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Register a new userPrenatal stress perturbs fetal iron homeostasis in a sex-specific manner
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What is the influence of chronic maternal prenatal stress (PS) on fetal iron homeostasis? In a prospective case-control study in 164 pregnant women, we show that cord blood transferrin saturation is lower in male stressed neonates. The total effect of PS exposure on fetal ferritin revealed a decrease of 15.4% compared with controls. Electrocardiogram-based Fetal Stress Index (FSI) identified affected fetuses non-invasively during the third trimester of gestation. FSI-based timely detection of fetuses affected by PS can support early individualized iron supplementation and neurodevelopmental follow-up to prevent long-term sequelae due to PS-exacerbated impairment of the iron homeostasis.
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Functional development of affective and reward circuits, cognition and response inhibition later in life exhibits vulnerability periods during gestation and early childhood. Extensive evidence supports the model that exposure to stressors in the gestational period and early postnatal life increases an individuals susceptibility to future impairments of functional development. Rece
In the pregnant mother and her fetus, chronic prenatal stress results in entrainment of the fetal heartbeat by the maternal heartbeat, quantified by the fetal stress index (FSI). Deep learning (DL) is capable of pattern detection in complex medical data with high accuracy in noisy real-life environments, but little is known about DLs utility in non-invasive biometric monitoring during pregnancy. A recently established self-supervised learning (SSL) approach to DL provides emotional recognition from electrocardiogram (ECG). We hypothesized that SSL will identify chronically stressed mother-fetus dyads from the raw maternal abdominal electrocardiograms (aECG), containing fetal and maternal ECG. Chronically stressed mothers and controls matched at enrolment at 32 weeks of gestation were studied. We validated the chronic stress exposure by psychological inventory, maternal hair cortisol and FSI. We tested two variants of SSL architecture, one trained on the generic ECG features for emotional recognition obtained from public datasets and another transfer-learned on a subset of our data. Our DL models accurately detect the chronic stress exposure group (AUROC=0.982+/-0.002), the individual psychological stress score (R2=0.943+/-0.009) and FSI at 34 weeks of gestation (R2=0.946+/-0.013), as well as the maternal hair cortisol at birth reflecting chronic stress exposure (0.931+/-0.006). The best performance was achieved with the DL model trained on the public dataset and using maternal ECG alone. The present DL approach provides a novel source of physiological insights into complex multi-modal relationships between different regulatory systems exposed to chronic stress. The final DL model can be deployed in low-cost regular ECG biosensors as a simple, ubiquitous early stress detection and monitoring tool during pregnancy. This discovery should enable early behavioral interventions.
Background and Objective: Biometric measurements of fetal head are important indicators for maternal and fetal health monitoring during pregnancy. 3D ultrasound (US) has unique advantages over 2D scan in covering the whole fetal head and may promote the diagnoses. However, automatically segmenting the whole fetal head in US volumes still pends as an emerging and unsolved problem. The challenges that automated solutions need to tackle include the poor image quality, boundary ambiguity, long-span occlusion, and the appearance variability across different fetal poses and gestational ages. In this paper, we propose the first fully-automated solution to segment the whole fetal head in US volumes. Methods: The segmentation task is firstly formulated as an end-to-end volumetric mapping under an encoder-decoder deep architecture. We then combine the segmentor with a proposed hybrid attention scheme (HAS) to select discriminative features and suppress the non-informative volumetric features in a composite and hierarchical way. With little computation overhead, HAS proves to be effective in addressing boundary ambiguity and deficiency. To enhance the spatial consistency in segmentation, we further organize multiple segmentors in a cascaded fashion to refine the results by revisiting context in the prediction of predecessors. Results: Validated on a large dataset collected from 100 healthy volunteers, our method presents superior segmentation performance (DSC (Dice Similarity Coefficient), 96.05%), remarkable agreements with experts. With another 156 volumes collected from 52 volunteers, we ahieve high reproducibilities (mean standard deviation 11.524 mL) against scan variations. Conclusion: This is the first investigation about whole fetal head segmentation in 3D US. Our method is promising to be a feasible solution in assisting the volumetric US-based prenatal studies.
Background: The chronically instrumented pregnant sheep has been used as a model of human fetal development and responses to pathophysiologic stimuli. This is due to the unique amenability of the unanesthetized fetal sheep to the surgical placement and maintenance of catheters and electrodes, allowing repetitive blood sampling, substance injection, recording of bioelectrical activity, application of electric stimulation and in vivo organ imaging. Recently, there has been growing interest in pleiotropic effects of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on various organ systems such as innate immunity, metabolism, and appetite control. There is no approach to study this in utero and corresponding physiological understanding is scarce. New Method: Based on our previous presentation of a stable chronically instrumented unanesthetized fetal sheep model, here we describe the surgical instrumentation procedure allowing successful implantation of a cervical uni- or bilateral VNS probe with or without vagotomy. Results: In a cohort of 53 animals, we present the changes in blood gas, metabolic, and inflammatory markers during the postoperative period. We detail the design of a VNS probe which also allows recording from the nerve. We also present an example of vagus electroneurogram (VENG) recorded from the VNS probe and an analytical approach to the data. Comparison with Existing Methods: This method represents the first implementation of VENG/VNS in a large pregnant mammalian organism. Conclusions: This study describes a new surgical procedure allowing to record and manipulate chronically the vagus nerve activity in an animal model of human pregnancy.
The two classic theories for the existence of sexual replication are that sex purges deleterious mutations from a population, and that sex allows a population to adapt more rapidly to changing environments. These two theories have often been presented as opposing explanations for the existence of sex. Here, we develop and analyze evolutionary models based on the asexual and sexual replication pathways in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Bakers yeast), and show that sexual replication can both purge deleterious mutations in a static environment, as well as lead to faster adaptation in a dynamic environment. This implies that sex can serve a dual role, which is in sharp contrast to previous theories.
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