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Single-cell RNA-seq analysis has been widely used for revealing heterogeneity of cells in various tissues and conditions. The goal of our research is to elucidate a variety of responses of individual leukocytes in inflammatory stimulation by analyzing their transcriptomic heterogeneity. In this research, we present an analysis of single-cell transcriptome data of mouse leukocytes in several inflammatory stimulations.

This paper presents a method for analyzing leukocyte migration in live animals by image processing. For detecting leukocyte movements, we adopt a tracking-by-matching approach that compares between consecutive time-frames in a time-lapse motion image observed with intravital microscopy. Since leukocytes migrate at a large variety of speeds, we developed a tool based on a matching algorithm, called DeepMatching, which uses a deep, multi-layer, convolutional architecture designed for matching images and can therefore efficiently determine dense correspondences in the presence of significant changes between images. DeepMatchihg was originally designed in computer vision research, and we modified the code to apply for cell tracking. Also we extended the matching method to handle not only 2D movements but also depth-directional ones in 3D motion images. By linking the leukocyte movements into their trajectories, we have detected leukocyte gathering points that are estimated as high concentration points of chemo-attractants. It is suggested that leukocytes may act as living micro-probes to the concentration of allergens in contact dermatitis by our method.

Previous studies have shown that people with autistic traits have difficulties in motion perception, such as human gait as depicted on a point-light display. A recent study reported that adults with autism spectrum disorders showed atypical visual event-related evoked potentials (ERPs) in response to radial optic flow. To determine the correlation between gait perception and autistic traits in the general population, the present study recorded ERPs time-locked to the onset of approaching and receding point-light walkers. ERPs were measured using an 8-channel system in 19 adults and the correlation between the ERP components and the Subthreshold Autism Trait Questionnaire (SATQ) score were assessed to quantitatively measure autistic traits in the general population. The results showed that the higher SATQ score was, the longer the latency of the ERP component for an approaching walker was. In conclusion, people with autistic traits have trouble perceiving the approach of other people.

Capturing and analyzing the actual packets in networks is useful in order to understand the behaviors of a system. Tap-as-a-Service (TaaS), an OpenStack project, has been proposed to enable capturing packets in a virtual network. TaaS, by expanding OpenStack Neutron APIs, provides a functionality that allows users to set up mirroring of the production traffic between virtual machines (VMs) and to transfer the mirrored traffic to the monitoring VM. However, the production traffic and the mirrored traffic affect each other because they share the same physical underlay network in the reference TaaS implementation. This may result in interference of resources. Since capturing packets on the virtual network may affect the performance of business applications running on the VMs, it is impossible to analyze the normal condition. In this paper, we propose two methods to solve this issue: (1) isolation of the production traffic and the mirrored traffic at the underlay network and (2) a quality of service (QoS) control method of mirrored traffic. Using these methods, we can reduce the influence of the mirrored traffic on the performance of the production traffic. Moreover, we also discuss the experimental results. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

We propose a thin, light-weight reflectionless metalens which collimates OAM beams with the mode numbers $l =\pm 1$ simultaneously for antenna gain enhancement in wireless communication systems. A tri-Iayer metalens is designed at 10 GHz band based on the transmission line theory and implemented on a tri-Iayer dielectric substrate. It is shown by numerical simulations that the unit cell has the reflection coefficient as low as −30 dB at the design frequency. It is also shown experimentally that a set of TX and RX metalenses yields the maximum gain as high as 18.7 dB which is 10.2 dB higher than that with conventional dielectric lenses.

Precision agriculture is a potential candidate for enhancing productivity and conserving water resources. In particular, irrigation activities can be optimized by collecting soil conditions using soil sensors to ensure water resource sustainability. While there are commercialized soil-monitoring systems, their cost is often too high for large-scale implementation. To guarantee water resource sustainability and food supply through irrigation optimization, large-scale deployments of soil sensors are required. Therefore, in this study, a cost-efficient soil monitoring device that employs capacitive touch sensing and printed electronics was developed. The target price of the proposed system that includes a sensor probe and a gateway is $1000. This is about three times cheaper than the commercially available systems and it is reasonably accurate. In India, irrigation optimization is essential to mitigate severe drought and water shortage caused by climate changes. Thus, to verify the usability of the proposed probes for irrigation management in a real farm field, the probes were tested in a maize field in Hyderabad. The deployed probes successfully detected soil moisture changes due to precipitation and irrigation, which is useful for irrigation optimization.

Fusion genes make for one of the mechanisms of tumorigenesis. The identification of fusion genes by RNA-Seq has attracted attention. Various methods for detecting fusion genes have been proposed, but their accuracy is not sufficient. One of the causes of this problem is the relatively short reading length in RNA-Seq data. Therefore, before mapping RNA-Seq data, we proposed a method, which is based on shifted short-read clustering (SSC), to identify shifted reads of the same origin and extend them as representative sequences. As a result, we assumed that the percentage of uniquely mapped reads would be increased, and the detection rates of the fusion genes could be improved. To verify these hypotheses, we applied the SSC method to RNA-Seq data from three cell lines (BT-474, MCF-7, and SKBR-3). When only one base was shifted, the average read lengths of BT-474, MCF-7, and SKBR-3 were extended from 201 to 223 bases (111%), 201 to 214 bases (106%), and 201 to 213 bases (106%), respectively. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the SSC method is demonstrated by comparing the performances of a fusion gene detection tool's results, STAR-Fusion, with and without the SSC method of the reads. The percentage of uniquely mapped reads of BT-474, MCF-7, and SKBR-3 were improved from 88% to 93%, 88% to 94%, and 92% to 95%, respectively. Finally, the fusion gene detection rates of BT-474, MCF-7, and SKBR-3 were increased from 48% to 57%, 49% to 53%, and 50% to 53% respectively. The SSC method is considered to be an effective method not only for improving the percentage of uniquely mapped reads but also for fusion gene detection.

Potential fluctuation in InGaN quantum wells causes carrier localization and it strongly affects the gain characteristics in blue/green lasers. In this study, the carrier localization has been experimentally investigated in InGaN quantum wells, and the results have been explained by a theoretical model.

Deformation potentials in InGaN alloy material have been precisely determined. Using these values, optical gain characteristics of semipolar and nonpolar InGaN quantum wells have been theoretically calculated, and it is predicted that high-performance green-emitting laser diodes could be realized on low-angle semipolar GaN substrates.

It is well-known that potential fluctuation in InGaN quantum-well layers is very large. To investigate its effect on the laser characteristics, we have found a new method to evaluate the degree of fluctuation from the temperature dependence of the lasing threshold excitation power density.

The purpose of this study is to develop the sensing device which measures three-axis force and three-axis moment for reducing the number of accident in orthodontic treatment. The device is necessary for adequate quantitative evaluation of orthodontic forces during orthodontics. The developed sensing device is composed of six-axis force sensors, tooth models, and arms for connecting sensors and tooth models. The developed device simulates rows of teeth in orthodontic operation and measures $14 \times 6$ axes force and moment from tooth models simultaneously. The averages of the difference of force and moment to theoretical values in each direction are 1.78 % (0.043 N) and 2.72 % (0.60 Nmm) respectively. The average moment applying couple forces is 17.1 % (0.81 Nmm). Then the device is able to measure more accurately as the value of the moment was larger. Therefore using our proposed device, we can conduct the orthodontic treatment which dentition moves large for attaching the rail of wire to the teeth.

X-ray inspections using X-ray flat panel detectors (FPDs) have been widely used in electronic packaging to detect defects and contaminations. In the FPDs, scintillating materials convert X-ray into visible light, and a-Si photodiode array converts the light into electrons for imaging. However, it is desired that the spatial resolution of FPDs is improved because the light spreading inside scintillator causes crosstalk to next a-Si pixels and the resolution is degraded. In this study, the scintillator was pixelated with same pixel pitch as a-Si photodiode array by barrier rib structure to limit the light spreading, and the spatial resolution was improved. The pixelated scintillator was aligned with 83μm pixel pitch of a-Si photodiode array and set as a FPD. The FPD with 83μm pitch pixelated scintillator showed high modulation transfer function (mTF) such as >0.90 at 2cycles/mm. The MTF value was almost equal to the maximum value that can be theoretically achieved. Thus the FPD with pixelated scintillator has great potential to apply to high spatial-resolution X-ray inspection.

A better understanding of in vivo bio images is expected to contribute to the discovery of new drugs and mechanisms of disease. To improve the contributions of in vivo bioimaging, the extraction of a particular region is required in order to detect a particular cell's motion because manual image processing of a massive number of images is unrealistic. One of the issues for automatic image-segmentation is that conditions of image-taking are variable. Thus, some manual input and/or manual tuning of some parameters is required to adjust each image. To reduce manual operation for image processing of bone marrow cavity segmentation, we focused on the texture pattern of bone marrow cavity. In this paper, we propose a bone marrow cavity segmentation method using support vector machine and wavelet-based texture feature. The proposed method does not require manual inputs to obtain distribution of intensity before processing, because the texture patterns of bone marrow cavity regions are integrated into the system in advance. Moreover, it is applicable to a particular frame in an image sequence in which the condition of fluorescent material is variable because it does not require temporal variation or initial frame for the segmentation. In the experiment, we evaluated our method with nine types of mother wavelets and several sets of scale parameters. The bone marrow cavity segmentation, using graph-cuts with our texture pattern classification, performs well without manual inputs by a user.

Spintronic devices, such as magnetic random access memory (MRAM), are built from materials with high spin polarization. Half-metals which have only one spin band at the Fermi level are necessary to improve the performance of the spintronic devices. Co-based Heusler alloys are predicted relatively high Curie temperature and high spin polarization from the first-principle band calculations. We therefore focus on the spin polarization and magnetization of Co-based Heusler alloys Co 2 TiGa 1-x Sn x .

Tidal flats have important roles in a coastal ecosystem as a habitat for benthic infaunal species, including commercial bivalves, and as a feeding ground for migratory species of fish and birds. Migratory species have a significant effect on the infaunal species abundance by predation. Therefore, it is important to know the type of migratory species and how often they appear on the flat. It is also important to know the abundance of commercially available and/or endangered migratory fish species (e.g., the Japanese eel). We tried to observe the migratory species on the tidal flats by using time-lapse still, infrared video, and network cameras to understand their dynamics. Commercially available cameras and hand-made underwater camera housing were used to reduce the equipment cost as low as possible. These camera observations could reveal the species composition of fish, presence of the Japanese eel, and appearance of ducks during winter on tidal flats. However, comparing the spatio-temporal difference in their abundance is difficult because underwater visibility differed among sites, and bio-fouling to the camera housing disturb the long term observation. Further impovements, such as the area estimation of the captured image and anti-bio-fouling mechanisms, are required in the future research to monitor the abundance of migratory species in tidal flats.

In this paper, we present a suitable electrode design for capacitive sensor for low-cost soil moisture profile probes. The probe can be implemented in quite low cost because it only requires single-side conductive patterns on PET film. Although inter-digital capacitor (IDC) is commonly used for coplanar capacitive sensor since it can sense wider area with sufficient accuracy, particularly for profile probe, narrower sensing area is preferred in order to observe capacitance on each depth. Coplanar plate capacitor (CPC) can focus on soil moisture on each profile level thanks to its single gap design so we conclude the CPC should be suitable for profile probes. We confirmed that CPC has almost identical or even better performance compared to IDC. In addition to that, CPC has an advantage that it has less sensitivity degradation with thick protective coating than IDC.

The temperature dependence (from -20 to +20 degrees C) of gamma-ray irradiated light outputs, energy resolutions, and decay time profiles of three YAG:Ce poly-ceramic scintillators are studied. The Ce concentrations are 0.5, 0.05, and 0.005 mol%.0 The relative light yield of the YAG:Ce with 0.5 mol% with a 2 μs shaping time was measured as 1 : 1.08 : 1.14 at +20, 0, and -20 degrees C, respectively, including the temperature dependence of the phototube (-0.2% /degree). The energy resolution stays almost constant at 7.2-1.984238or 662 keV gamma-rays. The ceramic with 0.05 mol??к_?ۿ?Sڟ?hows the almost same properties, while the light yield of that with 0.005 mol-1230736516s 2-4 times lower (hence the energy resolution becomes 14-19%). All the scintillators exhibit good linearities within ∼ 1 % between the light output and the irradiated gamma-ray energy from 59.5 keV to 662 keV. The decay time constants of the dominant decay components are about 80 ns and 300 ns at +20 degrees C. As the temperature increases from -20 to +20 degrees C, the effective decay of all the ceramics becomes faster, because the decay time constants and fractions of the slower components shorten and decrease, respectively. This result suggests that carriers which are captured in shallow traps before transferring excitation to Ce ions can escape the traps more easily at higher temperatures. Considering the decrease of the total light yield toward higher temperatures, it is thought that thermal quenching starts to dominate the temperature dependence of the ceramic YAG:Ce around the room temperature. The 0.5 mol?ڿ?R?@ʿ???S?cintillator shows a lower quenching energy than the 0.05 mol1001122502ne. This can be explained in terms of self absorption of Ce emission.

Node mobility models for MANETs are important to affect performance of their routing protocols. We have already proposed a new mobility model representing spatially and temporally biased change of node mobility and node density for MANETs. In order to evaluate routing protocols of MANETs for our new mobility model, this paper presents an efficient algorithm for enabling derivation of various mobility scenarios for our new mobility model if parameters called "variation rate" representing degree of biased variation of node mobility and node density are only inputted. Using the derived mobility scenarios in simulation experiments, performance of routing protocols for MANETs can be evaluated from the viewpoint of a new metric "variation rate."