Predicting Cancer Types From miRNA Stem-loops Using Deep Learning.

With cancer being one of the main remaining challenges of modern medicine, a lot of effort is put towards oncology research. Since early diagnosis is a highly important factor for the treatment of many types of cancer, screening tests have become a popular research subject. Technical and technological advances have brought down the price of genome sequencing and have led to an increase in understanding the relationship between DNA, RNA and tumor sites. These advances have sparked an interest in personalized and precision medicine research. In this work, we propose a deep neural network classifier to identify the anatomical site of a tumor. Using 27 TCGA miRNA stem-loops cohorts, we classify tumors in 20 anatomical sites with a 96.9% accuracy. Our results demonstrate the possibility of using stem-loop expression data for accurate cancer localization.

Perspectives on mobile robots as tools for child development and pediatric rehabilitation.

Mobile robots (i.e., robots capable of translational movements) can be designed to become interesting tools for child development studies and pediatric rehabilitation. In this article, the authors present two of their projects that involve mobile robots interacting with children: One is a spherical robot deployed in a variety of contexts, and the other is mobile robots used as pedagogical tools for children with pervasive developmental disorders. Locomotion capability appears to be key in creating meaningful and sustained interactions with children: Intentional and purposeful motion is an implicit appealing factor in obtaining children's attention and engaging them in interaction and learning. Both of these projects started with robotic objectives but are revealed to be rich sources of interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of assistive technology. This article presents perspectives on how mobile robots can be designed to address the requirements of child-robot interactions and studies. The authors also argue that mobile robot technology can be a useful tool in rehabilitation engineering, reaching its full potential through strong collaborations between roboticists and pediatric specialists.