RVMOS: Range-View Moving Object Segmentation Leveraged by Semantic and Motion Features

Detecting traffic participants is an essential and age-old problem in autonomous driving. Recently, the recognition of moving objects has emerged as a major issue in this field for safe driving. In this paper, we present RVMOS, a LiDAR Range-View-based Moving Object Segmentation framework that segments moving objects given a sequence of range-view images. In contrast to the conventional method, our network incorporates both motion and semantic features, each of which encodes the motion of objects and the surrounding circumstance of the objects. In addition, we design a new feature extraction module suitably designed for range-view images. Lastly, we introduce simple yet effective data augmentation methods: time interval modulation and zero residual image synthesis. With these contributions, we achieve a 19% higher performance (mIoU) with 10% faster computational time (34 FPS on RTX 3090) than the state-of-the-art method with the SemanticKitti benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our network design and data augmentation scheme.FALS

Characterization of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Derived from Patients with Cerebellar Ataxia: Downregulation of the Anti-Inflammatory Secretome Profile

Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy is a promising alternative approach for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, according to its neuroprotective and immunomodulatory potential. Despite numerous clinical trials involving autologous MSCs, their outcomes have often been unsuccessful. Several reports have indicated that MSCs from patients have low capacities in terms of the secretion of neurotrophic or anti-inflammatory factors, which might be associated with cell senescence or disease severity. Therefore, a new strategy to improve their capacities is required for optimal efficacy of autologous MSC therapy. In this study, we compared the secretory potential of MSCs among cerebellar ataxia patients (CA-MSCs) and healthy individuals (H-MSCs). Our results, including secretome analysis findings, revealed that CA-MSCs have lower capacities in terms of proliferation, oxidative stress response, motility, and immunomodulatory functions when compared with H-MSCs. The functional differences were validated in a scratch wound healing assay and neuron-glia co-cultures. In addition, the neuroprotective and immunoregulatory protein follistatin-like 1 (FSTL1) was identified as one of the downregulated proteins in the CA-MSC secretome, with suppressive effects on proinflammatory microglial activation. Our study findings suggest that targeting aspects of the downregulated anti-inflammatory secretome, such as FSTL1, might improve the efficacy of autologous MSC therapy for CA