The Neuroanatomic Basis of the Acupuncture Principal Meridians

Acupuncture involves treating illness by inserting needles at specified body locations (acupoints). The Principal meridians are pathways that join acupoints with related physiologic effects. Despite nearly 5000 years of continuous clinical study, an accepted anatomic or physiologic basis for acupuncture's clinical effects has remained elusive. Some acupoints overlie peripheral nerves, and fMRI studies demonstrate that acupoints have specific effects on central nervous system processing. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) founders described the body's viscera based on anatomic dissections yet not a discrete nervous system. By applying computer graphics and virtual human imaging techniques to human developmental neuroanatomy, this paradox may potentially be explained: acupuncture Principal meridians likely are TCM's representation of the nervous system. This neuroanatomic model of the Principal meridians is consistent with acupuncture's known neurophysiologic effects, and may allow 5 millennia of accumulated TCM observations regarding human health and illness to be understood in modern anatomic and physiologic terms

Fuzzy Fibers: Uncertainty in dMRI Tractography

Fiber tracking based on diffusion weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) allows for noninvasive reconstruction of fiber bundles in the human brain. In this chapter, we discuss sources of error and uncertainty in this technique, and review strategies that afford a more reliable interpretation of the results. This includes methods for computing and rendering probabilistic tractograms, which estimate precision in the face of measurement noise and artifacts. However, we also address aspects that have received less attention so far, such as model selection, partial voluming, and the impact of parameters, both in preprocessing and in fiber tracking itself. We conclude by giving impulses for future research

A Multi-GPU Programming Library for Real-Time Applications

We present MGPU, a C++ programming library targeted at single-node multi-GPU systems. Such systems combine disproportionate floating point performance with high data locality and are thus well suited to implement real-time algorithms. We describe the library design, programming interface and implementation details in light of this specific problem domain. The core concepts of this work are a novel kind of container abstraction and MPI-like communication methods for intra-system communication. We further demonstrate how MGPU is used as a framework for porting existing GPU libraries to multi-device architectures. Putting our library to the test, we accelerate an iterative non-linear image reconstruction algorithm for real-time magnetic resonance imaging using multiple GPUs. We achieve a speed-up of about 1.7 using 2 GPUs and reach a final speed-up of 2.1 with 4 GPUs. These promising results lead us to conclude that multi-GPU systems are a viable solution for real-time MRI reconstruction as well as signal-processing applications in general.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Focal Spot, Spring/Summer 1984

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1037/thumbnail.jp