Comparison of the Interference Effects on Somatosensory Evoked Potential from Tonic, Burst, and High-dose Spinal Cord Stimulations.

Spinal cord stimulations have been used widely to treat intractable neuropathic pain. The conventional spinal cord stimulation paradigm, the "tonic" type, suppresses excessive activation of wide dynamic range neurons in the dorsal horn via the collateral branch from the dorsal column. Therefore, preserved dorsal column function is an important prerequisite for tonic spinal cord stimulations. A tonic spinal cord stimulation requires eliciting paresthesia in the painful area due to stimulation of the dorsal column and dorsal root. Recent spinal cord stimulation paradigms, including burst and high-dose, are set below the paresthesia threshold and are proposed to have different pain reduction mechanisms. We conducted an interference study of these different stimulation paradigms on the somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) to investigate differences in the sites of action between tonic and new spinal cord stimulations. We recorded posterior tibial nerve-stimulated SEP in seven patients with neuropathic pain during tonic, burst, and high-dose stimulations. The total electrical energy delivered was calculated during SEP-spinal cord stimulation interference studies. High-dose stimulations could not reduce the SEP amplitude despite higher energy delivery than tonic stimulation. Burst stimulation with an energy similar to the tonic stimulation could not reduce SEP amplitude as tonic stimulation. The study results suggested different sites of action and effects on the spinal cord between the conventional tonic and burst or high-dose spinal cord stimulations.

Deep Neural Network for Early Image Diagnosis of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome/Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis.

BACKGROUND: Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS)/toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is a life-threatening cutaneous adverse drug reaction (cADR). Distinguishing SJS/TEN from nonsevere cADRs is difficult, especially in the early stages of the disease. OBJECTIVE: To overcome this limitation, we developed a computer-aided diagnosis system for the early diagnosis of SJS/TEN, powered by a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). METHODS: We trained a DCNN using a dataset of 26,661 individual lesion images obtained from 123 patients with a diagnosis of SJS/TEN or nonsevere cADRs. The DCNN's accuracy of classification was compared with that of 10 board-certified dermatologists and 24 trainee dermatologists. RESULTS: The DCNN achieved 84.6% sensitivity (95% confidence interval [CI], 80.6-88.6), whereas the sensitivities of the board-certified dermatologists and trainee dermatologists were 31.3 % (95% CI, 20.9-41.8; P < .0001) and 27.8% (95% CI, 22.6-32.5; P < .0001), respectively. The negative predictive value was 94.6% (95% CI, 93.2-96.0) for the DCNN, 68.1% (95% CI, 66.1-70.0; P < .0001) for the board-certified dermatologists, and 67.4% (95% CI, 66.1-68.7; P < .0001) for the trainee dermatologists. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the DCNN for a SJS/TEN diagnosis was 0.873, which was significantly higher than that for all board-certified dermatologists and trainee dermatologists. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a DCNN to classify SJS/TEN and nonsevere cADRs based on individual lesion images of erythema. The DCNN performed significantly better than did dermatologists in classifying SJS/TEN from skin images.

Characterisation of the static offset in the travelling wave in the cochlear basal turn.

In mammals, audition is triggered by travelling waves that are evoked by acoustic stimuli in the cochlear partition, a structure containing sensory hair cells and a basilar membrane. When the cochlea is stimulated by a pure tone of low frequency, a static offset occurs in the vibration in the apical turn. In the high-frequency region at the cochlear base, multi-tone stimuli induce a quadratic distortion product in the vibrations that suggests the presence of an offset. However, vibrations below 100 Hz, including a static offset, have not been directly measured there. We therefore constructed an interferometer for detecting motion at low frequencies including 0 Hz. We applied the interferometer to record vibrations from the cochlear base of guinea pigs in response to pure tones. When the animals were exposed to sound at an intensity of 70 dB or higher, we recorded a static offset of the sinusoidally vibrating cochlear partition by more than 1 nm towards the scala vestibuli. The offset's magnitude grew monotonically as the stimuli intensified. When stimulus frequency was varied, the response peaked around the best frequency, the frequency that maximised the vibration amplitude at threshold sound pressure. These characteristics are consistent with those found in the low-frequency region and are therefore likely common across the cochlea. The offset diminished markedly when the somatic motility of mechanosensitive outer hair cells, the force-generating machinery that amplifies the sinusoidal vibrations, was pharmacologically blocked. Therefore, the partition offset appears to be linked to the electromotile contraction of outer hair cells.

In vivo tomographic visualization of intracochlear vibration using a supercontinuum multifrequency-swept optical coherence microscope.

This study combined a previously developed optical system with two additional key elements: a supercontinuum light source characterized by high output power and an analytical technique that effectively extracts interference signals required for improving the detection limit of vibration amplitude. Our system visualized 3D tomographic images and nanometer scale vibrations in the cochlear sensory epithelium of a live guinea pig. The transverse- and axial-depth resolution was 3.6 and 2.7 µm, respectively. After exposure to acoustic stimuli of 21-25 kHz at a sound pressure level of 70-85 dB, spatial amplitude and phase distributions were quantified on a targeted surface, whose area was 522 × 522 µm2.

Multifrequency-swept optical coherence microscopy for highspeed full-field tomographic vibrometry in biological tissues.

Because conventional laser Doppler vibrometry or Doppler optical coherence tomography require mechanical scanning probes that cannot simultaneously measure the wide-range dynamics of bio-tissues, a multifrequency-swept optical coherence microscopy with wide-field heterodyne detection technique was developed. A 1024 × 1024 × 2000 voxel volume was acquired with an axial resolution of ~1.8 µm and an acquisition speed of 2 s. Vibration measurements at 10 kHz were performed over a wide field of view. Wide-field tomographic vibration measurements of a mouse tympanic membrane are demonstrated to illustrate the applicability of this method to live animals.

Directional lapped orthogonal transform: theory and design.

This paper proposes a directional design method of 2-D nonseparable linear-phase paraunitary filter banks. The proposed method is based on a lattice structure consisting of the 2-D separable DCT block and nonseparable support extension processes. Because of the nonseparability, the bases are allowed to be directional with the critically fixed subsampling, overlapping, orthogonal, symmetric, real-valued, and compact support properties. First, a novel vanishing moment (VM) condition is introduced as a suitable directional constraint, where the moment is referred to as the trend VM. The condition forces wavelet filters, i.e., high-pass and bandpass filters, to annihilate trend-surface components. Second, some theoretical properties of TVMs are discussed for general 2-D paraunitary systems, and then, the properties are applied to the lattice parameters. In order to verify the significance, several design examples are shown, the trend-surface annihilation properties are numerically confirmed, and the denoising capability is evaluated for images through shrinkage. It is shown that our proposed transforms yield perceptually preferable results.

Boundary operation of 2-D nonseparable linear-phase paraunitary filter banks.

This paper proposes a boundary operation technique of 2-D nonseparable linear-phase paraunitary filter banks (NS-LPPUFBs) for size limitation. The proposed technique is based on a lattice structure consisting of the 2-D separable block discrete cosine transform and nonseparable support-extension processes. The bases are allowed to be anisotropic with the fixed critically subsampling, overlapping, orthogonal, symmetric, real-valued, and compact-support properties. First, the blockwise implementation is developed so that the basis images can be locally controlled. The local control of basis images is shown to maintain orthogonality. This property leads a basis termination (BT) technique as a boundary operation. The technique overcomes the drawback of NS-LPPUFBs that the popular symmetric extension method is invalid. Through some experimental results of diagonal texture coding, the significance of the BT is verified.

Motion-JPEG2000 codec compensated for interlaced scanning videos.

This paper presents an implementation scheme of Motion-JPEG2000 (MJP2) integrated with invertible deinterlacing. In previous work, we developed an invertible deinterlacing technique that suppresses the comb-tooth artifacts which are caused by field interleaving for interlaced scanning videos, and affect the quality of scalable frame-based codecs, such as MJP2. Our technique has two features, where sampling density is preserved and image quality is recovered by an inverse process. When no codec is placed between the deinterlacer and inverse process, the original video is perfectly reconstructed. Otherwise, it is almost completely recovered. We suggest an application scenario of this invertible deinterlacer for enhancing the sophisticated signal-to-noise ratio scalability in the frame-based MJP2 coding. The proposed system suppresses the comb-tooth artifacts at low bitrates, while enabling the quality recovery through its inverse process at high bitrates within the standard bitstream format. The main purpose of this paper is to present a system that yields high quality recovery for an MJP2 codec. We demonstrate that our invertible deinterlacer can be embedded into the discrete.wavelet transform employed in MJP2. As a result, the energy gain factor to control rate-distortion characteristics can be compensated for optimal compression. Simulation results show that the recovery of quality is improved by, for example, more than 2.0 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio by applying our proposed gain compensation when decoding 8-bit grayscale Football sequence at 2.0 bpp.