Generating inner ear organoids containing putative cochlear hair cells from human pluripotent stem cells

In view of the prevalence of sensorineural hearing defects in an ageing population, the development of protocols to generate cochlear hair cells and their associated sensory neurons as tools to further our understanding of inner ear development are highly desirable. We report herein a robust protocol for the generation of both vestibular and cochlear hair cells from human pluripotent stem cells which represents an advance over currently available methods that have been reported to generate vestibular hair cells only. Generating otic organoids from human pluripotent stem cells using a three-dimensional culture system, we show formation of both types of sensory hair cells bearing stereociliary bundles with active mechano-sensory ion channels. These cells share many morphological characteristics with their in vivo counterparts during embryonic development of the cochlear and vestibular organs and moreover demonstrate electrophysiological activity detected through single-cell patch clamping. Collectively these data represent an advance in our ability to generate cells of an otic lineage and will be useful for building models of the sensory regions of the cochlea and vestibule

3D Deformable Super-Resolution for Multi-Camera 3D Face Scanning

International audienceLow-cost and high-accuracy 3D face measurementis becoming increasingly important in many computer visionapplications including face recognition, facial animation,games, orthodontics and aesthetic surgery. In most casesfringe projection based systems are used to overcome therelatively uniform appearance of skin. These systems employa structured light camera/projector device and requireexplicit user cooperation and controlled lighting conditions.In this paper, we propose a 3D acquisition solution with a3D space-time non-rigid super-resolution capability, usingthree calibrated cameras coupled with a non calibrated projectordevice, which is particularly suited to 3D face scanning,i.e. rapid, easily movable and robust to ambient lightingvariation. The proposed solution is a hybrid stereovisionand phase-shifting approach, using two shifted patterns anda texture image, which not only takes advantage of stereovisionand structured light, but also overcomes their weaknesses.The super-resolution scheme involves a shape+texture3D non-rigid registration for 3D artifacts correction in thepresence of small non-rigid deformations as facial expressions