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Surface rendering of MRI brain scans may lead to identification of the participant through facial characteristics. In this study, we evaluate three methods that overwrite voxels containing privacy‐sensitive information: Face Masking, FreeSurfer defacing, and FSL defacing. We included structural T1‐weighted MRI scans of children, young adults and older adults. For the young adults, test–retest data were included with a 1‐week interval. The effects of the de‐identification methods were quantified using different statistics to capture random variation and systematic noise in measures obtained through the FreeSurfer processing pipeline. Face Masking and FSL defacing impacted brain voxels in some scans especially in younger participants. FreeSurfer defacing left brain tissue intact in all cases. FSL defacing and FreeSurfer defacing preserved identifiable characteristics around the eyes or mouth in some scans. For all de‐identification methods regional brain measures of subcortical volume, cortical volume, cortical surface area, and cortical thickness were on average highly replicable when derived from original versus de‐identified scans with average regional correlations >.90 for children, young adults, and older adults. Small systematic biases were found that incidentally resulted in significantly different brain measures after de‐identification, depending on the studied subsample, de‐identification method, and brain metric. In young adults, test–retest intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were comparable for original scans and de‐identified scans with average regional ICCs >.90 for (sub)cortical volume and cortical surface area and ICCs >.80 for cortical thickness. We conclude that apparent visual differences between de‐identification methods minimally impact reliability of brain measures, although small systematic biases can occur., De‐identification methods remove or blur facial characteristics on anatomical MRI scans, but also have a small effect on FreeSurfer brain measures. Furthermore, some methods are too invasive in younger participants or do not always succeed to remove all facial characteristics.

Background and Hypothesis An existing model suggests that some brain features of relatives of people affected by psychosis can be distinguished from both the probands and a control group. Such findings can be interpreted as representing a compensating mechanism. Study Design We studied white matter features using diffusion tensor imaging in a cohort of 82 people affected by psychosis, 122 of their first-degree relatives, and 89 control subjects that were scanned between two to three times with an interval of approximately 3 years between consecutive scans. We measured both fractional anisotropy and other standard diffusivity measures such as axial diffusivity. Additionally, we calculated standard connectivity measures such as path length based on probabilistic or deterministic tractography. Finally, by averaging the values of the different measures over the two or three consecutive scans, we studied epoch-averagely the difference between these three groups. Study Results For several tracts and several connectivity measures, the relatives showed distinct features from both the probands and the control groups. In those cases, the relatives did not necessarily score between the probands and the control group. An aggregate analysis in the form of a group-dependent score for the different modes of the analysis (e.g., for fractional anisotropy) supported this observation. Conclusions We interpret these results as evidence supporting a compensation mechanism in the brain of relatives that may be related to resilience that some of them exhibit in the face of the genetic risk they have for being affected by psychosis.

Normal brain-aging occurs at all structural levels. Excessive pathophysiological changes in the brain, beyond the normal one, are implicated in the etiology of brain disorders such as severe forms of the schizophrenia spectrum and dementia. To account for brain-aging in health and disease, it is critical to study the age-dependent trajectories of brain biomarkers at various levels and among different age groups.The intracranial volume (ICV) is a key biological marker, and changes in the ICV during the lifespan can teach us about the biology of development, aging, and gene X environment interactions. However, whether ICV changes with age in adulthood is not resolved.Applying a semi-automatic in-house-built algorithm for ICV extraction on T1w MR brain scans in the Dutch longitudinal cohort (GROUP), we measured ICV changes. Individuals between the ages of 16 and 55 years were scanned up to three consecutive times with 3.32±0.32 years between consecutive scans (N=482, 359, 302). Using the extracted ICVs, we calculated ICV longitudinal aging-trajectories based on three analysis methods; direct calculation of ICV differences between the first and the last scan, fitting all ICV measurements of individuals to a straight line and applying a global linear mixed model fitting. We report statistically significant increases in the ICV in adulthood until the fourth decade of life (average change +0.03%/y, or about 0.5 ml/y, at age 20), and decreases in the ICV afterward (−0.09%/y, or about −1.2 ml/y, at age 55). To account for previous cross-sectional reports of ICV changes, we analyzed the same data using a cross-sectional approach. Our cross-sectional analysis detected ICV changes consistent with the previously reported cross-sectional effect. However, the reported amount of cross-sectional changes within this age range was significantly larger than the longitudinal changes. We attribute the cross-sectional results to a generational effect.In conclusion, the human intracranial volume does not stay constant during adulthood but instead shows a small increase during young adulthood and a decrease thereafter from the fourth decade of life. The age-related changes in the longitudinal setup are smaller than those reported using cross-sectional approaches and unlikely to affect structural brain imaging studies correcting for intracranial volume considerably. As to the possible mechanisms involved, this awaits further study, although thickening of the meninges and skull bones have been proposed, as well as a smaller amount of brain fluids addition above the overall loss of brain tissue.

Thanks to recent improvements in biological engineering, the idea of building a synthetic minimal cell that is able to replicate itself using a minimal amount of components has recently emerged as an ambitious goal that may be feasible to achieve in the long term. Following a bottom-up approach, two essential elements are required to provide the fundamental functionality of cellular division: a lipid membrane for confinement and a protein machinery to carry out fission. We have developed a technique to produce cell-size liposomes by means of a microfluidic device, which provides an innovative way to obtain monodisperse membrane confinements with a fine control over the concentrations of the solutions inside and outside the membrane (see the contribution by S. Deshpande in this conference). To these liposomes, we administer a minimal form of the divisome machinery of E. coli, viz., the proteins that constitute the Z-ring, a highly dynamic structure responsible for the membrane's constriction and fission. A central element of the Z-ring is FtsZ, a protein that, under GTP hydrolysis, polymerizes into filament structures that have been suggested to provide the force to constrict the membrane. Using our microfluidics and fluorescence microscopy, we temporally resolve the FtsZ filaments formation and their interaction with the membrane anchor proteins FtsA and ZipA, studying the entity of the liposome deformation to optimize the crowding conditions required for the divisome machinery to better perform its constrictive action on the membrane.

Liposomes are versatile supramolecular assemblies that are widely used in basic as well as applied sciences. Importantly, they mimic the semi-permeable lipid-bilayer boundary of living cells, and thus lie at the very heart of creating synthetic cells. Using liposomes as the basic architectural element and a controlled microfluidic environment, we wish to establish a continuous growth-division cycle of liposomes.We have developed a new and robust microfluidic technique to form unilamellar, cell-sized (5-20 μm), and monodisperse liposomes with an excellent encapsulation efficiency. Named octanol-assisted liposome assembly (OLA), our method involves a bubble-blowing process where an inner aqueous phase and a biocompatible 1-octanol phase containing lipids are simultaneously focused and pinched-off by an outer aqueous phase to form a double-emulsion droplet. This double-emulsion droplet quickly develops into an intermediate complex of a liposome connected to a 1-octanol pocket, and owing to interfacial energy minimization, the pocket spontaneously separates within a few minutes, leaving behind a fully functional liposome. We show the unilamellarity of the OLA-based liposomes by inserting functional α-hemolysin pores in the membranes. OLA is robust to physiological salt concentrations and variations in the bilayer composition, rendering it a very versatile high-throughput technique. It also circumvents the common problems such as remnants of unwanted organic solvents in the lipid bilayer and the time-consuming solvent-extraction associated with existing methods.In order to gain further control and increase the stability of the liposomes, we incorporate pneumatic valves, decoupling the production phase from the manipulation phase, and use dielectrophoresis to separate the liposomes from 1-octanol droplets. Future plans are aimed at exploring the division of liposomes using a combination of physical and biological approaches. Establishing on-chip growth-division cycle of liposomes would present a breakthrough towards synthetic cells.

Passage of polymers through pores narrower than the hydrodynamic diameter is impeded by an entropic penalty for their confinement. This might be balanced by an attractive interaction with the pore ...

This paper studies the problem of sequence-to-sequence alignment, namely, establishing correspondences in time and in space between two different video sequences of the same dynamic scene. The sequences are recorded by uncalibrated video cameras which are either stationary or jointly moving, with fixed (but unknown) internal parameters and relative intercamera external parameters. Temporal variations between image frames (such as moving objects or changes in scene illumination) are powerful cues for alignment, which cannot be exploited by standard image-to-image alignment techniques. We show that, by folding spatial and temporal cues into a single alignment framework, situations which are inherently ambiguous for traditional image-to-image alignment methods, are often uniquely resolved by sequence-to-sequence alignment. Furthermore, the ability to align and integrate information across multiple video sequences both in time and in space gives rise to new video applications that are not possible when only image-to-image alignment is used.

This paper shows how two image sequences that have no spatial overlap between their fields of view can be aligned both in time and in space. Such alignment is possible when the two cameras are attached closely together and are moved jointly in space. The common motion induces “similar” changes over time within the two sequences. This correlated temporal behavior, is used to recover the spatial and temporal transformations between the two sequences. The requirement of “consistent appearance” in standard image alignment techniques is therefore replaced by “consistent temporal behavior”, which is often easier to satisfy. This approach to alignment can be used not only for aligning non-overlapping sequences, but also for handling other cases that are inherently difficult for standard image alignment techniques. We demonstrate applications of this approach to three real-world problems: (i) alignment of non-overlapping sequences for generating wide-screen movies, (ii) alignment of images (sequences) obtained at significantly different zooms, for surveillance applications, and, (iii) multi-sensor image alignment for multi-sensor fusion.

Structural analysis, supported by biochemical, mutagenesis and computational evidence, indicates that the peptidyltransferase centre of the contemporary ribosome is a universal symmetrical pocket composed solely of rRNA. This pocket seems to be a relic of the proto-ribosome, an ancient ribozyme, which was a dimeric RNA assembly formed from self-folded RNA chains of identical, similar or different sequences. This could have occurred spontaneously by gene duplication or gene fusion. This pocket-like entity was capable of autonomously catalysing various reactions, including peptide bond formation and non-coded or semi-coded amino acid polymerization. Efforts toward the structural definition of the early entity capable of genetic decoding involve the crystallization of the small ribosomal subunit of a bacterial organism harbouring a single functional rRNA operon.

We propose a principled approach to summarization of visual data (images or video) based on optimization of a well-defined similarity measure. The problem we consider is re-targeting (or summarization) of image/video data into smaller sizes. A good ldquovisual summaryrdquo should satisfy two properties: (1) it should contain as much as possible visual information from the input data; (2) it should introduce as few as possible new visual artifacts that were not in the input data (i.e., preserve visual coherence). We propose a bi-directional similarity measure which quantitatively captures these two requirements: Two signals S and T are considered visually similar if all patches of S (at multiple scales) are contained in T, and vice versa. The problem of summarization/re-targeting is posed as an optimization problem of this bi-directional similarity measure. We show summarization results for image and video data. We further show that the same approach can be used to address a variety of other problems, including automatic cropping, completion and synthesis of visual data, image collage, object removal, photo reshuffling and more.

In the near future, the majority of personal computers are expected to have several processing units. This is referred to as Core Multiprocessing (CMP). Furthermore, each of the computation units will be capable of running multiple hardware threads. To benefit from the additional processing power, application developers should multithread their software. This paper studies the scalability (expected speedup factor) of multimedia applications and provides guidelines for proper utilization of these new multi-core platforms. In particular, we discuss the decomposition method, load balancing, synchronization primitives, interaction with the operating system and hardware issues such as cache hierarchy and memory bandwidth. Our results are based on analysis of several state-of-the-art applications, including H.264 video encoding, panoramic image stitching and dense optical-flow estimation. We demonstrate how to multithread them properly, and report scalability results on several next-generation multi-core platforms.

Segmenting an image into semantically meaningful parts is a fundamental and challenging task in computer vision. Automatic methods are able to segment an image into coherent regions, but such regions generally do not correspond to complete meaningful parts. In this paper, we show that even a single training example can greatly facilitate the induction of a semantically meaningful segmentation on novel images within the same domain: images depicting the same, or similar, objects in a similar setting. Our approach constructs a non-parametric representation of the example segmentation by selecting patch-based representatives. This allows us to represent complex semantic regions containing a large variety of colors and textures. Given an input image, we first partition it into small homogeneous fragments, and the possible labelings of each fragment are assessed using a robust voting procedure. Graph-cuts optimization is then used to label each fragment in a globally optimal manner.

Illustrating motion in still imagery for the purpose of summary, abstraction and motion description is important for a diverse spectrum of fields, ranging from arts to sciences. In this paper, we introduce a method that produces an action synopsis for presenting motion in still images. The method carefully selects key poses based on an analysis of a skeletal animation sequence, to facilitate expressing complex motions in a single image or a small number of concise views. Our approach is to embed the high-dimensional motion curve in a low-dimensional Euclidean space, where the main characteristics of the skeletal action are kept. The lower complexity of the embedded motion curve allows a simple iterative method which analyzes the curve and locates significant points, associated with the key poses of the original motion. We present methods for illustrating the selected poses in an image as a means to convey the action. We applied our methods to a variety of motions of human actions given either as 3D animation sequences or as video clips, and generated images that depict their synopsis.

We studied local budding and tubulation induced in highly oblate lipid vesicles by the anchoring of either polymers having a hydrophilic backbone and grafted hydrophobic anchor groups, or by oleoyl-coenzyme A, an amphiphilic molecule important in lipid metabolism. The dynamics of bud formation, shrinkage, and readsorption is consistent with an induced spontaneous curvature coupled with local amphiphile diffusion on the membrane. We report a novel metastable state prior to bud readsorption.

This paper shows how two image sequences that have no spatial overlap between their fields of view can be aligned both in time and in space. Such alignment is possible when the two cameras are attached closely together and are moved jointly in space. The common motion induces "similar" changes over time within the two sequences. This correlated temporal behavior is used to recover the spatial and temporal transformations between the two sequences. The requirement of "coherent appearance" in standard image alignment techniques is therefore replaced by "coherent temporal behavior", which is often easier to satisfy. This approach to alignment can be used not only for aligning nan-overlapping sequences, but also for handling other cases that are inherently difficult for standard image alignment techniques. We demonstrate applications of this approach to three real-world problems: (i) alignment of non-overlapping sequences for generating wide-screen movies, (ii) alignment of images (sequences) obtained at significantly different zooms, for surveillance applications, and (iii) multi-sensor image alignment for multi-sensor fusion.

The paper presents an approach for establishing correspondences in time and in space between two different video sequences of the same dynamic scene, recorded by stationary uncalibrated video cameras. The method simultaneously estimates both spatial alignment as well as temporal synchronization (temporal alignment) between the two sequences, using all available spatio-temporal information. Temporal variations between image frames (such as moving objects or changes in scene illumination) are powerful cues for alignment, which cannot be exploited by standard image-to-image alignment techniques. We show that by folding spatial and temporal cues into a single alignment framework, situations which are inherently ambiguous for traditional image-to-image alignment methods, are often uniquely resolved by sequence-to-sequence alignment. We also present a "direct" method for sequence-to-sequence alignment. The algorithm simultaneously estimates spatial and temporal alignment parameters directly from measurable sequence quantities, without requiring prior estimation of point correspondences, frame correspondences, or moving object detection. Results are shown on real image sequences taken by multiple video cameras.

We propose a method for constructing a video sequence of high space-time resolution by combining information from multiple low-resolution video sequences of the same dynamic scene. Super-resolution is performed simultaneously in time and in space. By "temporal super-resolution" we mean recovering rapid dynamic events that occur faster than regular frame-rate. Such dynamic events are not visible (or else observed incorrectly) in any of the input sequences, even if these are played in "slow-motion".The spatial and temporal dimensions are very different in nature, yet are inter-related. This leads to interesting visual tradeoffs in time and space, and to new video applications. These include: (i) treatment of spatial artifacts (e.g., motion-blur) by increasing the temporal resolution, and (ii) combination of input sequences of different space-time resolutions (e.g., NTSC, PAL, and even high quality still images) to generate a high quality video sequence.