Sensation of presence and cybersickness in applications of virtual reality for advanced rehabilitation

Around three years ago, in the special issue on augmented and virtual reality in rehabilitation, the topics of simulator sickness was briefly discussed in relation to vestibular rehabilitation. Simulator sickness with virtual reality applications have also been referred to as visually induced motion sickness or cybersickness. Recently, study on cybersickness has been reported in entertainment, training, game, and medical environment in several journals. Virtual stimuli can enlarge sensation of presence, but they sometimes also evoke unpleasant sensation. In order to safely apply augmented and virtual reality for long-term rehabilitation treatment, sensation of presence and cybersickness should be appropriately controlled. This issue presents the results of five studies conducted to evaluate visually-induced effects and speculate influences of virtual rehabilitation. In particular, the influence of visual and vestibular stimuli on cardiovascular responses are reported in terms of academic contribution

Long-term QiGong practice is associated with improved self-perceived health and quality of life

In cross-sectional studies, we examined the long-term practice effects of QiGong exercise on perceived health and quality of life (QoL) in middle-aged (over 50 years) Japanese individuals. In Study 1, Japanese adults (n = 320) who practised QiGong responded to a questionnaire concerning the perceived benefits of QiGong practice and QoL. In Study 2, we collected data from QiGong participants who attended a QiGong conference (n = 799). Participants in Study 1 perceived that QiGong affords physical, psychological, and social benefits and QiGong duration in years correlated strongly with QoL. In Study 2, those who practised QiGong for 0–3 years vs. 13+ years reported a greater likelihood of perceived palpitation, insomnia, a lack of vigour, and attention deficit (odd ratios 1.56–2.60, all p  .05). QiGong is a multi-component form of physical activity, which – if practised for prolonged periods – affords motor, cognitive, social, and QoL benefits

Fibromatosis of the Plantar Fascia: Diagnosis and Indications For Surgical Treatment

Plantar fibromatosis is a rare, benign lesion involving the plantar aponeurosis. Eleven patients (13 feet) underwent 24 operations, including local excision, wide excision, or complete plantar fasciectomy. Clinical results were evaluated retrospectively. There were no differences among the subgroups in postoperative complications. Two primary fasciectomies did not recur. Three of six revised fasciectomies, seven of nine wide excisions, and six of seven local excisions recurred. Our results indicate that recurrence of plantar fibromatosis after surgical resection can be reduced by aggressive initial surgical resection

Chiral persistent currents and magnetic susceptibilities in the parafermion quantum Hall states in the second Landau level with Aharonov-Bohm flux

Using the effective conformal field theory for the quantum Hall edge states we propose a compact and convenient scheme for the computation of the periods, amplitudes and temperature behavior of the chiral persistent currents and the magnetic susceptibilities in the mesoscopic disk version of the Z_k parafermion quantum Hall states in the second Landau level. Our numerical calculations show that the persistent currents are periodic in the Aharonov-Bohm flux with period exactly one flux quantum and have a diamagnetic nature. In the high-temperature regime their amplitudes decay exponentially with increasing the temperature and the corresponding exponents are universal characteristics of non-Fermi liquids. Our theoretical results for these exponents are in perfect agreement with those extracted from the numerical data and demonstrate that there is in general a non-trivial contribution coming from the neutral sector. We emphasize the crucial role of the non-holomorphic factors, first proposed by Cappelli and Zemba in the context of the conformal field theory partition functions for the quantum Hall states, which ensure the invariance of the annulus partition function under the Laughlin spectral flow.Comment: 14 pages, RevTeX4, 7 figures (eps

Software.ncrna.org: web servers for analyses of RNA sequences

We present web servers for analysis of non-coding RNA sequences on the basis of their secondary structures. Software tools for structural multiple sequence alignments, structural pairwise sequence alignments and structural motif findings are available from the integrated web server and the individual stand-alone web servers. The servers are located at http://software.ncrna.org, along with the information for the evaluation and downloading. This website is freely available to all users and there is no login requirement

RNA secondary structure prediction from multi-aligned sequences

It has been well accepted that the RNA secondary structures of most functional non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are closely related to their functions and are conserved during evolution. Hence, prediction of conserved secondary structures from evolutionarily related sequences is one important task in RNA bioinformatics; the methods are useful not only to further functional analyses of ncRNAs but also to improve the accuracy of secondary structure predictions and to find novel functional RNAs from the genome. In this review, I focus on common secondary structure prediction from a given aligned RNA sequence, in which one secondary structure whose length is equal to that of the input alignment is predicted. I systematically review and classify existing tools and algorithms for the problem, by utilizing the information employed in the tools and by adopting a unified viewpoint based on maximum expected gain (MEG) estimators. I believe that this classification will allow a deeper understanding of each tool and provide users with useful information for selecting tools for common secondary structure predictions.Comment: A preprint of an invited review manuscript that will be published in a chapter of the book `Methods in Molecular Biology'. Note that this version of the manuscript may differ from the published versio

Improved accuracy of multiple ncRNA alignment by incorporating structural information into a MAFFT-based framework

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Structural alignment of RNAs is becoming important, since the discovery of functional non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Recent studies, mainly based on various approximations of the Sankoff algorithm, have resulted in considerable improvement in the accuracy of pairwise structural alignment. In contrast, for the cases with more than two sequences, the practical merit of structural alignment remains unclear as compared to traditional sequence-based methods, although the importance of multiple structural alignment is widely recognized.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We took a different approach from a straightforward extension of the Sankoff algorithm to the multiple alignments from the viewpoints of accuracy and time complexity. As a new option of the MAFFT alignment program, we developed a multiple RNA alignment framework, X-INS-i, which builds a multiple alignment with an iterative method incorporating structural information through two components: (1) pairwise structural alignments by an external pairwise alignment method such as SCARNA or LaRA and (2) a new objective function, Four-way Consistency, derived from the base-pairing probability of every sub-aligned group at every multiple alignment stage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The BRAliBASE benchmark showed that X-INS-i outperforms other methods currently available in the sum-of-pairs score (SPS) criterion. As a basis for predicting common secondary structure, the accuracy of the present method is comparable to or rather higher than those of the current leading methods such as RNA Sampler. The X-INS-i framework can be used for building a multiple RNA alignment from any combination of algorithms for pairwise RNA alignment and base-pairing probability. The source code is available at the webpage found in the Availability and requirements section.</p

PicXAA-R: Efficient structural alignment of multiple RNA sequences using a greedy approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Accurate and efficient structural alignment of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) has grasped more and more attentions as recent studies unveiled the significance of ncRNAs in living organisms. While the Sankoff style structural alignment algorithms cannot efficiently serve for multiple sequences, mostly progressive schemes are used to reduce the complexity. However, this idea tends to propagate the early stage errors throughout the entire process, thereby degrading the quality of the final alignment. For multiple protein sequence alignment, we have recently proposed PicXAA which constructs an accurate alignment in a non-progressive fashion.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we propose PicXAA-R as an extension to PicXAA for greedy structural alignment of ncRNAs. PicXAA-R efficiently grasps both folding information within each sequence and local similarities between sequences. It uses a set of probabilistic consistency transformations to improve the posterior base-pairing and base alignment probabilities using the information of all sequences in the alignment. Using a graph-based scheme, we greedily build up the structural alignment from sequence regions with high base-pairing and base alignment probabilities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Several experiments on datasets with different characteristics confirm that PicXAA-R is one of the fastest algorithms for structural alignment of multiple RNAs and it consistently yields accurate alignment results, especially for datasets with locally similar sequences. PicXAA-R source code is freely available at: <url>http://www.ece.tamu.edu/~bjyoon/picxaa/</url>.</p