Spinal angles were automated, a brain pipeline was unified and eye movements were steered
Automated spinal measurement approached specialist agreement; an open toolkit unified optical brain imaging. A retinal-stabilisation experiment measured how tiny eye movements contribute to peripheral sensitivity.
Science··Evening
Automated angle measurement entered the range between human readers
The system locates vertebrae on spinal X-rays and automatically calculates the curvature angle. Its results differed from measurements by experienced specialists by roughly 2.3 to 3.4 degrees. That gap matches the range between two human readers measuring the same images. The comparison shows that the tool can derive the core quantity used in scoliosis assessment with consistency similar to specialist measurement; the retained evidence does not say that the full clinical decision was handed to the automated system.[1]
Cedalion gathered brain-imaging steps in one environment
The open-source Cedalion toolkit runs functional near-infrared spectroscopy and diffuse optical tomography in one Python environment. Simulation of light propagation through tissue, photogrammetric estimation of sensor positions, artefact correction, statistical modelling and image reconstruction sit in the same pipeline. The toolkit supports the SNIRF and BIDS data standards and includes Jupyter notebooks that can run in the cloud. Separate processing steps can therefore be followed inside a shared, open technical framework.[2]
Retinal stabilisation isolated the contribution of tiny eye movements
In the peer-reviewed study published in PLOS Biology, real-time retinal stabilisation let the researchers dictate microsaccade direction experimentally. Extrafoveal visual sensitivity increased by 3.4 per cent when the movement was congruent with the target and by 1.5 per cent when it was incongruent. Experiments involved four rhesus macaques and human participants, with 112 sessions recorded in the monkeys. The effect also appeared at visual eccentricities roughly 50 times the microsaccade amplitude.[3]
