Towards automated visual flexible endoscope navigation

Background:\ud The design of flexible endoscopes has not changed significantly in the past 50 years. A trend is observed towards a wider application of flexible endoscopes with an increasing role in complex intraluminal therapeutic procedures. The nonintuitive and nonergonomical steering mechanism now forms a barrier in the extension of flexible endoscope applications. Automating the navigation of endoscopes could be a solution for this problem. This paper summarizes the current state of the art in image-based navigation algorithms. The objectives are to find the most promising navigation system(s) to date and to indicate fields for further research.\ud Methods:\ud A systematic literature search was performed using three general search terms in two medical–technological literature databases. Papers were included according to the inclusion criteria. A total of 135 papers were analyzed. Ultimately, 26 were included.\ud Results:\ud Navigation often is based on visual information, which means steering the endoscope using the images that the endoscope produces. Two main techniques are described: lumen centralization and visual odometry. Although the research results are promising, no successful, commercially available automated flexible endoscopy system exists to date.\ud Conclusions:\ud Automated systems that employ conventional flexible endoscopes show the most promising prospects in terms of cost and applicability. To produce such a system, the research focus should lie on finding low-cost mechatronics and technologically robust steering algorithms. Additional functionality and increased efficiency can be obtained through software development. The first priority is to find real-time, robust steering algorithms. These algorithms need to handle bubbles, motion blur, and other image artifacts without disrupting the steering process

Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo

Machine translation for Sranantongo (Sranan, srn), a low-resource Creole language spoken predominantly in Surinam, is virgin territory. In this study we create a general purpose machine translation system for srn. In order to facilitate this research, we introduce the SRNcorpus, a collection of parallel Dutch (nl) to srn and monolingual srn data. We experiment with a wide range of proven machine translation methods. Our results demonstrate a strong baseline machine translation system for srn.Comment: Accepted to WiNLP (EMNLP). 2 page

Multilingual k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

k-nearest-neighbor machine translation has demonstrated remarkable improvements in machine translation quality by creating a datastore of cached examples. However, these improvements have been limited to high-resource language pairs, with large datastores, and remain a challenge for low-resource languages. In this paper, we address this issue by combining representations from multiple languages into a single datastore. Our results consistently demonstrate substantial improvements not only in low-resource translation quality (up to +3.6 BLEU), but also for high-resource translation quality (up to +0.5 BLEU). Our experiments show that it is possible to create multilingual datastores that are a quarter of the size, achieving a 5.3x speed improvement, by using linguistic similarities for datastore creation.Comment: Accepted to EMNL

Influence of the hypoxic cell sensitizer misonidazole on the proliferation of well-oxygenated cells in vitro during prolonged exposure.

Analysis of time-lapse cinematographic film permitted the construction of pedigrees from 88 well oxygenated cells of a mouse osteosarcoma (MOS). These cells have been chronically treated with various concentrations of the hypoxic cell sensitizer misonidazole (MIS) over periods of up to 96 h. At concentrations of 0.5 and 7 mM there is a 2--3 h increase in cell-cycle time. Concentrations of 2 mM show an intermitotic time delay of 7.6--10.3 h. At 4 mM cells divided only once. With increasing drug concentration there was an increase in the number of abnormal mitoses. These results were compared with cloning efficiency (PE) experiments. PE at 0.5 mM is 80%, at 1 mM 40 and at 2 mM is reduced to 4%. Cells treated with 2mM MIS over a period of 28.6 h resume their normal cycle when the drug is washed from the culture. This may indicate that DNA is not a major target for MIS. It is concluded that this hypoxic cell sensitizer is also toxic for MOS cells in well oxygenated conditions

The impact of the temperature-CO2 decoupling on the state-dependency of paleo climate sensitivity during the late Pleistocene

Climate change projections for the future are uncertain, also due to inter-model differences. The application of these models to paleo times, which can be constrained by reconstructions, is therefore essential, not only to gain a better understanding of past climate changes, but also for model validation purposes. In this respect both data- and model-based approaches have been used to generate time series of global temperature changes, ∆Tg. The ratio of ∆Tg over radiative forcing, ∆R, defines the specific equilibrium climate sensitivity S, and has been suggested to be state-dependent, potentially increasing towards warming climates, and therefore suggesting climate sensitivity for the future to be at the upper end of the range of published results (Köhler et al., 2015, 2017). Here we reanalyse existing time series of ∆Tg and ∆R for the last 800,000 years and show that this proposed state-dependency of S is only found if ∆Tg is based on data (reconstructions), and not if ∆Tg is based on models (simulations). We furthermore identify that in data-based reconstructions ∆Tg is decoupled from atmospheric CO2 predominantely during times of decreasing obliquity (identical to periods of land-ice sheet growth and sea level fall), while in model simulations ∆Tg and CO2 vary in phase throughout. This multi-millennial decoupling of CO2 and temperature has been suggested to be partially caused by a sea level-induced surge in magma and CO2 fluxes from oceanic hotspot volcanoes and mid ocean ridges (Hasenclever et al., 2017). The neglection of these feedbacks between the solid Earth and the climate system in recent Earth system models is partly responsible for the data/model misfit, and illustrates our current limitation in the model-based interpretation of the paleo records. Paleo-based estimates of S might be restricted to data without this ∆Tg-CO2-decoupling leading to a 20% smaller quantification of S for interglacial conditions of the late Pleistocene

Holding still, together

This book provides unique insights into how health professionals and people with Parkinson’s disease shape care together. It shows both the courage and vulnerabilities of those who have to face this disease. It consists of photos of people with Parkinson’s disease and their care professionals, both of their interaction and portrayed individually, interwoven with fragments of their dialogue about meaningful care. This book is an integral part of a research project at Radboud university medical center into person-centred care. With it, we hope to contribute to a positive, hopeful vision of ever-improving Parkinson’s care