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Silvia Brem
Content and goals
In this longitudinal study, we follow a group of children at familial risk for dyslexia from kindergarten age through second grade and investigate the reading learning process. Different measures from behavioural tests and imaging (magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography) reflecting the learning of letter-language sound associations in kindergarten age will be collected for an improved prediction of the children's reading skills. Children who show problems in learning to read will be supported with a newly developed computer game.
This study has three main aims: 1). Improved understanding of reading development in the brain, especially the integration of writing and speech sounds. 2). Improved prediction of preschool reading development in at-risk children. 3). Further development of computerised letter speech sound training to support learning to read in 1st/2nd grade.
Scientific and social context
This study takes a new approach to significantly improve the early identification of children with dyslexia. In this way, children at risk could be supported as early as possible and in a targeted manner through appropriate training in order to reduce problems in learning to read as well as negative school experiences from the very beginning.
Further information: Silvia Brem & SNF
Birgit Kleim & Urte Scholz
Summary
About five to ten percent of the population develop suicidal thoughts in the course of their lives. How these suicidal thoughts and suicidal acts can be predicted is so far relatively unclear and accurate prediction is not possible with certainty, even in vulnerable individuals. The present study examines digital predictors from a current and empirically validated theory of suicidality by Thomas Joiner (Joiner, 2009; Van Orden et al., 2011). Predictors from the Theory, together with other indices, are to be recorded via smartphone in vulnerable persons, patients leaving acute psychiatric care. Subsequently, an algorithm will be developed using machine learning models to predict suicidal thoughts and re-entry into the hospital.
Further information: Birgit Kleim & SNF
Tobias Kleinjung
in cooperation with Alfred Buck, Valerie Treyer, Georgios Mantokoudis, Martin Kompis & Sarang Dalal
Summary
The aim of the study is to investigate the hemisphere-specific effects of postlingually acquired, unilateral deafness and their changes through fitting with a cochlear implant. By means of imaging (positron emission tomography), electrophysiological (electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography) and audiological procedures, it will be shown whether measurable, hemisphere-specific changes in brain function can be traced for right-sided and left-sided acquired deafness. In a second step, it will be investigated whether such neuroplastic changes can be at least partially reversed by rehabilitating the deaf ear with a cochlear implant. The study was also completed in 2017 with regard to data collection. The complex evaluations are currently taking place at the various participating centres (Zurich, Bern, Constance). The results can be expected in 2018.
Further Information: Tobias Kleinjung
Tobias Kleinjung
in cooperation with ESIT (European School for Interdisciplinary Tinnitus Research)
Summary
Tinnitus is a common symptom that in some cases can lead to significant impairment of quality of life. There are many different therapeutic approaches, some of which benefit some patients, but others do not. This suggests that there must be different forms of tinnitus that differ in their underlying pathophysiology and therefore respond differently to therapeutic interventions. In recent decades, basic research has been able to make decisive contributions to understanding the mechanisms of development of chronic tinnitus. However, this has not yet led to the development of universally valid therapeutic approaches that help a majority of patients. One possible reason for the failure of various studies is the small number of patients and the insufficient characterisation of the individual study participants. For this reason, it is necessary to have a standardised instrument to subtype different tinnitus patients. Our research group is involved in the data collection of the TINNET Action ("An Action for Better Understanding the Heterogeneity of Tinnitus to Improve and Develop New Treatments"), a research network funded by the EU under the COST Programme ("European Cooperation in Science and Technology"), which developed a standardised database to allow better subtyping of individual patients. In addition to the data collection, other working groups of the action, with the collaboration of members of our working group, are concerned with the development of international standards in neuroscientific imaging, the definition of uniform criteria in the evaluation of a therapeutic success in tinnitus studies and the identification of genetic factors in the pathogenesis of tinnitus. The four-year project will be completed in 2018. A follow-up action is being planned.
Further Information: Tobias Kleinjung
Martin Meyer, Volker Dellwo & Tobias Kleinjung
Summary
Declining integrity and functioning of the auditory system results in problems understanding spoken language and consequently in difficulties participating in conversations and, as a consequence, in a reduced quality of life. In addition, however, the likelihood of hearing loss inevitably increases with age. In various psychological domains, the influence of age on cognitive abilities is well documented, but little is known about the relationship between ageing processes and language processing. The focus here is therefore on changes in the processing of acoustic information across the lifespan as a function of the ageing brain.
By collecting behavioural measures in combination with electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we will gain insights into changes in behaviour, brain anatomy and neural function related to language processing across the lifespan. It is hypothesised that difficulties in processing rapidly changing acoustic stimuli arise with increasing age and that the ageing brain is therefore increasingly reliant on information that changes more slowly, whereas younger individuals can rely more heavily on fine-grained spoken language information.
Further Information: Martin Meyer & SNF
Paul Hoff, Yvonne Ilg & Anke Maatz
in cooperation with Marina Lienhard, Angelika Linke, Jakob Tanner, Margrit Tröhler, Veronika Rall
Summary
Introduced into academic discourse by Zurich psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908, the term "schizophrenia" quickly led to the abandonment of previous and alternative terms like for instance Emil Kraepelin’s "dementia praecox". Questioning the biological, biographical and social aetiologies of mental illness, the term not only became central to psychiatry but also gained influence in various societal contexts.
Working from the perspectives of psychiatry, philosophy, linguistics, history, and film studies the project aims to provide an analysis of the reception, semantic shift and criticism of the term as well as the metaphor "schizophrenia".
Further information: Yvonne Ilg & Website
Meike Brockmann-Bauser, Jörg E. Bohlender, Robert Hillman, Jarrad H. Van Stan & Daryush D. Mehta
Summary
Spectrum based instrumental acoustic voice measures such as smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) and spectral slope have been associated with laryngeal pathology and perceptual voice quality in voice patients. Recent work has shown that the spectral measure of Harmonics-to-Noise-Ratio (HNR) increases with elevated voice sound pressure level (SPL) in healthy speakers and individuals with voice disorders. It is unclear if similar SPL effects are present in cepstral and other spectral measures. Also, fundamental frequency (F0) tends to covary with speaking SPL in vowel and speech related phonation. Therefore, main aim of the present study is to investigate SPL and F0 effects on CPPS and spectral slope in women with and without voice disorders.
Independent research project between the Phoniatrics and Speech Pathology Research Group, Department of Phoniatrics and Speech Pathology, Clinic for Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University Hospital Zurich in cooperation with Prof. R. Hillman, Dr. D. Mehta, Dr. Jarrad van Stan, Center for Laryngeal Surgery and Voice Rehabilitation, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston USA.
This work was supported in part by the NIH National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under Grant R33 DC011588 and in part by the Voice Health Institute USA.
Further information: Meike Brockmann-Bauser, USZ & NIH
Meike Brockmann-Bauser & Jörg E. Bohlender
Summary
Vocal fatigue has been described as a common complaint in patients with voice disorders. However to date there is no standardized questionnaire in German language to assess specific symptoms. Main aim of this prospective study is to assess the validity and retest reliability of the first German version of the Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI), an English questionnaire developed for voice patients to assess potential symptoms of vocal fatigue.
Further information: Meike Brockmann-Bauser & USZ
Anna Magdalena Elsner
Scientific Abstract
This project seeks to contextualize the meaning of ‘palliative’ within French literature and theory from the 1950s onwards. It proposes that the term’s dual grounding in the humanities and medicine allows us to gain a more nuanced understanding of modern palliative care and its philosophical assumptions about what constitutes a ‘good death’. In the last four decades, palliative care, recognised as a medical sub-speciality and defined by the World Health Organisation in 2002 as a holistic approach to life-threatening illnesses, has been increasingly integrated in the way healthcare systems manage symptoms and treat physical and psychological pain in patients with serious conditions. The project therefore analyses the ways in which twenty-first century and contemporary French narratives about illness and dying debate concepts associated with palliative care, such as pain control, care instead of cure, the integration of family, an individually defined quality of life and the spiritual and psychological accompaniment of the patient. It also more generally questions whether and by what means self-reflective writing constitutes a ‘palliative’ practice or, on the contrary, leads to a subversion of the ‘palliative’ in writing conceived to produce mental and physical distress. It thereby points towards ambivalences in the self-understanding of contemporary medicine, namely whether the revival of a Hippocratic vision in the philosophy of modern palliative care can be established outside of a religious framework and within the scientific convictions driving the age of evidence-based medicine. Methodologically this project relies on interdisciplinary studies in French literature and medicine, comparative approaches developed in narrative medicine and the history and philosophy of medicine and palliative care in France. While it aims to contribute to the field of the Medical Humanities, it also substantiates the philosophy of palliative care with its literary representations, and hopes to trigger a discussion on how to generate more meaningful and humane outcomes in end-of-life care.
Werner Surbeck & Boris B. Quednow
Abstract
The core symptoms of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) include abnormal semantic processing which may rely on the ventral language stream of the human brain. Thus, structural disruption of the ventral language stream may play an important role in semantic deficits observed in SSD patients.
Therefore, we compared white matter tract integrity in SSD patients and healthy controls using diffusion tensor imaging combined with probabilistic fiber tractography. For the ventral language stream, we assessed the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus [IFOF], inferior longitudinal fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus. The arcuate fasciculus and corticospinal tract were used as control tracts. In SSD patients, the relationship between semantic processing impairments and tract integrity was analyzed separately. Three-dimensional tract reconstructions were performed in 45/44 SSD patients/controls (“Bern sample”) and replicated in an independent sample of 24/24 SSD patients/controls (“Basel sample”).
Multivariate analyses of fractional anisotropy, mean, axial, and radial diffusivity of the left IFOF showed significant differences between SSD patients and controls (p(FDR-corr) < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.23) in the Bern sample. Axial diffusivity (AD) of the left UF was inversely correlated with semantic impairments (r = −0.454, p(FDR-corr) = 0.035). In the Basel sample, significant group differences for the left IFOF were replicated (p < .01, ηp2 = 0.29), while the correlation between AD of the left IFOF and semantic processing decline (r = −0.376, p = .09) showed a statistical trend. No significant effects were found for the dorsal language stream.
This is direct evidence for the importance of the integrity of the ventral language stream, in particular the left IFOF, in semantic processing deficits in SSD.
Further information: Publication in Schizophrenia Research
Martin Meyer, Volker Dellwo & Norbert Dillier
Summary
Declining integrity and functioning of the auditory system results in problems understanding spoken language and consequently in difficulties participating in conversations and, as a consequence, in a reduced quality of life. In addition, however, the likelihood of hearing loss inevitably increases with age. In various psychological domains, the influence of age on cognitive abilities is well documented, but little is known about the relationship between ageing processes and language processing. The focus here is therefore on changes in the processing of acoustic information across the lifespan as a function of the ageing brain.
By collecting behavioural measures in combination with electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we will gain insights into changes in behaviour, brain anatomy and neural function related to language processing across the lifespan. It is hypothesised that difficulties in processing rapidly changing acoustic stimuli arise with increasing age and that the ageing brain is therefore increasingly reliant on information that changes more slowly, whereas younger individuals may rely more heavily on fine-grained spoken language information.
We will investigate how listeners of different ages use high- and low-frequency acoustic information. The subjects will be presented with linguistic stimuli that vary in their temporal information content in various behavioural experiments. We are primarily interested in how well listeners from different age groups can assess the acoustic similarity, how well they identify the speakers and how comprehensible the stimuli are for the listeners, and whether there are differences in this respect in different age groups.
Further information: Martin Meyer, Volker Dellwo & SNF
Volker Dellwo & Sascha Frühholz
Summary
Voices are part of our human personality and play an essential role in social interaction between people and in numerous industrial and medical applications. People can be recognised by their voice in terms of their identity and voices contain essential information about emotional states and important personality traits.
Until recently, the social functions of the voice were an inviolable property and 'owned' by the individual, but the digital revolution has fundamentally changed the way speech and voice information can be processed. Some recent breakthroughs, for example, have made it possible to create and copy digital voice recordings of a person's voice profile in just a few minutes. Such technologies offer many opportunities (e.g. medical fields), but also many risks (e.g. voice verification in banking systems).
In this project we will address key issues of digital, cognitive and neural perception of manipulated and synthetic voices in humans. From an 'opportunities' perspective, we will explore how digital voice manipulation can be used to improve digital speech and voice technology (e.g. making voices more trustworthy). From a 'risks' perspective, we will investigate the potential of manipulated voices to deceive people and machines (e.g. people and/or machines can be misled by manipulated voices).
The results of our research will be fundamental to understanding the opportunities and risks of human-machine interaction and the development of secure digital speech technologies.
Further information: Volker Dellwo & SNF
Tobias Kleinjung
in cooperation with Birgit Mazurek & Petra Brüggemann
Summary
Various standardised questionnaires already exist to classify the severity of a ringing in the ears. In the past, these questionnaires were also used for the evaluation of tinnitus therapies, although they were not developed for this purpose. To solve this problem, a new questionnaire, the "Tinnitus Functional Index" (TFI), was developed in 2012 at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). Our research group was already able to validate the TFI translated into German for Switzerland in 2017 (link). At the same time, the TFI was also validated in Germany. However, the German versions for Germany and for Switzerland show slight semantic differences in the individual questions. For this reason, the two German versions of the TFI are being compared within the framework of a current study. In view of the standardisation taking place in tinnitus evaluation, our aim is to agree on one questionnaire in the German-speaking countries.
Further information: Tobias Kleinjung
Tobias Kleinjung
in cooperation with Strekin AG, Technologiepark Basel
Summary
In 2017, our research group began the phase 3 multicentre study initiated by the company Strekin AG (Basel) as the main testing centre in Switzerland to evaluate the efficacy of intratympanally applied STR001 (a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma agonist) in hearing loss. The drug is intended to help protect the hair cells in the inner ear from premature death during the hearing loss event.
Further Information: Tobias Kleinjung
Silvia Brem & Ulla Richardson
Summary
GraphoLearn is a computer-based app fostering reading acquisition in children of the elementary grades. Step by step children are acquainted with increasingly difficult aspects of the written language. With regard to the relatively transparent orthography of the German language, the training is based on phoneme-grapheme correspondences, progressing from very simple, transparent correspondences via semi-transparent to completely opaque ones. First presented in isolation, phoneme-grapheme correspondences appear in progressively larger context. Hence, lexical representations are built, the semantic network is reinforced and automatisms are established. Special attention is payed to the facilitation of reading fluency and comprehension.
Further information: Silvia Brem & GraphoLearn
Tobias Kleinjung & Martin Meyer
in cooperation with ESIT (European School for Interdisciplinary Tinnitus Research)
Summary
The first study on the use of tomographic neurofeedback in patients with chronic tinnitus, which began in 2015, was completed in 2017. Within the framework of the study, 50 patients were treated. The comprehensive data evaluation is currently underway, which forms the basis for a follow-up project. This is dedicated to the development of a personalised neurofeedback therapy programme for chronic tinnitus patients based on individual EEG data.
Further Information: Tobias Kleinjung
Tobias Kleinjung
in cooperation with ESIT (European School for Interdisciplinary Tinnitus Research)
Summary
The cochlear implant (CI) is considered one of the most successful instruments in tinnitus treatment. Within the framework of the European research network described above, a project is investigating the effectiveness of CIs with regard to concomitant tinnitus complaints. At the same time, the further development of a fully implantable CI system is intended to expand the range of application and acceptance of this fully electronic sensory prosthesis (in cooperation with the Otology/Biomechanics of Hearing Research Group).
Further Information: Tobias Kleinjung
