BACKGROUND In many African countries, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services are predominantly delivered by nurses. Although task-shifting is not yet well established, community health workers (CHWs) are often informally used as part of PMTCT delivery. According to the 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) Task-shifting Guidelines, many PMTCT tasks can be shifted from...

This paper describes the Synalp-Empathic system that competed in SemEval-2014 Task 9B Sentiment Analysis in Twitter. Our system combines syntactic-based valence shifting rules with a supervised learning algorithm (Sequential Minimal Optimization). We present the system, its features and evaluate their impact. We show that both the valence shifting mechanism and the supervised model enable to re...

OBJECTIVE Set-shifting difficulties have been reported in subjects with anorexia nervosa and appear to persist after recovery; therefore, they may be endophenotypic traits. The goals of this study were to investigate whether set-shifting difficulties are familial by examining discordant sister-pairs in comparison with healthy unrelated women and to replicate, with a broader battery, the lack of...

BACKGROUND Somalia is one of the most political unstable countries in the world. Ongoing insecurity has forced an inconsistent medical response by the international community, with little data collection. This paper describes the "remote" model of surgical care by Medecins Sans Frontieres, in Guri-El, Somalia. The challenges of providing the necessary prerequisites for safe surgery are discusse...

People with eating disorders (EDs) are reported to have set-shifting difficulties, strengths in local or detailed information processing and weak central coherence or global processing. This study aimed to explore the validity of a novel, brief, global, neurocognitive task which has not previously been utilised in an ED population, the Navon Figures Task (NFT). The NFT is substantially quicker ...

This study investigated the extent to which cognitive measures of individual differences predict strategy shifts in a series of procedural-motor curve-drawing tasks. College students participated in a task which required them to trace or draw various forms of a figure-8 before completing a battery of cognitive tests. Three distinct drawing strategies emerged, and the tendency to vary these stra...

OBJECTIVES Recent research suggests certain neuropsychological deficits occur in anorexia nervosa (AN). The role of starvation in these deficits remains unclear. Studies of individuals without AN can elucidate our understanding of the effect of short-term starvation on neuropsychological performance. METHODS Using a within-subjects repeated measures design, 60 healthy female participants were...

Weight-shift training during stroke rehabilitation requires patient effort, potentially causing leg spasticity and anxiety, which disturb motor learning. The purpose of this study was (1) to devise an implicit guidance method for weight bearing that uses vibratory cues (and is therefore low exertion) and (2) to determine if the implicit guidance method is feasible. The first experiment included...

Alterations in executive control and cognitive flexibility, such as attentional set-shifting abilities, are core features of several neuropsychiatric diseases. The most widely used neuropsychological tests for the evaluation of attentional set-shifting in human subjects are the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the CANTAB Intra-/Extra-dimensional set shift task (ID/ED). These tasks have pr...