College students experience a high prevalence of mood disorders, largely due to unstable life structure. This group encounters multiple barriers in accessing mental health treatment, including a...Show moreCollege students experience a high prevalence of mood disorders, largely due to unstable life structure. This group encounters multiple barriers in accessing mental health treatment, including a demanding schedules limited time, stigma, and a tight budget. Moodpep, an online eHealth intervention designed to address depressive symptoms, helps overcome these barriers. This study investigated the effectiveness of Moodpep, a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy based online intervention for students with depressive symptoms, and examined whether its effects persisted during follow-up. Additionally, this study explored the impact of gender, concurrent treatment, and the differential improvement between clinically and subclinically depressed participants. The sample consisted of 255 students from 9 universities in the Netherlands. Repeated measures ANOVA and independent samples t-tests were used for data-analysis. The findings indicated that depressive symptoms significantly reduced after completing Moodpep, with these improvements maintained at the six-month follow-up. Gender and concurrent treatments did not have a significant effect on the outcomes. Notably, participants with clinical levels of depression showed greater improvement compared to those with subclinical symptoms. Despite these promising results, the study faced limitations, including high dropout rates, uncertainty regarding the reasons for dropout, lack of a control group and regression toward the mean. Future research should focus on understanding dropout causes, conducting randomized controlled trials, evaluating long-term effects, and exploring the integration of eHealth interventions with traditional face-to-face treatments. Moodpep offers a promising early intervention for depressive symptoms by providing an anonymous, travel-free, flexible treatment option accessible to all students. The practical implication could be increased by raising awareness of Moodpep's availability.Show less
Electrical properties tomography (ETP) enables find the electrical properties of tissues in a non-invasive method by using the magnetic fields of an MRI scanner. EPT can be used in clinic to assess...Show moreElectrical properties tomography (ETP) enables find the electrical properties of tissues in a non-invasive method by using the magnetic fields of an MRI scanner. EPT can be used in clinic to assess lesions in the breast. Still, there is a lot of variance between inter-subject conductivity values. In this project, we studied the effect of SNR, which we varied by receiving the signal with different coils. The effect of the pulse sequence was investigated by scanning a phantom and a healthy volunteer with a 3D turbo spin echo (TSE), a 3D balanced steady state free precession (bSSFP) and additionally the healthy volunteer was scanned with a 2D TSE. Lastly, we studied the effect of noise-smoothing operations by pre-processing the data with a Gaussian filter with a standard deviation of 2 pixels and post-processing with a 5x5 pixel median filter. We found that the noise does not affect the mean value of the conductivity. Also, the noise can be smoothed with the operations described above. Artifacts caused by acquisition does influence the values that we obtained. From the sequences that were used, we found that the 2D TSE resulted in the best conductivity map. In the future, we hope to differentiate benign from malignant tumors in breast data by applying this sequence in the clinic, such that histology of the tumoral tissue can be abolished.Show less