Decoding Neurotransmitter Switching: The Road Forward

Neurotransmitter Switching? No Surprise

Among the many forms of brain plasticity, changes in synaptic strength and changes in synapse number are particularly prominent. However, evidence for neurotransmitter respecification or switching has been accumulating steadily, both in the developing nervous system and in the adult brain, with observations of transmitter addition, loss, or replacement of one transmitter with another. Natural s...

Quality indicators for colonoscopy: The road forward.

Division of Gastroenterology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario Correspondence: Dr David Armstrong, Division of Gastroenterology, McMaster University, 1200 Main Street West, HSC-3V3, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 3Z5. Telephone 905-521-2100 ext 76404, fax 905-521-4958, email [email protected] Received and accepted for publication April 14, 2014 The widespread introduction of colon cancer screeni...

Neurotransmitter switching in the adult brain regulates behavior.

Neurotransmitters have been thought to be fixed throughout life, but whether sensory stimuli alter behaviorally relevant transmitter expression in the mature brain is unknown. We found that populations of interneurons in the adult rat hypothalamus switched between dopamine and somatostatin expression in response to exposure to short- and long-day photoperiods. Changes in postsynaptic dopamine r...

Forward-Decoding Kernel-Based Phone Sequence Recognition

Forward decoding kernel machines (FDKM) combine large-margin classifiers with hidden Markov models (HMM) for maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptive sequence estimation. State transitions in the sequence are conditioned on observed data using a kernel-based probability model trained with a recursive scheme that deals effectively with noisy and partially labeled data. Training over very large datase...

Expectation Maximization of Forward Decoding Kernel Machines