Treatment of schizophrenic psychoses with Lyorodin

Forty-four patients suffering from acute and chronic schizophrenic psychoses were used to obtain, by using Lorr's scale (IMPS) and taking the changes in disease state observed within three months as a base, suggestions or pointers as to the proper treatment of disease with fluphenazine (lyorodin) which is a neuroleptically highly potent phenothiazine derivative. Megalomania, grandiose delusions apathetic and depressive syndromes showed marked tendencies toward major improvement. An "antiautistic" effect was observed in chronic patients. The effective dose was between 6 and 12 mg a day. The drug was well tolerated. In the majority of cases it was also necessary for antiparkinsonian drugs to be administered to patients. After twelve months of treatment, slight to major improvements or even freedom from symptoms could be observed in 28 cases (or 64%).     

Chaotic exploration and learning of locomotion behaviors

We present a general and fully dynamic neural system, which exploits intrinsic chaotic dynamics, for the real-time goal-directed exploration and learning of the possible locomotion patterns of an articulated robot of an arbitrary morphology in an unknown environment. The controller is modeled as a network of neural oscillators that are initially coupled only through physical embodiment, and goal-directed exploration of coordinated motor patterns is achieved by chaotic search using adaptive bifurcation. The phase space of the indirectly coupled neural-body-environment system contains multiple transient or permanent self-organized dynamics, each of which is a candidate for a locomotion behavior. The adaptive bifurcation enables the system orbit to wander through various phase-coordinated states, using its intrinsic chaotic dynamics as a driving force, and stabilizes on to one of the states matching the given goal criteria. In order to improve the sustainability of useful transient patterns, sensory homeostasis has been introduced, which results in an increased diversity of motor outputs, thus achieving multiscale exploration. A rhythmic pattern discovered by this process is memorized and sustained by changing the wiring between initially disconnected oscillators using an adaptive synchronization method. Our results show that the novel neurorobotic system is able to create and learn multiple locomotion behaviors for a wide range of body configurations and physical environments and can readapt in realtime after sustaining damage.     

Time-of-flight sensor and color camera calibration for multi-view acquisition

This paper presents a multi-view acquisition system using multi-modal sensors, composed of time-of-flight (ToF) range sensors and color cameras. Our system captures the multiple pairs of color images and depth maps at multiple viewing directions. In order to ensure the acceptable accuracy of measurements, we compensate errors in sensor measurement and calibrate multi-modal devices. Upon manifold experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the major sources of systematic error in sensor measurement and construct an error model for compensation. As a result, we provide a practical solution for the real-time error compensation of depth measurement. Moreover, we implement the calibration scheme for multi-modal devices, unifying the spatial coordinate for multi-modal sensors. The main contribution of this work is to present the thorough analysis of systematic error in sensor measurement and therefore provide a reliable methodology for robust error compensation. The proposed system offers a real-time multi-modal sensor calibration method and thereby is applicable for the 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes.     

Recursive nonlinear observer design: beyond the uniform observability

We propose a recursive design scheme of a state observer for multiple-input-multiple-output, partly lower triangular nonlinear systems. The design begins from the subdynamics far from the output and propagates to the subdynamics close to the output, recalling the backstepping scheme for nonlinear control. The proposed class of systems is fairly general since it includes nonuniformly observable and/or detectable multioutput systems. Error convergence to zero is proved assuming boundedness of inputs a posteriori (i.e., after the design), which is preferable whereas most results in the literature assume the boundedness; a priori (i.e., before the design). A global observer is proposed with the global Lipschitz condition of the system, but without any restriction on the size of Lipschitz coefficient. The Lipschitz condition can be removed when a semiglobal observer is of interest.     

A flight control system for aerial robots: algorithms and experiments

This paper presents a hierarchical flight control system for unmanned aerial vehicles. The proposed system executes high-level mission objectives by progressively substantiating them into machine-level commands. The acquired information from various sensors is propagated back to the higher layers for reactive decision making. Each vehicle is connected via standardized wireless communication protocol for scalable multi-agent coordination. The proposed system has been successfully implemented on a number of small helicopters and validated in various applications. Results from waypoint navigation, a probabilistic pursuit-evasion game and vision-based target tracking demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach toward intelligent flying robots.     

WALRUS: a similarity retrieval algorithm for image databases

Approaches for content-based image querying typically extract a single signature from each image based on color, texture, or shape features. The images returned as the query result are then the ones whose signatures are closest to the signature of the query image. While efficient for simple images, such methods do not work well for complex scenes since they fail to retrieve images that match the query only partially, that is, only certain regions of the image match. This inefficiency leads to the discarding of images that may be semantically very similar to the query image since they may contain the same objects. The problem becomes even more apparent when we consider scaled or translated versions of the similar objects. We propose WALRUS (wavelet-based retrieval of user-specified scenes), a novel similarity retrieval algorithm that is robust to scaling and translation of objects within an image. WALRUS employs a novel similarity model in which each image is first decomposed into its regions and the similarity measure between a pair of images is then defined to be the fraction of the area of the two images covered by matching regions from the images. In order to extract regions for an image, WALRUS considers sliding windows of varying sizes and then clusters them based on the proximity of their signatures. An efficient dynamic programming algorithm is used to compute wavelet-based signatures for the sliding windows. Experimental results on real-life data sets corroborate the effectiveness of WALRUS'S similarity model.     

Metabolic mapping of the effects of oral alcohol self-administration in rats

A method for the quantitation of protein carbonyls, which have been widely employed as markers of protein oxidative damage, is described. Protein carbonyls were derivatized with tritiated sodium borohydride and the tritiated proteins were separated on SDS-PAGE. Protein bands, visualized by Coomassie blue staining, were then excised and incubated in 30% H2O2 at 60 degrees C for 48 h. Tritium, incorporated into the proteins, was quantitated by liquid scintillation counting after gel solubilization by H2O2. This method can be applied to the measurement of carbonylation of specific proteins as it employs SDS-PAGE and has the advantage that unreacted NaB3H4 in the labeling reaction mixture need not be removed. The present method, when combined with immunochemical detection of protein carbonyls, should be very useful in the quantitation of oxidative damage to individual proteins.