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Neurotherapeutics : the Journal of the... Jun 2024Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS) is a debilitating neuro-otological disorder where individuals consistently feel self-motion, often triggered by motion like being on...
Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS) is a debilitating neuro-otological disorder where individuals consistently feel self-motion, often triggered by motion like being on a boat (MT-MdDS). Due to the unknown pathophysiological mechanism, available treatment options for managing symptoms are limited. Our objective was to develop a virtual reality application (VRA) to simulate the full field optokinetic stimulation (OKS) booth and evaluate its efficacy compared to the standard treatment. In our randomized, open, non-inferiority clinical trial with 30 MT-MdDS patients, 15 received the OKS booth and 15 the new VRA over four consecutive days. Two 4-min treatment blocks were scheduled in the morning and afternoon, with a total of four blocks. Treatment effectiveness was evaluated through questionnaires and posturography. Our findings suggest that the choice of modality does not significantly differ in achieving an overall improvement in symptoms. We advocate that the VRA can be used as an accessible alternative to the booth method worldwide, effectively mitigating MdDS symptoms and enhancing the QoL of numerous MdDS patients.
PubMed: 38942708
DOI: 10.1016/j.neurot.2024.e00390 -
Journal of Hand Therapy : Official... Jun 2024A brachial plexus birth injury (BPBI) can cause reduced ability to use the arm and hand in daily activities due to reduced grip strength and endurance. A soft robotic...
BACKGROUND
A brachial plexus birth injury (BPBI) can cause reduced ability to use the arm and hand in daily activities due to reduced grip strength and endurance. A soft robotic glove can increase the number of activities performed and improve activity performance for patients with neurological disease. The use of a soft robotic glove for patients with BPBI has not been studied.
PURPOSE
To investigate if a soft robotic glove can improve activity performance and body function for patients with BPBI.
STUDY DESIGN
Longitudinal Case Series.
METHODS
A convenience sample of patients with BPBI, treated by the Brachial plexus injury service in Umeå, Sweden were studied. Eight patients used a soft robotic glove, (Carbonhand®), at home for three months. Data on activity performance and satisfaction with activity performance, active range of motion and strength were collected at baseline, and at three and four months. A patient evaluation form was filled out at three months, all patients kept a diary for three out of 12 weeks.
RESULTS
Six out of eight patients wanted to continue using the device and improved their self-perception of activity performance and satisfaction with the performance due to a more secure grip, compared to when not using the device. All patients had improved maximum strength and endurance in elbow flexion at three months. The device was useful as an assisting device and as a training tool.
CONCLUSION
A soft robotic glove (Carbonhand) may improve activity performance and perceived satisfaction and increase the number of activities that a person with BPBI can perform in everyday life. It is possible to increase strength in elbow flexion after using such a device. Due to this limited material, more research is needed.
PubMed: 38937162
DOI: 10.1016/j.jht.2024.02.009 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024The accurate perception of external environment information through the robot foot is crucial for the mobile robot to evaluate its ability to traverse terrain. Adequate...
The accurate perception of external environment information through the robot foot is crucial for the mobile robot to evaluate its ability to traverse terrain. Adequate foot-end contact signals can provide robust support for robot motion control and decision-making processes. The shape and uncertain rotation of the wheel-legged robot foot end represent a significant challenge to sensing the robot foot-end contact state, which current foot-end sensing schemes cannot solve. This paper presents a sensing method for the tire stress field of wheel-legged robots. A finite element analysis was conducted to study the deformation characteristics of the foot-end tire under force. Based on this analysis, a heuristic contact position estimator was designed that utilizes symmetrical deformation characteristics. Strain sensors, arranged in an array, extract the deformation information on the inner surface of the tire at a frequency of 200 Hz. The contact position estimator reduces the dimensionality of the data and fits the eigenvalues to the estimated contact position. Using support vector regression, the force estimator utilizes the estimated contact position and sensor signal to estimate the normal reaction force, designated as F. The sensing system is capable of detecting the contact position on the wheel circumference (with a root mean square error of 1.150°), as well as the normal force of 160 N on the Z axis (with a root mean square error of 6.04%). To validate the efficacy of the sensor detection method, a series of randomized and repeated experiments were conducted on a self-constructed test platform. This novel approach offers a promising avenue for perceiving contact states in wheel-legged robots.
PubMed: 38931739
DOI: 10.3390/s24123956 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024The remarkable human ability to predict others' intent during physical interactions develops at a very early age and is crucial for development. Intent prediction,...
The remarkable human ability to predict others' intent during physical interactions develops at a very early age and is crucial for development. Intent prediction, defined as the simultaneous recognition and generation of human-human interactions, has many applications such as in assistive robotics, human-robot interaction, video and robotic surveillance, and autonomous driving. However, models for solving the problem are scarce. This paper proposes two attention-based agent models to predict the intent of interacting 3D skeletons by sampling them via a sequence of glimpses. The novelty of these agent models is that they are inherently multimodal, consisting of perceptual and proprioceptive pathways. The action (attention) is driven by the agent's generation error, and not by reinforcement. At each sampling instant, the agent completes the partially observed skeletal motion and infers the interaction class. It learns where and what to sample by minimizing the generation and classification errors. Extensive evaluation of our models is carried out on benchmark datasets and in comparison to a state-of-the-art model for intent prediction, which reveals that classification and generation accuracies of one of the proposed models are comparable to those of the state of the art even though our model contains fewer trainable parameters. The insights gained from our model designs can inform the development of efficient agents, the future of artificial intelligence (AI).
Topics: Humans; Algorithms; Robotics; Attention
PubMed: 38931706
DOI: 10.3390/s24123922 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia, and out-of-hospital, wearable, long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring can help with the early detection of AF. The...
Artificial Intelligence-Based Atrial Fibrillation Recognition Method for Motion Artifact-Contaminated Electrocardiogram Signals Preprocessed by Adaptive Filtering Algorithm.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia, and out-of-hospital, wearable, long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring can help with the early detection of AF. The presence of a motion artifact (MA) in ECG can significantly affect the characteristics of the ECG signal and hinder early detection of AF. Studies have shown that (a) using reference signals with a strong correlation with MAs in adaptive filtering (ADF) can eliminate MAs from the ECG, and (b) artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can recognize AF when there is no presence of MAs. However, no literature has been reported on whether ADF can improve the accuracy of AI for recognizing AF in the presence of MAs. Therefore, this paper investigates the accuracy of AI recognition for AF when ECGs are artificially introduced with MAs and processed by ADF. In this study, 13 types of MA signals with different signal-to-noise ratios ranging from +8 dB to -16 dB were artificially added to the AF ECG dataset. Firstly, the accuracy of AF recognition using AI was obtained for a signal with MAs. Secondly, after removing the MAs by ADF, the signal was further identified using AI to obtain the accuracy of the AF recognition. We found that after undergoing ADF, the accuracy of AI recognition for AF improved under all MA intensities, with a maximum improvement of 60%.
Topics: Atrial Fibrillation; Electrocardiography; Humans; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Artifacts; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Signal-To-Noise Ratio
PubMed: 38931572
DOI: 10.3390/s24123789 -
Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) Jun 2024Platinum-based combination chemotherapy, including cisplatin and carboplatin, are important cytotoxic anti-cancer agents that are widely used to treat various solid...
Platinum-based combination chemotherapy, including cisplatin and carboplatin, are important cytotoxic anti-cancer agents that are widely used to treat various solid tumors. Carboplatin has a similar effect on survival in small cell lung cancer, but generally has a milder toxicity profile when compared with cisplatin. Both may cause moderate or severe neurotoxicity, but ocular neurotoxicity from carboplatin is rarely reported. A 79-year-old man underwent intravenous polychemotherapy (atezolizumab, etoposide, and carboplatin) for small cell lung cancer. One week after the second cycle of chemotherapy, he reported bilateral visual loss as hand motion in both eyes. Dilated fundus examination showed retinal arterial narrowing without hemorrhage, and diffuse choroidal and retinal thinning was observed in an optical coherence tomography scan. Fluorescein angiography revealed significantly delayed circulation without evidence of obstructive lesions. 30-Flicker electroretinogram testing showed a complete absence of cone response in both eyes. The patient's visual acuity aggravated to no light perception in both eyes, even after the cessation of chemotherapy. Carboplatin combination chemotherapy administered at therapeutic doses can result in irreversible visual loss, a side effect that is not widely acknowledged. When using carboplatin, physicians should be aware of its potential ocular toxicity.
Topics: Humans; Carboplatin; Male; Aged; Lung Neoplasms; Small Cell Lung Carcinoma; Antineoplastic Combined Chemotherapy Protocols; Vision Disorders; Antineoplastic Agents
PubMed: 38929609
DOI: 10.3390/medicina60060992 -
Behavioral and Brain Functions : BBF Jun 2024An intronic deletion within intron 2 of the DCDC2 gene encompassing the entire READ1 (hereafter, READ1d) has been associated in both children with developmental dyslexia...
BACKGROUND
An intronic deletion within intron 2 of the DCDC2 gene encompassing the entire READ1 (hereafter, READ1d) has been associated in both children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and typical readers (TRs), with interindividual variation in reading performance and motion perception as well as with structural and functional brain alterations. Visual motion perception -- specifically processed by the magnocellular (M) stream -- has been reported to be a solid and reliable endophenotype of DD. Hence, we predicted that READ1d should affect neural activations in brain regions sensitive to M stream demands as reading proficiency changes.
METHODS
We investigated neural activations during two M-eliciting fMRI visual tasks (full-field sinusoidal gratings controlled for spatial and temporal frequencies and luminance contrast, and sensitivity to motion coherence at 6%, 15% and 40% dot coherence levels) in four subject groups: children with DD with/without READ1d, and TRs with/without READ1d.
RESULTS
At the Bonferroni-corrected level of significance, reading skills showed a significant effect in the right polar frontal cortex during the full-field sinusoidal gratings-M task. Regardless of the presence/absence of the READ1d, subjects with poor reading proficiency showed hyperactivation in this region of interest (ROI) compared to subjects with better reading scores. Moreover, a significant interaction was found between READ1d and reading performance in the left frontal opercular area 4 during the 15% coherent motion sensitivity task. Among subjects with poor reading performance, neural activation in this ROI during this specific task was higher for subjects without READ1d than for READ1d carriers. The difference vanished as reading skills increased.
CONCLUSIONS
Our findings showed a READ1d-moderated genetic vulnerability to alterations in neural activation in the ventral attentive and salient networks during the processing of relevant stimuli in subjects with poor reading proficiency.
Topics: Humans; Dyslexia; Male; Child; Female; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Parietal Lobe; Reading; Motion Perception; Frontal Lobe; Microtubule-Associated Proteins; Brain Mapping; Nerve Net; Photic Stimulation
PubMed: 38926731
DOI: 10.1186/s12993-024-00241-2 -
PloS One 2024The aim of this pilot study was to determine whether viewing an immersive 3D movie with large disparities in a cinema resulted in improved visual acuity (VA),...
PURPOSE
The aim of this pilot study was to determine whether viewing an immersive 3D movie with large disparities in a cinema resulted in improved visual acuity (VA), stereoscopic depth perception (ST), and improved eye alignment in residual amblyopic children and children without amblyopia.
METHODS
A total of 24 children aged between 5 and 12 years with a history of anisometropic and/or strabismic amblyopia, that had been previously treated and who currently have residual amblyopia (N = 14), and in children with typical development without amblyopia (N = 10) viewed the movie in 3D Sing 2 in a cinema for 110 minutes. Visual acuity, stereoacuity and ocular deviation were assessed before viewing the movie, and three months later. Stereoacuity and ocular deviation were also measured immediately after viewing the movie.
RESULTS
We observed an improvement in visual acuity in the non-dominant (amblyopic) eye 3 months after viewing the movie in the amblyopic group (P<0.001). Stereopsis improved immediately after viewing the movie (P = 0.02), and after 3 months by ≈ 40% (P = 0.01). Moreover, improvements in stereopsis were also observed in children without amblyopia (P = 0.04). No significant changes in ocular deviation were observed in either group.
CONCLUSIONS
These pilot results suggest that brief exposure to large disparities by viewing a 3D movie in a cinema can help to improve stereopsis and visual acuity in children aged 5‒12 years with previously treated amblyopia, and provide a rationale for a randomized clinical trial.
Topics: Humans; Amblyopia; Child; Pilot Projects; Visual Acuity; Female; Male; Child, Preschool; Depth Perception; Motion Pictures
PubMed: 38917142
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305401 -
BioRxiv : the Preprint Server For... Jun 2024Our intuition suggests that when a movie is played in reverse, our perception of motion in the reversed movie will be perfectly inverted compared to the original. This...
UNLABELLED
Our intuition suggests that when a movie is played in reverse, our perception of motion in the reversed movie will be perfectly inverted compared to the original. This intuition is also reflected in many classical theoretical and practical models of motion detection. However, here we demonstrate that this symmetry of motion perception upon time reversal is often broken in real visual systems. In this work, we designed a set of visual stimuli to investigate how stimulus symmetries affect time reversal symmetry breaking in the fruit fly 's well-studied optomotor rotation behavior. We discovered a suite of new stimuli with a wide variety of different properties that can lead to broken time reversal symmetries in fly behavioral responses. We then trained neural network models to predict the velocity of scenes with both natural and artificial contrast distributions. Training with naturalistic contrast distributions yielded models that break time reversal symmetry, even when the training data was time reversal symmetric. We show analytically and numerically that the breaking of time reversal symmetry in the model responses can arise from contrast asymmetry in the training data, but can also arise from other features of the contrast distribution. Furthermore, shallower neural network models can exhibit stronger symmetry breaking than deeper ones, suggesting that less flexible neural networks promote some forms of time reversal symmetry breaking. Overall, these results reveal a surprising feature of biological motion detectors and suggest that it could arise from constrained optimization in natural environments.
SIGNIFICANCE
In neuroscience, symmetries can tell us about the computations being performed by a circuit. In vision, for instance, one might expect that when a movie is played backward, one's motion percepts should all be reversed. Exact perceptual reversal would indicate a time reversal symmetry, but surprisingly, real visual systems break this symmetry. In this research, we designed visual stimuli to probe different symmetries in motion detection and identify features that lead to symmetry breaking in motion percepts. We discovered that symmetry breaking in motion detection depends strongly on both the detector's architecture and how it is optimized. Interestingly, we find analytically and in simulations that time reversal symmetries are broken in systems optimized to perform with natural inputs.
PubMed: 38915608
DOI: 10.1101/2024.06.08.598068 -
Communications Biology Jun 2024That younger individuals perceive the world as moving slower than adults is a familiar phenomenon. Yet, it remains an open question why that is. Using event segmentation...
That younger individuals perceive the world as moving slower than adults is a familiar phenomenon. Yet, it remains an open question why that is. Using event segmentation theory, electroencephalogram (EEG) beamforming and nonlinear causal relationship estimation using artificial neural network methods, we studied neural activity while adolescent and adult participants segmented a movie. We show when participants were instructed to segment a movie into meaningful units, adolescents partitioned incoming information into fewer encapsulated segments or episodes of longer duration than adults. Importantly, directed communication between medial frontal and lower-level perceptual areas and between occipito-temporal regions in specific neural oscillation spectrums explained behavioral differences between groups. Overall, the study reveals that a different organization of directed communication between brain regions and inefficient transmission of information between brain regions are key to understand why younger people perceive the world as moving slow.
Topics: Humans; Adolescent; Electroencephalography; Male; Female; Adult; Young Adult; Brain; Motion Perception; Neural Networks, Computer
PubMed: 38909084
DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06439-4