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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Small Individual Loans And Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial Among South African Adults, Lia C. H. Fernald, Rita Hamad, Dean Karlan, Emily J. Ozer, Jonathan Zinman
Small Individual Loans And Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial Among South African Adults, Lia C. H. Fernald, Rita Hamad, Dean Karlan, Emily J. Ozer, Jonathan Zinman
Dartmouth Scholarship
Background: In the developing world, access to small, individual loans has been variously hailed as a poverty-alleviation tool – in the context of "microcredit" – but has also been criticized as "usury" and harmful to vulnerable borrowers. Prior studies have assessed effects of access to credit on traditional economic outcomes for poor borrowers, but effects on mental health have been largely ignored.
Methods: Applicants who had previously been rejected (n = 257) for a loan (200% annual percentage rate – APR) from a lender in South Africa were randomly assigned to a "second-look" that encouraged loan officers to approve their …
Freesurfer-Initiated Fully-Automated Subcortical Brain Segmentation In Mri Using Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping., Ali R Khan, Lei Wang, Mirza Faisal Beg
Freesurfer-Initiated Fully-Automated Subcortical Brain Segmentation In Mri Using Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping., Ali R Khan, Lei Wang, Mirza Faisal Beg
Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications
Fully-automated brain segmentation methods have not been widely adopted for clinical use because of issues related to reliability, accuracy, and limitations of delineation protocol. By combining the probabilistic-based FreeSurfer (FS) method with the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM)-based label-propagation method, we are able to increase reliability and accuracy, and allow for flexibility in template choice. Our method uses the automated FreeSurfer subcortical labeling to provide a coarse-to-fine introduction of information in the LDDMM template-based segmentation resulting in a fully-automated subcortical brain segmentation method (FS+LDDMM). One major advantage of the FS+LDDMM-based approach is that the automatically generated segmentations generated are …
Effects Of Acute Ethyl Alcohol Consumption On A Psychophysical Measure Of Lateral Inhibition In Human Vision., Kevin D Johnston, Brian Timney
Effects Of Acute Ethyl Alcohol Consumption On A Psychophysical Measure Of Lateral Inhibition In Human Vision., Kevin D Johnston, Brian Timney
Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications
Acute consumption of ethyl alcohol affects a variety of visual functions. However, there have been few systematic attempts to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying these effects. Here, we employed the Westheimer paradigm to investigate the hypothesis that alcohol reduces lateral inhibition within human "perceptive fields", the psychophysical analogue of physiological receptive fields. Westheimer functions obtained under alcohol and no-alcohol conditions at photopic, mesopic, and scotopic levels of adaptation showed changes consistent with an alcohol-induced decrease in lateral inhibition. We conclude that this decrease in lateral inhibition may be responsible for some of the changes in visual perception that result from …