The human quest to master the anatomy and physiology of living systems started as early as 1600 BC, with documents from the Greeks, Indians, and Romans presenting the earliest systematic studies and advances. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the progress slowed until the Renaissance renewed scientific interest in anatomy and physiology, ushering in an era of spectacular advances. Alongside the discoveries of modern science, innovations in media such as printing, photography and color reproduction, improved the accuracy of communicating science. Techniques for noninvasively viewing the human body, such as magnetic resonance imaging, opened up new ways of exploring and understanding anatomy, physiology, and disease pathogenesis. Advances in three-dimensional (3D)-technologies, including computer graphics and animation are directly linked to many advances in medicine and surgery. Anatomy education has come a long way from papyrus leaf inscriptions to computerized 3D modeling, holographic representation, and virtual reality-based software. The future presents unlimited options for studying and understanding anatomy as Google glasses, bioprinting, virtual reality, and allied technologies transform the world into a classroom. This review summarizes the journey of mankind to master anatomy and physiology.
Bioprinting ; Computer Graphics ; Education ; Eyeglasses ; Glass ; Human Body ; Humans ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging ; Photography ; Physiology ; Reproduction ; Roman World

STUDY DESIGN: Review article. OBJECTIVES: To present the latest knowledge on spine surgery using augmented reality (AR). SUMMARY OF LITERATURE REVIEW: AR is a new technology that simulates interactions with real-world surroundings using computer graphics, and it is a field that has recently been highlighted as part of the fourth industrial revolution. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Review of related literature and introduction of latest research. RESULTS: Spine surgery using AR is currently in its early stages. If industry, academia, and research institutes cooperate and develop, spine surgery using AR is highly likely to develop to the next level. CONCLUSIONS: Spine surgeons should strive to develop relevant technology.
Academies and Institutes ; Computer Graphics ; Spine ; Surgeons

The overall details of causality frames in the objective world remain obscure, which poses difficulty for causality research. Based on the temporality of cause and effect, the objective world is divided into three time zones and two time points, in which the causal relationships of the variables are parsed by using Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Causal DAGs of the world (or causal web) is composed of two parts. One is basic or core to the whole DAGs, formed by the combination of any one variable originating from each time unit mentioned above. Cause effect is affected by the confounding only. The other is an internal DAGs within each time unit representing a parent-child or ancestor-descendant relationship, which exhibits a structure similar to the confounding. This paper summarizes the construction of causality frames for objective world research (causal DAGs), and clarify a structural basis for the control of the confounding in effect estimate.
Causality ; Computer Graphics ; Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic ; Data Interpretation, Statistical ; Epidemiologic Methods ; Humans

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful technique to analyze the transcriptomic heterogeneities at the single cell level. It is an important step for studying cell sub-populations and lineages, with an effective low-dimensional representation and visualization of the original scRNA-Seq data. At the single cell level, the transcriptional fluctuations are much larger than the average of a cell population, and the low amount of RNA transcripts will increase the rate of technical dropout events. Therefore, scRNA-seq data are much noisier than traditional bulk RNA-seq data. In this study, we proposed the deep variational autoencoder for scRNA-seq data (VASC), a deep multi-layer generative model, for the unsupervised dimension reduction and visualization of scRNA-seq data. VASC can explicitly model the dropout events and find the nonlinear hierarchical feature representations of the original data. Tested on over 20 datasets, VASC shows superior performances in most cases and exhibits broader dataset compatibility compared to four state-of-the-art dimension reduction and visualization methods. In addition, VASC provides better representations for very rare cell populations in the 2D visualization. As a case study, VASC successfully re-establishes the cell dynamics in pre-implantation embryos and identifies several candidate marker genes associated with early embryo development. Moreover, VASC also performs well on a 10× Genomics dataset with more cells and higher dropout rate.
Computer Graphics ; Gene Expression Profiling ; methods ; Humans ; Sequence Analysis, RNA ; methods ; Single-Cell Analysis

Interactions between chromatin segments play a large role in functional genomic assays and developments in genomic interaction detection methods have shown interacting topological domains within the genome. Among these methods, Hi-C plays a key role. Here, we present the Genome Interaction Tools and Resources (GITAR), a software to perform a comprehensive Hi-C data analysis, including data preprocessing, normalization, and visualization, as well as analysis of topologically-associated domains (TADs). GITAR is composed of two main modules: (1) HiCtool, a Python library to process and visualize Hi-C data, including TAD analysis; and (2) processed data library, a large collection of human and mouse datasets processed using HiCtool. HiCtool leads the user step-by-step through a pipeline, which goes from the raw Hi-C data to the computation, visualization, and optimized storage of intra-chromosomal contact matrices and TAD coordinates. A large collection of standardized processed data allows the users to compare different datasets in a consistent way, while saving time to obtain data for visualization or additional analyses. More importantly, GITAR enables users without any programming or bioinformatic expertise to work with Hi-C data. GITAR is publicly available at http://genomegitar.org as an open-source software.
Animals ; Chromatin ; chemistry ; Computer Graphics ; Genome ; Genomics ; methods ; Humans ; Mice ; Software

Ancestry composition of populations and individuals has been extensively investigated in recent years due to advances in the genotyping and sequencing technologies. As the number of populations and individuals used for ancestry inference increases remarkably, say more than 100 populations or 1000 individuals, it is usually challenging to present the ancestry composition in a traditional way using a rectangular graph. To address this issue, we developed a program, AncestryPainter, which can illustrate the ancestry composition of populations and individuals with a rounded and nice-looking graph to save space. Individuals are depicted as length-fixed bars partitioned into colored segments representing different ancestries, and the population of interest can be highlighted as a pie chart in the center of the circle plot. In addition, AncestryPainter can also be applied to display personal ancestry in a way similar to that for displaying population ancestry. AncestryPainter is publicly available at http://www.picb.ac.cn/PGG/resource.php.
Computer Graphics ; Genetics, Population ; Humans ; Software

BACKGROUND: Laser therapy is generally postponed until scar maturation. We speculated that the use of laser therapy at the beginning of the wound healing process might minimize discomfort and problems at an early stage. METHODS: From January 2013 to May 2014, we conducted a study of 50 patients who underwent primary closure or scar revision procedures due to facial scarring. Within 1 to 2 weeks after the removal of all stitches, we performed laser treatments with a 532-nm neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) laser. To assess the improvement of the scars, we evaluated the scars using the Vancouver Scar Scale (VSS) and conducted a photo analysis using a computer graphics program. RESULTS: The mean score on the VSS decreased from 5.99 to 1.49 after the laser treatment. The score for each evaluation item decreased, meaning that the scars improved. The differences showed statistical significance. In the photo analysis that was conducted using Adobe Photoshop, the mean brightness of the pixels located within the scar territory increased from 61.54% to 69.42% after laser treatment, and the mean chroma decreased from 50.65% to 43.12%. These changes were statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: We used a 532-nm Nd:YAG laser at an early stage of scar formation and confirmed improvements in the redness, hyperpigmentation, and hypertrophy of the scars shortly after treatment.
Cicatrix* ; Computer Graphics ; Humans ; Hyperpigmentation ; Hypertrophy ; Laser Therapy ; Wound Healing ; Yttrium

BACKGROUND: Laser therapy is generally postponed until scar maturation. We speculated that the use of laser therapy at the beginning of the wound healing process might minimize discomfort and problems at an early stage. METHODS: From January 2013 to May 2014, we conducted a study of 50 patients who underwent primary closure or scar revision procedures due to facial scarring. Within 1 to 2 weeks after the removal of all stitches, we performed laser treatments with a 532-nm neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) laser. To assess the improvement of the scars, we evaluated the scars using the Vancouver Scar Scale (VSS) and conducted a photo analysis using a computer graphics program. RESULTS: The mean score on the VSS decreased from 5.99 to 1.49 after the laser treatment. The score for each evaluation item decreased, meaning that the scars improved. The differences showed statistical significance. In the photo analysis that was conducted using Adobe Photoshop, the mean brightness of the pixels located within the scar territory increased from 61.54% to 69.42% after laser treatment, and the mean chroma decreased from 50.65% to 43.12%. These changes were statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: We used a 532-nm Nd:YAG laser at an early stage of scar formation and confirmed improvements in the redness, hyperpigmentation, and hypertrophy of the scars shortly after treatment.
Cicatrix* ; Computer Graphics ; Humans ; Hyperpigmentation ; Hypertrophy ; Laser Therapy ; Wound Healing ; Yttrium

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to review and visualize the medical informatics field over the previous 12 months according to the frequencies of keywords and topics in papers published in the top four journals in the field and in Healthcare Informatics Research (HIR), an official journal of the Korean Society of Medical Informatics. METHODS: A six-person team conducted an extensive review of the literature on clinical and consumer informatics. The literature was searched using keywords employed in the American Medical Informatics Association year-in-review process and organized into 14 topics used in that process. Data were analyzed using word clouds, social network analysis, and association rules. RESULTS: The literature search yielded 370 references and 1,123 unique keywords. ‘Electronic Health Record’ (EHR) (78.6%) was the most frequently appearing keyword in the articles published in the five studied journals, followed by ‘telemedicine’ (2.1%). EHR (37.6%) was also the most frequently studied topic area, followed by clinical informatics (12.0%). However, ‘telemedicine’ (17.0%) was the most frequently appearing keyword in articles published in HIR, followed by ‘telecommunications’ (4.5%). Telemedicine (47.1%) was the most frequently studied topic area, followed by EHR (14.7%). CONCLUSIONS: The study findings reflect the Korean government's efforts to introduce telemedicine into the Korean healthcare system and reactions to this from the stakeholders associated with telemedicine.
Computer Graphics ; Data Mining ; Delivery of Health Care ; Informatics* ; Medical Informatics ; Telemedicine

No abstract available.
*Computer Graphics ; *Editorial Policies ; Marketing/*methods ; *Periodicals as Topic ; *Publishing