Gap prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle (GPIAS) method has been used effectively for the objective assessment of tinnitus in animals. Among two types of enclosures for the GPIAS, the unconstrained type carries less risk of animal death due to the absence of binding stress in the enclosure, and lack of need for alteration to animal size variation as it grows. However, animals' voluntary movements, which have no relation to the startles evoked by acoustic stimuli, are problematic, as they cannot be excluded in the case of the unconstrained enclosure based GPIAS measurement system. In order to discount voluntary movements which are not associated with external acoustic stimuli, we propose the conditional random interstimulus interval (CR ISI) method for unconstrained enclosure based GPIAS measurement. With the proposed ISI method, the unconstrained enclosure based acoustic startle response measurement system has been implemented in this paper. As a result, the effectiveness of the proposed CR ISI method has been verified and compared with those of conventional ISI methods through animal experiments using SD-rats. The experimental results showed that abnormal startle responses and invalid GPIAS values caused by motion were prevented when our proposed CR ISI method was applied to our implemented system. It was also verified that our proposed CR ISI method is advantageous in reducing the total experimental time for acquiring normal startle responses and valid GPIAS values, compared to conventional ISI methods, since our proposed CR ISI can begin the acoustic stimulation only when the animal gets stable and motionless.
Acoustic Stimulation ; Acoustics ; Animal Experimentation ; Animals ; Integrin alpha2 ; Methods ; Prepulse Inhibition ; Reflex, Startle ; Tinnitus

Objectives: The outbreak of Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was one of the major events in South Korea in 2015. In particular, this study pays attention to formulating a mathematical model for MERS transmission dynamics and estimating transmission rates. Methods: Incidence data of MERS-CoV from the government authority was analyzed for the first aim and a mathematical model was built and analyzed for the second aim of the study. A mathematical model for MERS-CoV transmission dynamics is used to estimate the transmission rates in two periods due to the implementation of intensive interventions. Results: Using the estimates of the transmission rates, the basic reproduction number was estimated in two periods. Due to the superspreader, the basic reproduction number was very large in the first period; however, the basic reproduction number of the second period has reduced significantly after intensive interventions. Conclusion It turned out to be the intensive isolation and quarantine interventions that were the most critical factors that prevented the spread of the MERS outbreak. The results are expected to be useful to devise more efficient intervention strategies in the future.