Shared vision

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a promising tool in the field of AutoML for designing more accurate and efficient architectures. The majority of NAS works employ a weight-sharing technique to reduce the search cost by sharing the weights of a supernet, which is a composite of all architectures produced from the search space. Nonetheless, this method has a significant drawback in that negative interference may arise when candidate architectures share the same weights. This issue becomes even more severe in multi-task searches, where a supernet is shared across tasks...

We obtain large amounts of external information through our eyes, a process often considered analogous to picture mapping onto a camera lens. However, our eyes are never as still as a camera lens, with saccades occurring between fixations and microsaccades occurring within a fixation. Although saccades are agreed to be functional for information sampling in visual perception, it remains unknown if microsaccades have a similar function when eye movement is restricted. Here, we demonstrated that saccades and microsaccades share common spatiotemporal structures in viewing visual objects...

BACKGROUND: Fruit freshness detection by computer vision is essential for many agricultural applications, e.g., automatic harvesting and supply chain monitoring. This paper proposes to use the multi-task learning (MTL) paradigm to build a deep convolutional neural work for fruit freshness detection. RESULTS: We design an MTL model that optimizes the freshness detection (T1 ) and fruit type classification (T2 ) tasks in parallel. The model uses a shared CNN (convolutional neural network) subnet and two FC (fully connected) task heads...

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has shown great clinical value and has been widely used in deep learning (DL) based computer-aided brain disease diagnosis. Previous DL-based approaches focused on local shapes and textures in brain sMRI that may be significant only within a particular domain. The learned representations are likely to contain spurious information and have poor generalization ability in other diseases and datasets. To facilitate capturing meaningful and robust features, it is necessary to first comprehensively understand the intrinsic pattern of the brain that is not restricted within a single data/task domain...

Luminance and spatial contrast provide information on the surfaces and edges of objects. We investigated neural responses to black and white surfaces in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mice and monkeys. Unlike primates that use their fovea to inspect objects with high acuity, mice lack a fovea and have low visual acuity. It thus remains unclear whether monkeys and mice share similar neural mechanisms to process surfaces. The animals were presented with white or black surfaces and the population responses were measured at high spatial and temporal resolution using voltage-sensitive dye imaging...

BACKGROUND: Intermittent exotropia is a common form of pediatric strabismus characterized by intermittent misalignment of the eyes. This study investigated the clinical effectiveness of alternating occlusion therapy as a non-surgical alternative for children aged 3-10 with intermittent exotropia. METHODS: A comprehensive review of recent research, including randomized controlled trials and case series, was conducted. These studies utilized standardized control scores to assess the impact of alternating occlusion therapy on both distance and near control of alignment...

BACKGROUND AIMS: The marketing authorization of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) in Brazil is recent. The features of these therapies impose specialized regulatory action and are consequently challenging for developers. The goal of this study was to identify the industry's experience in clinical development, marketing authorization and access to ATMPs through the Unified Health System (SUS, acronym in Portuguese), from a regulatory perspective. METHODS: A survey containing structured questions was conducted among research participants who work at companies that commercialize ATMPs...

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent forms of cancer, affecting approximately one in eight women during their lifetime. Deciding on breast cancer treatment, which includes the choice between surgical options, frequently demands prompt decision-making within an 8-week timeframe. However, many women lack the necessary knowledge and preparation for making informed decisions. Anxiety and unsatisfactory outcomes can result from inadequate decision-making processes, leading to decisional regret and revision surgeries...

Firearm-related injury and mortality prevention strategies are often incompatible with and potentially ineffective for the very populations at risk. Such incompatibility is reflective of a cultural disconnect between investigators and prevention specialists and those who own and use firearms. The current paper describes Project GRIP, a research study that was guided by the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR). We present the project as a case-example and demonstration of how PAR principles can inform an approach to partner with firearm owners in injury prevention research...

Genome structural variations within species are rare. How selective constraints preserve gene order and chromosome structure is a central question in evolutionary biology that remains unsolved. Our sequencing of several genomes of the appendicularian tunicate Oikopleura dioica around the globe reveals extreme genome scrambling caused by thousands of chromosomal rearrangements, although showing no obvious morphological differences between these animals. The breakpoint accumulation rate is an order of magnitude higher than in ascidian tunicates, nematodes, Drosophila, or mammals...

Diplopia, or double vision, has been listed as a rare adverse effect of intravenous hydromorphone, although there are no case studies or literature documenting this. We detail a case of acute transient diplopia correlated with the use of intraoperative hydromorphone and postoperative hydromorphone patient-controlled analgesia. Although the mechanism for this adverse effect is unknown, there may be risk factors that predispose patients to the potential toxic metabolic effects of hydromorphone. We share the first published case of diplopia as a clinically relevant adverse effect of hydromorphone and propose a potential reason behind this association...

Japan is progressing towards its circular economy (CE) goals as many of its cities have adopted circular city (CC) policies and programs, although further progress is constrained as a result of the lack of a common framework. A novel framework was proposed with the "European circular cities declaration" (ECCD) (2020), consisting of a list of 10 principles committing to integrate circularity into the city's design, development, and management. As a foremost finding, and building on the authors' previous studies of Japan's CE and CC, this work shaped a circular cities declaration (CCD) for Japan following a triple-axis methodology; It (1) evaluates the ECCD as a baseline, (2) adapts it to Japan's unique socio-economic landscape, and (3) considers the three pillars of sustainable development, offering practical guidance for governments facing similar challenges...

AIM: The aim of this study is to further develop a preliminary framework into a model that can translate mechanisms into output and impact, based on the views of those working in practice and the relations between the mechanisms: a model that can inform practitioners and organizations on what has to be in place to shape a learning and innovating environment in nursing. BACKGROUND: A Learning and Innovation Network (LIN) is a network of healthcare professionals, students and education representatives who come together to be part of a nursing community to integrate education, research and practice to contribute to quality of care...

INTRODUCTION: Mummy berry is a serious disease that may result in up to 70 percent of yield loss for lowbush blueberries. Practical mummy berry disease detection, stage classification and severity estimation remain great challenges for computer vision-based approaches because images taken in lowbush blueberry fields are usually a mixture of different plant parts (leaves, bud, flowers and fruits) with a very complex background. Specifically, typical problems hindering this effort included data scarcity due to high manual labelling cost, tiny and low contrast disease features interfered and occluded by healthy plant parts, and over-complicated deep neural networks which made deployment of a predictive system difficult...

It is well known that objects become grouped in perceptual organization when they share some visual feature, like a common direction of motion. Less well known is that grouping can change how people perceive a set of objects. For example, when a pair of shapes consistently share a common region of space, their aspect ratios tend to be perceived as more similar (are attracted toward each other). Conversely, when shapes are assigned to different regions in space their aspect ratios repel from each other. Here we examine whether the visual system produce both attractive and repulsive distortions when the state of grouping between a pair of shapes changes on a moment-to-moment basis...

Participating in mentored research is an enormous benefit to undergraduate students. These immersive experiences can dramatically improve retention and completion rates, especially for students from traditionally underserved populations in STEM disciplines. Scientists typically do not receive any formal training in management or group dynamics before taking on the role of a lab head. Thus, peer forums and shared wisdom are crucial for developing the vision and skills involved with mentorship and leading a successful research lab...

This paper explores news media discourse about care.data: an NHS England programme of work for amalgamating and sharing patient data from primary care for planning and research. It was scrapped in 2016 after three years of public outcry, delays and around 1.5 million opt-outs. I examine UK news media coverage of this programme through the 'fire object' metaphor, focusing upon the visions of purpose and value it inspired, the abrupt discontinuities, juxtapositions and transformations it performed, and the matters of concern that went unheeded...

In primates, high-acuity vision is mediated by the fovea, a small specialized central region of the retina. The fovea, unique to the anthropoid lineage among mammals, undergoes notable neuronal morphological changes during postnatal maturation. However, the extent of cellular similarity across anthropoid foveas and the molecular underpinnings of foveal maturation remain unclear. Here, we used high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing to profile retinal cells of the common marmoset ( Callithrix jacchus ), an early divergent in anthropoid evolution from humans, apes, and macaques...

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are being intensively researched and developed to leverage their ability to safely and effectively deliver therapeutics. To achieve optimal therapeutic delivery, a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between formulation, structure, and efficacy is critical. However, the vast chemical space involved in the production of LNPs and the resulting structural complexity make the structure to function relationship challenging to assess and predict. New components and formulation procedures, which provide new opportunities for the use of LNPs, would be best identified and optimized using high-throughput characterization methods...

Shape is a property that could be perceived by vision and touch, and is classically considered to be supramodal. While there is mounting evidence for the shared cognitive and neural representation space between visual and tactile shape, previous research tended to rely on dissimilarity structures between objects and had not examined the detailed properties of shape representation in the absence of vision. To address this gap, we conducted three explicit object shape knowledge production experiments with congenitally blind and sighted participants, who were asked to produce verbal features, 3D clay models, and 2D drawings of familiar objects with varying levels of tactile exposure, including tools, large nonmanipulable objects, and animals...