Thermal constraints on in vivo optogenetic manipulations.

A key assumption of optogenetics is that light only affects opsin-expressing neurons. However, illumination invariably heats tissue, and many physiological processes are temperature-sensitive. Commonly used illumination protocols increased the temperature by 0.2-2 °C and suppressed spiking in multiple brain regions. In the striatum, light delivery activated an inwardly rectifying potassium conductance and biased rotational behavior. Thus, careful consideration of light-delivery parameters is required, as even modest intracranial heating can confound interpretation of optogenetic experiments

Generalized Coherent Point Drift With Multi-Variate Gaussian Distribution and Watson Distribution

This letter introduces a novel rigid point set registration (PSR) approach that accurately aligns the pre-operative space and the intra-operative space together in the scenario of computer-Assisted orthopedic surgery (CAOS). Motivated by considering anisotropic positional localization noise and utilizing undirected normal vectors in the point sets (PSs), the multi-variate Gaussian distribution and the Watson distribution are utilized to model positional and normal vectors' error distributions respectively. In the proposed approach, with the above probability distributions, the PSR problem is then formulated as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem and solved under the expectation maximization (EM) framework. Our contributions are three folds. First, the rigid registration problem of aligning generalized points with undirected normal vectors is formally formulated in a probabilistic manner. Second, the MLE problem is solved under the EM framework. Third, the gradients of associated objective functions with respect to desired parameters are computed and provided. Experimental results on both the human pelvis and femur models demonstrate the potential clinical values and that the proposed approach owns significantly improved performances compared with existing methods

Direct Visual Servoing Based on Discrete Orthogonal Moments

This paper proposes a new approach to achieve direct visual servoing (DVS) based on discrete orthogonal moments (DOM). DVS is conducted whereby the extraction of geometric primitives, matching and tracking steps in the conventional feature-based visual servoing pipeline can be bypassed. Although DVS enables highly precise positioning, and suffers from a small convergence domain and poor robustness, due to the high non-linearity of the cost function to be minimized and the presence of redundant data between visual features. To tackle these issues, we propose a generic and augmented framework to take DOM as visual features into consideration. Through taking Tchebichef, Krawtchouk and Hahn moments as examples, we not only present the strategies for adaptive adjusting the parameters and orders of the visual features, but also exhibit the analytical formulation of the associated interaction matrix. Simulations demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our method, as well as the advantages over the state of the art. The real experiments have also been performed to validate the effectiveness of our approach

Validity and equivalence of the SF-12v2 Health Survey for a Chinese Population

Poster Session 3: no. 124/1264Conference Theme: Integrating HRQOL in Health Care Policy, Research, and Practic

Rapid Communication: TaqI Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism at the Porcine Transporter Associated with Antigen Processing 2 [TAP2] Locus

Source and Description of Probe. A 2.7-kb human cDNA clone for TAP2 was excised from the XbaI site of the plasmid pRSV.5neo (Bahram et al., 1991). Method of Detection. DNA was isolated from whole blood and digested with TuqI. Fragments were separated by agarose gel electrophoresis and transferred to charged nylon membranes. Hybridizations were for 16 to 20 h at 65°C (10% dextran sulfate, 7% SDS, .263 M Na2HP04, 1% BSA, 1 mM EDTA, 100 pglmL sonicated denatured salmon sperm DNA). Final washes were at 65°C in .7x SSC, 5% SDS for 15 to 20 min

Rapid Communication: Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism at the Porcine Superoxide Dismutase Locus

PoZymorphism. An RFLP was detected in the superoxide dismutase 2 (SOD2) locus of swine using the restriction enzyme StuI. Source and Description of Probe. An 827-bp human cDNA clone for SOD2 was excised from the EcoRI site of plasmid phMnSOD4 (Xiang et al., 1987)

Enhance Connectivity of Promising Regions for Sampling-based Path Planning

Sampling-based path planning algorithms usually implement uniform sampling methods to search the state space. However, uniform sampling may lead to unnecessary exploration in many scenarios, such as the environment with a few dead ends. Our previous work proposes to use the promising region to guide the sampling process to address the issue. However, the predicted promising regions are often disconnected, which means they cannot connect the start and goal state, resulting in a lack of probabilistic completeness. This work focuses on enhancing the connectivity of predicted promising regions. Our proposed method regresses the connectivity probability of the edges in the x and y directions. In addition, it calculates the weight of the promising edges in loss to guide the neural network to pay more attention to the connectivity of the promising regions. We conduct a series of simulation experiments, and the results show that the connectivity of promising regions improves significantly. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of connectivity on sampling-based path planning algorithms and conclude that connectivity plays an essential role in maintaining algorithm performance.Comment: Accepted in Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 202

Virtual Reality Based Robot Teleoperation via Human-Scene Interaction

Robot teleoperation gains great success in various situations, including chemical pollution rescue, disaster relief, and long-distance manipulation. In this article, we propose a virtual reality (VR) based robot teleoperation system to achieve more efficient and natural interaction with humans in different scenes. A user-friendly VR interface is designed to help users interact with a desktop scene using their hands efficiently and intuitively. To improve user experience and reduce workload, we simulate the process in the physics engine to help build a preview of the scene after manipulation in the virtual scene before execution. We conduct experiments with different users and compare our system with a direct control method across several teleoperation tasks. The user study demonstrates that the proposed system enables users to perform operations more instinctively with a lighter mental workload. Users can perform pick-and-place and object-stacking tasks in a considerably short time, even for beginners. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingxiaomeng/VR_Teleoperation_Gen3