Characterizing a Common Class of Spontaneous Movements.

Our aim is to describe a possible class of nonpathological spontaneous movements that has so far received little attention in the scientific literature. These movements arise spontaneously without an underlying pathology such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, cerebral palsy or spinal cord injury. The movements arise in many different contexts including therapeutic, social, religious, and solitary settings. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the movements are related to development and maintenance of form, being part of inherited autoregulatory behaviors and hence bringing an overlooked therapeutic potential. We describe contexts in which they occur, illustrate with case reports, and characterize the movements in terms of their various triggers, movement phenotypes, and conscious and subconscious influences that can occur at both the individual level as well as during collaborative movement relationships between patient and therapist. This description is intended to create a more widespread awareness of the movements, and provide a foundation for future research as to their healing potential.

A shape-based helmet fitting system for concussion protection.

Helmets are widely used as protection against sports-related concussions. The degree of concussion protection offered by a helmet may be related to the fit between the helmet and head. This paper presents the design of a prototype helmet fitting recommendation system using shape-based helmet fitting. The shape-based helmet fitting system uses a Kinect sensor to scan a client's head and then compares the head shape to helmet shapes from a database of off-the-shelf helmets. A slice extraction method is used to compare a standard reference slice extracted from the head to a corresponding slice from the helmet. The degree to which the helmet fits the client's head is calculated and displayed to the user. The prototype system could potentially help a concussion expert make recommendations about helmet fit to clients, if more research about the effects of helmet fitting on concussion protection becomes available.

Encoding structure in holographic reduced representations.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) such as Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are computational associative memories used by cognitive psychologists to model behavioural and neurological aspects of human memory. We present a novel analysis of the mathematics of VSAs and a novel technique for representing data in HRRs. Encoding and decoding in VSAs can be characterised by Latin squares. Successful encoding requires the structure of the data to be orthogonal to the structure of the Latin squares. However, HRRs can successfully encode vectors of locally structured data if vectors are shuffled. Shuffling results are illustrated using images but are applicable to any nonrandom data. The ability to use locally structured vectors provides a technique for detailed modelling of stimuli in HRR models.

Integrating image data into biomedical text categorization.

Categorization of biomedical articles is a central task for supporting various curation efforts. It can also form the basis for effective biomedical text mining. Automatic text classification in the biomedical domain is thus an active research area. Contests organized by the KDD Cup (2002) and the TREC Genomics track (since 2003) defined several annotation tasks that involved document classification, and provided training and test data sets. So far, these efforts focused on analyzing only the text content of documents. However, as was noted in the KDD'02 text mining contest-where figure-captions proved to be an invaluable feature for identifying documents of interest-images often provide curators with critical information. We examine the possibility of using information derived directly from image data, and of integrating it with text-based classification, for biomedical document categorization. We present a method for obtaining features from images and for using them-both alone and in combination with text-to perform the triage task introduced in the TREC Genomics track 2004. The task was to determine which documents are relevant to a given annotation task performed by the Mouse Genome Database curators. We show preliminary results, demonstrating that the method has a strong potential to enhance and complement traditional text-based categorization methods.