A recombinant SARS-CoV-2 spike protein nanoparticle vaccine delivered in the deltoid muscle on days 0 and 21 was found to be immunogenic at both 5 μg and 25 μg doses. When given with a saponin-based ...adjuvant, both doses were equally immunogenic, with little or no reactogenicity, and elicited neutralizing antibody titers higher than those in convalescent serum.
Proprioceptive sensation via embedded flexible sensors is essential for soft robotic grippers to realize safe and dexterous grasping. We demonstrate a self-powered, flexible multifunctional sensor by ...combining a polyvinylidene difluoride film with a microstructured jamming layer. The jamming layers and the finger body are fabricated by a multimaterial 3D printing technology. The sensor built into the soft finger can provide passive proprioceptive sensations of curvature and stiffness, with maximum sensitivity of 0.55 mV m and 0.09 Vm/N respectively. It also acted as an active jamming element to tune finger stiffness (15–44 N/m) while not affecting the dynamics of the robotic movement. We demonstrate the multifunctional sensor with a three-fingered robotic gripper to successfully record finger bending and stiffening in the ‘pick and place’ process. This work shows potential of greatly enhancing the way in which a gripper interacts with objects that are manipulated and provide a route to achieve anthropomorphic grippers.
Display omitted
•Sensitive enhancing layer was printed with soft finger by multimaterial 3D printing.•The self-powered sensor can measure curvature and stiffness up to 10 m-1 and 44 N/m.•The multifunctional sensor is able to sense finger curvature and stiffness.•This work suggests a new way of designing sensors in robotic applications.
Hazy images have limited visibility and low contrast. The degradation is expressed by transmission map, which is one of the most important estimates of single image dehazing. Transmission map ...estimation is an underconstraint problem, and lots of priors have been proposed. Among them, the dark channel prior is widely recognized. However, traditional methods have not fully exploited its power due to improper assumptions or operations, which cause unwanted artifacts. The postrefinement algorithms employed to remove these artifacts in turn undermine the merits of the prior. In this letter, a novel method for estimating transmission map by energy minimization is proposed to solve this problem. The energy function combines the dark channel prior with piecewise smoothness. The method is compared to the state-of-the-art methods and shows outstanding performance.
This review provides an overview of the current state‐of‐the‐art of the emerging field of flexible multifunctional sensors for wearable and robotic applications. In these application sectors, there ...is a demand for high sensitivity, accuracy, reproducibility, mechanical flexibility, and low cost. The ability to empower robots and future electronic skin (e‐skin) with high resolution, high sensitivity, and rapid response sensing capabilities is of interest to a broad range of applications including wearable healthcare devices, biomedical prosthesis, and human–machine interacting robots such as service robots for the elderly and electronic skin to provide a range of diagnostic and monitoring capabilities. A range of sensory mechanisms is examined including piezoelectric, pyroelectric, piezoresistive, and there is particular emphasis on hybrid sensors that provide multifunctional sensing capability. As an alternative to the physical sensors described above, optical sensors have the potential to be used as a robot or e‐skin; this includes sensory color changes using photonic crystals, liquid crystals, and mechanochromic effects. Potential future areas of research are discussed and the challenge for these exciting materials is to enhance their integration into wearables and robotic applications.
Flexible multifunctional sensors can provide intelligent sensing for wearable and human–machine interacting robots. This review focuses on recent progress in the development and advancement of flexible and multifunctional sensors based on a range of sensory mechanisms and materials including piezoelectric, conductive, and optical materials. Potential future research directions and challenges are discussed.
NVX-CoV2373 is an adjuvanted recombinant full-length SARS-CoV-2 spike trimer protein vaccine demonstrated to be protective against COVID-19 in efficacy trials. Here we demonstrate that vaccinated ...individuals made CD4
+
T cell responses after 1 and 2 doses of NVX-CoV2373, and a subset of individuals made CD8
+
T cell responses. Characterization of the vaccine-elicited CD8
+
T cells demonstrated IFN-γ production. Characterization of the vaccine-elicited CD4
+
T cells revealed both circulating T follicular helper (cTfh) cells and Th1 cells (IFN-γ
+
, TNF-α
+
, and IL-2
+
) were detectable within 7 days of the primary immunization. Spike-specific CD4
+
T cells were correlated with the magnitude of the later SARS-CoV-2–neutralizing antibody titers, indicating that robust generation of CD4
+
T cells, capable of supporting humoral immune responses, may be a key characteristic of NVX-CoV2373 that utilizes Matrix-M adjuvant.
Purpose
Minimally invasive total hip arthroplasty (MITHA) is a treatment for hip arthritis, and it causes less tissue trauma, blood loss, and recovery time. However, the limited incision makes it ...difficult for surgeons to perceive the instruments’ location and orientation. Computer-assisted navigation systems can help improve the medical outcome of MITHA. Directly applying existing navigation systems for MITHA, however, suffers from problems of bulky fiducial marker, severe feature-loss, multiple instruments tracking confusion, and radiation exposure. To tackle these problems, we propose an image-guided navigation system for MITHA using a novel position-sensing marker.
Methods
A position-sensing marker is proposed to serve as the fiducial marker with high-density and multi-fold ID tags. It results in less feature span and enables the use of ID for each feature, overcoming the problem of bulky fiducial markers and multiple instruments tracking confusion. And the marker can be recognized even when a large part of locating features is obscured. As for the elimination of intraoperative radiation exposure, we propose a point-based method to achieve patient-image registration based on anatomical landmarks.
Results
Quantitative experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our system. The accuracy of instrument positioning is achieved at 0.33 ± 0.18 mm, and that of patient-image registration is achieved at 0.79 ± 0.15 mm. And qualitative experiments are also performed, verifying that our system can be used in compact surgical spatial volume and can address severe feature-loss and tracking confusion problems. In addition, our system does not require any intraoperative medical scans.
Conclusion
Experimental results indicate that our proposed system can assist surgeons without larger space occupations, radiation exposure, and extra incision, showing its potential application value in MITHA.
The gene encoding PTEN is one of the most frequently mutated tumor suppressor-encoding genes in human cancer. While PTEN's function in tumor suppression is well established, its relationship to ...anti-microbial immunity remains unknown. Here we found a pivotal role for PTEN in the induction of type I interferon, the hallmark of antiviral innate immunity, that was independent of the pathway of the kinases PI(3)K and Akt. PTEN controlled the import of IRF3, a master transcription factor responsible for IFN-β production, into the nucleus. We further identified a PTEN-controlled negative phosphorylation site at Ser97 of IRF3 and found that release from this negative regulation via the phosphatase activity of PTEN was essential for the activation of IRF3 and its import into the nucleus. Our study identifies crosstalk between PTEN and IRF3 in tumor suppression and innate immunity.
Purpose
The re-measurement of full-arch implant digital impressions is an important step in denture restoration. This paper provides an efficient oral photogrammetry technology using projective ...invariant marker, applied in the re-measurement of full-arch implant digital impressions.
Methods
We have developed a self-recognizing marker with projection invariance, along with its detection code. The marker is installed on the scanning body and used for photogrammetric measurements. Triangulation is utilized to determine the 3D coordinates of the marker, followed by a series of post-processing steps to obtain more accurate 3D coordinates.
Results
The experimental data indicate that the optimal working distance is between 200 and 250 mm, with a minimum measurement error of less than 0.05 mm and an average measurement error of 0.10 mm. The measurement time is less than 2 min.
Conclusions
The experimental results show that the photogrammetric system can obtain reliable positions of full-arch implants with efficient photogrammetry, without the need to enter the patient’s oral cavity, and has potential clinical application value.
Dark Channel: The Devil is in the Details Zhu, Mingzhu; He, Bingwei; Liu, Jiantao ...
IEEE signal processing letters,
07/2019, Letnik:
26, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Dark channel prior is a highly valued theory mostly used in the area of haze removal. It reveals the wide existence of pixels with very small channel. However, the definition is in a decorated way ...that relies on the concept of dark channel. The dark channel works like an image domain wherein non-sky regions of clear outdoor images are close to zero. In this letter we show that, such a concept is unnecessary and misleading, and can be improved by using a more basic concept named dark pixel. A novel transmission estimation method based on finding dark pixels is proposed. The method is concise and easy to understand. In comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, our method shows significant improvements on both transmission estimation and haze removal results.
In this paper, a marker and its real-time tracking method are proposed. Different from existing technologies that recognize the markers by spatial event features, which lead to many practical ...problems, we discover the possibility of using temporal features. Strobe LEDs (light emitting diode) are used as markers to produce periodically flipping events, and a fast clustering-based algorithm is designed to track and recognize these markers simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our methods have superior speed and accuracy compared to state-of-the-arts. The markers can be stably tracked in many challenging situations, thus can be used in various visual tracking applications. The proposed method introduces a new marker and its corresponding recognition algorithm for event camera-based targets tracking, offering a reliable solution for various applications.
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