Altered awareness of action in Parkinson’s disease: evaluations by explicit and implicit measures

Deficits in the integration of motor prediction and its feedback have been reported in Parkinson's disease. Conscious awareness of action is proposed to emerge under the integration of motor prediction and its feedback. Thus, it may lead to changes in the awareness of the authorship of action (in other words, the sense of agency) in Parkinson's disease. We have employed both explicit and implicit measures to assess the awareness of action in Parkinson's disease and matched controls. As an explicit measure, an action recognition task requiring explicit judgments was used. Patients showed less attribution of their movements to non-biased and angular-biased visual feedbacks. As an implicit measure, the temporal attraction between the perceived time of actions and their effects, which is known as intentional binding task, was used. While action-effect association was observed in the control group, actions were not experienced as having shifted towards their subsequent effects in the patient group. These tendencies were consistent regardless of the side of the asymmetrical motor symptoms. These results may reflect an underlying abnormality in the awareness of voluntary action in Parkinson's disease

Pre-pregnancy BMI-specific optimal gestational weight gain for women in Japan

Background: The Institute of Medicine (IOM) guidelines are the most widely used guidelines on gestational weight gain; however, accumulation of evidence that body composition in Asians differs from other races has brought concern regarding whether their direct application is appropriate. We aimed to study to what extent optimal gestational weight gain among women in Japan differs by pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and to compare estimated optimal gestational weight gain to current Japanese and Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations. Methods: We retrospectively studied 104,070 singleton pregnancies among nulliparous women in 2005–2011 using the Japanese national perinatal network database. In five pre-pregnancy BMI sub-groups (17.0–18.4, 18.5–19.9, 20–22.9, 23–24.9, and 25–27.4 kg/m2), we estimated the association of the rate of gestational weight gain with pregnancy outcomes (fetal growth, preterm delivery, and delivery complications) using multivariate regression. Results: Weight gain rate associated with the lowest risk of adverse outcomes decreased with increasing BMI (12.2 kg, 10.9 kg, 9.9 kg, 7.7 kg, and 4.3 kg/40 weeks) for the five BMI categories as described above, respectively. Current Japanese guidelines were lower than optimal gains, with the lowest risk of adverse outcomes for women with BMI below 18.5 kg/m2, and current IOM recommendations were higher than optimal gains for women with BMI over 23 kg/m2. Conclusion: Optimal weight gain during pregnancy varies largely by pre-pregnancy BMI, and defining those with BMI over 23 kg/m2 as overweight, as proposed by the World Health Organization, may be useful when applying current IOM recommendations to Japanese guidelines

Clusters of Coronavirus Disease in Communities, Japan, January-April 2020

We analyzed 3, 184 cases of coronavirus disease in Japan and identified 61 case-clusters in healthcare and other care facilities, restaurants and bars, workplaces, and music events. We also identified 22 probable primary case-patients for the clusters; most were 20-39 years of age and presymptomatic or asymptomatic at virus transmission

パーキンソン病における行為の主体感の変容

京都大学0048新制・課程博士博士(医学)甲第20805号医博第4305号新制||医||1025(附属図書館)京都大学大学院医学研究科医学専攻(主査)教授 高橋 淳, 教授 古川 壽亮, 教授 小杉 眞司学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Medical ScienceKyoto UniversityDFA

Free viewpoint video synthesis and presentation of sporting events for mixed reality entertainment

This paper presents a new framework for arbitrary view synthesis and presentation of sporting events for mixed reality entertainment. In accordance with the viewpoint position of an observer, virtual view image of sporting scene is generated by view interpolation among multiple videos captured at real stadium. Then the synthesized sporting scene is overlaid onto a desktop stadium model in the real world via HMD. This makes it possible to watch the event in front of the observer. Projective geometry between cameras is used for virtual view generation of the dynamic scene and geometric registration between the real world and the virtual view image of sporting scene. The proposed method does not need to calibrate multiple video cameras for capturing the event and the HMD camera. Therefore it can be applied even to dynamic events in a large space and enables observation with immersive impression. The proposed approach leads to make a new type of mixed reality entertainment for sporting events. 1

Immersive Observation of Virtualized Soccer Match at Real Stadium Model

This paper presents a novel observation system for immersive soccer match taken by multiple video cameras at a real stadium. The user sees the soccer field model in front of his/her eyes from the viewpoint through head-mounted display, while the images of players and a soccer ball are also rendered onto the display. For geometric registration between the soccer field model in the real world and the dynamic soccer scene in the rendered images, the viewpoint position of the user is computed by using only natural feature lines in the HMD camera image. Since it is difficult to strongly calibrate the HMD camera and the multiple cameras that capture the real soccer scene, we employ projective geometry for the registration and the rendering. For demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed system, video images of soccer matches taken at real stadium are rendered onto the HMD camera images of a tabletop stadium model. This is a completely new challenge to apply augmented reality to a dynamic event in a large-space. 1

Appearance Based Prosthetic Eye

This paper introduces a new approach to improve the appearance of a prosthetic eye using computer vision and graphics technology. The proposed method can synthesize realistic appearance and movement of a prosthetic eye

Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders.

Available online 5 August 2015The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that "I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action". A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency

Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that "I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action". A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency