Technical Evaluation of HoloLens for Multimedia: A First Look

A recently released cutting-edge AR device, Microsoft HoloLens, has attracted considerable attention with its advanced capabilities. In this article, we report the design and execution of a series of experiments to quantitatively evaluate HoloLens' performance in head localization, real environment reconstruction, spatial mapping, hologram visualization, and speech recognition

Evaluating and Improving the Depth Accuracy of Kinect for Windows v2

Microsoft Kinect sensor has been widely used in many applications since the launch of its first version. Recently, Microsoft released a new version of Kinect sensor with improved hardware. However, the accuracy assessment of the sensor remains to be answered. In this paper, we measure the depth accuracy of the newly released Kinect v2 depth sensor, and obtain a cone model to illustrate its accuracy distribution. We then evaluate the variance of the captured depth values by depth entropy. In addition, we propose a trilateration method to improve the depth accuracy with multiple Kinects simultaneously. The experimental results are provided to ascertain the proposed model and method

EVM-CNN: Real-Time Contactless Heart Rate Estimation from Facial Video

With the increase in health consciousness, noninvasive body monitoring has aroused interest among researchers. As one of the most important pieces of physiological information, researchers have remotely estimated the heart rate (HR) from facial videos in recent years. Although progress has been made over the past few years, there are still some limitations, like the processing time increasing with accuracy and the lack of comprehensive and challenging datasets for use and comparison. Recently, it was shown that HR information can be extracted from facial videos by spatial decomposition and temporal filtering. Inspired by this, a new framework is introduced in this paper to remotely estimate the HR under realistic conditions by combining spatial and temporal filtering and a convolutional neural network. Our proposed approach shows better performance compared with the benchmark on the MMSE-HR dataset in terms of both the average HR estimation and short-time HR estimation. High consistency in short-time HR estimation is observed between our method and the ground truth

Upregulation of Toll-like receptor (TLR) expression and release of cytokines from P815 mast cells by GM-CSF

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Backgroud</p> <p>Recently, mast cells have been recognized to express several Toll-like receptors (TLRs) on their membrane surfaces, and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) was reported to be able to alter expression of TLRs and cytokine production in neutrophils. However, whether GM-CSF modulates the expression of TLR and cytokine production in mast cells is not clear.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using flow cytometry and real time PCR techniques, we found that GM-CSF upregulated expression of TLR3 and TLR7 in P815 cells in a concentration dependent manner. GM-CSF also provoked approximately up to 2.4 and 2.3 fold increase in IL-13 and IL-6 release from P815 cells, respectively following 16 h incubation. GM-CSF induced IL-13 secretion, TLR3 and TLR7 expression appeared to be through activation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and phosphotidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling pathways, whereas GM-CSF elicited IL-6 release seemed via Akt signaling pathway. At 10 ng/ml, GM-CSF significantly enhanced R-848-induced IL-6 release from P815 cells.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The ability of GM-CSF in modulation of expression of TLR3 and TLR7 in P815 mast cells and in stimulation of IL-13 and IL-6 release from P815 mast cells in vitro suggests that GM-CSF might play an important role in enhancing the innate immune responses of mast cell to viral infection</p

Spatially Guided Construction of Multilayered Epidermal Models Recapturing Structural Hierarchy and Cell–Cell Junctions

A current challenge in 3D bioprinting of skin equivalents is to recreate the distinct basal and suprabasal layers and promote their direct interactions. Such a structural arrangement is essential to establish 3D stratified epidermis disease models, such as for the autoimmune skin disease pemphigus vulgaris (PV), which targets the cell– cell junctions at the interface of the basal and suprabasal layers. Inspired by epithelial regeneration in wound healing, a method that combines 3D bioprinting and spatially guided self-reorganization of keratinocytes is developed to recapture the fine structural hierarchy that lies in the deep layers of the epidermis.Herein, keratinocyteladen fibrin hydrogels are bioprinted to create geographical cues, guiding dynamic self-reorganization of cells through collective migration, keratinocyte differentiation, and vertical expansion. This process results in a region of self-organized multilayers (SOMs) that contain the basal-to-suprabasal transition, marked by the expressed levels of different types of keratins that indicate differentiation. Finally, the reconstructed skin tissue as an in vitro platform to study the pathogenic effects of PV is demonstrated, illuminating a significant difference in cell–cell junction dissociation induced by PV antibodies in different epidermis layers, which indicates their applications in the preclinical test of possible therapies

Genomic and Transcriptomic Evidence for Carbohydrate Consumption among Microorganisms in a Cold Seep Brine Pool

The detailed lifestyle of microorganisms in deep-sea brine environments remains largely unexplored. Using a carefully calibrated genome binning approach, we reconstructed partial to nearly-complete genomes of 51 microorganisms in biofilms from the Thuwal cold seep brine pool of the Red Sea. The recovered metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) belong to six different phyla: Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Candidatus Cloacimonetes, Candidatus Marinimicrobia, Bathyarchaeota and Thaumarchaeota. By comparison with close relatives of these microorganisms, we identified a number of unique genes associated with organic carbon metabolism and energy generation. These genes included various glycoside hydrolases, nitrate and sulfate reductases, putative bacterial microcompartment biosynthetic clusters (BMC), and F420H2 dehydrogenases. Phylogenetic analysis suggested that the acquisition of these genes probably occurred through horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Metatranscriptomics illustrated that glycoside hydrolases are among the most highly expressed genes. Our results suggest that the microbial inhabitants are well adapted to this brine environment, and anaerobic carbohydrate consumption mediated by glycoside hydrolases and electron transport systems (ETSs) is a dominant process performed by microorganisms from various phyla within this ecosystem

Local Gromov-Witten Invariants are Log Invariants

We prove a simple equivalence between the virtual count of rational curves in the total space of an anti-nef line bundle and the virtual count of rational curves maximally tangent to a smooth section of the dual line bundle. We conjecture a generalization to direct sums of line bundles.Comment: 15 pages, version accepted for publication in Advances in Mathematic