Research that Guides Clinical Decisions

Making smart investment decisions in clinical research

UNLABELLED A recent trial in rheumatoid arthritis found an inexpensive, but infrequently used, combination of therapies is neither inferior nor less safe than an expensive biologic drug. If the trial had been conducted over 10 years ago, arguably 100's of millions of dollars since spent on biologics could have been released to other, more effective treatments. Given the ever increasing number o...

Commentary: Communication between Viruses Guides Lysis–Lysogeny Decisions

Implicit knowledge of visual uncertainty guides decisions with asymmetric outcomes.

Perception is an "inverse problem," in which the state of the world must be inferred from the sensory neural activity that results. However, this inference is both ill-posed (Helmholtz, 1856; Marr, 1982) and corrupted by noise (Green & Swets, 1989), requiring the brain to compute perceptual beliefs under conditions of uncertainty. Here we show that human observers performing a simple visual cho...

Posterior Parietal Cortex Guides Visual Decisions in Rats.

Neurons in putative decision-making structures can reflect both sensory and decision signals, making their causal role in decisions unclear. Here, we tested whether rat posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is causal for processing visual sensory signals or instead for accumulating evidence for decision alternatives. We disrupted PPC activity optogenetically during decision making and compared effect...

A Denoising Autoencoder that Guides Stochastic Search

An algorithm is described that adaptively learns a non-linear mutation distribution. It works by training a denoising autoencoder (DA) online at each generation of a genetic algorithm to reconstruct a slowly decaying memory of the best genotypes so far. A compressed hidden layer forces the autoencoder to learn hidden features in the training set that can be used to accelerate search on novel pr...