Dopamine induces functional extracellular traps in microglia

Dopamine (DA) plays many roles in the brain, especially in movement, motivation, and reinforcement of behavior; however, its role in regulating innate immunity is not clear. Here, we show that DA can induce DNA-based extracellular traps in primary, adult, human microglia and BV2 microglia cell line. These DNA-based extracellular traps are formed independent of reactive oxygen species, actin polymerization, and cell death. These traps are functional and capture fluorescein (FITC)-tagged Escherichia coli even when reactive oxygen species production or actin polymerization is inhibited. We show that microglial extracellular traps are present in Glioblastoma multiforme. This is crucial because Glioblastoma multiforme cells are known to secrete DA. Our findings demonstrate that DA plays a significant role in sterile neuro-inflammation by inducing microglia extracellular traps

Granular Flow Graph, Adaptive Rule Generation and Tracking

A new method of adaptive rule generation in granular computing framework is described based on rough rule base and granular flow graph, and applied for video tracking. In the process, several new concepts and operations are introduced, and methodologies formulated with superior performance. The flow graph enables in defining an intelligent technique for rule base adaptation where its characteristics in mapping the relevance of attributes and rules in decision-making system are exploited. Two new features, namely, expected flow graph and mutual dependency between flow graphs are defined to make the flow graph applicable in the tasks of both training and validation. All these techniques are performed in neighborhood granular level. A way of forming spatio-temporal 3-D granules of arbitrary shape and size is introduced. The rough flow graph-based adaptive granular rule-based system, thus produced for unsupervised video tracking, is capable of handling the uncertainties and incompleteness in frames, able to overcome the incompleteness in information that arises without initial manual interactions and in providing superior performance and gaining in computation time. The cases of partial overlapping and detecting the unpredictable changes are handled efficiently. It is shown that the neighborhood granulation provides a balanced tradeoff between speed and accuracy as compared to pixel level computation. The quantitative indices used for evaluating the performance of tracking do not require any information on ground truth as in the other methods. Superiority of the algorithm to nonadaptive and other recent ones is demonstrated extensively

Neighborhood rough filter and intuitionistic entropy in unsupervised tracking

This paper aims at developing a novel methodology for unsupervised video tracking by exploring the merits of neighborhood rough sets. A neighborhood rough filter is designed in this process for initial labeling of continuous moving object(s) even in the presence of several variations in different feature spaces. The locations and color models of the object(s) are estimated using their lower-upper approximations in spatio-color neighborhood granular space. Velocity neighborhood granules and acceleration neighborhood granules are then defined over this estimation to predict the object location in the next frame and to speed up the tracking process. A novel concept, namely, intuitionsistic entropy is introduced here, which consists of two new measures: neighborhood rough entropy and neighborhood probabilistic entropy to deal with the ambiguities that arise due to occurrence of overlapping/ occlusion in a video sequence. The unsupervised method of tracking is equally good even when compared with some of the state-of-the art partially supervised methods while showing superior performance during total occlusion

Granulated deep learning and Z-numbers in motion detection and object recognition

The article deals with the problems of motion detection, object recognition, and scene description using deep learning in the framework of granular computing and Z-numbers. Since deep learning is computationally intensive, whereas granular computing, on the other hand, leads to computation gain, a judicious integration of their merits is made so as to make the learning mechanism computationally efficient. Further, it is shown how the concept of z-numbers can be used to quantify the abstraction of semantic information in interpreting a scene, where subjectivity is of major concern, through recognition of its constituting objects. The system, thus developed, involves recognition of both static objects in the background and moving objects in foreground separately. Rough set theoretic granular computing is adopted where rough lower and upper approximations are used in defining object and background models. During deep learning, instead of scanning the entire image pixel by pixel in the convolution layer, we scan only the representative pixel of each granule. This results in a significant gain in computation time. Arbitrary-shaped and sized granules, as expected, perform better than regular-shaped rectangular granules or fixed-sized granules. The method of tracking is able to deal efficiently with various challenging cases, e.g., tracking partially overlapped objects and suddenly appeared objects. Overall, the granulated system shows a balanced trade-off between speed and accuracy as compared to pixel level learning in tracking and recognition. The concept of using Z-numbers, in providing a granulated linguistic description of a scene, is unique. This gives a more natural interpretation of object recognition in terms of certainty toward scene understanding

Neighborhood granules and rough rule-base in tracking

This paper deals with several new methodologies and concepts in the area of rough set theoretic granular computing which are then applied in video tracking. A new concept of neighborhood granule formation over images is introduced here. These granules are of arbitrary shapes and sizes unlike other existing granulation techniques and hence more natural. The concept of rough-rule base is used for video tracking to deal with the uncertainties and incompleteness as well as to gain in computation time. A new neighborhood granular rough rule base is formulated which proves to be effective in reducing the indiscernibility of the rule-base. This new rule-base provides more accurate results in the task of tracking. Two indices to evaluate the performance of tracking are defined. These indices do not need ground truth information or any estimation technique like the other existing ones. All these features are demonstrated with suitable experimental results