Scenario-based VR Framework for Product Design

International audienc

Transcriptional analysis of late ripening stages of grapevine berry

* Background: The composition of grapevine berry at harvest is a major determinant of wine quality. Optimal oenological maturity of berries is characterized by a high sugar/acidity ratio, high anthocyanin content in the skin, and low astringency. However, harvest time is still mostly determined empirically, based on crude biochemical composition and berry tasting. In this context, it is interesting to identify genes that are expressed/repressed specifically at the late stages of ripening and which may be used as indicators of maturity. * Results: Whole bunches and berries sorted by density were collected in vineyard on Chardonnay (white cultivar) grapevines for two consecutive years at three stages of ripening (7-days before harvest (TH-7), harvest (TH), and 10-days after harvest (TH+10)). Microvinification and sensory analysis indicate that the quality of the wines made from the whole bunches collected at TH-7, TH and TH+10 differed, TH providing the highest quality wines. In parallel, gene expression was studied with Qiagen/Operon microarrays using two types of samples, i.e. whole bunches and berries sorted by density. Only 12 genes were consistently up-or down-regulated in whole bunches and density sorted berries for the two years studied in Chardonnay. 52 genes were differentially expressed between the TH-7 and TH samples. In order to determine whether these genes followed a similar pattern of expression during the late stages of berry ripening in a red cultivar, nine genes were selected for RT-PCR analysis with Cabernet Sauvignon grown under two different temperature regimes affecting the precocity of ripening. The expression profiles and their relationship to ripening were confirmed in Cabernet Sauvignon for seven genes, encoding a carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase, a galactinol synthase, a late embryogenesis abundant protein, a dirigent-like protein, a histidine kinase receptor, a valencene synthase and a putative S-adenosyl-L-methionine: salicylic acid carboxyl methyltransferase. * Conclusions: This set of up-and down-regulated genes characterize the late stages of berry ripening in the two cultivars studied, and are indirectly linked to wine quality. They might be used directly or indirectly to design immunological, biochemical or molecular tools aimed at the determination of optimal ripening in these cultivars

Effect of terminal accuracy requirements on temporal gaze-hand coordination during fast discrete and reciprocal pointings

Background\ud \ud Rapid discrete goal-directed movements are characterized by a well known coordination pattern between the gaze and the hand displacements. The gaze always starts prior to the hand movement and reaches the target before hand velocity peak. Surprisingly, the effect of the target size on the temporal gaze-hand coordination has not been directly investigated. Moreover, goal-directed movements are often produced in a reciprocal rather than in a discrete manner. The objectives of this work were to assess the effect of the target size on temporal gaze-hand coordination during fast 1) discrete and 2) reciprocal pointings.\ud \ud Methods\ud \ud Subjects performed fast discrete (experiment 1) and reciprocal (experiment 2) pointings with an amplitude of 50 cm and four target diameters (7.6, 3.8, 1.9 and 0.95 cm) leading to indexes of difficulty (ID = log2[2A/D]) of 3.7, 4.7, 5.7 and 6.7 bits. Gaze and hand displacements were synchronously recorded. Temporal gaze-hand coordination parameters were compared between experiments (discrete and reciprocal pointings) and IDs using analyses of variance (ANOVAs).\ud \ud Results\ud \ud Data showed that the magnitude of the gaze-hand lead pattern was much higher for discrete than for reciprocal pointings. Moreover, while it was constant for discrete pointings, it decreased systematically with an increasing ID for reciprocal pointings because of the longer duration of gaze anchoring on target.\ud \ud Conclusion \ud \ud Overall, the temporal gaze-hand coordination analysis revealed that even for high IDs, fast reciprocal pointings could not be considered as a concatenation of discrete units. Moreover, our data clearly illustrate the smooth adaptation of temporal gaze-hand coordination to terminal accuracy requirements during fast reciprocal pointings. It will be interesting for further researches to investigate if the methodology used in the experiment 2 allows assessing the effect of sensori-motor deficits on gaze-hand coordination

Vaccine breakthrough hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia in patients with auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs

Life-threatening `breakthrough' cases of critical COVID-19 are attributed to poor or waning antibody response to the SARS- CoV-2 vaccine in individuals already at risk. Pre-existing autoantibodies (auto-Abs) neutralizing type I IFNs underlie at least 15% of critical COVID-19 pneumonia cases in unvaccinated individuals; however, their contribution to hypoxemic breakthrough cases in vaccinated people remains unknown. Here, we studied a cohort of 48 individuals ( age 20-86 years) who received 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine and developed a breakthrough infection with hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia 2 weeks to 4 months later. Antibody levels to the vaccine, neutralization of the virus, and auto- Abs to type I IFNs were measured in the plasma. Forty-two individuals had no known deficiency of B cell immunity and a normal antibody response to the vaccine. Among them, ten (24%) had auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs (aged 43-86 years). Eight of these ten patients had auto-Abs neutralizing both IFN-a2 and IFN-., while two neutralized IFN-omega only. No patient neutralized IFN-ss. Seven neutralized 10 ng/mL of type I IFNs, and three 100 pg/mL only. Seven patients neutralized SARS-CoV-2 D614G and the Delta variant (B.1.617.2) efficiently, while one patient neutralized Delta slightly less efficiently. Two of the three patients neutralizing only 100 pg/mL of type I IFNs neutralized both D61G and Delta less efficiently. Despite two mRNA vaccine inoculations and the presence of circulating antibodies capable of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2, auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs may underlie a significant proportion of hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia cases, highlighting the importance of this particularly vulnerable population

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for Severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome associated with COVID-19: An Emulated Target Trial Analysis.

RATIONALE: Whether COVID patients may benefit from extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) compared with conventional invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) remains unknown. OBJECTIVES: To estimate the effect of ECMO on 90-Day mortality vs IMV only Methods: Among 4,244 critically ill adult patients with COVID-19 included in a multicenter cohort study, we emulated a target trial comparing the treatment strategies of initiating ECMO vs. no ECMO within 7 days of IMV in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (PaO2/FiO2 <80 or PaCO2 ≥60 mmHg). We controlled for confounding using a multivariable Cox model based on predefined variables. MAIN RESULTS: 1,235 patients met the full eligibility criteria for the emulated trial, among whom 164 patients initiated ECMO. The ECMO strategy had a higher survival probability at Day-7 from the onset of eligibility criteria (87% vs 83%, risk difference: 4%, 95% CI 0;9%) which decreased during follow-up (survival at Day-90: 63% vs 65%, risk difference: -2%, 95% CI -10;5%). However, ECMO was associated with higher survival when performed in high-volume ECMO centers or in regions where a specific ECMO network organization was set up to handle high demand, and when initiated within the first 4 days of MV and in profoundly hypoxemic patients. CONCLUSIONS: In an emulated trial based on a nationwide COVID-19 cohort, we found differential survival over time of an ECMO compared with a no-ECMO strategy. However, ECMO was consistently associated with better outcomes when performed in high-volume centers and in regions with ECMO capacities specifically organized to handle high demand. This article is open access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

COVID-19 symptoms at hospital admission vary with age and sex: results from the ISARIC prospective multinational observational study

Background: The ISARIC prospective multinational observational study is the largest cohort of hospitalized patients with COVID-19. We present relationships of age, sex, and nationality to presenting symptoms. Methods: International, prospective observational study of 60 109 hospitalized symptomatic patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 recruited from 43 countries between 30 January and 3 August 2020. Logistic regression was performed to evaluate relationships of age and sex to published COVID-19 case definitions and the most commonly reported symptoms. Results: ‘Typical’ symptoms of fever (69%), cough (68%) and shortness of breath (66%) were the most commonly reported. 92% of patients experienced at least one of these. Prevalence of typical symptoms was greatest in 30- to 60-year-olds (respectively 80, 79, 69%; at least one 95%). They were reported less frequently in children (≤ 18 years: 69, 48, 23; 85%), older adults (≥ 70 years: 61, 62, 65; 90%), and women (66, 66, 64; 90%; vs. men 71, 70, 67; 93%, each P &lt; 0.001). The most common atypical presentations under 60 years of age were nausea and vomiting and abdominal pain, and over 60 years was confusion. Regression models showed significant differences in symptoms with sex, age and country. Interpretation: This international collaboration has allowed us to report reliable symptom data from the largest cohort of patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. Adults over 60 and children admitted to hospital with COVID-19 are less likely to present with typical symptoms. Nausea and vomiting are common atypical presentations under 30 years. Confusion is a frequent atypical presentation of COVID-19 in adults over 60 years. Women are less likely to experience typical symptoms than men

Supporting the collaborative design process in Virtual Reality : from a scenario-based Framework to interactions

Cette thèse traite d’aides à la création d’applications pour la conception collaborative en Réalité Virtuelle (RV). Nous proposons un Framework basé scénarios pour structurer les activités de conception collaborative dans l’environnement virtuel. Ce Framework s’appuie sur notre modèle théorique de la conception collaborative qui établit des enchaînements et des liens entre les activités de conception. Par ailleurs, nous proposons un outil basé sur le dessin et le Machine Learning pour compléter des maquettes en RV. Nous décrivons le fonctionnement du Framework et nous montrons qu’il est possible d’y intégrer des outils de conception et d’interaction. Nous montrons aussi la capacité du Framework à aider à la création d’applications en présentant un cas d’usage d’aménagement de salles de contrôle inspiré d’un projet industriel. Nous proposons également le concept d’un outil permettant de gérer en RV l’accès et le partage d’informations multidomaine en RV afin de faciliter la compréhension commune entre utilisateurs. Nous terminons par une étude utilisateur de l’inhibition sociale en RV induite par la présence d’évaluateurs distants ou colocalisés pour comprendre l’impact de la localisation des utilisateurs lors d’une session de conception collaborative en RV.The thesis is about supporting the design of applications that are dedicated to collaborative design in Virtual Reality. We propose a scenariobased Framework to structure the collaborative design activities in the virtual environment. The Framework is based on our theoretical model of the collaborative design that describes the sequences and the links between the design activities. Then, we propose a tool based on sketching and Machine Learning techniques to populate mockups in VR. We demonstrate how the Framework runs, the integration of design and interaction tools, and the ability of the Framework to create applications by a control room layout use case based on an industrial project. Furthermore, we propose the concept of a tool that enables the access and the sharing of multi-domain information in VR in order to ease the understanding between designers in VR. We end the thesis with a user study on social inhibition in VR that emerges because of the presence of distant or colocalised examiners in the environment. The aim of the study is to understand the possible impact of the geographical localization of the users during a collaborative design session in VR

Support à la conception collaborative en Réalité Virtuelle : du Framework basé scénarios aux interactions

The thesis is about supporting the design of applications that are dedicated to collaborative design in Virtual Reality. We propose a scenariobased Framework to structure the collaborative design activities in the virtual environment. The Framework is based on our theoretical model of the collaborative design that describes the sequences and the links between the design activities. Then, we propose a tool based on sketching and Machine Learning techniques to populate mockups in VR. We demonstrate how the Framework runs, the integration of design and interaction tools, and the ability of the Framework to create applications by a control room layout use case based on an industrial project. Furthermore, we propose the concept of a tool that enables the access and the sharing of multi-domain information in VR in order to ease the understanding between designers in VR. We end the thesis with a user study on social inhibition in VR that emerges because of the presence of distant or colocalised examiners in the environment. The aim of the study is to understand the possible impact of the geographical localization of the users during a collaborative design session in VR.Cette thèse traite d’aides à la création d’applications pour la conception collaborative en Réalité Virtuelle (RV). Nous proposons un Framework basé scénarios pour structurer les activités de conception collaborative dans l’environnement virtuel. Ce Framework s’appuie sur notre modèle théorique de la conception collaborative qui établit des enchaînements et des liens entre les activités de conception. Par ailleurs, nous proposons un outil basé sur le dessin et le Machine Learning pour compléter des maquettes en RV. Nous décrivons le fonctionnement du Framework et nous montrons qu’il est possible d’y intégrer des outils de conception et d’interaction. Nous montrons aussi la capacité du Framework à aider à la création d’applications en présentant un cas d’usage d’aménagement de salles de contrôle inspiré d’un projet industriel. Nous proposons également le concept d’un outil permettant de gérer en RV l’accès et le partage d’informations multidomaine en RV afin de faciliter la compréhension commune entre utilisateurs. Nous terminons par une étude utilisateur de l’inhibition sociale en RV induite par la présence d’évaluateurs distants ou colocalisés pour comprendre l’impact de la localisation des utilisateurs lors d’une session de conception collaborative en RV

Comprendre la perspective temporelle future des travailleurs âgés : une étude qualitative

Nous avons choisi d'explorer dans ce mémoire le concept de la perspective temporelle future, qui s'inscrit dans le cadre théorique de la théorie de sélectivité émotionnelle. Une fois le cadre théorique mis en place nous avons déterminé les variables qu'il convenait d'examiner. La théorie faitefait état d'un grand nombre de variables. Cette étude étant limitée dans le temps et dans sa portée, l'auteur a établi une sélection raisonnée, basée sur une revue de littérature, des concepts les plus pertinents. Ainsi nous avons fait le choix de nous concentrer sur les concepts d'âge subjectif, de support organisationnel perçu et de satisfaction de vie professionnelle.Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, Université catholique de Louvain, 2018La diffusion de ce mémoire n'est pas autorisée par l'institutio