Investigating stakeholders' perceptions of environmental protection fleets within the framework of policies designed to mitigate marine debris.

Since 2017, Taiwan has established the "Marine Debris Management Platform" and has implemented various action plans to mitigate the problem of marine debris. This study focuses on the implementation plan for an environmentally friendly fleet within the proposed solutions. The study aims to analyze perspectives and perceptions regarding the role of the environmental fleet in marine waste recovery and subsequent disposal issues through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders.

Modeling saccade reaction time in marmosets: the contribution of earlier visual response and variable inhibition.

Marmosets are expected to serve as a valuable model for studying the primate visuomotor system due to their similar oculomotor behaviors to humans and macaques. Despite these similarities, differences exist; challenges in training marmosets on tasks requiring suppression of unwanted saccades, having consistently shorter, yet more variable saccade reaction times (SRT) compared to humans and macaques. This study investigates whether the short and variable SRT in marmosets is related to differences in visual signal transduction and variability in inhibitory control.

Visual Functions of the Primate Superior Colliculus.

The superior colliculus (SC) is a subcortical brain structure that is relevant for sensation, cognition, and action. In nonhuman primates, a rich history of studies has provided unprecedented detail about this structure's role in controlling orienting behaviors; as a result, the primate SC has become primarily regarded as a motor control structure. However, as in other species, the primate SC is also a highly visual structure: A fraction of its inputs is retinal and complemented by inputs from visual cortical areas, including the primary visual cortex.

Active vision at the foveal scale in the primate superior colliculus.

The primate superior colliculus (SC) has recently been shown to possess both a large foveal representation as well as a varied visual processing repertoire. This structure is also known to contribute to eye movement generation. Here, we describe our current understanding of how SC visual and movement-related signals interact within the realm of small eye movements associated with the foveal scale of visuomotor behavior.

Properties of visually guided saccadic behavior and bottom-up attention in marmoset, macaque, and human.

Saccades are stereotypic behaviors whose investigation improves our understanding of how primate brains implement precise motor control. Furthermore, saccades offer an important window into the cognitive and attentional state of the brain. Historically, saccade studies have largely relied on macaques.

Visual feature tuning of superior colliculus neural reafferent responses after fixational microsaccades.

The primate superior colliculus (SC) is causally involved in microsaccade generation. Moreover, visually responsive SC neurons across this structure's topographic map, even at peripheral eccentricities much larger than the tiny microsaccade amplitudes, exhibit significant modulations of evoked response sensitivity when stimuli appear perimicrosaccadically. However, during natural viewing, visual stimuli are normally stably present in the environment and are only shifted on the retina by eye movements.

Harnessing a New Co-Host System and Low Concentration of New TADF Emitters Equipped with Trifluoromethyl- and Cyano-Substituted Benzene as Core for High-Efficiency Blue OLEDs.

A strategic approach combining a new co-host system and low concentration of new thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters to make efficient blue TADF organic light-emitting diode (OLED) was developed. The benchmark TADF molecule, , was adopted as a probe to examine the feasibility of a co-host composing of a hole transporter SimCP and an electron transporter CF-T2T. As a result, a sky blue device with 1 wt % doped in SimCP:CF-T2T co-host exhibited 100% energy transfer and achieved a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) up to 26.

The Foveal Visual Representation of the Primate Superior Colliculus.

A defining feature of the primate visual system is its foveated nature. Processing of foveal retinal input is important not only for high-quality visual scene analysis but also for ensuring precise, albeit tiny, gaze shifts during high-acuity visual tasks. The representations of foveal retinal input in the primate lateral geniculate nucleus and early visual cortices have been characterized.

Texture-Map-Based Branch-Collaborative Network for Oral Cancer Detection.

The paper proposes an innovative deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) combined with texture map for detecting cancerous regions and marking the ROI in a single model automatically. The proposed DCNN model contains two collaborative branches, namely an upper branch to perform oral cancer detection, and a lower branch to perform semantic segmentation and ROI marking. With the upper branch the network model extracts the cancerous regions, and the lower branch makes the cancerous regions more precision.

Orientation and Contrast Tuning Properties and Temporal Flicker Fusion Characteristics of Primate Superior Colliculus Neurons.

The primate superior colliculus is traditionally studied from the perspectives of gaze control, target selection, and selective attention. However, this structure is also visually responsive, and it is the primary visual structure in several species. Thus, understanding the visual tuning properties of the primate superior colliculus is important, especially given that the superior colliculus is part of an alternative visual pathway running in parallel to the predominant geniculo-cortical pathway.

Spatial frequency sensitivity in macaque midbrain.

Visual brain areas exhibit tuning characteristics well suited for image statistics present in our natural environment. However, visual sensation is an active process, and if there are any brain areas that ought to be particularly in tune with natural scene statistics, it would be sensory-motor areas critical for guiding behavior. Here we found that the rhesus macaque superior colliculus, a structure instrumental for rapid visual exploration with saccades, detects low spatial frequencies, which are the most prevalent in natural scenes, much more rapidly than high spatial frequencies.

Intelligent system to predict intradialytic hypotension in chronic hemodialysis.

Background: Intradialytic hypotension (IDH) is a serious complication and a major risk factor of increased mortality during hemodialysis (HD). However, predicting the occurrence of intradialytic blood pressure (BP) fluctuations clinically is difficult. This study aimed to develop an intelligent system with capability of predicting IDH.

Meglitinides increase the risk of hypoglycemia in diabetic patients with advanced chronic kidney disease: a nationwide, population-based study.

The safety of short-acting meglitinides in diabetic patients with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) has not been widely reported. Diabetic patients with advanced CKD who had a serum creatinine level of > 6 mg/dL a hematocrit level of ≦ 28% and received erythropoiesis-stimulating agent treatment between 2000 and 2010, were included in this nationwide study in Taiwan. The outcomes of interest were defined as hypoglycemia and long-term mortality.

Sequential hemifield gating of α- and β-behavioral performance oscillations after microsaccades.

Microsaccades are tiny saccades that occur during gaze fixation. Even though visual processing has been shown to be strongly modulated close to the time of microsaccades, both at central and peripheral eccentricities, it is not clear how these eye movements might influence longer term fluctuations in brain activity and behavior. Here we found that visual processing is significantly affected and, in a rhythmic manner, even several hundreds of milliseconds after a microsaccade.

Alteration of the microsaccadic velocity-amplitude main sequence relationship after visual transients: implications for models of saccade control.

Microsaccades occur during gaze fixation to correct for miniscule foveal motor errors. The mechanisms governing such fine oculomotor control are still not fully understood. In this study, we explored microsaccade control by analyzing the impacts of transient visual stimuli on these movements' kinematics.

A neural locus for spatial-frequency specific saccadic suppression in visual-motor neurons of the primate superior colliculus.

Saccades cause rapid retinal-image shifts that go perceptually unnoticed several times per second. The mechanisms for saccadic suppression have been controversial, in part because of sparse understanding of neural substrates. In this study we uncovered an unexpectedly specific neural locus for spatial frequency-specific saccadic suppression in the superior colliculus (SC).

Sharper, Stronger, Faster Upper Visual Field Representation in Primate Superior Colliculus.

Visually guided behavior in three-dimensional environments entails handling immensely different sensory and motor conditions across retinotopic visual field locations: peri-personal ("near") space is predominantly viewed through the lower retinotopic visual field (LVF), whereas extra-personal ("far") space encompasses the upper visual field (UVF). Thus, when, say, driving a car, orienting toward the instrument cluster below eye level is different from scanning an upcoming intersection, even with similarly sized eye movements. However, an overwhelming assumption about visuomotor circuits for eye-movement exploration, like those in the primate superior colliculus (SC), is that they represent visual space in a purely symmetric fashion across the horizontal meridian.

Vision, Perception, and Attention through the Lens of Microsaccades: Mechanisms and Implications.

Microsaccades are small saccades. Neurophysiologically, microsaccades are generated using similar brainstem mechanisms as larger saccades. This suggests that peri-saccadic changes in vision that accompany large saccades might also be expected to accompany microsaccades.

Neuronal Response Gain Enhancement prior to Microsaccades.

Neuronal response gain enhancement is a classic signature of the allocation of covert visual attention without eye movements. However, microsaccades continuously occur during gaze fixation. Because these tiny eye movements are preceded by motor preparatory signals well before they are triggered, it may be the case that a corollary of such signals may cause enhancement, even without attentional cueing.

Nerve growth factor-induced synapse-like structures in contralateral sensory ganglia contribute to chronic mirror-image pain.

Elevated nerve growth factor (NGF) in the contralateral dorsal root ganglion (DRG) mediates mirror-image pain after peripheral nerve injury, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Using intrathecal injection of NGF antibodies, we found that NGF is required for the development of intra-DRG synapse-like structures made by neurite sprouts of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP(+)) nociceptors and sympathetic axons onto neurite sprouts of Kv4.3(+) nociceptors.

Mirror-image pain is mediated by nerve growth factor produced from tumor necrosis factor alpha-activated satellite glia after peripheral nerve injury.

Mirror-image pain is characterized by mechanical hypersensitivity on the uninjured mirror-image side. Recent reports favor central mechanisms, but whether peripheral mechanisms are involved remains unclear. We used unilateral spinal nerve ligation (SNL) to induce mirror-image pain in rats.