986 results match your criteria: "School of Information Sciences[Affiliation]"

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are becoming more and more popular as a device for displaying a virtual reality space, but how real are they? The present study attempted to quantitatively evaluate the degree of reality achieved with HMDs by using a perceptual phenomenon as a measure. Lightness constancy is an ability that is present in human visual perception, in which the perceived reflectance (i.e.

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Introduction: The current study investigated the relationship between the characteristics of a darts game, including the throwing motion toward a target, and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). To this end, we examined the associations between cognitive function and mental health, and the shift in center of gravity while throwing darts. In a preliminary investigation, a 1-month dart game intervention was conducted among older individuals living in the community.

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Sleep apnea (SA) is associated with risk of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and accidents due to sleepiness, yet the majority (over 80%) of patients remain undiagnosed. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are built into modern wearable devices and are capable of long-term continuous measurement with low power consumption. We examined if SA can be detected by an IMU embedded in a wristwatch device.

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Purpose: This study aimed to develop an unobtrusive method for home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) utilizing micromotion signals obtained by a piezoelectric rubber sheet sensor.

Methods: Algorithms were designated to extract respiratory and ballistocardiogram components from micromotion signals and to detect respiratory events as the characteristic separation of the fast envelope of the respiration component from the slow envelope. In 78 adults with diagnosed or suspected sleep apnea, micromotion signal was recorded with a piezoelectric rubber sheet sensor placed beneath the bedsheet during polysomnography.

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Two-step reconstruction framework of fluorescence molecular tomography based on energy statistical probability.

J Biophotonics

May 2024

The Xi'an Key Laboratory of Radiomics and Intelligent Perception, Xi'an, China.

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT), as a promising technique for early tumor detection, can non-invasively visualize the distribution of fluorescent marker probe three-dimensionally. However, FMT reconstruction is a severely ill-posed problem, which remains an obstacle to wider application of FMT. In this paper, a two-step reconstruction framework was proposed for FMT based on the energy statistical probability.

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Background: Photobiomodulation (PBM) or Low-level laser is used to treat diabetic foot complications. The existing method of laser application to the foot did not cover the foot's entire area to improve the foot's microcirculation. Therefore, we have developed a cost-effective Special LASER Shoe device, focusing exclusively on the entire foot region to manage neuropathic pain and other symptoms in individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

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Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)-the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary sex characteristics in transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) individuals-are vital health care for many TGNB people. Some hormone providers require a letter from a mental health provider before hormone initiation. We explore the perspectives of TGNB individuals regarding the impact of the letter requirement on their experience of care.

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Anxiety control by astrocytes in the lateral habenula.

Neurosci Res

August 2024

Super-network Brain Physiology, Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577 Japan. Electronic address:

The potential role of astrocytes in lateral habenula (LHb) in modulating anxiety was explored in this study. The habenula are a pair of small nuclei located above the thalamus, known for their involvement in punishment avoidance and anxiety. Herein, we observed an increase in theta-band oscillations of local field potentials (LFPs) in the LHb when mice were exposed to anxiety-inducing environments.

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Article Synopsis
  • Whole blood transcriptome analysis offers valuable insights for medical research, primarily due to easy sample collection and the detailed information it provides about gene expression influenced by factors like age and gender.
  • A study was conducted on 576 participants from the Tohoku Medical Megabank, stratifying by age (20-30s and 60-70s) and gender, including pregnant women, to analyze RNA sequencing data and investigate gene expression differences.
  • Findings revealed associations between gene expression and age/gender differences, as well as the impact of immune response status (neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio) on gene diversity, resulting in a significant data set for future research in the Japanese population.
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Prediction of high-risk events amongst patients with mental disorders is critical for personalized interventions. We developed DeepBiomarker2 by leveraging deep learning and natural language processing to analyze lab tests, medication use, diagnosis, social determinants of health (SDoH) parameters, and psychotherapy for outcome prediction. To increase the model's interpretability, we further refined our contribution analysis to identify key features by scaling with a factor from a reference feature.

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Dynamic fluorescence molecular tomography (DFMT), as a noninvasive optical imaging method, can quantify metabolic parameters of living animal organs and assist in the diagnosis of metabolic diseases. However, existing DFMT methods do not have a high capacity to reconstruct abnormal metabolic regions, and require additional prior information and complicated solution methods. This paper introduces a problem decomposition and prior refactor (PDPR) method.

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Article Synopsis
  • The Tsuruoka Metabolomics Cohort Study (TMCS) is a large-scale, ongoing research project in rural Japan aiming to improve disease prevention strategies for complex illnesses by analyzing risk factors and predictors.
  • The study includes 11,002 participants aged 35-74 from Tsuruoka City, who provide extensive health and lifestyle data and undergo molecular profiling to identify potential disease-linked biomarkers.
  • TMCS focuses on outcomes related to cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and aging effects, utilizing a multi-omics approach to capture comprehensive biological, behavioral, and social data, and boasts a high participation rate and robust study design.
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Importance: Publishing study protocols might reduce research waste because of unclear methods or incomplete reporting; on the other hand, there might be few additional benefits of publishing protocols for registered trials that are never completed or published. No study has investigated the proportion of published protocols associated with published results.

Objective: To estimate the proportion of published trial protocols for which there are not associated published results.

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In a fire outbreak, firefighters are expected to rapidly extinguish fires to stop the spread of damage and prevent secondary disasters. We proposed the concept of a dragon firefighter (DFF), which is a flying-hose-type firefighting robot. We developed a 3.

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FeGeTe is a two-dimensional van der Waals material that exhibits ferromagnetic order with a high Curie temperature () of around room temperature. In addition to , two magnetic transitions occur with decreasing temperature, and a charge-ordered state is observed at low temperatures. We employed Ge Kα X-ray fluorescence holography (XFH) for FeGeTe to directly investigate the local structure in the charge-ordered state, i.

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Computational Exploration of Minimum Energy Reaction Pathway of NO Formation from Intermediate of P450nor Using an Active Center Model.

Int J Mol Sci

December 2023

Graduate School of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, 3-4-1 Ozukahigashi Asaminamiku, Hiroshima 731-3194, Japan.

Article Synopsis
  • P450nor is a heme enzyme that converts nitric oxide (NO) into nitrous oxide (N2O) and has a complex catalytic cycle with three main steps.
  • Researchers used B3LYP calculations to investigate the unknown reaction pathway for NO generation from an intermediate, validating their model by examining heme distortions in P450nor versus other oxidoreductases.
  • Their findings revealed that the electrostatic environment of P450nor does not significantly impact the hydride affinity in the active site or the NO generation process, indicating that the reaction depends mainly on the reactivity of the heme cofactor.
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Engineering biomaterials for the recovery of rare earth elements.

Trends Biotechnol

May 2024

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Electronic address:

The escalating global demand for rare earth elements (REEs) and the overabundance of REE-containing waste require innovative technologies for REE recovery from waste to achieve a sustainable supply of REEs while reducing the environmental burden. Biosorption mediated by peptides or proteins has emerged as a promising approach for selective REE recovery. To date, multiple peptides and proteins with high REE-binding affinity and selectivity have been discovered, and various strategies are being exploited to engineer robust and reusable biosorptive materials for selective REE recovery.

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Wearable sensors provide a tool for at-home monitoring of motor impairment progression in neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD). This study examined the ability of deep learning approaches to grade the motor impairment severity in a modified version of the Movement Disorders Society-sponsored revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) using low-cost wearable sensors. We hypothesized that expanding training datasets with motion data from healthy older adults (HOAs) and initializing classifiers with weights learned from unsupervised pre-training would lead to an improvement in performance when classifying lower vs.

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The illegal poaching of lions for their body parts poses a severe threat to lion populations across Africa. Poaching accounts for 35% of all human-caused lion deaths, with 51% attributed to retaliatory killings following livestock predation. In nearly half of the retaliatory killings, lion body parts are removed, suggesting that high demand for lion body parts may fuel killings attributed to human-lion conflict.

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Objective: To construct an exhaustive Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) Lexicon (CIHLex) to help better represent the often underrepresented physical and psychological CIH approaches in standard terminologies, and to also apply state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques to help recognize them in the biomedical literature.

Materials And Methods: We constructed the CIHLex by integrating various resources, compiling and integrating data from biomedical literature and relevant sources of knowledge. The Lexicon encompasses 724 unique concepts with 885 corresponding unique terms.

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Introduction: Infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which can result in acute respiratory distress syndrome and multiple organ failure. However, its comprehensive influence on pathological immune responses in the respiratory epithelium and peripheral immune cells is not yet fully understood.

Methods: In this study, we analyzed multiple public scRNA-seq datasets of nasopharyngeal swabs and peripheral blood to investigate the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of healthy individuals and COVID-19 patients with mild/moderate and severe disease, respectively.

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[Allostasis and Heart Rate Variability Analysis].

Brain Nerve

November 2023

Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University.

This paper reviews patterns of heart rate variability and mechanisms of allostasis. The paper focuses on traditional autonomic nervous system and brain-heart axis research, recent biological measurements, and ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) big data analysis. The importance of biological measurement of daily activities and the results of data-driven research that analyzes ECG big data will provide new insights into the use of bio-signals.

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