasminogen was studied using nephelometry. An enhancement by plasminogen of both the rate of clotting and the opacity of the clot was demonstrated. It is proposed that these effects are explicable in terms of a plasminogen-bridging model, in which the zymogen binds divalently between two monomer units of forming polymeric fibrin.

Comparative growth of primary schoolchildren from one and two parent families.

Data drawn from the National Study of Health and Growth enabled an examination to be made of the attained height, weight for height, and triceps skinfold of children from one and two parent families. Children from one parent families were shorter than children from two parent families; however, once heights had been adjusted for birthweight, number of siblings, mother's height, father's height, and mother's education this was no longer the case. An examination of the adjusting factors showed that low birthweights and shorter parents accounted for the shorter stature of the one parent family children. An examination of weight for height and triceps skinfold measurements indicated an increased tendency towards obesity in the one parent family children, although this difference was not statistically significant. The higher prevalence of low birthweights and shorter parents that account for the shorter stature of one parent children are factors that cannot be ignored in a consideration of the health and growth of this group of children and obesity may be a potential health problem among the one parent family children.