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Miniaturized head-mounted microscopes for in vivo recording of neural activity have gained much recognition within the past decade of neuroscience research. In combination with fluorescent reporters, these miniature microscopes allow researchers to record the neural activity that underlies behavior, cognition, and perception in freely moving animals. Single-photon miniature microscopes are convenient for widefield recording but lack the increased penetration depth and optical sectioning capabilities of multiphoton imaging. Here we discuss the current state of head-mounted multiphoton miniature microscopes and introduce a miniature head-mounted two-photon fiber-coupled microscope (2P-FCM) for neuronal imaging with active axial focusing enabled using a miniature electrowetting lens. The 2P-FCM enables three-dimensional two-photon optical recording of structure and activity at multiple focal planes in a freely moving mouse. Detailed methods are provided in this chapter on the 2P-FCM design, operation, and software for data analysis.

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) has imaged more than 200 square degrees of the southern Galactic bulge, providing photometry in the ugrizy filters for $\sim 250$ million unique stars. The presence of a strong foreground disk population, along with complex reddening and extreme image crowding, has made it difficult to constrain the presence of young and intermediate age stars in the bulge population. We employed an accurate cross-match of BDBS with the latest data release (EDR3) from the Gaia mission, matching more than 140 million sources with BDBS photometry and Gaia EDR3 photometry and astrometry. We relied on Gaia EDR3 astrometry, without any photometric selection, to produce clean BDBS bulge colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs). Gaia parallaxes were used to filter out bright foreground sources, and a Gaussian mixture model fit to Galactic proper motions could identify stars kinematically consistent with bulge membership. We applied this method to 127 different bulge fields of $1$ deg$^2$ each, with $|\ell| \leq 9.5^\circ$ and $-9.5^\circ \leq b \leq -2.5^\circ$. The astrometric cleaning procedure removes the majority of blue stars in each field, especially near the Galactic plane, where the ratio of blue to red stars is $\lesssim 10\%$, increasing to values $\sim 20\%$ at higher Galactic latitudes. We rule out the presence of a widespread population of stars younger than 2 Gyr. The vast majority of blue stars brighter than the turnoff belong to the foreground population, according to their measured astrometry. We introduce the distance between the observed red giant branch bump and the red clump as a simple age proxy for the dominant population in the field, and we confirm the picture of a predominantly old bulge. Further work is needed to apply the method to estimate ages to fields at higher latitudes, and to model the complex morphology of the Galactic bulge., 21 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

Over the last twenty years since the introduction of automated coding schemes, research in foreign policy analysis (FPA) has made great advances. However, this automatization process is based on the analysis of verbal statements of leaders to create leadership profiles and has remained largely confined in terms of language. That is, the coding schemes can only parse English-language texts. This reduces both the quality and quantity of available data and limits the application of these leadership profiling techniques beyond the Anglosphere. Against this background, this forum offers five reports on the development of freely available coding schemes for either operational code analysis or leadership trait analysis for languages other than English (i.e., Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Persian).

We present photometric metallicity measurements for a sample of 2.6 million bulge red clump stars extracted from the Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS). Similar to previous studies, we find that the bulge exhibits a strong vertical metallicity gradient, and that at least two peaks in the metallicity distribution functions appear at b < -5. We can discern a metal-poor ([Fe/H] ~ -0.3) and metal-rich ([Fe/H] ~ +0.2) abundance distribution that each show clear systematic trends with latitude, and may be best understood by changes in the bulge's star formation/enrichment processes. Both groups exhibit asymmetric tails, and as a result we argue that the proximity of a star to either peak in [Fe/H] space is not necessarily an affirmation of group membership. The metal-poor peak shifts to lower [Fe/H] values at larger distances from the plane while the metal-rich tail truncates. Close to the plane, the metal-rich tail appears broader along the minor axis than in off-axis fields. We also posit that the bulge has two metal-poor populations -- one that belongs to the metal-poor tail of the low latitude and predominantly metal-rich group, and another belonging to the metal-poor group that dominates in the outer bulge. We detect the X-shape structure in fields with |Z| > 0.7 kpc and for stars with [Fe/H] > -0.5. Stars with [Fe/H] < -0.5 may form a spheroidal or "thick bar" distribution while those with [Fe/H] > -0.1 are strongly concentrated near the plane., 26 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS; the full data table is very long so only a stub table has been provided here; the full electronic table will be provided through MNRAS upon publication, but early access to the full table will be granted upon request to the authors

We present photometric evidence for multiple stellar populations (MPs) in 14 globular clusters (GCs) toward the southern Galactic bulge. The photometric data come as part of the Blanco DECam Bulge Survey, which is a deep, wide-field near-UV-near-IR (ugrizY) survey of the southern Galactic bulge. Here, we present the first systematic study of bulge GC multiple populations with deep photometry including the u band, which is a crucial indicator of the abundance of CNO-bearing molecules in stellar atmospheres. We identify cluster members using Gaia EDR3 proper motion measurements, and then isolate red giant branch stars using r versus u − r color–magnitude diagrams. We find evidence suggesting all 14 clusters host at least two populations, and NGC 6441, NGC 6626, and NGC 6656 appear to have at least three populations. Many of these clusters are not part of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) surveys nor do they have comprehensive spectroscopic analyses so we are presenting the first evidence of MPs in several clusters. Not only do we find a strong anticorrelation between the fraction of first-generation stars and cluster absolute V magnitude, but the correlation coefficient and cluster-to-cluster scatter are similar to the results obtained from HST. Our ground-based data extend to much larger radial distances than similar HST observations, enabling a reliable estimate of the global fraction of first-generation stars in each cluster. This study demonstrates that ground-based u-band photometry as provided by DECam will prove powerful in the study of multiple populations in resolved GCs.

A significant minority of threateners stalk, approach, or become violent after threatening. Violence risk and threat assessment have traditionally relied on evaluating the threatener’s behavior, disposition, and membership in violent groups. However, the identity of the threatener is often unknown, and the assessor must make an initial evaluation using only the language in the threat. By combining predictive factors and their ratios to one another, our predictive model can assess linguistic characteristics of the threat without any information about the threatener, the target, or the relationship between the two. This model assesses predatory thinking, which has a strong relationship with eventual action. The language in both single threat cases and the first threats in cases with multiple threats can be used to promptly assess the likelihood that a threatener will act, enabling assessors to effectively manage cases and mitigate harm.

Red clump (RC) stars are one of the best stellar tracers of the structure of the Milky Way (MW) bulge. Here we report a new view of the double RC through luminosity and color distributions of RC stars in nine bulge fields ($l$ = 0.0$^{\circ}$, $\pm$4.5$^{\circ}$; $b$ = -6.0$^{\circ}$, -7.5$^{\circ}$, -9.0$^{\circ}$) from the Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS), which covers near-ultraviolet to near-infrared bandpasses. The bright and faint RCs show contrasting distributions in ($u-g$)$_{0}$ and ($u-i$)$_{0}$ colors but similar distributions in ($J-K_{s}$)$_{0}$ with a variation depending on the Galactic longitude, where the bright RC is typically redder than the faint RC. In particular, the RC stars are clearly divided into the bluer and redder populations when using the ($u-g$)$_{0}$ color (($u-g$)$_{0}$ $, Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

The Blanco Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Bulge survey is a Vera Rubin Observatory (LSST) pathfinder imaging survey, spanning $\sim 200$ sq. deg. of the Southern Galactic bulge, $-2^\circ, Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures; MNRAS in press; revision corrects some errors and omissions

Medical imaging, a key component in clinical diagnosis of and research on numerous medical conditions, is very costly and can generate massive datasets. For instance, a single scanned subject produces hundreds of thousands of images and millions of key-value metadata pairs that must be verified to ensure instrument and research protocol compliance. Many projects lack funds to reacquire images if data quality issues are detected later. Data quality assurance (QA) requires continuous involvement by all stakeholders and use of specific quality control (QC) methods to identify data issues likely to require post-processing correction or real-time re-acquisition. While many useful QC methods exist, they are often designed for specific use-cases with limited scope and documentation, making integration with other setups difficult. We present the Scalable Quality Assurance for Neuroimaging (SQAN), an open-source software suite developed by Indiana University for protocol quality control and instrumental validation on medical imaging data. SQAN includes a comprehensive QC Engine that ensures adherence to a research study’s protocol. A modern, intuitive web portal serves a wide range of users including researchers, scanner technologists and data scientists, each of whom approach QC with unique priorities, expertise, insights and expectations. Since Fall 2017, a fully operational SQAN instance has supported 50+ research projects, and has QC’d ∼3.5 million images and over 700 million metadata tags. SQAN is designed to scale to any imaging center’s QC needs, and to extend beyond protocol QC toward image-level QC and integration with pipeline and non-imaging database systems.

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) imaged more than 200 square degrees of the Southern Galactic bulge using the ugrizY filters of the Dark Energy Camera, and produced point spread function photometry of approximately 250 million unique sources. In this paper, we present details regarding the construction and collation of survey catalogs, and also discuss the adopted calibration and dereddening procedures. Early science results are presented with a particular emphasis on the bulge metallicity distribution function and globular clusters. A key result is the strong correlation (sigma ~ 0.2 dex) between (u-i)o and [Fe/H] for bulge red clump giants. We utilized this relation to find that interior bulge fields may be well described by simple closed box enrichment models, but fields exterior to b ~ -6 degrees seem to require a secondary metal-poor component. Applying scaled versions of the closed box model to the outer bulge fields is shown to significantly reduce the strengths of any additional metal-poor components when compared to Gaussian mixture models. Additional results include: a confirmation that the u-band splits the sub-giant branch in M 22 as a function of metallicity, the detection of possible extra-tidal stars along the orbits of M 22 and FSR 1758, and additional evidence that NGC 6569 may have a small but discrete He spread, as evidenced by red clump luminosity variations in the reddest bands. We do not confirm previous claims that FSR 1758 is part of a larger extended structure., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS; 26 pages

Don't you just love it? Your employment case is in the discovery stage when the defense suggests an early mediation. No promises, of course, but the defendant thinks it would be a “productive exercise” to see if the parties can find a settlement before the litigation fees and costs get too far out of control.

Over the past several years we have faced the need to develop a number of solutions to address the challenge of archiving large-format scientific imaging data and seamlessly visualizing that data—irrespective of the image format—on a web browser. ImageX is a ground-up rewrite and synthesis of our solutions to this issue, with a goal of reducing the workload required to transition from simply storing vast amounts of scientific imaging data on disk to securely archiving and sharing that data with the world. The components that make up the ImageX service stack include a secure and scalable back-end data service optimized for providing imaging data, a pre-processor to harvest metadata and intelligently scale and store the imaging data, and a flexible and embeddable front-end visualization web application. Our latest version of the software suite called ImageX 3.0 has been designed to meet the needs of a single user running locally on their own personal computer or scaled up to provide support for the image storage and visualization needs of a modern observatory with the intention of providing a ’Push button’ solution to a fully deployed solution. Each ImageX 3.0 component is provided as a Docker container, and can be rapidly and seamlessly deployed to meet demand. In this paper, we describe the ImageX architecture while demonstrating many of its features, including intelligent image scaling with adaptive histograms, load-balancing, and administrative tools. On the user-facing side we demonstrate how the ImageX 3.0 viewer can be embedded into the content of any web application, and explore the astronomy-specific features and plugins we’ve written into it. The ImageX service stack is fully open-sourced, and is built upon widely-supported industry standards (Node.js, Angular, etc.). Apart from being deployed as a standalone service stack, ImageX components are currently in use or expected to be deployed on: (1) the ODI-PPA portal serving astronomical images taken at the WIYN Observatory in near real-time; (2) the web portal serving microscopy images taken at the IU Electron Microscopy Center; (3) the RADY-SCA portal supporting radiology and medical imaging as well as neuroscience researchers at IU.

Background: Group interventions are effective for addressing the transition from cancer treatment to survivorship but are not widely available outside of urban areas. In addition, minimal training is available for group facilitators outside of the mental healthcare discipline. Telehealth as a medium can facilitate conversation and interactive learning and make learning accessible to individuals in areas that lack resources for traditional classroom teaching. Little is known, however, regarding the feasibility and acceptability of a telehealth training program for group leaders. This project aimed to investigate the utility of a telehealth training program for the delivery of a copyrighted, manualized psychosocial group intervention, Cancer Transitions: Moving Beyond Treatment. Materials and Methods: Nine group leaders attended one in-person orientation, four telehealth training classes, and four telehealth supervision sessions, completing self-report measures of content knowledge, quality satisfaction, and self-confidence. Following the completion of their last Cancer Transitions facilitation, group leaders participated in a focus group to provide qualitative feedback regarding their experiences in training for and leading the respective groups in eight urban and rural North Carolina communities. Results: Group leaders rated the training program highly across the domains of content knowledge, quality satisfaction, and self-confidence. Satisfaction with the technology itself was equivocal. Conclusions: Telehealth represents a feasible avenue for training and supporting leaders of psychosocial interventions. In addition, telehealth is particularly well suited to the need for training group leaders in areas outside urban centers or academic communities.

Spatial Frequency Modulated Imaging (SPIFI) with single element detection has previously been demonstrated with a time varying amplitude spatial frequency. This has been shown in a variety of modalities (linear, TPEF, SHG) and also with variations on the base design to provide additional dimensions of information. SPIFI is also capable of providing enhanced resolution images. However, the signal-to-noise is a limiting factor in the quality of the resolution enhancement. We present a microscope design which uses a nematic spatial light modulator to provide a time varying amplitude from an amplitude or phase grating. Twophoton excitation fluorescence images of 10-µm fluorescent polystyrene beads are presented using a phase grating. Additionally, the microscope can provide spatial gratings in polarization which provide an alternative means of imaging in third harmonic generation (THG). THG images are provided using an amplitude and polarization-grating modulation pattern.

This piece is a response to the Conway, Conway, Gornick, and Houck (2014) description of an automated method for assessing integrative complexity. It builds on the authors' 15 years of experience in automating a variety of textual analysis coding schemes including that measuring conceptual complexity and is intended to address some of the issues raised in the process of automating content analysis categories.

We describe the SpArc science gateway for spectral data obtained during the period from 1975 through 1995 at the Kitt Peak National Observatory using the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) in operation at the Mayall 4-m telescope. SpArc is hosted by Indiana University Bloomington and is available for public access. The archive includes nearly 10,000 individual spectra of more than 800 different astronomical sources including stars, nebulae, galaxies, and Solar System objects. We briefly describe the FTS instrument itself, and summarize the conversion of the original interferograms into spectral data and the process for recovering the data into FITS files. The architecture of the archive is discussed, and the process for retrieving data from the archive is introduced. Sample use cases showing typical FTS spectra are presented., Accepted for publication in the PASP

The Astronomy scientific community has embraced Big Data processing challenges, e.g. associated with time-domain astronomy, and come up with a variety of novel and efficient data processing solutions. However, data processing is only a small part of the Big Data challenge. Efficient knowledge discovery and scientific advancement in the Big Data era requires new and equally efficient tools: modern user interfaces for searching, identifying and viewing data online without direct access to the data; tracking of data provenance; searching, plotting and analyzing metadata; interactive visual analysis, especially of (time-dependent) image data; and the ability to execute pipelines on supercomputing and cloud resources with minimal user overhead or expertise even to novice computing users. The Trident project at Indiana University offers a comprehensive web and cloud-based microservice software suite that enables the straight forward deployment of highly customized Scalable Compute Archive (SCA) systems; including extensive visualization and analysis capabilities, with minimal amount of additional coding. Trident seamlessly scales up or down in terms of data volumes and computational needs, and allows feature sets within a web user interface to be quickly adapted to meet individual project requirements. Domain experts only have to provide code or business logic about handling/visualizing their domain's data products and about executing their pipelines and application work flows. Trident's microservices architecture is made up of light-weight services connected by a REST API and/or a message bus; a web interface elements are built using NodeJS, AngularJS, and HighCharts JavaScript libraries among others while backend services are written in NodeJS, PHP/Zend, and Python. The software suite currently consists of (1) a simple work flow execution framework to integrate, deploy, and execute pipelines and applications (2) a progress service to monitor work flows and sub-work flows (3) ImageX, an interactive image visualization service (3) an authentication and authorization service (4) a data service that handles archival, staging and serving of data products, and (5) a notification service that serves statistical collation and reporting needs of various projects. Several other additional components are under development. Trident is an umbrella project, that evolved from the One Degree Imager, Portal, Pipeline, and Archive (ODI-PPA) project which we had initially refactored toward (1) a powerful analysis/visualization portal for Globular Cluster System (GCS) survey data collected by IU researchers, 2) a data search and download portal for the IU Electron Microscopy Center's data (EMC-SCA), 3) a prototype archive for the Ludwig Maximilian University's Wide Field Imager. The new Trident software has been used to deploy (1) a metadata quality control and analytics portal (RADY-SCA) for DICOM formatted medical imaging data produced by the IU Radiology Center, 2) Several prototype work flows for different domains, 3) a snapshot tool within IU's Karst Desktop environment, 4) a limited component-set to serve GIS data within the IU GIS web portal. Trident SCA systems leverage supercomputing and storage resources at Indiana University but can be configured to make use of any cloud/grid resource, from local workstations/servers to (inter)national supercomputing facilities such as XSEDE.

The One Degree Imager - Portal, Pipeline, and Archive (ODI-PPA) has included the Image Explorer interactive image visualization tool since it went operational. Portal users were able to quickly open up several ODI images within any HTML5 capable web browser, adjust the scaling, apply color maps, and perform other basic image visualization steps typically done on a desktop client like DS9. However, the original design of the Image Explorer required lossless PNG tiles to be generated and stored for all raw and reduced ODI images thereby taking up tens of TB of spinning disk space even though a small fraction of those images were being accessed by portal users at any given time. It also caused significant overhead on the portal web application and the Apache webserver used by ODI-PPA. We found it hard to merge in improvements made to a similar deployment in another project's portal. To address these concerns, we re-architected Image Explorer from scratch and came up with ImageX, a set of microservices that are part of the IU Trident project software suite, with rapid interactive visualization capabilities useful for ODI data and beyond. We generate a full resolution JPEG image for each raw and reduced ODI FITS image before producing a JPG tileset, one that can be rendered using the ImageX frontend code at various locations as appropriate within a web portal (for example: on tabular image listings, views allowing quick perusal of a set of thumbnails or other image sifting activities). The new design has decreased spinning disk requirements, uses AngularJS for the client side Model/View code (instead of depending on backend PHP Model/View/Controller code previously used), OpenSeaDragon to render the tile images, and uses nginx and a lightweight NodeJS application to serve tile images thereby significantly decreasing the Time To First Byte latency by a few orders of magnitude. We plan to extend ImageX for non-FITS images including electron microscopy and radiology scan images, and its featureset to include basic functions like image overlay and colormaps. Users needing more advanced visualization and analysis capabilities could use a desktop tool like DS9+IRAF on another IU Trident project called StarDock, without having to download Gigabytes of FITS image data.

Surging data volumes make it increasingly unfeasible to transfer astronomical datasets to the local systems of individual scientists. Centralized pipelines offer some relief, but lack flexibility to fulfill the needs of all users. We have developed a system that leverages the Docker container application virtualization software. Along with a suite of commonly used astronomy applications, users can configure a container with their own custom software and analysis tools. Our StarDock system will move the users container to the data, and expose the requested dataset, allowing our users to safely and securely process their data without needlessly transferring hundreds of gigabytes.

Superresolved far-field microscopy has emerged as a powerful tool for investigating the structure of objects with resolution well below the diffraction limit of light. Nearly all superresolution imaging techniques reported to date rely on real energy states of fluorescent molecules to circumvent the diffraction limit, preventing superresolved imaging with contrast mechanisms that occur via virtual energy states, including harmonic generation (HG). We report a superresolution technique based on spatial frequency-modulated imaging (SPIFI) that permits superresolved nonlinear microscopy with any contrast mechanism and with single-pixel detection. We show multimodal superresolved images with two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) and second-harmonic generation (SHG) from biological and inorganic media. Multiphoton SPIFI (MP-SPIFI) provides spatial resolution up to 2η below the diffraction limit, where η is the highest power of the nonlinear intensity response. MP-SPIFI can be used to provide enhanced resolution in optically thin media and may provide a solution for superresolved imaging deep in scattering media.

MultiPhoton SPatIal Frequency modulated Imaging (MP-SPIFI) has recently demonstrated the ability to simultaneously obtain super-resolved images in both coherent and incoherent scattering processes — namely, second harmonic generation and two-photon fluorescence, respectively. 1 In our previous analysis, we considered image formation produced by the zero and first diffracted orders from the SPIFI modulator. However, the modulator is a binary amplitude mask, and therefore produces multiple diffracted orders. In this work, we extend our analysis to image formation in the presence of higher diffracted orders. We find that tuning the mask duty cycle offers a measure of control over the shape of super-resolved point spread functions in an MP-SPIFI microscope.

A direct-diode pumped Ti:sapphire femtosecond oscillator is used to perform multiphoton imaging for the first time.

Spatial frequency modulated imaging (SPIFI) is a powerful imaging method that when used in conjunction with multiphoton contrast mechanisms has the potential to improve the spatial and temporal scales that can be explored within a single nonlinear optical microscope platform. Here we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, that it is possible to fabricate inexpensive masks using femtosecond laser micromachining that can be readily deployed within the multiphoton microscope architecture to transform the system from a traditional point-scanning system to SPIFI and gain the inherent advantages that follow.