Neuroscientists work to helps soldiers break camouflage

Researchers Jay Hegde and Xing Chen are using functional MRI to look at the brains of study participants learning how to break camouflage in order to help identify soldiers who will be good at it and identify better ways to teach it. Credit: Phil Jones, GHSU Photographer

Researchers want to help the Army better camouflage its soldiers and break the enemy's efforts to hide.

"We want to make our camouflage unbreakable and we want to break the camouflage of the enemy," said Dr. Jay Hegde, neuroscientist in the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University.

Hegde and GHSU Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Xing Chen are using a relatively simple technique they developed to teach civilian volunteers to break camouflage. They flash a series of camouflage pictures on a computer screen, providing about a half second after each to spot, for instance, a face in a sea of mushrooms. A green light signals a correct answer and a red light signals an incorrect answer. The computer-generated images include distractions to make the difficult task even more challenging.

They are finding that an hour of daily training in as little as two weeks results in proficiency for 60 percent of the mostly college and graduate school students who have signed up for their training. The Army's current approach is taking soldiers into battlefield situations to hone these skills.

As part of a three-year grant from the Office of Army Research, the researchers want to determine which parts of the brain light up when trained snipers break camouflage.

"We need to figure out how the expert camouflage-breakers do it," Hegde said. "We want to figure out what parts of the brain are most responsive when people break camouflage and, a related experiment is what part of the brain changes its response when people learn to break camouflage." Their techniques include functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood flow activity as an indicator of brain cell activity.

Figuring out which parts of the brain are involved could give the Army and others a better way to identify future first-rate snipers and objectively assess instructional efforts.

"If you are the Dean of the Army Sniper Corps and want to develop top-notch snipers, you don't want to spend a year training them before giving up on half of them," Hegde said. A brain scan could help signal whose relevant areas are well developed and, consequently, have natural skill.

Early evidence points toward two regions of the temporal lobe, found on either side of the brain and known to have a role in speech and vision. A region called the fusiform gyrus – which plays a role in facial recognition and lights up when people become experts at recognizing various objects, such as a particular bird species – may be important in breaking camouflage as well.

Hegde suspects that expertise at breaking camouflage stems from the fusiform gyrus in combination with some other area(s) of the brain. And, because good recognition skills don't typically translate from one area to another, he also suspects that the parts of the brain involved vary with the object of their attention. For example, the ability to easily recognize the make and model of a car doesn't guarantee skill at breaking camouflage and Hegde notes that some military snipers aren't good at game-hunting.

Vision happens when light enters the retina where photoreceptor cells turn it into signals that are interpreted by the brain. "If there is a whole lot of light falling on them, they send a lot of signals, beep, beep, beep," he said in rapid succession. "If there is a little bit of light they fire slowly." The brain connects the dots to form a familiar face or landscape. Camouflage complicates the task – the difference between recognizing a mountain goat against a clear blue sky and finding a moth among a pile of fall leaves.

"Here is the beautiful thing that we are finding out: if you know what you are looking for, the next time you can break the camouflage of the moth. Without knowing what you are looking for, the picture also is ambiguous," Hegde said.

Provided by Georgia Health Sciences University

"Neuroscientists work to helps soldiers break camouflage." March 30th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-neuroscientists-soldiers-camouflage.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

CDC study forges link between depression and sleep apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea and other symptoms of OSA are associated with probable major depression, regardless of factors like weight, age, sex or race, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There was no link between depression and snoring.

"Snorting, gasping or stopping breathing while asleep was associated with nearly all depression symptoms, including feeling hopeless and feeling like a failure," said Anne G. Wheaton, PhD, lead author of the study. "We expected persons with sleep-disordered breathing to report trouble sleeping or sleeping too much, or feeling tired and having little energy, but not the other symptoms."

The study, appearing in the April issue of the journal SLEEP, is the first nationally representative sampling to examine this relationship, surveying 9,714 American adults. Previous studies have focused on smaller samples of specific populations, such as people suffering from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), depression or other health conditions.

Wheaton, an epidemiologist with CDC, said the likelihood of depression increased with the reported frequency of snorting and/or instances when breathing stopped in the study. She suggested screening for these disorders in the presence of the other could help address the high prevalence and underdiagnosis of sleep apnea and depression, especially if sleepiness is a chief complaint.

Snorting, gasping and pauses in breathing during sleep are all signs of OSA, a common form of sleep-disordered breathing. Six percent of men and 3 percent of women in the study reported having physician-diagnosed sleep apnea. OSA occurs when the muscles relax during sleep, causing soft tissue in the back of the throat to collapse and block the upper airway.

More information: "Sleep Disordered Breathing and Depression among U.S. Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2005-2008," SLEEP.

Provided by American Academy of Sleep Medicine

"CDC study forges link between depression and sleep apnea." March 30th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-cdc-forges-link-depression-apnea.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

How honey heals: study

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH LIMITED

Comvita, the New Zealand-based global exporter of natural health and beauty products, and collaborators have identified key compounds in honey that stimulate the immune system, paving the way for a range of new wound-healing products. The ground-breaking research, carried out at Industrial Research Ltd (IRL), Plant & Food Research and Massey University, found that different varieties of New Zealand honey appear to trigger different immune responses.   IRL's role was to provide its world-class expertise in the extraction, analysis, and purification of complex molecules that play an important role in biological systems. Comvita’s Chief Technology Officer Dr Ralf Schlothauer says the research provides the tools for understanding why honey stimulates healing of stalled wounds. “We know a lot about the anti-microbial properties of manuka honey but had much less scientific information about the immune system-related effects of honey in wound healing. “The findings suggest there could be a number of honeys to consider if you want to stimulate the immune system. Ultimately, it might mean we produce medical honey products that are specifically tailored for certain treatments or that we select a range of honeys for their particular properties to include in a specific blend.” Headquartered in Paengaroa in the Bay of Plenty, Comvita is the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of Manuka honey and produces natural health products for the wound care, health care, personal care and functional foods markets. It also produces Medihoney™ wound care products that are sold through a global licensing deal with US-based Derma Sciences. Prior to the latest work, Dr Schlothauer says published research had shown there were big carbohydrate molecules in honey that stimulated immune cells but their structure had not been analysed. Comvita put two students, Swapna Gannabathula and Gregor Steinhorn, onto the task and their discoveries eventually led the company to Crown Research Institute IRL. “We started separating the molecule but were puzzled about what it was. Initially we thought it was a glycan and sought appropriate analysis but they put us on to Dr Ian Sims in the Carbohydrate Chemistry group at IRL, who is a leading expert in analysing complex molecules that play an important role in biological systems,” says Dr Schlothauer. IRL has one of only three laboratories world-wide with the capability and expertise required to carry out complex research into the extraction, purification and analysis of oligo- and poly-saccharides, and glycoconjugates. Dr Sims began his work with small-scale analyses that were conducted on Manuka, Kanuka and Clover honeys. Starting with five grams of honey, separation of high molecular weight polymers from small sugars yielded just a few milligrams of sample for analysis.  After Dr Sims completed an initial, detailed analysis of the sugars Gregor Steinhorn, who now works full-time for Comvita, spent many hours purifying buckets of honey and identified its exact nature under the supervision of Dr Sims and Dr Alistair Carr (Massey University). Comvita is determining the commercial value of this discovery and has a range of new products under development. The findings from the research have been published in Food Chemistry, an international, peer-reviewed publication that reports on the chemistry and biochemistry of foods and raw materials. Dr Schlothauer says the next challenge is to better understand how and why honey promotes healing, with Comvita planning to do more research with the University of Auckland and IRL. “The work is helping us ensure there is much better information about natural medicines,” says Dr Schlothauer. "We need to be able to talk about the immune relevance of honey and have proof of its scientific efficacy to ensure natural medicines can sit alongside conventional health products.” Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.