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Royal Melbourne Hospital

2 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Medicine

A Method of Trigonometric Modelling of Seasonal Variation Demonstrated with Multiple Sclerosis Relapse Data

Tim Spelman^1,2, Orla Gray³, Robyn Lucas⁴, Helmut Butzkueven^1,2

¹Department of Neurology, Royal Melbourne Hospital, ²Department of Medicine (RMH), The University of Melbourne, ³Department of Neurology, Ulster Hospital, ⁴National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University

Combining plot analysis with trigonometric regression is a robust method for exploring complex, cyclical phenomena such as relapse onset timing in multiple sclerosis (MS). This method enabled unbiased characterisation of seasonal trends in relapse onset permitting novel inferences around the influence of seasonal variation, ultraviolet radiation (UVR) and latitude.

Neuroscience

Operant Protocols for Assessing the Cost-benefit Analysis During Reinforced Decision Making by Rodents

Mojtaba Kermani^*1,3, Zahra Fatahi^*2, Dechuan Sun³, Abbas Haghparast², Chris French^3,4

¹Department of Optometry and Vision Science, The University of Melbourne, ²Neuroscience Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Science, ³Department of Medicine, The University of Melbourne, ⁴Royal Melbourne Hospital

A cost-benefit analysis is a weighing-scale approach that the brain performs during the course of decision making. Here, we propose a protocol to train rats on an operant-based decision-making paradigm where rats choose higher rewards at the expense of waiting for 15 s to receive them.