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BVB overcome next obstacle on the road to Europe – Kehl: "On a really good path" | OneFootballBorussia Dortmund
After 16 points and 19 goals from the last six games, hope of a happy ending has returned to BVB
who at one point had slipped to 11th place
I think we've increased the pressure on the other teams,’ said Sebastian Kehl
commenting on the significantly improved position ahead of the final two games in Leverkusen and at home against Kiel
"We're on a really good path to achieving what the team are capable of
I see great desire and a great willingness to run," said the sporting director
The 4-0 (1-0) win over VfL Wolfsburg saw Borussia climb to fourth place
thanks to braces from Serhou Guirassy (3/59) and Karim Adeyemi (69/73)
SC Freiburg could move past them again with a point in their home game against Bayer Leverkusen on Sunday (17:30 CEST)
But Saturday's success at SIGNAL IDUNA PARK
which was played in front of a sell-out crowd of 81,365
bolstered Kehl's confidence: "If we win both games
But that's where we want to be after Matchday 34."
Only the brilliant interplay between two key players broke the deadlock
Gross set up a goal for Guirassy - this time in spectacular style
the midfielder left three Wolfsburg players standing on the byline and provided a perfect assist for the centre-forward
This exact same move earned Gross a great deal of respect during his time in the Premier League with Brighton & Hove Albion
"I've been doing that trick for a long time
they used to call it the Cruyff turn," commented the midfielder with a mischievous smile
Adeyemi also had a huge role to play in the win
The forward was only on the pitch for 20 minutes
but he was clearly keen to recommend himself for a place in the starting XI in future
Less than 120 seconds after coming on as a substitute for Jamie Gittens (67)
he increased the lead to 3-0 after a fine solo run and scored the next goal just four minutes later
"Karim did a really impressive job," said coach Kovac
The positive trend of the past few weeks and the encouraging personnel situation increases the anticipation for the pivotal match next Sunday (15:30 CEST) away to second-placed Leverkusen
coach Kovac sees no reason for complacency: "The team are now at a really good level
That's why we'll continue to point out what we need to do."
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Consistent reports have indicated that Borussia Dortmund are considering offloading Julian Brandt this summer
ahead of Dortmund’s 4-0 win over Wolfsburg on Saturday
sporting director Sebastian Kehl played down the speculation
saying the 29-year-old is likely to remain at the club next season
“The likelihood is high - he has a contract
But we’re not that far along yet; we haven’t talked about it,” Kehl told Sky Germany when asked about Brandt’s future
Brandt has recently reminded Dortmund of his value
scoring in last week’s 3-2 win over Hoffenheim and registering two assists in the dominant victory against Wolfsburg
The attacking midfielder joined Dortmund from Bayer Leverkusen in 2019 for a fee of €25 million
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April 14 at The Center at Lincoln skilled nursing facility
Known to all as "Larry," he was a son
Larry will be remembered as a great "mushball" of a man
with an immensely positive attitude and a big heart that relished giving tight hugs
He was a technology enthusiast and loved dogs
rarely living without at least one at home
He avidly pursued interests in photography and in smoking meats
A graduate of Smoky Hill High School in 1981 and DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix
AZ in 1984 with a diploma in Industrial Electronics & Technology
Larry's primary career was spent as a lead technician in the burglar/fire alarm and fire suppression systems industry
Larry fulfilled his youthful dream by working as a lift operator and ski school instructor at Keystone Ski Resort
Many of Larry's fondest memories were from his years living in Dillon
CO where he was hired by Apex Security for his first job in alarm systems
While living in Summit County he served as a volunteer fire fighter
often driving the the firetruck during 4th of July parades
Larry and Joan built a beloved family home on CO Highway 9 at over 11,000 ft
close to Hoosier Pass where they welcomed their son James into the world in 2003
son and the Beck family to international destinations including Italy and the Virgin Islands.
and had a special place in his heart for the many hours spent at his family home with his father
It was during those fruitful hours of working in the garden
fixing the sprinklers and maintaining the stalwart Wheel Horse tractor along side his "best friend" and dad where Larry developed his dedication to family and caring that ran throughout his life
A celebration of Larry's life will be held at the family home on Saturday
Anyone so moved would be encouraged to make a donation in Larry's name to Catholic Charities of Denver or the local animal shelter of your choice
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She was the second youngest of eight siblings; Ernest Weller
Because of the terrible times of World War II
those in her family that were left in England and did not serve in the military were forced to flee to the United States
but those in her family did not think twice to become proud American citizens
Janet graduated from Hicksville High School at the age of 15
she started her training to become a registered nurse
She worked numerous jobs; she was a nurse at Eastern Long Island Hospital
wore badge number 23 as a Southold Town Police Officer and was the truant officer for Southold School District
She was also a devoted member of Southold and South Carolina Methodist church where she was seen every Sunday singing her praises to the Lord
and remained deeply in love and devoted to him till his passing on May 4
on their 58th anniversary and his 83rd birthday
Janet is survived by her siblings Robert Weller
Audrey Loukides and Eric Weller; her sister-in-law Lena Slodki; and her cousin Barbara Davids
She is survived by her children Robert Kehl (Joanne)
Janet is also survived by her grandchildren Robert Kehl
Richard Pisacano and Stephenie Pisacano-Shetell
She is also survived by her great-grandchildren Luca Shetell
A celebration of life will be held at The Vine at North Fork Southold United Methodist Church on Saturday
She will be buried at a later date at the Calverton National Cemetery in Wading River
the family asks that donations be made to in memory of Janet M
Kehl to either Calverton National Cemetery to help maintain the grounds where Janet and Andrew will be buried together
or to The Vine at North Fork Southold United Methodist Church (631-734-6033)
DeFriest-Grattan Funeral Home in Southold is serving the family
who has turned around his tennis game with..
Leon Maurice Creighton of Greenport Village died Monday
With the birth of river otter pups at the Long Island Aquarium and possible sightings of otters at Marion..
Dorothy Ellen Kehl age 85 of Beloit died Tuesday October 22
1939 to Royal and Lucille (Neyhard) Canfield in Shopiere
Dorothy worked as a die cast operator for 25 years until her retirement on October 29
She was an active member of Grace Evangelical Free Church
Dorothy loved her family and cherished her time with her grandchildren and great grandchildren
Dorothy will be remembered for devoting her life to the Lord
thirty seven great grandchildren and her brother Rev
Special thanks to Lisa Leach and the staff at Beloit Memorial Hospital
Dorothy’s Funeral Service will be at 12 Noon on Saturday October 26
Friends will be received on Saturday in the Funeral Home from 10:00 a.m
Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared on our website
Jernaro Gilford had no idea at the time
but when he picked off Utah’s Lance Rice late in the fourth quarter in 2001
he did much more than seal BYU’s come-from-behind victory
Gilford made an indelible impression on Bryan Kehl
“I was a senior in high school sitting in the student-recruiting section
That play was iconic,” Kehl told the “Y’s Guys” podcast this week
He was such an incredible player and a great teammate
Gilford is still making plays in the Cougars secondary — as the cornerbacks coach and newly promoted defensive passing game coordinator
“He has maximized the output of the guys he’s had,” he said
“The way we have covered on the outside and at the back end is unprecedented
I would argue that we have never been so complete in our secondary
tackling and (being) assignment sound and that is why they were so good last year.”
BYU finished its 11-2 season tied with Texas for the most interceptions (22) and ranked No
1 in total defense and scoring defense in the Big 12
I was hoping for six wins and then they went through the roof
“The best programs compete every single year
What can I do to get better?” The former linebacker said about his approach to spring drills
21 tackles-for-loss and three interceptions at BYU (2002
Watching the Giants beat the Patriots on Feb
2012 in Super Bowl XLVI was a painful sight for Kehl to see
New York’s 2008 fourth-round draft pick was released in 2011 and quickly signed by the lowly Rams
“I still remember sitting at my parent’s house all by myself watching that game
anger and resentment (with) all my buddies celebrating on the field,” Kehl said
Adding salt to his emotional wound was the fact that it wasn’t the first time the Giants won the Big Game without him
“I missed (the Super Bowl) twice because (New York) won it the year before I got there and they won it the year after I left,” he said
Kehl played 72 games over six seasons in the NFL (2008-13)
Among his 95 solo tackles was a hit he will never forget
Minnesota’s Adrian Peterson took the handoff
and the Giants rookie stuck him in the backfield for a loss
“He got up afterward and tapped me on the helmet and genuinely said
“It was one of those moments that was like
He’s such a superstar and that interaction was cool.”
Peterson retired after 15 seasons and remains No
5 among the NFL’s all-time leading rushers with 14,918 yards
He would have had a few more had Kehl not dropped him in the backfield in 2008
Dave McCann is a sportswriter and columnist for the Deseret News and is a play-by-play announcer and show host for BYUtv/ESPN+. He co-hosts “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com and is the author of the children’s book “C is for Cougar,” available at deseretbook
Support us
She was the second youngest of eight siblings
her family fled to the United States when she was 13
Janet graduated from Hicksville High School at 15 and began her training to become a registered nurse at 16
She worked as a registered nurse at Eastern Long Island Hospital
and was the truant officer for the Southold School District
She was a devoted member of the Southold and South Carolina Methodist churches
and they remained deeply in love until his passing on May 4
by her children: Robert (Joanne) of Southold
She is also survived by eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren
A service will be held at The Vine at North Fork Southold United Methodist Church in Southold as “A Celebration of Life” on Nov
She will be buried at a later date at Calverton National Cemetery in Wading River
donations may be made in memory of Janet M
Kehl to Calverton National Cemetery or The Vine at North Fork Southold United Methodist Church
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Borussia Dortmund have extended the contract of Sebastian Kehl
has been in the role since 2022 but was out of contract this summer
The uncertainty around his future had become an increasing distraction for the club
It’s been a complicated political period for Dortmund
Long-term CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke will leave in the summer of 2025
inherited part of Watzke’s responsibilities
within a newly-created sporting managing director role
and his future has been in doubt ever since
The return of former chief scout Sven Mislintat — with whom Kehl has a strained relationship — as technical director
In an interview with Sky Deutschland in 2024
he admitted to being a “little disappointed” at not receiving the promotion
but insisted that he was “happy” for Ricken and that the two “enjoyed a long-term
the club have maintained that an extension for Kehl — who captained Borussia Dortmund as a player and made over 350 appearances – was a priority
Ricken stressed that again at the club’s November AGM
Nevertheless, without a formal agreement in place, speculation has continued around his future, and at a time when — on the field — Dortmund are enduring an awkward season under new coach Nuri Sahin, who was appointed in the summer.
It meant that the transition on the pitch was being mirrored at the executive level above Sahin
with Kehl now under contract for a further three years and the club’s recruiting direction assured
Dortmund consider loan move for Rashford from Man United
“I am extremely committed to Borussia Dortmund and am delighted to be able to continue working for this great club,” said Kehl upon the confirmation of his contract extension
“I feel the trust our management has in me as sporting director and I would like to thank Lars in particular for the good and constructive discussions over the past few weeks.”
Ricken added: “Sebastian and I have known and trusted each other for many years
In recent weeks we have had intensive discussions about content
structures and economic issues and have now brought these to a positive conclusion
“Our primary goal is clear: We want to be continuously represented in the Champions League in the coming years and play the necessary role in the Bundesliga
Sebastian has my full support on this path.”
(Top photo: Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images)
He was the proud big brother to his sister
and an intensive engineering program at the University of Colorado
After serving our country in the Army and the United States National Guard
he had a fifty plus year career at the phone company
One of his fondest career memories was his appointment to the National ESAC Committee
He enjoyed years of collaboration and friendship
Bob enjoyed coaching his sons’ baseball and soccer teams
He had a knack of turning underdogs into winners on and off the field
He also logged many hours volunteering at the National Sports Center for the Disabled in Winter Park and Meals on Wheels in Littleton
In his retirement years he worked in West Yellowstone at the Museum
He loved touring others in the Yellowstone Historic Yellow Bus and sharing his vast knowledge of Yellowstone National Park
He was a man that will be remembered for a Coke and a smile
Until we meet again… Rest in Peace Big Bob
Services to be held at Fort Logan National Cemetery on November 1
Information will be provided at the service.
Enter your phone number above to have directions sent via text
Kehl speaks on Brandt's uncertain futureBulinewsApril 28
2025 at 7:32 AM UTC·1 min readBorussia Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl has commented on the future of Julian Brandt following recent speculation about a summer move
who scored in Saturday’s 3-2 victory over Hoffenheim
received strong backing from Kehl after his performance
and he’s an incredibly important player for us," Kehl told Sky Germany
Brandt has just one year left on his contract
and unless both parties are keen on an extension
Dortmund may look to cash in on him this summer
and he will continue to be in the coming weeks,” said Kehl
I know he’s 100 percent BVB - and players like him are what we need."
Borussia Dortmund's sporting director Sebastian Kehl entered the mixed zone after today's victory over Borussia Mönchengladbach
The 45-year-old praised the team for their hard work and determination to see out the result
"We've now had two 'English weeks' in a row and still managed to produce a really good performance
My compliments to the team for the way they put up a fight again today
ran a lot more and had a lot more possession
we could have made it a little easier for ourselves in the end
We've had other phases this season where we might have ended up drawing games like this," Kehl added
Daniel Svensson also faced the media after a memorable day in yellow and black - the 23-year-old Swede ended up netting Dortmund's third goal on the day and his first for the club
"I enjoy training and playing here every day
And then in front of this crowd - it's just incredible and so emotional
I actually scored my first goal at my previous club with a header," he explained.
age 92 of Crosby passed away on February 18
2025 at the Cuyuna Regional Medical Center in Crosby
He was born in Aitkin on September 21
1932 to Grant and Helen (Borg) Kehl. Don was a retired employee of Potlatch in Brainerd with 34 years of service
Don was a member of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Crosby and the Walter Scott Erickson American Legion Post #557 of Deerwood. Survivors include one son
Shirley Davies of Aitkin; two grandchildren
Anthony Kehl of Barnesville and Chassidy Kehl of Brainerd; and three great grandchildren. Preceding Don in death are his parents; his wife
Robert and Willard Kehl. A Memorial service will be held at 2:00 p.m
2025 at the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Crosby with full military honors presented by the Walter Scott Erickson American Legion Post
Visitation will be one hour prior to the service at the church on Friday
Burial will be at the Bethlehem Lutheran Cemetery in Nordland Township
Arrangements are with the Koop Funeral Home in Crosby
The basic reason for this struggle is that Mislintat wants Kehl’s job and this has resulted in the pair not getting on
When Mislintat returned to the club it was hoped that his way of working would help spark success at the club
but it has not and the pair cannot work together and limit their interactions
When it comes to transfer issues the pair have different views
the arrivals of Waldemar Anton and Pascal Groß were Mislintat’s ideas
while Yan Couto and Maximilian Beier were Sebastian Kehl’s ideas
The only player the pair agreed on was the signing of Serhou Guirassy
But it is not just Kehl that Mislintat did this with, the former Arsenal and Stuttgart director wanted Rayan Cherki, while Nuri Şahin did not
and Mislintat also negotiated with Yakuba Minteh over a potential transfer without Kehl knowing before the winger moved to Brighton
Kehl is said to be in a very weak position
especially as he was not promoted to be Hans-Joachim Watzke’s replacement and Lars Ricken was handed the role instead
Kehl has lost Slaven Stanic and Eduard Graf from the Dortmund staff who were pro-Kehl
This has resulted in Kehl’s ideas usually being voted against
Kehl previously tried to extend the contract of Mats Hummels as well as sign Dean Huijsen for €15m from Juventus
but the ideas were rejected and Anton came in instead
The same thing happened 18 months ago when Kehl proposed the signing of Edson Alvarez
GGFN | Jack Meenan
playGomez: Gio Reyna is 'rotting' at Borussia Dortmund (1:06)Herc Gomez explains why he thinks Gio Reyna should leave Borussia Dortmund in this transfer window
adding that "he could become important for us" this season
Reyna made 11 appearances for Dortmund in the first half of the season before being loaned to Nottingham Forest, where he saw little action and did not persuade the Premier League club to make the move permanent
prompting rumours Dortmund might seek to transfer him
There's nothing on the table and I haven't heard that the player wants to leave," Kehl told Bild
who said he expects Reyna to stay this season under new head coach Nuri Sahin
Reyna played in Saturday's Bundesliga opener, going in at the 81st minute in the team's 2-0 win over Eintracht Frankfurt
Kehl said Reyna has a chance to grow into a role at Dortmund
"He has to accept his role, free himself from it," Kehl said. "It was clear when we had the talks in the summer that Gio wanted to take on this role
that there will be enough games in which we need him
We know that he has incredible abilities."
Gio Reyna played minutes in Dortmund's 2-0 win over Eintracht Frankfurt last weekend. Leon Kuegeler/Getty Images"He worked on himself, worked on his stability, worked on his charisma," Kehl said. "This clever turning between the lines and his goal threat -- he has developed that further
Gio can still be very important for us this season."
Dortmund play at Werder Bremen next Saturday before the international break. The U.S. will host Canada in Kansas City
7 and New Zealand in Cincinnati three days later in a pair of friendlies
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Westminster University in Salt Lake City is seen in this photo from Saturday Sept
A lawsuit filed against the school by a former soccer player was dismissed in December 2024
A high-profile lawsuit filed by a former soccer player against Westminster University last year has been tossed out — but the dismissal was not based on whether there was merit to her sexual harassment and hazing allegations
a federal judge threw out Naomi Kehl’s case this week on a technicality: She no longer had an attorney representing her
And 21 days after her representation withdrew
Kehl also failed to respond to the court’s request asking about her intentions on moving forward
meaning she can refile later if she does find an attorney
The decision puts an end — at least for now — to the case that initially drew widespread attention against the small private university in Salt Lake City
In her lawsuit, Kehl had alleged that when she was a freshman on the women’s soccer team in April 2021, she and other new players were forced to take part in an “initiation ritual,” where they had to answer sexual questions in front of male coach Tony LeBlanc
She said it took place on a bus to an away game
“How many sexual partners have you had?” and “What is your favorite sexual position?” were among the questions
They would become increasingly explicit until the player answering had nothing left to say
or broke down crying from embarrassment or anxiety from the game they called “the hot seat.”
LeBlanc, who is also an assistant attorney general for Utah
piped in with his own follow-up questions and laughed at the players’ answers
Kehl said some of the players didn’t want to participate but felt they must to avoid repercussions
including being benched for games if they didn’t
she called the experience sexual harassment and said the coach had an obligation to not let the ritual happen — and not to join in
went to complain about it to administrators
LeBlanc then allegedly retaliated against her and benched her for four games
Kehl argued that it wasn’t appropriate for the coach to continue in his position and that he violated federal Title IX law on sexual harassment
LeBlanc is a Westminster alumnus who played for the men’s soccer team, according to his biography on the school’s website. He has coached the college’s women’s soccer team the entire time it has existed and is still currently listed as head coach.
He has worked in the Utah attorney general’s office since 2010; initially, when the lawsuit was filed, he was placed on leave while the office internally investigated the allegations. A spokesperson for the office said the investigation “did not substantiate any of the allegations,” and LeBlanc returned to work.
Kehl’s lawsuit was originally filed by the Lento Law Group, with three attorneys there representing her. One stepped down in April, according to the court docket, and the other two followed later in the summer. A spokesperson for the group did not respond to a request for comment from The Salt Lake Tribune.
Calls to Kehl and her father this week also were not answered.
Westminster had pushed for the case to be dropped based on Kehl’s lack of representation. The school also filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying her claims that the school did not take action were unfounded.
When the university received the report from Kehl’s father, Westminster said it investigated the allegations, suspended the coach for two games and required all athletes on the soccer team to complete Title IX training.
Title IX law, the school said in its filing, “does not require ‘flawless investigations or perfect solutions.’”
It continued that Kehl “cannot succeed in her claim that Westminster [University] remained deliberately indifferent to her. She may not like the outcome reached, but her complaint fails to assert deliberate indifference.”
The school also argued that the alleged “hot seat” game happened once, was not “pervasive” and did not deny Kehl of educational opportunities. Westminster also claimed the decision to bench Kehl was not made by LeBlanc — and instead by another coach — and was based on another player performing better as goalkeeper.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the school issued a brief statement: “Westminster University is pleased the legal process resulted in a dismissal of the claim.”
For e-edition questions or comments, contact customer support 801-237-2900 or email subscribe@sltrib.com
sltrib.com © 1996-2025 The Salt Lake Tribune
Metrics details
the underlying neural processes of human olfaction are still poorly understood at the fundamental—that is
Here we report recordings of single-neuron activity in the piriform cortex and medial temporal lobe in awake humans performing an odour rating and identification task
We identified odour-modulated neurons within the piriform cortex
neuronal firing accurately encodes odour identity
repeated odour presentations reduce response firing rates
demonstrating central repetition suppression and habituation
Different medial temporal lobe regions have distinct roles in odour processing
with amygdala neurons encoding subjective odour valence
and hippocampal neurons predicting behavioural odour identification performance
Whereas piriform neurons preferably encode chemical odour identity
hippocampal activity reflects subjective odour perception
we identify that piriform cortex neurons reliably encode odour-related images
supporting a multimodal role of the human piriform cortex
We also observe marked cross-modal coding of both odours and images
especially in the amygdala and piriform cortex
we identify neurons that respond to semantically coherent odour and image information
demonstrating conceptual coding schemes in olfaction
Our results bridge the long-standing gap between animal models and non-invasive human studies and advance our understanding of odour processing in the human brain by identifying neuronal odour-coding principles
regional functional differences and cross-modal integration
Odours activate olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs)
which is connected to hippocampus (Hp) and PHC
Innermost clinical electrodes projected to the MNI-ICBM152 template
The post-implantation computed tomography (CT) scan
co-registered onto the pre-implantation MRI scan
schematic (top right) and scalpel-trimmed microwire (bottom right; scanning electron microscopy (SEM))
Respiratory depth (mean ± s.e.m.) aligned to odour delivery
The odour rating and identification task: 15 odours (+1 odourless control) were presented 8 times in a pseudorandom order
the participants rated (like or dislike) each odour
the participants identified the correct odour (four options; four times per odour)
showing ratings (left) and correct identification (right)
The box plots show the median values (centre lines)
and the whiskers span data within 1.5× the interquartile range
Statistical analysis of odour identification was performed using two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests versus chance (25%; dashed line); for all 15 odours
The firing rate varied significantly with odour identity (left; one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
Odour-modulated neurons per session and region (mean ± s.e.m.)
EC and hippocampus host significant populations of odour-modulated neurons (PC
P = 0.78; two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests versus chance; the dashed line indicates 5%)
EC and hippocampus increase their firing rate (FR) after odour stimulation versus the odourless controls (PC
P = 0.63; all compared with control: n = 404
P < 10−10; two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests)
PSTHs (odour-modulated (red) versus other (grey) neurons; 50 ms bins)
Odour-modulated neurons increase firing in all regions except in the PHC (two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests comparing z-scored firing rates (0–2 s after odour onset) against zero; PC
Diagrams were created using BioRender (a) and Noun Project (e)
it remains unclear whether and how individual neurons respond to olfactory cues and encode odour identity
We therefore investigated the individual contributions of central olfactory areas to odour processing and their link to human behaviour at the neuronal level
We took advantage of the rare opportunity to record individual neuron activity in the human PC and MTL during an odour rating and identification task
Such single-unit recordings offer unique insights that bridge the long-standing gap between animal electrophysiology and human imaging studies in olfactory research
We identified odour-modulated neurons that effectively encode odour identity
We further demonstrate a distinct role of the amygdala in emotional processing of odours and highlight hippocampal involvement in odour identification
not only do our recordings reveal that PC neurons are able to encode the identity of odour-related images
but they also demonstrate cross-modal integration of visual and olfactory information in both the PC and amygdala
whereas no such increase was observed in the parahippocampal cortex (PHC)
our findings firmly establish the existence of odour-modulated neurons both in the human PC and MTL
Odour-identity decoding: neuronal spiking was used to train decoders to predict odour identity (here
The odour-identity decoding accuracy per region
Each red dot shows the decoding performance based on 200 randomly drawn neurons (1,000 subsampling runs)
The decoding performance (mean ± s.e.m.) across subsampling runs is shown in black
The grey dots indicate the decoding performance on label-permuted data
The chance level (6.25%) is indicated by the dashed horizontal line
Significance was calculated based on the percentile of mean decoding performance of the real data within the surrogate distribution (PC
P = 0.16; label permutation test with n = 1,000 permutations)
Odour-identity decoding (mean ± s.e.m.) as a function of the number of neurons included (100 subsampling runs)
The horizontal bars below the dashed line (chance level) indicate neuron counts with significant odour-identity decoding (P < 0.05
right-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests against chance
with Bonferroni correction for different neuron counts)
Odour-identity decoding (mean ± s.e.m.) as a function of the decoding time window beginning at odour onset (200 randomly drawn neurons
The horizontal bars below the dashed line (chance level) indicate the times of significant decoding performance (P < 0.05
right-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test against chance
with Bonferroni correction for 80 time windows; beginning of sustained significant decoding: PC
The odour decoding performance (mean ± s.e.m.
black) per recording session and region (coloured dots)
Despite the limited and variable neuron counts per session
odour identity could be decoded significantly above chance (6.25%
14 out of n = 17 sessions showed significant decoding compared to 1,000 odour-label-permuted data
Diagrams were created using BioRender (a) and Noun Project (a)
our analyses reveal differences in sparseness across central odour-processing areas
in conjunction with central repetition suppression
This correlation was observed in a significant number of sessions (6 out of n = 27
P = 0.002) and participants (4 out of n = 17
Linear regressions (black) with 95% confidence intervals (grey)
Odour identification: the participants chose the odour label
Neuronal odour-decoding accuracy and behavioural odour-identification performance across regions and sessions (coloured dots)
The decoding accuracy in the hippocampus was positively correlated with behavioural odour-identification performance across sessions (Spearman correlation
The difference in decoding accuracies based on chemical versus perceived (selected) odour identity
PC neurons decoded chemical odour identity more reliably
whereas hippocampal neurons predicted selected odour labels more accurately (PC
75.8% chemical versus 22.1% perceived more accurate
P < 10−10; amygdala: 45.6% versus 49.7%
P = 0.0024; two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests across 1,000 subsampling runs)
Diagrams were created using BioRender (a and f) and Noun Project (a and f)
our findings reveal distinct roles of amygdala neurons in odour-valence coding and hippocampal neurons in odour identification
The decoding performance for cross-modal decoding trained on images and evaluated on odours (d) and vice versa (e) (image to odour: PC
An amygdala neuron that increases firing in response to banana odour
a banana image and the written word ‘banana’ (right-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum tests
comparing the pre-odour baseline firing rates (n = 128
2 s) with the firing rates after the onsets of odours (n = 8
A PC neuron that increases firing in response to the odour of liquorice and anise
The same neuron exhibited the most pronounced response to liquorice among images and names (liquorice
Pimage = 0.026; statistical analysis was performed as described in g)
Diagrams were created using BioRender (a) and Noun Project (a
this neuron also responded to a second odour
an odour that is typically associated with and contained in liquorice candy
These observations in the amygdala and PC suggest semantic representations of odours at early stages of olfactory processing
our findings reveal encoding of odour-related visual information in human PC neurons
as well as multimodal odour representations in the human amygdala and PC
Despite the importance of human olfaction in health and disease
our understanding of central odour coding relies primarily on animal models and human imaging studies
Although highly informative at the macroscopic level
functional human brain imaging lacks both the spatial and temporal resolution necessary to investigate the individual neuron and circuit coding logic underlying human olfactory processing
We are therefore facing a considerable knowledge gap in human olfactory research
Here we recorded from human single neurons in PC and MTL
providing insights into olfactory processing
Across both primary and secondary olfactory areas
we identified neurons that responded to odours and altered their firing based on odour identity
We observed suppressed response strength after repeated odour presentations at prolonged intervals beyond peripheral sensory adaptation
Analysis of population sparseness revealed a more distributed code in PC compared to MTL regions
neuronal activity in both the PC and MTL could accurately decode odour identity
Our findings suggest that different MTL regions mediate distinct aspects of odour processing
whereas hippocampal activity predicts odour identification performance
we show that human PC neurons efficiently encode odour-related image identity
Integrating data from both odour-related visual and olfactory stimuli
we identified neurons with the ability to represent a specific stimulus concept (for example
banana) in a cross-modal manner by responding to the scent
The PC and amygdala in particular engage in cross-modal coding
the labelled-line organization of chemotopic information established in the human olfactory bulb is disrupted along the bulb-to-PC signalling axis
setting the stage for future studies to decipher the human olfactory code
future studies should also systematically vary odour intensity to investigate the interplay of valence and intensity coding
high-end olfactometers allowing for precise odour control will be essential
Our results link odour representations of hippocampal neurons directly with behavioural odour-identification performance
indicating that hippocampal degeneration may contribute to odour-identification deficits
Impaired behavioural odour identification performance could be a direct result of local neurodegeneration or could instead result indirectly from degeneration of upstream circuits (for example
Future research will have to explore causal contributions of odour-modulated neurons in odour identification
chemosensory concept cells have not been identified to date
We observed neurons that generalize their response to congruent visual and olfactory stimuli
As demonstrated by cross-modal decoding analysis
amygdala neurons in particular generalize their coding between the olfactory and visual domain
our findings demonstrate concept-based neuronal coding in human olfaction
Data were collected at the Department of Epileptology at the University of Bonn Medical Center
All of the patients in our study had drug-resistant epilepsy and underwent invasive seizure monitoring with the goal of subsequent neurosurgical resection of the seizure-generating focus
27 sessions were recorded in 17 patients with epilepsy (12 female
Microwire bundles were implanted bilaterally to record single-neuron activity in the MTL and
also in the PC (17 sessions in 9 patients)
All studies conformed with and were approved by the Medical Institutional Review Board of the University of Bonn
Each patient provided informed written consent
A total of 2,416 units was recorded (1,292 single units (SU)): 622 units (348 SU) in the amygdala
419 units (199 SU) in the PHC and 277 units (148 SU) in the PC
Bilateral measurements of nasal airflow will allow future studies to precisely examine the interactions of neuronal activity and local oscillatory dynamics across the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres at a high temporal resolution
Standardized pen-like odour stimuli lack millisecond precision and exact control of odour concentrations that can be achieved with high-end olfactometers
this odour-delivery method proved to be both efficient and effective for presenting a wide range of odour stimuli in the clinical environment
Neurons with a significant effect of image identity across all 128 trials (P < 0.05) were termed image-modulated neurons
indicating that population decoding extrapolates well to larger populations of neurons
The odour-decoding performance for each session was estimated based on all recorded neurons per region with a minimum of 2 neurons
8 cross-validation data splits and 1,000 resample runs
a surrogate distribution was estimated by repeating the decoding analysis 1,000 times on odour-label-permuted data
The percentile of the actual decoding performance within this surrogate distribution was used to estimate P values
Decoding performances per participant were evaluated by averaging decoding performances across repeated sessions within anatomical target regions
To test whether neural activity predicted chemical odour identity better than perceived odour identity (that is
we used a decoding analysis during the odour-identification task (4 trials per odour)
An equal number of neurons was randomly subsampled from recordings in which each odour was chosen at least twice
100 neurons were randomly subsampled 1,000 times
and a decoder was trained using two cross-validation data splits and ten resample runs
Decoders were trained based both on chemical odour identity and perceived odour identity (selected odour label) using the same neuronal populations
The differences between the two decoding accuracies were used to assess which labels were predicted more accurately by neuronal firing
Slopes were calculated for each region and compared with a constant response strength (that is
a slope of 0) using a Wilcoxon signed-rank test
All random effects comprised an individual intersect
Likelihood ratio tests (MATLAB’s ‘compare’ function) confirmed that the full models that we used with both random slopes and intercepts outperformed models incorporating only random intercepts
Poisson models were fitted based on the restricted maximum pseudo likelihood with a logarithmic link function
two microwires from a new bundle were used
wires were shortened to approximately 8 mm in length and mounted onto aluminium stubs using conductive carbon tape
The samples were then sputter-coated with 15 nm of gold using a Quorum 150 R ES coating unit (Quorum Technologies) and imaged using the Everhart–Thornley secondary electron detector in a Zeiss Sigma 300 (Zeiss) Field Emission Gun SEM operated at 2 kV
five images of two scalpel-trimmed microwires and four images of two untrimmed microwires were obtained
Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article
Codes used to generate the main figures and reproduce the central results of this study are publicly available at GitHub (https://github.com/marcelkehl/HumanOdorRepresentations)
Central mechanisms of odour object perception
Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth
A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: a molecular basis for odor recognition
Wilson, D. A., Chapuis, J. & Sullivan, R. M. in Handbook of Olfaction and Gustation Ch. 10 (ed. Doty, R.) 209–224 (John Wiley & Sons, 2015); https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118971758.ch10
Coordinated electrical activity in the olfactory bulb gates the oscillatory entrainment of entorhinal networks in neonatal mice
Distinct representations of olfactory information in different cortical centres
Mapping the microstructure and striae of the human olfactory tract with diffusion MRI
Neurons and circuits for odor processing in the piriform cortex
Representations of odor in the piriform cortex
Odor quality coding and categorization in human posterior piriform cortex
Dissociable codes of odor quality and odorant structure in human piriform cortex
Activation and habituation in olfaction—an fMRI study
Theta oscillations rapidly convey odor-specific content in human piriform cortex
Spatial maps in piriform cortex during olfactory navigation
Odor representations in olfactory cortex: “sparse” coding
Diverse patterns of odor representation by neurons in the anterior piriform cortex of awake mice
Odor identity coding by distributed ensembles of neurons in the mouse olfactory cortex
Odor coding in piriform cortex: mechanistic insights into distributed coding
Structure and flexibility in cortical representations of odour space
Olfactory cortical neurons read out a relative time code in the olfactory bulb
Odor-evoked activity in the mouse lateral entorhinal cortex
Responses of amygdala single units to odors in the rat
Neural correlates of olfactory processing in congenital blindness
The human brain representation of odor identification
Ultra-fine frequency tuning revealed in single neurons of human auditory cortex
Representation of abstract semantic knowledge in populations of human single neurons in the medial temporal lobe
The architecture of human memory: insights from human single-neuron recordings
Neurons in the human basolateral amygdala and hippocampal formation do not respond to odors
Ketamine-xylazine-induced slow (<1.5 Hz) oscillations in the rat piriform (olfactory) cortex are functionally correlated with respiration
Sniffing and smelling: separate subsystems in the human olfactory cortex
Nasal respiration entrains human limbic oscillations and modulates cognitive function
Sparse coding and decorrelation in primary visual cortex during natural vision
How many neurons can we see with current spike sorting algorithms
The brain basis of positive and negative affect: evidence from a meta-analysis of the human neuroimaging literature
Integrated neural representations of odor intensity and affective valence in human amygdala
The relation between valence and arousal in subjective odor experience
Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain
Explicit encoding of multimodal percepts by single neurons in the human brain
Olfactory adaptation: recordings from the human olfactory epithelium
Habituation of odor responses in the rat anterior piriform cortex
Time course of odorant-induced activation in the human primary olfactory cortex
Responses of human medial temporal lobe neurons are modulated by stimulus repetition
Experience-dependent plasticity of odor representations in the telencephalon of zebrafish
Recurrent circuitry dynamically shapes the activation of piriform cortex
Non-invasive recording from the human olfactory bulb
Amygdala response to both positively and negatively valenced stimuli
Human amygdala represents the complete spectrum of subjective valence
Dissociated neural representations of intensity and valence in human olfaction
Olfactory dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases: is there a common pathological substrate
A major role for intracortical circuits in the strength and tuning of odor-evoked excitation in olfactory cortex
Context-driven activation of odor representations in the absence of olfactory stimuli in the olfactory bulb and piriform cortex
Preprocessing of emotional visual information in the human piriform cortex
A rose by any other name: would it smell as sweet
Olfactomotor activity during imagery mimics that during perception
Verbal coding in olfactory versus nonolfactory cognition
Olfactory imagery: is exactly what it smells like
A wearable platform for closed-loop stimulation and recording of single-neuron and local field potential activity in freely moving humans
Tay, A. S.-M. S., Caravan, B. & Mamelak, A. N. in Intracranial EEG: A Guide for Cognitive Neuroscientists (ed. Axmacher, N.) 671–682 (Springer, 2023); https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20910-9_42
Reliable analysis of single-unit recordings from the human brain under noisy conditions: tracking neurons over hours
Duplicate detection of spike events: a relevant problem in human single-unit recordings
LeGUI: a fast and accurate graphical user interface for automated detection and anatomical localization of intracranial electrodes
FieldTrip: open source software for advanced analysis of MEG
Automated analysis of breathing waveforms using BreathMetrics: a respiratory signal processing toolbox
I know what I like when I see it: likability is distinct from pleasantness since early stages of multimodal emotion evaluation
The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: transforming numbers into movies
Latency and selectivity of single neurons indicate hierarchical processing in the human medial temporal lobe
Single-neuron mechanisms of neural adaptation in the human temporal lobe
Sparseness of the neuronal representation of stimuli in the primate temporal visual cortex
What determines the capacity of autoassociative memories in the brain
A solution to dependency: using multilevel analysis to accommodate nested data
Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal
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Kehl, Sina Mackay, Rainer Surges & Florian Mormann
Matthias Schneider & Valeri Borger
Spehr planned and designed the analyses with contributions from K.O.; M.S.K
wrote the paper with contributions from K.O
All of the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript
The company had no influence on the study design or interpretation of the results and did not provide any financial support
The other authors declare no competing interests
Nature thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
Microwires inserted through the shaft of the hollow clinical macro electrode protrude from the tip of the electrode
The electrode features eight cylindrical clinical platin-iridium contacts
while the remaining contacts are equidistantly spaced along the electrode
Illustration of the electrode geometry and dimensions
Scanning electron microscopy images of the tip of a microwire before (top) and after cutting (bottom)
Mean odour ratings for each participant and odour
Odours are sorted from most to least liked (left to right) and participants are organized by average valence ratings (top to bottom)
Average behavioural odour identification performance for each participant and odour
Odours are sorted from most to the least accurately identified (left to right) and participants are organized by their mean identification performance (top to bottom)
Examples of odour-modulated neurons across recording sites exhibiting significantly different firing rates in response to distinct odours (one-way ANOVA of z-scored firing rates with odour identity
Spike shape density plots of each neuron are shown in the top of each panel
amygdala neuron: F15,112 = 5.5; P = 3.0⋅10−8; f
EC neuron: F15,112 = 6.8; P = 3.1⋅10−10; h
hippocampus neuron: F15,112 = 3.4; P = 0.00012
Distribution of odour-modulated neurons after omitting the neutral odour stimuli for the definition of odour-modulated neurons (PC: 36.8 ± 4.2%
P = 0.42; one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank against chance)
Population of odour-modulated neurons identified with and without the odourless control showed a highly significant overlap (P < 10−10 in a two-sided binomial test with k = 353
n = 2,416 neurons and Pchance = (406/2,416)⋅(378/2,416))
Respiration was measured with thoracic (upper
Respiration signals were amplified and recorded using the Neuralynx ATLAS system
ensuring reliable temporal synchronization with neural recordings
Performance (adjusted R2) of linear regression models
predicting neuronal firing (z-scores) based on odour identity
or odour identity combined with respiration (inhalation depth)
Adding respiratory information to odour identity did not significantly improve the model predictions of firing rates of odour-modulated neurons (odour identity & respiration (R2 = 0.194 ± 0.008) versus odour identity alone (R2 = 0.190 ± 0.008)
n = 240 odour-modulated neurons with respiratory recordings
odour-modulated neurons are primarily driven by odour-specific differences and not variations in respiration
Averaged odour-locked respiratory signals for each individual recording session (mean ± s.e.m.
Participants consistently inhaled once (single peak) during the first 2 seconds after odour onset (grey shaded area)
the analysis time window used for identification of odour-modulated neurons
= not significant. Diagrams were created using BioRender (a) and Noun Project (a)
Odour-decoding accuracy and behavioural odour-identification performance across regions and participants
averaged across sessions for each participant (coloured dots)
Decoding accuracy in the hippocampus positively correlated with odour-identification performance across participants (Spearman correlation
Linear regressions (black) with 95%-confidence intervals (grey)
Odour identification improves with more odour-modulated neurons in the hippocampus and EC
Percentage of odour-modulated neurons and performance for each recording session for different regions
Percentage of odour-modulated neurons in the EC and hippocampus is positively correlated with individual performance in the odour identification task (Spearman correlation
Despite the limited and variable neuron count per session
image identity could be decoded significantly above chance (6.25%
dashed horizontal line) across sessions in PC
and hippocampus (PC: 7 out of n = 17 sessions showed significant decoding compared to 1,000 image-label-permuted data
P = 0.00061; hippocampus: 10 out of n = 20
P = 0.21; right-sided binomial test with Pchance = 0.05
regions with ≥ 2 neurons in recordings with both olfactory and visual task)
Cross-modal decoding per session trained on images and evaluated on odours (e)
revealed significant cross-modal coding in PC and amygdala (Image-to-odour: PC: 4 out of n = 17 sessions
P = 1; Odour-to-image: PC: 0 out of n = 17
P = 1; right-sided binomial test with Pchance = 0.05
regions with ≥ 2 neurons in recordings with both olfactory and visual task as in (d))
Population sparseness index in response to odours for each recording session and odour (mean ± s.e.m
Sparseness significantly differed across recording sites (one-way ANOVA
All pairwise tests significant (P < 0.05) following Tukey’s honestly significant difference procedure
except the pairwise comparison of amygdala and hippocampus (P = 0.11)
Average respiratory traces (mean ± s.e.m.) for each odour presentation (trials 1 to 8) across 13 recording sessions
black) for each odour presentation (1 to 8) and recording session (coloured dots)
Inhalation depth was consistent across odour repetitions (one-way ANOVA
n = 13 recording sessions with 8 trials each)
Average response strength for repeated odour presentations across all recorded neurons in each anatomical region (mean ± s.e.m.)
Odour repetitions are approximately 5 min apart
Insets depict the mean response slopes per region (mean ± s.e.m.)
Significance is based on a two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank against a slope of zero (PC: n = 276 neurons
neurons with a non-zero pre-odour baseline firing rate)
First-trial effect in the human piriform cortex
in black) of odour-modulated neurons between consecutive trials
we calculated the differences of firing rate between successive trials (i.e.
Firing rate changes were significantly different across trials and regions (one-way ANOVA
PC neurons showed the most pronounced decline in firing rate from first to second trial
as indicated by the blue cross and error bar
All 27 pairwise comparisons (blue cross versus each of the remaining crosses) were statistically significant (P < 0.05) after Tukey’s correction for multiple comparisons across all n = 378 (binomial coefficient for selecting 2 out of 27) pair-wise comparisons
The y-axis is truncated to display 99% of the data to improve visibility
Mean spike peak amplitude distribution (mean ± s.e.m.: 44.8 ± 0.5µV
Isolation distance (mean ± s.e.m.: 66 ± 12
for the 1786 clusters for which this measure could be calculated)
Chance level (6.25%) shown as dashed horizontal line
Note that with 8-32 microwires per anatomical target region
it is rarely possible to simultaneously record the activity of 30 or more neurons per participant
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warning that a lack of response could jeopardize their future at the club:
The sporting director, Sebastian Kehl, is not playing games anymore. With his job at risk, while some names are already speculated in the media as his likely successor, the former BVB legend did not spare criticism in an interview for Ruhr Nachrichten BVB
It is indeed a more than fair warning, especially with so many players getting into their contract year; therefore
Kehl even reinforced his point in a more severe tone
asking for a quick response in an upcoming month that will feature hard-to-beat opposition like Bayern Münich and FC Barcelona:
As much as Kehl is also attempting to save his own neck with an interview like this
his message clearly reverberates within the administration
mainly with the possibility of staying out of European competition next year
Kehl sounds more like a frustrated captain in the locker room
as he understands the standard the club should be aiming for:
and things could (or will) definitely change at Signal Iduna Park very soon
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It is indeed a more than fair warning, especially with so many players getting into their contract year; therefore
The BVB sporting director had some severe criticism for the team's current form and sent a direct message to the ones who need to prove themselves for next season
Amy Kehl of 119 Strecker Hill poses with the white oak tree that fell Sunday at her home
An old tree that was part of a prominent Marietta resident’s history is now itself history
The white oak in front of 119 Strecker Hill that once was the residence of S
the present-day owner of the house built in 1937
She believes the tree may be from 125 to 150 years old
The tree was there before the house was constructed
Kehl wanted the event chronicled because of Hoag’s prominence in the history of Marietta
Hoag also was an amateur photographer and his collections are at Marietta College
originally constructed in 1892 and known as the Bellevue
Durwood Hoag built this home in 1937 in Marietta
Hoag’s family was prominent in Marietta and once owned the Lafayette Hotel
Kehl was planning to have the tree removed
“It was the trademark of the home,” Kehl
a teacher of talented and gifted students in Marietta
“It’s a miracle that it cleared the house,” she said
“It landed on a fence that needed to be replaced anyway.”
Kehl said she was at home when the tree fell
“I was still inside clueless to what happened,” Kehl said
“I thought it was my cat running through the house.”
“It was a beautiful sunny day,” she said
the clamor caused by the falling tree drew the interest of deer from the nearby woods
“You wouldn’t believe all the deer that came out,” she said
The Marietta Water Department and Triton Construction will be connecting the new North Hills transmission line on ..
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Databases that link molecular data to clinical outcomes can inform precision cancer research into novel prognostic and predictive biomarkers
cancer outcomes are typically recorded only in text form within electronic health records (EHRs)
Artificial intelligence (AI) models have been trained to extract outcomes from individual EHRs
patient privacy restrictions have historically precluded dissemination of these models beyond the centers at which they were trained
the vulnerability of text classification models trained directly on protected health information to membership inference attacks is confirmed
A teacher-student distillation approach is applied to develop shareable models for annotating outcomes from imaging reports and medical oncologist notes
‘Teacher’ models trained on EHR data from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) are used to label imaging reports and discharge summaries from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-IV dataset
‘Student’ models are trained to use these MIMIC documents to predict the labels assigned by teacher models and sent to Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) for evaluation
The student models exhibit high discrimination across outcomes in both the DFCI and MSK test sets
Leveraging private labeling of public datasets to distill publishable clinical AI models from academic centers could facilitate deployment of machine learning to accelerate precision oncology research
key phenotypic variables needed for this purpose
are generally recorded only in unstructured text in routine practice
The manual medical records review needed to obtain these clinical variables is too slow and resource-intensive to scale further
To make full use of clinico-genomic datasets
natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods are needed to extract key validated oncologic phenotypes from longitudinal EHR data
which is analogous to reconstructing private information such as patient names in medical records
This would involve training a “teacher” model on PHI to extract clinical outcomes and then applying that model to a publicly available
PHI-free text dataset to generate labels for that public database
a large language model could serve as the “teacher” by prompting it to label such a public dataset
A “student” model could then be trained using the public text to predict the labels assigned by the teacher(s)
In this work, a teacher-student framework is used to train AI/NLP models to extract clinical outcomes from imaging reports and medical oncologist notes at one academic cancer center for evaluation at a second center for patients in a multi-institutional clinico-genomic cohort Fig. 1.
including training and evaluation of a teacher model on DFCI data
application of the teacher model to label MIMIC documents
training a student model on the MIMIC document labels
and evaluation of the student model in the DFCI and MSK test sets
Patient and clinical document characteristics are provided in Table 1
The DFCI cohort consisted of patients with seven cancer types
including 3213 patients with 37,274 annotated imaging reports and 3588 patients with 39,191 annotated oncologist notes
These data were divided randomly at the patient level into 80% training
The MSK cohort consisted of patients with five cancer types
including 2672 patients with 24,472 annotated imaging reports and 3617 patients with 40,701 annotated oncologist notes
The MIMIC dataset consisted of 217,642 imaging reports and 141,377 discharge summaries that met our inclusion criteria
DFCI test set: N = 3405 reports for 305 patients
MSK test set: N = 24,472 reports for 2672 patients
Bar heights represent point estimates for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC)
and error bars represent 95% bootstrap confidence intervals around that estimate
Source data is provided as a Source Data file (worksheet Figure 2)
DFCI test set N = 3405 reports for 305 patients
Bar heights represent point estimates for the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC)
The null value for the AUPRC for each outcome is equivalent to the outcome probability in each dataset
Source data is provided as a Source Data file (worksheet Figure 3)
Imaging report model performance as measured by F1 scores is provided in Fig. 4. The best F1 scores for DFCI-imaging-teacher and DFCI-imaging-student were similar when evaluated on DFCI test set imaging reports and were higher than those achieved by Llama-imaging-student.
Bar heights represent point estimates for the best F1 score
Null values for the best F1 score are calculated by assuming a “model” that always guesses that an outcome is present
and they are calculated as (2 × p(outcome)) / (p(outcome) + 1)
Source data provided as a Source Data file (worksheet Figure 4)
DFCI test set: N = 3382 reports for 345 patients
MSK test set: N = 40,701 reports for 3617 patients
Source data provided as a Source Data file (worksheet Figure 5)
Source data provided as a Source Data file (Figure 6)
Medical oncologist note model performance as measured by the best F1 score is described in Fig. 7. Comparative performance patterns were similar to those observed for the AUPRC metric.
and they are calculated as (2 × p(outcome)) / (p(outcome) + 1)
Source data provided as a Source Data file (Figure 7)
Model performance within individual cancer types for all three metrics (AUROC, AUPRC, and F1 score) is detailed in Supplementary Tables 1-21
A simple formulation of a membership inference attack on the oncologist note classification models was performed to demonstrate that classification teacher models trained on protected health information can leak private data
An attack model trained on labels and outputs from an overfit DFCI-medonc-teacher model yielded an AUROC of 0.71 (95% CI
0.59 to 0.82) for discriminating whether notes were used to train the teacher
this approach could not be used to attack a DFCI-medonc-student in the same way
The student could not be successfully fit using the MIMIC discharge summaries to predict the outputs from the overfit teacher
This student model’s outputs converged to constant values
such that the attack model yielded an uninformative AUROC of 0.55 (95% CI
To demonstrate the applicability of the teacher-student distillation process beyond classification/information extraction tasks
another new teacher model (DFCI-prognosis-teacher) was trained to predict survival using individual imaging reports from the DFCI training set
It achieved an c-index of 0.76 in the DFCI test set
DFCI-prognosis-teacher was then used to label the MIMIC imaging reports described above
yielding mortality risk scores for those reports
A DFCI-prognosis-student model was trained to predict those teacher-generated labels; this model also achieved a c-index of 0.76 in the DFCI test set
The DFCI-prognosis-student model was then transferred to MSK for evaluation on its imaging reports
achieving a c-index of 0.76 at MSK as well
These results indicate that a “teacher-student” approach can be used to develop shareable AI/NLP models to extract structured cancer outcome variables from EHRs for creation of multi-site clinico-genomic datasets
a ‘teacher’ model is trained on PHI from one or more institutions and used to label publicly available datasets to facilitate the training of a ‘student’ model that predicts those labels
These student models do not expose PHI directly to the risk of memorization and data leakage
facilitating deployment across health systems
demonstrating the need for shareable customized models even as general AI technology evolves rapidly
external generalizability of the DFCI-imaging-student model to MSK imaging reports appeared somewhat better than external generalizability of the DFCI-medonc-student model to MSK oncologist notes for progression and response outcomes as measured by the AUPRC and F1
This could be due in part to the more uniform nature of imaging reports across sites compared to oncologist notes
as well as to the closer match between MIMIC imaging reports and DFCI imaging reports than between MIMIC discharge summaries and DFCI oncologist notes
Federated learning seeks to preserve the privacy of training data by keeping each site’s data housed locally and only sharing model weight updates at each training step
weight updates in federated learning have been derived from private training data
such that there may still be regulatory barriers to deployment in healthcare due to privacy risks
This demonstrates the need for privacy-protecting approaches to model training
PATE would involve training several individual teacher models on private datasets at individual centers
then using an ensemble of these models to label a shared public dataset with an injection of additional privacy-preserving noise
training a student model on the public dataset to predict the ensemble labels
The teacher-student distillation approach has the intuitive benefit for regulatory stakeholders of yielding shared models that have not been directly exposed to PHI
This could specifically facilitate clinical annotation of genomic data using common AI models in multi-institutional consortia such as AACR Project GENIE
addressing the critical barrier to research using such datasets historically posed by the lack of outcomes data at scale
We focused specifically on the task of cancer outcome extraction in this analysis
Evaluating the performance of the teacher-student approach for other tasks would require further research
such as whether a given EHR document describes progression of disease
It is quite likely that a distillation approach applied to a task that involves predicting possible PHI
Quantifying the extent of this risk also requires further investigation
a teacher-student distillation approach can be used to distill AI/NLP models to extract clinical variables from the EHR across cancer centers without publishing models trained on PHI
This technique could significantly expand the scale of clinical datasets available for precision oncology research
Collection of data at DFCI and MSK was approved by the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center Institutional Review Board and the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Institutional Review Board respectively
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) are the two largest contributors to GENIE
DFCI annotations were split at the patient level into training (80%)
MSK annotations were used only for model evaluation
Reports were truncated at the maximum BERT sequence length of 512 tokens
Oncologist notes were left-truncated at the maximum Longformer sequence length of 4096 tokens
were tuned manually based on performance in the validation/tuning set
Final models were evaluated in the test set
The loss function applied for each label was the binary cross entropy loss
the DFCI-imaging-teacher and DFCI-medonc-teacher models were used to label radiology reports and discharge summaries
MIMIC radiology reports were restricted to documents addressing cancer or its absence by filtering for text including the strings “cancer”
and to cancer-relevant imaging modalities by additionally requiring the strings “‘ct”
MIMIC discharge summaries were restricted to documents addressing cancer or its absence by requiring the strings “cancer” or “malignan*”
DFCI-imaging-teacher inference was then run on the MIMIC radiology reports
yielding the predicted log odds of each of the ten imaging report labels
DFCI-medonc-teacher inference was run on the MIMIC discharge summaries
yielding predicted log odds of each of the three medical oncologist note labels
In contrast to the common distillation paradigm
our student models had the same underlying architecture as the teacher models but were freshly trained from BERT-base-uncased and ClinicalLongformer
so they were not exposed to PHI during training
Student model hyperparameters were manually tuned based on performance among patients in the validation/tuning set of PHI-containing imaging reports and oncologist notes from DFCI
Student model performance was then evaluated in the held-out DFCI BPC PHI test set
student model weights and inference code were shared with MSK
which evaluated the models’ performance on their own private BPC-labeled documents
Student models (Llama-student-imaging and Llama-student-medonc) with the same architectures as DFCI-imaging-student and DFCI-medonc-student were then trained on the MIMIC samples to predict the Llama-assigned labels
to facilitate fair comparison between the DFCI-teacher and Llama-teacher labeling strategy without confounding by training set size
we retrained versions of DFCI-imaging-student and DFCI-medonc-student on the same samples of 20000 MIMIC documents each
yielding ‘DFCI-imaging-student-sample’ and ‘DFCI-medonc-student-sample’ models
Performance of these student models was then evaluated in the same way as the student models trained to predict labels assigned by the DFCI teachers
Model training and inference were performed using Pytorch
A visual depiction of our overall supervised teacher-student approach is provided in Fig. 1
to illustrate the applicability of the teacher-student distillation approach to tasks beyond information extraction and classification
a BERT-based model (DFCI-prognosis-teacher) was trained to predict survival using the text of individual imaging reports for patients in the DFCI training set
A negative log-likelihood loss accommodating censored data was applied
Performance was evaluated in the test set using the c-index
and another student (DFCI-prognosis-student) was trained to predict those labels
Performance of DFCI-prognosis-student was then evaluated in both the DFCI and MSK test sets
Each human annotation-derived outcome label was binary
and raw model outputs corresponded to the predicted log odds of each outcome
The primary model outcome metrics was the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC)
the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC)
The best F1 score was defined based on the best F1 threshold in the dataset being evaluated
Evaluation was performed on a per-document basis
Metrics were compared to null values for each outcome
the prevalence of an outcome in the evaluation dataset
the null value is obtained by simply always guessing the positive class and corresponds to 2 × p(outcome) / (p(outcome) + 1)
To evaluate the vulnerability of the teacher and student models to a membership inference attack
a version of the oncologist note teacher classification model was trained and overfitted to a sample of 100 notes from the DFCI PHI training dataset
We then pulled a sample of 100 notes from the DFCI PHI training/validation dataset
Inference using the overfit teacher model was performed on all 200 notes
A simple logistic regression attack model was then trained on 60% of these 200 notes to predict whether a given note was in the teacher’s training dataset
Inputs to the attack model included the true manual labels (any cancer
and the log odds of each of those outcomes generated by the teacher
The attack model was then evaluated on the remaining 40% of the note sample using the AUROC metric to capture its ability to discern whether notes were used to train the teacher
The overfit teacher was used to re-label the MIMIC discharge summary dataset
We then attempted to train a version of the student model to predict the overfit teacher labels on those discharge summaries and train a new attack model for the student it in the same way
among patients who underwent tumor next-generation sequencing (NGS) for their cancers
patients whose tumors underwent NGS on a research basis provided written informed consent; those whose tumors underwent NGS on a standard-of-care clinical basis were eligible based on a waiver of informed consent given the minimal risk of the current study to participants
all patients provided written informed consent
Race and ethnicity were defined based on institutional medical record systems
as reported by patients when they registered for clinical care
Patients were not compensated for participation
Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article
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This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute (R00CA245899
ZB); the United States Department of Defense (W81XWH-22-1-0086
KLK); and the American Association for Cancer Research (KLK
Choueiri is supported in part by the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Kidney SPORE (2P50CA101942-16) and Program 5P30CA006516-56
the Kohlberg Chair at Harvard Medical School and the Trust Family
Hinda and Arthur Marcus Fund and Loker Pinard Funds for Kidney Cancer Research at DFCI
The content was developed or derived using the PRISSMM™ system licensed and enhanced by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases
and Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (collectively “MSK”)
Original system and improvements © 2019-2022 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Additional functionality and enhancements © 2023 MSK
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developed and conducted the analyses in the study and wrote the manuscript
participated in the external validation of trained models
Trukhanov provided assistance in manuscript review and revision
developed the clinical data model used in this study
here are no patents related to this research
Kehl reports funding from the American Association for Cancer Research to his institution related to this research and honoraria from UpToDate and travel sponsored by Meta in the context of a grant submission process unrelated to this research
Choueiri reports institutional and/or personal
He also reports institutional patents filed on molecular alterations and immunotherapy response/toxicity
and Bicycle; committee participation in NCCN
He reports that medical writing and editorial assistance support may have been funded by Communications companies in part
He reports that he has mentored several non-US citizens on research projects with potential funding (in part) from non-US sources/Foreign Components
His institution (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) may have received additional independent funding of drug companies or/and royalties potentially involved in research around the subject matter
Bakouny reports Honoraria from UpToDate; serving as Associate Editor at Journal of Clinical Oncology Clinical Cancer Informatics (JCO CCI); serving as co-chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s International Medical Graduate Community of Practice (ASCO IMG CoP); and serving as co-founder of the IMG Oncologists nonprofit non-governmental organization
Schrag reports funding from AACR to her institution related to this research
Nichols reports funding from AACR to her institution related to this research
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Nature Communications thanks Moritz Gerstung
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Kehl speaks on Brandt's uncertain future | OneFootballBulinews
Borussia Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl has commented on the future of Julian Brandt following recent speculation about a summer move
and he’s an incredibly important player for us," Kehl told Sky Germany
"After the season, like with all other matters, we will address his situation. I know he’s 100 percent BVB - and players like him are what we need."
Related NewsBrandt likely to remain at Dortmund, says Kehl
Borussia Dortmund face tough Julian Brandt call with no clear backup plan
Facts: Brandt leads the way, Nmecha cleans up, Guirassy and Adeyemi on fire
Report: Guirassy committed to Dortmund despite €70m release clause
The Bulls beat the Black-and-Yellows in a match marked by critical defensive mistakes and missed opportunities from BVB
Borussia Dortmund manager Niko Kovač was straightforward about his opinion of the result:
Borussia Dortmund summed up another Bundesliga defeat this season following an agonizing loss to Leipzig
where the Bulls dominated in terms of possession and chance creation
BVB's second half was a tremendous upgrade
even with Openda's early header to make it two to the homeowners
The Black-and-Yellows had a 3.06xG in this match and no goals scored
as the Croatian manager also commented on his team's wasted chances to score and make a comeback from Leipzig's 2-nil lead:
Kovač was not only disappointed about the lack of goals
but his record as a BVB manager in the league has been nothing but lackluster
Dortmund has now more defeats than wins in the current Bundesliga season
while Kovač has lost four and won two matches against sides like Union Berlin
Niko Kovač tried to find the positives from yesterday's 2-nil loss to Leipzig
mainly highlighting the team's effort in the second half:
How did Kovač find ways to pay compliments to a defeat like that
mainly because the team was depending too much on long balls and individual plays to create chances against Leipzig
BVB sporting director Sebastian Kehl had his own thoughts on the overall performance:
A more self-conscious perspective from Leipzig's matchup indeed
but it still lacks some explicit criticism of the team's management this season and the current standards the club has put itself at
BVB will have the international break to regroup
which apparently is not Kehl's primary wish at the moment:
I am unaware of what exactly Kehl is referring to when he says the team is "continuing to improve in many areas." Still
Borussia Dortmund will have a boom-or-bust type of weeks after the break
where the Black-and-Yellows will play Freiburg and Bayern Münich away and FC Barcelona twice for the Champions League quarterfinals
A couple of weeks that could potentially put an end to any aspirations for European football next season
and mercifully finishing a 2024/2025 season that seemed to be destined for failure
BVB's sporting director and manager gave some truthful post-match interviews from yesterday's defeat in Leipzig
Sebastian Kehl remains confident that Borussia Dortmund will be able to turn things around with under-fire head coach Nuri Sahin at the helm
Borussia Dortmund fell to yet another defeat on Tuesday as they were eliminated from the DFB-Pokal by VfL Wolfsburg
the club's fourth in their last five matches
who has endured a difficult start to life as BVB head coach
In what was a scrappy game from the outset, Wolfsburg scored in the 117th minute to knock Borussia Dortmund out of the DFB-Pokal in the second round
Calls for the Borussia Dortmund bosses to sack Sahin are getting louder with every such performance and result
But Sebastian Kehl maintains faith in his former BVB midfield partner's ability to get the team back on track
When asked what the defeat means for Sahin's future
"This is not a situation that BVB hasn't overcome in the past
The squad is currently small due to injuries
but we'll do everything we can to win this game [against Leipzig]."
A tough test lies in store for Borussia Dortmund this weekend as they go up against their former head coach Marco Rose and his in-form RB Leipzig side
the Black and Yellows have a perfect record at the Westfalenstadion this season
And Nuri Sahin will certainly hope that it continues on Saturday
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Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Minute Media or its affiliates and related brands
Joey has written about Borussia Dortmund for several years and has been a fan of the German club much longer
His work has previously appeared on SB Nation's Fear The Wall and his creative work has been published internationally
Joey's stories and essays can be found across the internet and in print from Half and One Journal
Joey holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Alma College
Joey enjoys writing fiction and playing Disc Golf
In what was a scrappy game from the outset, Wolfsburg scored in the 117th minute to knock Borussia Dortmund out of the DFB-Pokal in the second round
Sebastian Kehl is set to sign a new contract as Borussia Dortmund sporting director
Kehl has agreed to extend his contract until 2027 following talks with BVB managing director for sport Lars Ricken
Kehl's current deal is due to expire at the end of the season
The former Borussia Dortmund player has been in the role since the summer of 2022
Dortmund's sporting director Sebastian Kehl (L) and Dortmund's managing director Lars Ricken talk ahead of the German Bundesliga soccer match between Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen at Signal Iduna Park. Bernd Thissen/dpaDPAApril 9, 2025 at 8:26 AM UTC·1 min readBorussia Dortmund managing director for sport Lars Ricken has said that the club wants to continue with coach Niko Kovac and sporting director Sebastian Kehl beyond what has largely been an underwhelming season.
"This is our clear aim," Ricken told Wednesday's papers of the Funke publishing house, speaking of an "intensive cooperation" with Kehl.
Kehl's contract at the former Bundesliga champions and Champions League winners was renewed until 2027 in January. Kovac replaced Nuri Sahin in February on a deal until 2026.
"When we renewed Sebastian's contract it was important for me that we get the maximum out of the season and head into the future together. I made that very clear at the time. Nothing has changed concerning this goal," Ricken said.
Kehl has come under criticism over the composition of the squad in a season where Dortmund are eighth in the Bundesliga and face missing a top four finish which would guarantee Champions League football.
Kovac has led the team into the Champions League quarter-finals where they were to face Barcelona later Wednesday. In the Bundesliga, he has partly steadied the ship but there has still been inconsistency.
Ricken however praised Kovac's work, saying: "Under Niko's leadership we have the best defensive tackle ratio in the league. We are creating more scoring opportunities, allow much less, and have reduced the amount of goals we concede."
Sebastian Kehl said that Nuri Sahin retains the full support of those in charge
After Borussia Dortmund fell to their third defeat of the Bundesliga season
Nuri Sahin has certainly not had an ideal start to life as Borussia Dortmund head coach, with the team languishing in seventh place in the Bundesliga standings. The latest setback arrived on Saturday as the Black and Yellows fell to a 2-1 defeat to FC Augsburg
extending their woeful run of form away from home
The defeat came just days after Borussia Dortmund blew a two-goal lead away to Real Madrid and ended up losing 5-2
With the DFB-Pokal second round tie against VfL Wolfsburg and the Bundesliga clash against RB Leipzig coming up
But those in charge at Borussia Dortmund retain confidence in the former midfielder's ability to turn things around. Following the defeat to FC Augsburg, BVB sporting director Sebastian Kehl gave his backing to Sahin. "He has our full confidence, no question about it," Kehl told Sky Sport after the game (via Kicker)
"We took a new direction in the summer
But there is no alternative but to keep working hard."
I see the coach and his team working with the squad every day
Nuri prepares the team meticulously and also worked out a match plan for [Augsburg]
the players have to implement it on the pitch."
Borussia Dortmund have certainly not looked convincing in any of their games in the Bundesliga so far this season
And they are yet to record their first away win of the season in the league
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Nuri Sahin has certainly not had an ideal start to life as Borussia Dortmund head coach, with the team languishing in seventh place in the Bundesliga standings. The latest setback arrived on Saturday as the Black and Yellows fell to a 2-1 defeat to FC Augsburg
But those in charge at Borussia Dortmund retain confidence in the former midfielder's ability to turn things around. Following the defeat to FC Augsburg, BVB sporting director Sebastian Kehl gave his backing to Sahin. "He has our full confidence, no question about it," Kehl told Sky Sport after the game (via Kicker)
“We lacked a little conviction” – Sebastian Kehl analyses Borussia Dortmund defeatGet German Football NewsJanuary 11
2025 at 6:21 AM UTC·1 min read“Maybe we lacked a little conviction,” Sebastian Kehl somewhat surprised many with his statement after Borussia Dortmund’s first Bundesliga defeat at home this season
Conceding three goals to Bayer Leverkusen in the opening 20 minutes wasn’t in their gameplan
but BVB’s sporting director believed his squad “were extremely unlucky.”
“We got off to a very bad start,” said Kehl
“Leverkusen scored very effectively but we didn’t defend well either
We made it a little too easy for Leverkusen
“And yet you always had the feeling that there was more in it today
because I don’t think Leverkusen were particularly good
We still had hope that we would equalise.”
especially in the dying embers of the game
Serhou Guirassy’s 79th minute penalty put Dortmund to within one goal of Leverkusen but despite dominating possession throughout the game
they failed to seriously test Lukas Hradecky
who looked uncomposed in the closing stages
GGFN | Daniel Pinder
Borussia Dortmund suffered their third straight defeat in 2025 as they went down 2-0 to Eintracht Frankfurt on Friday night
The defeat piles further pressure on under-fire head coach Nuri Sahin, with Dortmund sitting in 10th place in the Bundesliga ahead of the weekend's remaining fixtures in Germany's top flight.
Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl insisted after the game that the 36-year-old still has the backing of the club's management
"We will not escape criticism and we will continue to work on ourselves."
"The arguments are performance and results
I don't need confirmation that I'm in office every three days
“You can either doubt yourself or you can accept this catastrophic situation and stand your ground
I won't ask for anything else until the last day I'm here as coach.”
Sebastian Kehl: "We've shown that we can surpass ourselves"Borussia DortmundApril 8
2025 at 2:15 PM UTC·3 min readSebastian Kehl on the approach to the game against Barcelona: "We'll need to be courageous and to have phases of possession in order not to give Barcelona too much space
they score an unbelievable amount of goals
We've also done that in the Champions League
They have the top goalscorer in the Champions League in Raphinha – but we have the second-top goalscorer
We're aware of Barcelona's strengths
but we will still create opportunities to switch the play time and time again
They will offer up spaces and we will try to attack them."
…the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona: "I believe that FC Barcelona have long since gotten used to this stadium and have played some really good games there
We know that it will become heated and we know that they're a really good team
we have to go into this match with the right attitude and with the right intensity
I can only say that we're all extremely looking forward to it and I hope that this excitement will translate into passion tomorrow too."
…home advantage in the return leg: "I think that Barcelona will of course try everything tomorrow in order to put themselves in a very good position
Because they know what it might be like at ours next week
We have repeatedly shown in the past that we can surpass ourselves
we will need a really good performance tomorrow
…the 3-2 defeat to Barcelona in the league phase: "Barcelona have extreme strengths and a great many difference-makers
They showed that in the match in the league phase
We lost that game in the end – even though we were at least on their level in the second period and could have turned the game in a different direction
All of these moments will give us hope for the two matches
but they are knockout games and slightly different to a league phase game."
…the absence of Nico Schlotterbeck: "It's really been a shock for us
now means that he will be out of action for several months
But one thing is clear: Nico will get our total support
We will sorely miss him over the coming weeks and we will need him as soon as he comes back again
That will of course have an impact on tomorrow's game and on the coming weeks
as are we – it is a loss that weighs heavily
But we will try everything tomorrow to bring him a little joy in front of the television."
Patty had been employed at the Marietta Times where she worked in the Production Department for 31 years
She was a member of Gilman United Methodist Church and enjoyed doing Genealogy and crocheting and shopping trips
her brother Steven Kehl of Marietta and several aunts
Funeral services will be held on Monday (July 15) at 11:00 am at McClure-Schafer-Lankford Funeral Home
Family will greet friends on Sunday evening at the funeral home from 5 until 7
Messages of sympathy may be sent at www.Lankfordfh.com
donations in her memory will be appreciated to either the Gilman United Methodist Church
“Sebastian and I have known and trusted each other for many years," Kehl's colleague Lars Ricken noted in a club statement. "In recent weeks, we have had intensive discussions about content, structures, and financial issues and have now brought them to a positive conclusion. We will continue to combine all our strengths to achieve these goals. As sporting director, Sebastian has my full support on this journey."
“I have extremely close ties to Borussia Dortmund and I'm very happy to continue working for this great club,” Kehl himself added. "I feel the trust that our management has in me as sporting director and I would like to thank Lars in particular for the good and constructive discussions we have had over the past few weeks. We have agreed on clear competencies and responsibilities and have large joint ambitions."
BVB still expects to sign a winger to replace Malen and a defender before February 3rd
The CEO required professionalism as Kehl and Mislintat to work together to get these deals finalized
Lars Ricken has put some pressure on Sebastian Kehl and Sven Mislintat to get signings done within five days before the transfer window deadline. As reported by Patrick Berger
there have been some agreement issues between these two
who expressed his discontent with the situation to Ricken
The board now hopes for a change in the mood
with Kehl and Mislintat bringing signings who can help BVB until the end of the season
Watzke also told Ricken that he should restore the balanced environment to Dortmund
even at the cost of eventual personnel consequences
Another name who has been under fire is Matthias Sammer
Ricken has reportedly advised the end of Sammer's position at the club
but BVB is not expected to make any changes in personnel before the end of the transfer period
has increased the pressure on the sporting department
which has made no signings in this winter transfer window
2025 at 10:42 AM UTCBorussia Dortmund's sporting director Sebastian Kehl spoke about the new interim coach Mike Tullberg in his interview
The defeat piles further pressure on under-fire head coach Nuri Sahin, with Dortmund sitting in 10th place in the Bundesliga ahead of the weekend's remaining fixtures in Germany's top flight.
Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl insisted after the game that the 36-year-old still has the backing of the club's management
"We will continue in this constellation
"We will not escape criticism and we will continue to work on ourselves."
"The arguments are performance and results
I don't need confirmation that I'm in office every three days
I won't ask for anything else until the last day I'm here as coach.”
Dortmund are going through a poor domestic season, ranked 11th and in danger of failing to qualify for the Champions League for the first time since 2015, and for Europe at all.
They are still in the Champions League but face a difficult quarter-final tie against Barcelona next month.
Dortmund play top four contenders Mainz, Freiburg and Borussia Mönchengladbach, and visit leaders Bayern Munich in their next four Bundesliga matches.
Kehl told Friday's Ruhr Nachrichten paper that the coming weeks are crucial for the club and for the players, as club leaders will have a close look at "which players Borussia Dortmund can build on in the future.
"Who will take on this situation now? Who faces up to it and who will take responsibility?
"We now need men who are up for a challenge, who are eager to attack and don't hide. That's what the fans want to see, we owe it to them. We will take a very close look at who follows this course."
No player contract expires but there could still be a squad overhaul, Kehl warned.
"Being 11th in the Bundesliga is very, very unsatisfactory. For our fans, for the club, for the team and also for me personally," he said.
"Our squad has caused bitter disappointment on several occasions. It has been put together for completely different expectations and demands. We have one of the most expensive squads in the Bundesliga, and we're not living up to it."
Coach Niko Kovac on Friday agreed with Kehl that they will have to decide what happens in summer but that it is "now about strengthening the players so that we get everything they have out of them."
Kovac urged a big effort, starting on Sunday against Mainz who in third are one of the season's surprise teams and two years ago denied Dortmund the title by holding them 2-2 on the final matchday.
"We have to win this match, regardless of how we do it. We all have a responsibility. That is our focus," Kovac told reporters on Friday.
"Mainz are doing a really good job. They are difficult to play and very efficient. They are on a roll. But we are playing at home and want to win this match together with our fans."
Kovac said that everyone has returned healthy from the international break, that Carney Chukwuemeka and Daniel Svensson are fit again, and Felix Nmecha also nearing a return.
"We have eight more games in the Bundesliga and hopefully more than two in the Champions League. We need every player. We will try to get everything out of it," Kovac said.
Randal “Randy” Kehl, 78, passed away November 12, 2024, after a courageous battle with cancer.
Born on January 12, 1946, Randy was the third of six children of Eileen Gibson (Kehl). Needing some direction in life, Randy entered the Navy at seventeen. After leaving the Navy, he returned to Atikokan and married his soulmate, Roberta Calder. Together they had two children, Tammy and Shayne (Cuffy).
Randy and Roberta were a team for 57 years. They were the most amazing dancers and others loved to sit back and watch them move on the dance floor. Together they built a beautiful cabin and enjoyed their retirement. They loved to fish, hunt, pick blueberries, garden and drive the countryside.
Randy loved to build. Early in his marriage he built furniture for his kids before turning his eye to building a garage, a new home and finally a cabin. He always had one more job to do and enjoyed being productive.
Family was extremely important to Randy, and he took pride in his children and grandchildren. He was a nurturing guy, so when his children left home, he adopted dogs to shower his love on. They were part of the family, and deeply mourned when they passed away. Randy loved to swim, fish and four-wheel with his family, and supported and encouraged them to be the best they could be. He loved to sing off-tune Happy Birthday wishes and chase all the boys away from his granddaughters.
Randy was known for his kindness. He was the person who brought blueberries to the elderly who couldn’t get out, and the one who held the door so others could go in first. He believed you shouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t nice, and he could be counted on to help his neighbors out if they needed a helping hand.
Randy was pre-deceased by his mother Eileen and his sisters Harlene (Lorne) and Lynn (Ed). He is survived by his wife Roberta; children Tammy (Mike) and Cuffy (Glenna; grandchildren Jacqueline, Andrew, Caryss and Reese; siblings Dawn (Victor), Dale (Kathy), and Tracy (Rick); as well as several nieces and nephews.
Services will be held at the Legion on Friday, November 29, at 1:00 p.m. A memorial book will be available at the service for those wishing to document their favorite story of a life well-lived.
but he is confident that the team will be able to turn things around
Sebastian Kehl has admitted that Borussia Dortmund's form away from home has not been good enough so far
Borussia Dortmund suffered yet another defeat away from home on Saturday as they were beaten by Mainz 05 in the Bundesliga
The Black and Yellows have now lost their last four away games in the league
and their last six away matches across all competitions
Defeats have included a 5-1 thrashing away to Stuttgart
a second-half collapse against Real Madrid
and abject showings away to FC Augsburg and Union Berlin
The team's poor run of form when they are not being cheered on by 80,000+ fans at the Westfalenstadion has raised many eyebrows. And Borussia Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl commented on their away day woes after the 3-1 defeat to Mainz 05 on Saturday
"One point in five away games doesn't live up to our expectations
"We want to collect a lot of points in November and December to stay in contention
Everything is still relatively close in the table if you leave Bayern Munich out
Other teams aren't as stable yet either
but we're continuing on this path and we believe in it."
While Borussia Dortmund have often looked out of sorts away from home
they have won all of their matches so far at the Westfalenstadion
Next up for Nuri Sahin's side is a home game against SC Freiburg
followed by a trip to Dinamo Zagreb in the UEFA Champions League
BVB will host Bayern Munich in what will be their toughest test of the season so far
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Borussia Dortmund suffered yet another defeat away from home on Saturday as they were beaten by Mainz 05 in the Bundesliga
The team's poor run of form when they are not being cheered on by 80,000+ fans at the Westfalenstadion has raised many eyebrows. And Borussia Dortmund sporting director Sebastian Kehl commented on their away day woes after the 3-1 defeat to Mainz 05 on Saturday
While Borussia Dortmund have often looked out of sorts away from home, they have won all of their matches so far at the Westfalenstadion. Next up for Nuri Sahin's side is a home game against SC Freiburg, followed by a trip to Dinamo Zagreb in the UEFA Champions League. Then, BVB will host Bayern Munich in what will be their toughest test of the season so far.
He mentioned that Borussia Dortmund is traveling to Portugal with a lot of anticipation and optimism and even gave some tactical spoilers on BVB's approach to facing the Lions:
Dortmund's sporting director, Sebastian Kehl, revealed hardcore truths during his press conference before Tuesday's UCL matchup against Sporting Lisbon
Kehl also talked about some senior players' underperformances this season
the former Dortmund player tried to take the focus off Brandt and provided a broader perspective on the underperformance issues:
Kehl highlighted the need to trust in the current squad since they will be the ones to take Dortmund out of this crisis:
Kehl was honest about the previous underperformance worries and agreed that a few players have been below the best level
He finished with a hardcore truth about Dortmund's current scenario and a so-needed acceptance of blame in which the club needs to be held accountable for this season's mistakes; something the fans craved for:
In the press conference before the Champions League playoff first leg
offered some intriguing insights into the club's future plans.