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Alcoholism is a disease that affects some part of brain that control emotion, decisions, and behavior. Sometimes, people experience situation that have to drink alcohol in their social life. Alcoholic needs cognitive behavior therapy to develop restraint on alcohol craving. Alcohol craving could be triggered when exposure to object, environment, or social pressure situation which is related with alcohol. But cognitive behavior therapy have defect in which does not provide social pressure situation properly. Virtual reality (VR) is humancomputer interface that computer expressed an immersive and interactive three-dimensional virtual environments like real space in world. In this study, we developed alcohol craving induction system using virtual reality to provide social situations in which avatar asks to drink together. Nine males and one female (age from 21 to 27 years) who do not have any history of alcohol related disease were recruited for this experiment. In the results, in situation without social pressure, more alcohol craving was induced in situation with alcohol than that of a situation without alcohol. That means our alcohol craving induction system shows same result as conventional study shows [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patients with hemiplegia have an asymmetric gait symptom due to a hemiplegic paralysis. Hip, knee, angle joint angle are measured for suitable gait training of hemiplegic gait disorder. Measured angles are used to grasp the difference between normal and abnormal sides. In particular, knee joint is more important than the other joints to hemiplegic patients. So, we developed marker based knee angle measurement system which is able to measure angle of knee joint using PC and PC camera. Then we integrated VR rehabilitation training system with the marker based knee angle measurement system. VR tasks were constructed with crossing stepping-stones to practice knee flexion and extension during walking. To validate feasibility of VR system, we performed experiment using a treadmill with a speed of 2.0 km/h and various target angles (40 degree, 50 degree, and 70 degree). The purpose of this study ascertained that normal participants make a success of task with the usual target angle (50 degree) as well as the unusual target angle (40 and 70 degree). Four healthy males (age from 24 to 28 years) were recruited for this experiment. And we measured average of trial numbers for success in each period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BOLD T2*-weighted MR images reflects cortical blood flow and oxygenation alterations. fMRI study relies on the detection of localized changes in BOLD signal intensity. Since fMRI measures the very small modulations in BOLD signal intensity that occur during changes in brain activity, it is also very sensitive to small signal intensity variations caused by physiologic noise during the scan. Due to the complexity of movement of various organs associated with heart beat, it is important to reduce cardiac related noise rather than other physiological noise which could be required with relatively simple method. Therefore, a number of methods have been developed for the estimation and reduction of cardiac noise in fMRI study. But, each method has limitation. In this study, we proposed a new estimation method for brain activities influenced by blood pulsation effect using regression analysis with blood pulsation signal and the correspond slice of fMRI. We could find out that the right anterior cingulate cortex and right olfactory cortex and left olfactory cortex were largely influenced by blood pulsation effect for new method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]