Applications of a signal averager for neurophysiological investigations in clinical function laboratories using a general signal-processing unit

A general 'coherent signal averager' software package which can be run on a small laboratory computer is presented as an application of a new approach to medical instrumentation. The combination of the minicomputer, preprocessing hardware and the above-mentioned software yields a flexible multipurpose averaging system for electrophysiological signals. The possibilities of the system are discussed with reference to visual evoked potential measurements in a clinical function laboratory.     

System for acquisition and real-time processing of multidimensional slit-scan flow cytometric data

The high-speed sampling requirements of multidimensional slit-scan signals (cell contours) have typically required custom hardware. This specialized hardware has often lacked the flexibility to adapt to varying instrument setups and experimental requirements. A hardware and software system capable of sampling multiple slit-scan cell contours at rates of up to 40 MHz with 10-bit resolution is described. It utilizes commercially available CAMAC transient recorders, a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-11/83 computer, and custom hardware for signal conditioning and trigger generation. The modular design of the software system allows various hardware options with minimal additional coding. Real-time digital processing checks each cell contour for multiple peaks; extracts morphological features such as width, height, and area; accumulates gated histograms of these data; and optionally saves the derived data, selected contours, or both into list mode files on disk.     

A semiautomatic image analyzing system based on an APPLE II or IIe personal computer

A new semiautomatic image analyzing system based on an APPLE II or IIe personal computer is described. The configurations of the hardware and software are extensively explained. The possibilities of applying the system are demonstrated by different examples taken from various projects in biological research and clinical pathology. The system is designed to fulfil the following requirements: (1) stepwise realization as a unit-by-unit system according to individual needs and interests, (2) acquisition and calculation of morphometric parameters, (3) provision of solutions for the greatest possible number of given problems in clinical and experimental pathology, (4) direct connection of the system to host computers for on-line data transfer and evaluation, and (5) optimum cost-benefit ratio by manifold application possibilities for the individual hardware and software elements. The advantages of the unit-by-unit system with personal computers outweigh in many respects the disadvantages (for example, increased file handling and limited capacity) in comparison with the closed automatized image evaluation system, particularly with regard to costs, flexibility and compatibility. The system is being further developed in collaboration with Kontron Bildanalyse GmbH, Eching/Munich, FRG.     

Generating precise mechanical stimuli and recording chordotonal organ discharge patterns using a microcomputer

A computer-controlled system for the investigation of the responseproperties of the tibio-femoral chordotonal organ in the locustis described. The computer is used to generate small amplitudesinusoidal movements of the tibia via a small servo-controlledmotor. The resulting response recorded via a suction electrodeis simultaneously detected, processed and stored on disk. Fullconstructional details for all hardware required are given.The software, developed for a BBC microcomputer, in additionto controlling all the hardware, has graphics and analysis routinesenabling the operator to display and manipulate the stored data.     

A microprocessor-based underwater data acquisition system

Summary A microprocessor-based data-acquisition system has been developed to meet the requirements of a range of oceanic sensor inputs. The system described is specially suitable for low-power, long-period underwater applications. Details are given of the hardware and software design, and examples of interface to propeller current sensor and pressure transducer. Preliminary field results in the Northern Great Barrier Reef are described.     

Automated auditory recognition training and testing

Laboratory training and testing of auditory recognition skills in animals is important for understanding animal communication systems that depend on auditory cues. Songbirds are commonly studied because of their exceptional ability to learn complex vocalizations. In recent years, mounting interest in the perceptual abilities of songbirds has increased the demand for laboratory behavioural training and testing paradigms. Here, we describe and demonstrate the success of a method for auditory discrimination experiments, including all the necessary hardware, training procedures and freely-available, versatile software. The system can run several behavioural training and testing paradigms, including operant (go-nogo, stimulus preference, and two-alternative forced choice) and classical conditioning tasks. The software and some hardware components can be used with any laboratory animal that learns and responds to sensory cues. The peripheral hardware and training procedures are designed for use with songbirds and auditory stimuli. Using the go-nogo paradigm of the training system, we show that adult zebra finches learn to recognize and correctly classify individual female calls and male songs. We also show that learning the task generalizes to new stimulus classes; birds that learned the task with calls subsequently learned to recognize songs faster than did birds that learned the task and songs at the same time.     

Developing manufacturing control software: A survey and critique

The complexity and diversity of manufacturing software and the need to adapt this software to the frequent changes in the production requirements necessitate the use of a systematic approach to developing this software. The software life-cycle model (Royce, 1970) that consists of specifying the requirements of a software system, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving this software can be followed when developing large portions of manufacturing software. However, the presence of hardware devices in these systems and the high costs of acquiring and operating hardware devices further complicate the manufacturing software development process and require that the functionality of this software be extended to incorporate simulation and prototyping. This paper reviews recent methods for planning, scheduling, simulating, and monitoring the operation of manufacturing systems. A synopsis of the approaches to designing and implementing the real-time control software of these systems is presented. It is concluded that current methodologies support, in a very restricted sense, these planning, scheduling, and monitoring activities, and that enhanced performance can be achieved via an integrated approach.     

Technologies for large-scale physical mapping of human chromosomes

Developing and characterization ordered clone collection from human chromosome specific DNA libraries is proceeding as part of a larger effort to construct a physical map of the entire human genome. The robotics and automation section at Los Alamos has been focussed on developing the hardware and software tools required to support this objective. These tools are typically integrated systems that combine an intuitive user interface, a database, as well as the relevant hardware technologies. To date, we have developed a system to automatically grid clones onto nylon filters in high density arrays. We have also developed a hybridization autoradiograph software scoring tool that combines image analysis, databasing, and a user interface.     

Toward an open architecture for morphometric computing

Prototype biomedical computing and graphics systems developed since the early 1970s for computer microscopy, architectonic or morphometric analysis and visual display have been marked by the highly local character of their designs. Such approaches, while often heroic and unusually creative in character, have limited the exportability of hardware or software products to the larger biomedical community. A general systems orientation, based on a shared, "open" architecture of hardware and software, with known and published standards, is proposed. The incremental nature and funding character of such a system is also discussed.     

A low‐cost,computer‐controlled robotic flower system for behavioral experiments

Human observations during behavioral studies are expensive, time‐consuming, and error prone. For this reason, automatization of experiments is highly desirable, as it reduces the risk of human errors and workload. The robotic system we developed is simple and cheap to build and handles feeding and data collection automatically. The system was built using mostly off‐the‐shelf components and has a novel feeding mechanism that uses servos to perform refill operations. We used the robotic system in two separate behavioral studies with bumblebees (Bombus terrestris): The system was used both for training of the bees and for the experimental data collection. The robotic system was reliable, with no flight in our studies failing due to a technical malfunction. The data recorded were easy to apply for further analysis. The software and the hardware design are open source. The development of cheap open‐source prototyping platforms during the recent years has opened up many possibilities in designing of experiments. Automatization not only reduces workload, but also potentially allows experimental designs never done before, such as dynamic experiments, where the system responds to, for example, learning of the animal. We present a complete system with hardware and software, and it can be used as such in various experiments requiring feeders and collection of visitation data. Use of the system is not limited to any particular experimental setup or even species.     

A case for spiking neural network simulation based on configurable multiple-FPGA systems

Recent neuropsychological research has begun to reveal that neurons encode information in the timing of spikes. Spiking neural network simulations are a flexible and powerful method for investigating the behaviour of neuronal systems. Simulation of the spiking neural networks in software is unable to rapidly generate output spikes in large-scale of neural network. An alternative approach, hardware implementation of such system, provides the possibility to generate independent spikes precisely and simultaneously output spike waves in real time, under the premise that spiking neural network can take full advantage of hardware inherent parallelism. We introduce a configurable FPGA-oriented hardware platform for spiking neural network simulation in this work. We aim to use this platform to combine the speed of dedicated hardware with the programmability of software so that it might allow neuroscientists to put together sophisticated computation experiments of their own model. A feed-forward hierarchy network is developed as a case study to describe the operation of biological neural systems (such as orientation selectivity of visual cortex) and computational models of such systems. This model demonstrates how a feed-forward neural network constructs the circuitry required for orientation selectivity and provides platform for reaching a deeper understanding of the primate visual system. In the future, larger scale models based on this framework can be used to replicate the actual architecture in visual cortex, leading to more detailed predictions and insights into visual perception phenomenon.     

Intelligent software for laboratory automation

The automation of laboratory techniques has greatly increased the number of experiments that can be carried out in the chemical and biological sciences. Until recently, this automation has focused primarily on improving hardware. Here we argue that future advances will concentrate on intelligent software to integrate physical experimentation and results analysis with hypothesis formulation and experiment planning. To illustrate our thesis, we describe the 'Robot Scientist' - the first physically implemented example of such a closed loop system. In the Robot Scientist, experimentation is performed by a laboratory robot, hypotheses concerning the results are generated by machine learning and experiments are allocated and selected by a combination of techniques derived from artificial intelligence research. The performance of the Robot Scientist has been evaluated by a rediscovery task based on yeast functional genomics. The Robot Scientist is proof that the integration of programmable laboratory hardware and intelligent software can be used to develop increasingly automated laboratories.     

医学检测设备中便携式图形显示系统的设计

本文介绍了一种基于液晶显示器的图形显示系统,适用于便携式医学信号监测设备。论述了该系统和软件的设计方案,并详细描述了两种动态显示算法。文章最后讨论了系统调试方案和结果。     

Accessible haptic technology for drug design applications

Structure-based drug design is a creative process that displays several features that make it closer to human reasoning than to machine automation. However, very often the user intervention is limited to the preparation of the input and analysis of the output of a computer simulation. In some cases, allowing human intervention directly in the process could improve the quality of the results by applying the researcher intuition directly into the simulation. Haptic technology has been previously explored as a useful method to interact with a chemical system. However, the need of expensive hardware and the lack of accessible software have limited the use of this technology to date. Here we are reporting the implementation of a haptic-based molecular mechanics environment aimed for interactive drug design and ligand optimization, using an easily accessible software/hardware combination.     

Using System Emulation to Model Next-Generation Shared Virtual Memory Clusters

Recently much effort has been spent on providing a shared address space abstraction on clusters of small-scale symmetric multiprocessors. However, advances in technology will soon make it possible to construct these clusters with larger-scale cc-NUMA nodes, connected with non-coherent networks that offer latencies and bandwidth comparable to interconnection networks used in hardware cache-coherent systems. The shared memory abstraction can be provided on these systems in software across nodes and hardware within nodes.Recent simulation results have demonstrated that certain features of modern system area networks can be used to greatly reduce shared virtual memory (SVM) overheads [5,19]. In this work we leverage these results and we use detailed system emulation to investigate building future software shared memory clusters. We use an existing, large-scale hardware cache-coherent system with 64 processors to emulate a complete future cluster. We port our existing infrastructure (communication layer and shared memory protocol) on this system and study the behavior of a set of real applications. We present results for both 32- and 64-processor system configurations.We find that: (i) System emulation is invaluable in quantifying potential benefits from changes in the technology of commodity components. More importantly, it reveals potential problems in future systems that are easily overlooked in simulation studies. Thus, system emulation should be used along with other modeling techniques (e.g., simulation, implementation) to investigate future trends. (ii) Our work shows that current SVM protocols can only partially take advantage of faster interconnects and wider nodes due to operating system and architectural implications. We quantify the related issues and identify the areas where more research is required for future SVM clusters.     

虚拟场景的下肢康复训练系统的设计与实现

大多数的脑卒中患者在下肢运动方面有障碍,给其生活带来了极大的不便,进行及时有效的康复训练是恢复下肢运动功能的关键。传统的下肢康复训练过程中重复性高,患者的参与度低和互动性差。为了解决该问题,本研究设计了一种基于虚拟场景的下肢康复训练系统。该系统实现了结合虚拟现实技术进行下肢康复训练和评估,采集和处理足底压力数据,控制虚拟场景中虚拟元素,显示训练的时间、得分和训练过程中足底压力的最大值、平均值。该系统由下位机硬件和上位机软件构成。硬件系统包括力传感模块和数据采集模块;软件系统是由虚拟场景模块和人机交互模块构成。基于SPSS软件的分析数据结果表明,系统不仅可以准确的采集足底脚掌与脚跟的压力值,而且组内相关系数均大于0.9,系统具有很好的可靠性。本研究的虚拟场景的趣味性很高,能有效地提高患者训练的积极性,并有利于医生制定针对性的康复计划。     

DScan - a high-performance digital scanning system for entomological collections

Here we describe a high-performance imaging system for creating high-resolution images of whole insect drawers. All components of the system are industrial standard and can be adapted to meet the specific needs of entomological collections. A controlling unit allows the setting of imaging area (drawer size), step distance between individual images, number of images, image resolution, and shooting sequence order through a set of parameters. The system is highly configurable and can be used with a wide range of different optical hardware and image processing software.     

全自动膜片钳数据采集控制系统USB接口的设计

介绍全自动膜片钳数据采集控制系统USB2.0接口的设计。该系统采用USB2.0控制器CY7C68013,实现了PC机和膜片钳放大器的数据传输。详细介绍了USB硬件接口、固件程序设计以及上位机应用程序的设计。     

Application of Computerized Polysomnographic Systems in Psychophysiology and Clinical Studies

The development of sleep medication, computer technologies, and microelectronics in the past decade brought about the creation of a new class of instruments for the diagnostics of sleep disorders, i.e., computerized polysomnographic systems. The application of the IBM PC PENTIUM using the MS Windows system for software development and standard hardware and software allows a user to economically supplement the basic equipment of the instrument with novel advanced programs. The possibilities of the application of algorithms of the manual and automated methods of sleep analysis for research purposes are discussed.