The spine in Paget’s disease

Paget’s disease (PD) is a chronic metabolically active bone disease, characterized by a disturbance in bone modelling and remodelling due to an increase in osteoblastic and osteoclastic activity. The vertebra is the second most commonly affected site. This article reviews the various spinal pathomechanisms and osseous dynamics involved in producing the varied imaging appearances and their clinical relevance. Advanced imaging of osseous, articular and bone marrow manifestations of PD in all the vertebral components are presented. Pagetic changes often result in clinical symptoms including back pain, spinal stenosis and neural dysfunction. Various pathological complications due to PD involvement result in these clinical symptoms. Recognition of the imaging manifestations of spinal PD and the potential complications that cause the clinical symptoms enables accurate assessment of patients prior to appropriate management

Sense of agency in the human brain

In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies

On-Body Tangible Interaction: Using the Body to Support Tangible Manipulations for Immersive Environments

International audienceRecent technological advances in immersive devices open up many opportunities for users to visualize data in their environments. However, current interactive solutions fail at providing a convenient approach to manipulate such complex immersive visualizations. In this article, we present a new approach to interact in these environments, that we call On-Body Tangible interaction (OBT): using the body to physically support the manipulation of an input device. The use of the body to support the interaction allows the user to move in his environment and avoid the inherent fatigue of mid-air interactions. In this paper, we explore the use of a rolling device, which fits well on-body interaction thanks to its form factor and offers enough degrees of freedom (DoF) for data manipulation. We first propose a new design space for OBT interactions, and specifically on the forearm. Then we validate the feasibility of such an approach through an experiment aimed at establishing the range, stability and comfort of gestures performed with the device on the forearm. Our results reveal that on-body tangible interaction on the forearm is stable and offers multiple DoFs with little fatigue. We illustrate the benefits of our approach through sample applications where OBT interactions are used to select and execute space-time cube operations