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BackgroundChild sexual abuse (CSA) has become a focal point for lawmakers, law enforcement, and mental health professionals. With high prevalence rates around the world and far-reaching, often chronic, individual, and societal implications, CSA and its leading risk factor, pedophilia, have been well investigated. This has led to a wide range of clinical tools and actuarial instruments for diagnosis and risk assessment regarding CSA. However, the neurobiological underpinnings of pedosexual behavior, specifically regarding hands-on pedophilic offenders (PO), remain elusive. Such biomarkers for PO individuals could potentially improve the early detection of high-risk PO individuals and enhance efforts to prevent future CSA.AimTo use machine learning and MRI data to identify PO individuals.MethodsFrom a single-center male cohort of 14 PO individuals and 15 matched healthy control (HC) individuals, we acquired diffusion tensor imaging data (anisotropy, diffusivity, and fiber tracking) in literature-based regions of interest (prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and corpus callosum). We trained a linear support vector machine to discriminate between PO and HC individuals using these WM microstructure data. Post hoc, we investigated the PO model decision scores with respect to sociodemographic (age, education, and IQ) and forensic characteristics (psychopathy, sexual deviance, and future risk of sexual violence) in the PO subpopulation. We assessed model specificity in an external cohort of 53 HC individuals.ResultsThe classifier discriminated PO from HC individuals with a balanced accuracy of 75.5% (sensitivity = 64.3%, specificity = 86.7%, P5000 = 0.018) and an out-of-sample specificity to correctly identify HC individuals of 94.3%. The predictive brain pattern contained bilateral fractional anisotropy in the anterior cingulate cortex, diffusivity in the left amygdala, and structural prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity in both hemispheres. This brain pattern was associated with the number of previous child victims, the current stance on sexuality, and the professionally assessed risk of future sexual violent reoffending.ConclusionAberrant white matter microstructure in the prefronto-temporo-limbic circuit could be a potential neurobiological correlate for PO individuals at high-risk of reoffending with CSA. Although preliminary and exploratory at this point, our findings highlight the general potential of MRI-based biomarkers and particularly WM microstructure patterns for future CSA risk assessment and preventive efforts.

We present the multi-band dual triply irreducible local expansion (D-TRILEX) approach to interacting electronic systems and discuss its numerical implementation. This method is designed for a self-consistent description of multi-orbital systems that can also have several atoms in the unit cell. The current implementation of the D-TRILEX approach is able to account for the frequency- and channel-dependent long-ranged electronic interactions. We show that our method is accurate when applied to small multi-band systems such as the Hubbard-Kanamori dimer. Calculations for the extended Hubbard, the two-orbital Hubbard-Kanamori, and the bilayer Hubbard models are also discussed.

Objective: LITT (laser interstitial thermal therapy) for selective amygdalohippocampectomy (sAH is a minimally invasive surgical treatment option for temporal lobe epilepsies (Willie et al., 2014). LITT-sAH regularly utilizes occipital entry points in order to lesion the amygdalohippocampal complex [for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]

Anguillicoloides crassus is an invasive nematode parasite of the critically endangered\ud European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and possibly one of the primary drivers of eel population\ud collapse. The presence of the parasite has been shown to impact many features of eel\ud physiology and life history. Early detection of the parasite is vital to limit the spread of A.\ud crassus, and to assess its potential impact on spawning biomass. However, until recently,\ud accurate diagnosis of infection could only be achieved via necropsy. To support A. anguilla\ud fisheries management in the context of A. crassus we developed a rapid, non-lethal,\ud minimally invasive and in-situ DNA-based method to infer the presence of the parasite in the\ud swim bladder. Screening of 131 wild eels was undertaken between 2017 and 2019 in Ireland\ud and UK to validate the procedure. DNA extractions and PCR were conducted using both a\ud Qiagen Stool kit at Glasgow University and in situ using Whatman qualitative filter paper\ud No. 1 and a miniPCR DNA Discovery System™. Primers were specifically designed to target\ud the cytochrome oxidase mtDNA gene region and in situ extraction and amplification takes\ud approximately 3h for up to 16 individuals. Our in situ diagnostic procedure demonstrated\ud Positive Predictive Values at 96% and Negative Predictive Values at 87% by comparison to\ud necropsy data. Our method could be a valuable tool in the hands of fisheries managers to\ud enable infection control and help protect this iconic but critically endangered species.

Poster-Abstract