Contemporary Diagnostic Systems Research Articles

Application of analysis of variance to determine important features of signals for diagnostic classifiers of displacement pumps

This paper presents the use of one-way analysis of variance ANOVA as an effective tool for ranking the features calculated from diagnostic signals and evaluates their impact on the accuracy of the machine learning system's classification of displacement pump wear.The first part includes a review of contemporary diagnostic systems and a description of typical damage of multi-piston displacement pumps and Its causes. The work also contains description of a diagnostic experiment which was conducted in order to obtain the matrix of vibration signals and the matrix of pressures measured at selected locations on the pump housing and at the pump pressure line. The measured signals were subjected to time–frequency analysis. The features of signals calculated in the time and frequency domains were ranked using the ANOVA. The next step involved the use the available classifiers in pump wear evaluation, conducting tests and assessing their effectiveness in terms of the ranking of features and the origin of diagnostic signals.

The Soteria Project: A forerunner of "a third way" in psychiatry?

The article presents a somehow forgotten, yet largely controversial, experiment and therapeutic phenomenon known as Soteria Research Project. History, circumstances and main methodological assumptions of the experiment are briefly presented. Theoretical inspirations behind therapeutic model of Soteria are discussed and analyzed, and the results of the experiment are shortly described. The Soteria Research Project is placed in historical and contemporary context and compared to other theoretical propositions and practical solutions. A summary of critical arguments against Soteria is presented. Results of the Soteria Research Project suggest that therapeutic methods employed there were at least as effective as hospital treatment as usual, despite a radical reduction in, or even a complete lack of, pharmacotherapy. These results are still very important in the context of the debate concerning effective and ethical treatment of psychiatric disorders. It is claimed that Soteria was an attempt of restoring the importance of subjective experiences and subjectivity of a psychiatric patient in organized mental health care and a forerunner of contemporary postpsychiatric approaches, which postulate larger autonomy of patients, criticize sole reliance on pharmacotherapy and contemporary diagnostic systems, and underline the importance of psychotherapeutic interventions.

The factor structures and correlates of PTSD in post-conflict Timor-Leste: an analysis of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire

BackgroundPost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most widely assessed form of mental distress in cross-cultural studies conducted amongst populations exposed to mass conflict and displacement. Nevertheless, there have been longstanding concerns about the universality of PTSD as a diagnostic category when applied across cultures. One approach to examining this question is to assess whether the same factor structure can be identified in culturally diverse populations as has been described in populations of western societies. We examine this issue based on an analysis of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) completed by a large community sample in conflict-affected Timor-Leste.MethodCulturally adapted measures were applied to assess exposure to conflict-related traumatic events (TEs), ongoing adversities, symptoms of PTSD and psychological distress, and functional impairment amongst a large population sample (n = 2964, response rate: 82.4%) in post-conflict Timor-Leste.ResultsConfirmatory factor analyses of the ICD-10, ICD-11, DSM-IV, four-factor Emotional Numbing and five-factor Dysphoric-Arousal PTSD structures, found considerable support for all these models. Based on these classifications, concurrent validity was indicated by logistic regression analyses which showed that being a woman, trauma exposure, ongoing adversity, severe distress, and functional impairment were all associated with PTSD.ConclusionsAlthough symptom prevalence estimates varied widely based on different classifications, our study found a general agreement in PTSD assignments across contemporary diagnostic systems in a large conflict-affected population in Timor-Leste. Further studies are needed, however, to establish the construct and concurrent validity of PTSD in other cultures.

Zaburzenia osobowości: krótkie wprowadzenie historyczne

In this paper we aim to portray the evolution of the understanding, classification and diagnosis of personality disorders. We analyze the characteristics of normal and abnormal personality in the light of the debate about the nature of mental disorders. A brief historical outline of the conceptualization of personality disorders is followed by a description of the evolution of contemporary diagnostic systems. The limitations and problems of these systems are analyzed.

CAD-Based Shielding Analysis for ITER Port Diagnostics

Radiation shielding analysis conducted in support of design development of the contemporary diagnostic systems integrated inside the ITER ports is relied on the use of CAD models. This paper presents the CAD-based MCNP Monte Carlo radiation transport and activation analyses for the Diagnostic Upper and Equatorial Port Plugs (UPP #3 and EPP #8, #17). The creation process of the complicated 3D MCNP models of the diagnostics systems was substantially accelerated by application of the CAD-to-MCNP converter programs MCAM and McCad. High performance computing resources of the Helios supercomputer allowed to speed-up the MCNP parallel transport calculations with the MPI/OpenMP interface. The found shielding solutions could be universal, reducing ports R&D costs. The shield block behind the Tritium and Deposit Monitor (TDM) optical box was added to study its influence on Shut-Down Dose Rate (SDDR) in Port Interspace (PI) of EPP#17. Influence of neutron streaming along the Lost Alpha Monitor (LAM) on the neutron energy spectra calculated in the Tangential Neutron Spectrometer (TNS) of EPP#8. For the UPP#3 with Charge eXchange Recombination Spectroscopy (CXRS-core), an excessive neutron streaming along the CXRS shutter, which should be prevented in further design iteration.

Zaburzenia osobowości: krótkie wprowadzenie historyczne

In this paper we aim to portray the evolution of the understanding, classification and diagnosis of personality disorders. We analyze the characteristics of normal and abnormal personality in the light of the debate about the nature of mental disorders. A brief historical outline of the conceptualization of personality disorders is followed by a description of the evolution of contemporary diagnostic systems. The limitations and problems of these systems are analyzed.

A Fallacious Forced Choice: Cloninger and Stoyanov, Machamer, and Schaffner Are Compatible

A Fallacious Forced Choice:Cloninger and Stoyanov, Machamer, and Schaffner Are Compatible Drozdstoj Stoyanov (bio), Peter Machamer (bio), and Kenneth F. Schaffner (bio) Keywords Cloninger, SMS paradigm, convergent validity In his commentary entitled Degeneracy of Categorical Disease Paradigms, Robert Cloninger (2013) presents several arguments to challenge our program of convergent transdisciplinary validation across psychopathology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry. The aim of this response is to demonstrate how Cloninger’s most insightful reflection is actually consistent with our paradigm. Let us summarize his major objections herewith: A paradigm is scientifically degenerate (perhaps in a Lakatosian sense) if it does not provide a way to test and modify its basic assumptions or if it cannot make predictions that go beyond observed data; Cloninger attempts to persuade us that the Stoyanov, Machamer, and Schaffner (SMS) paradigm is degenerate in this sense. Cloninger insists that we wrongly attribute specificity to MMPI scores for depression when in actual fact the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) can only be meaningfully interpreted in any given person as a multidimensional profile of scores. This error illustrates the way that contemporary diagnostic systems tend to reify categories as discrete entities despite the fact that there is no justification for doing so. Further, Cloninger raises the fundamental queries: Where is the basis for values and virtues in the SMS paradigm of health? How can we have an adequate model of health and disease without a role for values and virtue? We shall not focus extensively on arguments, because there is a large literature that defends the thesis that the MMPI can perform heterogeneous (hybrid) measures, both of traits and states. More precisely, a depression score of over 70 in MMPI depression rating scale has been considered valuable clinical measure for depression along with the Hamilton rating scale and others. First, it should be noted that we have not advocated the categorical approach only. On the contrary, in a number of previous publications we have argued that neurobiological signatures may underpin broader diagnostic entities (dimensions, [End Page 281] clusters, prototypes). However, we should keep in mind that there are many arguments of reservation in the current literature at the utility of the broader and complex diagnostic constructs (Phillips 2011). The provisional disagreement arises with the field of the particular study design introduced in our paper as a possible route to improvement of the neuroscience–clinical psychiatry correlations via simultaneous investigation of the clinical features of mental disorders and the underlying brain mechanisms, which is taken to be categorical per se by Cloninger. On a meta-theoretical level, it is not correct to say that our paradigm does not provide way to test and modify its basic assumptions since it has never been actually tested. Our predictions, however, can go far beyond the observed data, and toward bridging the explanatory gap and conformable dialogue of neuroscience and psychiatry. So, at least from these two perspectives, it is constructive and should not be defined as degenerate. The alternative Cloninger brings forward is his psychobiological model of personality, referring to his very motivating research into neurobiological correlates of personality. For example, the brain circuit regulating persistence has been determined to involve the anterior cingulate cortex (Brodmann area 24), orbitofrontal cortex (Brodmann area 47), and the ventral striatum, which regulates conditioning of reward-seeking behavior. Real-time testing of circuit activity was carried out by varying the proportion of neutral stimuli when people were asked to rate pictures as pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Circuit activity increased, along with increasing proportions of neutral pictures in highly persistent people, whereas it decreased under the same conditions in impersistent people; this nonlinear effect was direct evidence of a complex adaptive system. In addition, ratings of affective valence (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant) depended on nonlinear interactions of persistence with harm avoidance and self-directedness, which themselves modulate connectivity of the anterior cingulum with the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex respectively. Regardless to all those inspirational research facts, there is growing awareness that finding of any genetic–neuroscience to clinical interrelations in Cloninger’s paradigm will be very complicated and so far out of reach (Service 2012). In any case, it is exciting...

Nonaffective Acute Psychoses: Uncertainties on the Way to DSM-V and ICD-11

Since the early 20th century, a group of nonaffective psychoses with acute onset and brief duration have been described in different countries under various names, including cycloid psychosis, bouffée délirante, and reactive psychosis. These psychoses share several characteristics, including benign course, greater prevalence in women than men and in developing countries than in industrialized countries, and high prevalence of premorbid psychological and physiologic stressors. However, the variations in names and minute details of symptomatology have overshadowed the basic similarities across these various descriptions. Confusion in classification persists in the two contemporary diagnostic systems, the DSM-IV and the ICD-10. We believe that most cases of these psychoses could be captured under a broad, unified category of nonaffective psychosis with acute onset and brief duration, and urge the authors of the upcoming revisions of the DSM and ICD to create such a category. A unified diagnostic category for these disorders would reduce unnecessary fragmentation in the diagnostic systems and assist in the progress of research on these rare conditions.

What is Bizarre in Bizarre Delusions? A Critical Review

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) treats the presence of bizarre delusions (BD) as the heaviest-weighted clinical criterion of schizophrenia. Although BD play a major role in contemporary diagnostic systems, only a few empirical studies explore this issue. These studies provide highly heterogenous results because they are based on different experimental paradigms, in terms of definition, clinical sample, and number of raters. Here, we first discuss the psychopathological sources of the concept of BD, which were initially described as either nonsensical or incomprehensible. Then, we provide a critical review of contemporary studies on the reliability of BD and their methodological and conceptual limitations. Current approaches have focused intensely on BD's reliability and have defined BD strictly in terms of delusional content--mainly in terms of the physical impossibility or the cultural or historical incomprehensibility of the delusional claims. These approaches have neglected formal features of experience that underlie BD and the crucial issue of the nature and validity of BD. In the discussion, we argue that clinical diagnosis of BD cannot be limited to delusional contents alone and requires taking into account the subjective side of BD (how altered experience manifests itself) as well as the conditions of intersubjective encounter (how BD are expressed to and experienced by the clinician). The notion of "bizarreness" in schizophrenia is not purely theoretical; it has practical relevance for the therapeutic encounter and implications on further empirical research and on diagnostic approaches.

The concept of psychosis and psychotic qualities

The term "psychosis," first used by Canstatt and then by von Feuchtersleben, originally meant "psychic neurosis," one of several forms of one disease group. The term was taken up by Flemming and introduced among other typical indications such as psychic disturbance, psychic disease, mind disease, and madness around 1875 in the German-speaking world."Psychosis" was understood from the beginning as a cerebral pathology which found its expression in psychic symptomatology. The broadest interpretation of the concept of psychosis prior to the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries has today been reduced to the modern differentiations of psychopathologies and neuroses. Since then, no consensus has been reached on the extent of the concept of psychosis.We have remained at the "persistent unclarity" described by H. Kindt. Contemporary diagnostic systems have done without the concept of psychosis. The indication "psychotic" which has taken its place and is based primarily on characteristically schizophrenic phenomena is also unclear. Independently of the unsolved problem of differentiation, there remains the question of psychotic qualities which are understandable on biologic and psychopathologic levels at the same time and which combine biologic, interpretative, and descriptive elements, uniting them in the field of biologic and clinical psychiatry.

Depression and panic attacks: the significance of overlap as reflected in follow-up and family study data.

Ninety-one patients with panic attacks limited historically to depressive episodes had more severe depressive symptoms and were less likely to recover during a 2-year follow-up than 417 depressed patients who did not have panic attacks. Family study data clearly distinguished another 15 patients with panic disorder and secondary depression; interviewed relatives of panic disorder patients were significantly less likely to have primary depression and significantly more likely to have various anxiety disorders. These data support the hierarchical system by which many of the contemporary diagnostic systems separate panic disorder and major depression.