Symposium highlights and synopses of the scientific program: the Sixth Annual Mid-Atlantic Healthcare Informatics Symposium

As the bar to actively participate in one's own health is consistently lowered through technology, patients are helping to evolve traditional workflows to make data more accessible at the point of care. This growing trend of patient engagement and personalized medicine was the focus of the 2013 Mid-Atlantic Healthcare Informatics Symposium in Philadelphia, PA on April 26, 2013. The conference, presented annually by the Center for Bio-medical Informatics (CBMi) at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, featured plenary sessions, panel discussions, and paper presentations on a range of topics, including patient engagement and personalized medicine; using data and analytics to optimize patient care; nursing informatics; and the future of biomedical informatics.

Neural Representation of Vocalizations in the Primate Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

In this study, we examined the role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in encoding communication stimuli. Specifically, we recorded single-unit responses from the ventrolateral prefrontal cortext (vlPFC) in awake behaving rhesus macaques in response to species-specific vocalizations. We determined the selectivity of vlPFC cells for 10 types of rhesus vocalizations and also asked what types of vocalizations cluster together in the neuronal response. The data from the present study demonstrate that vlPFC auditory neurons respond to a variety of species-specific vocalizations from a previously characterized library. Most vlPFC neurons responded to two to five vocalizations, while a small percentage of cells responded either selectively to a particular vocalization type or nonselectively to most auditory stimuli tested. Use of information theoretic approaches to examine vocalization tuning indicates that on average, vlPFC neurons encode information about one or two vocalizations. Further analysis of the types of vocalizations that vlPFC cells typically respond to using hierarchical cluster analysis suggests that the responses of vlPFC cells to multiple vocalizations is not based strictly on the call's function or meaning but may be due to other features including acoustic morphology. These data are consistent with a role for the primate vlPFC in assessing distinctive acoustic features.