Academic literature on the topic 'Modularized morphology'

This paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms.

The evolution of morphological diversity has held a long-standing fascination among scientists. In particular, do bodies evolve as single, integrated units or do different body parts evolve semi-independently (modules)? Suckermouth armoured catfishes (Loricariidae) have a morphology that lends nicely to evolutionary modularity and integration studies. In addition to a ventrally facing oral jaw that directly contacts surfaces, the neurocranium and pectoral girdle are fused, which limits movement of the anterior part of the body. Functional constraints suggest it is likely the head and post-cranial body act as separate modules that can evolve independently. If true, one would expect to see a two- or three-module system where the head and post-cranial body are morphologically distinct. To test this hypothesis, we quantified shape using geometric morphometric analysis and assessed the degree of modularity across functionally important regions. We found the armoured catfish body is highly modularized, with varying degrees of integration between each module. Within subfamilies, there are different patterns of evolutionary modularity and integration, suggesting that the various patterns may have driven diversification along a single trajectory in each subfamily. This study suggests the evolution of armoured catfish diversification is complex, with morphological evolution influenced by interactions within and between modules.

AbstractCaenorhabditis elegans has been widely used as a model organism in developmental biology due to its invariant development. In this study, we developed a desktop software CShaperApp to segment fluorescence‐labeled images of cell membranes and analyze cellular morphologies interactively during C. elegans embryogenesis. Based on the previously proposed framework CShaper, CShaperApp empowers biologists to automatically and efficiently extract quantitative cellular morphological data with either an existing deep learning model or a fine‐tuned one adapted to their in‐house dataset. Experimental results show that it takes about 30 min to process a three‐dimensional time‐lapse (4D) dataset, which consists of 150 image stacks at a ∼1.5‐min interval and covers C. elegans embryogenesis from the 4‐cell to 350‐cell stages. The robustness of CShaperApp is also validated with the datasets from different laboratories. Furthermore, modularized implementation increases the flexibility in multi‐task applications and promotes its flexibility for future enhancements. As cell morphology over development has emerged as a focus of interest in developmental biology, CShaperApp is anticipated to pave the way for those studies by accelerating the high‐throughput generation of systems‐level quantitative data collection. The software can be freely downloaded from the website of Github (cao13jf/CShaperApp) and is executable on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.

Purpose This study aims to propose a novel lightweight tendon-driven musculoskeletal arm (LTDM-arm) robot with a flexible series–parallel mixed skeletal joint structure and modularized artificial muscle system (MAMS). The proposed LTDM-arm exhibits human-like flexibility, safety and operational accuracy. In addition, to improve the safety and stability of the LTDM-arm, a control method is proposed to solve local artificial muscle overload accidents. Design/methodology/approach The proposed LTDM-arm comprises seven degrees of freedom skeletons, 15 MAMSs and various sensor systems (joint sensing, muscle tension sensing, visual sensing, etc.). It retains the morphology of a human skeleton (humerus, ulna and radius) and a simplified muscle configuration. This study proposes an input saturation control with full-state constraints to reduce local artificial muscle overload accidents caused by redundant muscle tension calculations. Findings 3D circular trajectory experiments were conducted to verify the stability of the control method and the flexibility of the LTDM-arm. The results showed that the average error of the muscle length was approximately 0.35 mm (0.38%), which indicates that the proposed control scheme can make the output follow the target trajectory while ensuring constraint satisfaction. Originality/value The human arm is capable of performing compliant operations rapidly, flexibly and robustly in unstructured environments. Existing musculoskeletal arm robots lack simulations of the full morphology of the human arm and are insufficient in dexterity. However, the flexibility and safety features of the proposed LTDM-arm were consistent with that of the human arm. Therefore, this study offers a new approach for investigating the advantages of the musculoskeletal system and the concepts of muscle control.

AbstractWe demonstrate that isomorphically mapping gray-level medical image matrices onto energy spaces underlying the framework of fast data density functional transform (fDDFT) can achieve the unsupervised recognition of lesion morphology. By introducing the architecture of geometric deep learning and metrics of graph neural networks, gridized density functionals of the fDDFT establish an unsupervised feature-aware mechanism with global convolutional kernels to extract the most likely lesion boundaries and produce lesion segmentation. An AutoEncoder-assisted module reduces the computational complexity from $$\mathcal{O}\left({N}^{3}\right)$$ O N 3 to $$\mathcal{O}\left(N\mathrm{log}N\right)$$ O N log N , thus efficiently speeding up global convolutional operations. We validate their performance utilizing various open-access datasets and discuss limitations. The inference time of each object in large three-dimensional datasets is 1.76 s on average. The proposed gridized density functionals have activation capability synergized with gradient ascent operations, hence can be modularized and embedded in pipelines of modern deep neural networks. Algorithms of geometric stability and similarity convergence also raise the accuracy of unsupervised recognition and segmentation of lesion images. Their performance achieves the standard requirement for conventional deep neural networks; the median dice score is higher than 0.75. The experiment shows that the synergy of fDDFT and a naïve neural network improves the training and inference time by 58% and 51%, respectively, and the dice score raises to 0.9415. This advantage facilitates fast computational modeling in interdisciplinary applications and clinical investigation.

This paper proposes an incoming Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for segmenting retinal blood vessels automatically from fundus images. Automatic segmentation performs a substantial role in computer-aided diagnosis of retinal diseases; it is of considerable significance as eye diseases as well as some other systemic diseases give rise to perceivable pathologic changes. Retinal blood vessel segmentation is challenging because of the excessive changes in the morphology of the vessels on a noisy background. Previous deep learning-based supervised methods suffer from the insufficient use of low-level features which is advantageous in semantic segmentation tasks. The proposed architecture makes use of both high-level features and low-level features to segment retinal blood vessels. The major contribution of the proposed architecture concentrates on two important factors; the first in its supplying of extremely modularized network architecture of aggregated residual connections which enable us to copy the learned layers from the shallower model and developing additional layers to identity mapping. The second is to improve the utilization of computing resources within the network. This is achieved through a skillfully crafted design that allows for increased depth and width of the network while maintaining the stability of its computational budget. Experimental results show the effectiveness of using aggregated residual connections in segmenting retinal vessels more accurately and clearly. Compared to the best existing methods, the proposed method outperformed other existing methods in different measures, comprised less false positives at fine vessels, and caressed more clear lines with sufficient details like the human annotator.

Lorsqu’elle apparait dans les premiers mois de l’enfant, la surdité moyenne (pertes auditives entre 40dB et 70dB) peut entrainer des difficultés dans l’acquisition du langage, notamment en ce qui concerne la phonologie et la morphologie (Briscoe et al., 2001; Norbury et al., 2001; Tuller & Delage, 2014). Cette thèse étudie les réalisations des morphèmes grammaticaux libres en position prénominale et préverbale chez ces enfants, en étudiant l’influence de facteurs pragmatiques, morphologiques et phonologiques et l’interaction entre différents niveaux de difficulté. La variabilité des résultats des enfants sourds moyens ayant été relevée auparavant (Halliday et al., 2017; Koehlinger et al., 2013; Moeller et al., 2010; Tomblin et al., 2015), une comparaison avec celle des enfants normo-entendants est proposée. Un groupe d’enfants sourds moyens de moins de 6 ans et deux groupes d’enfants normo-entendants, d’âge similaire et plus jeunes, ont été enregistrés deux fois à un an ou un an et demi d’écart, dans différentes tâches : tests de langage, narration et jeu symbolique. Les enfants sourds moyens ont des difficultés en production (vocabulaire, morphosyntaxe et phonologie) plus souvent qu’ils en ont en compréhension. Dans les deux sessions, leur inventaire phonologique est comparable à celui d’enfants normo-entendants plus jeunes, en revanche leurs schémas de transformations diffèrent. Les facteurs pragmatiques comme le statut discursif de l’expression référentielle ou le type de référence ont une influence similaire chez les enfants sourds moyens et les enfants plus jeunes. Cependant, des facteurs morphologiques, comme le genre du nom, n'ont d’influence que dans les productions des enfants sourds moyens. Pour approfondir le lien entre phonologie et morphologie, la production des phonèmes a été analysé selon le type de mot ou selon la catégorie de la forme produite. Il apparait que les formes dont la cible est un pronom ou un déterminant sont plus souvent transformées que celles dont la cible est un lexème ou un autre type de morphème prélexical. À tous les niveaux de l’analyse, la variation interindividuelle diffère de celles des enfants normo-entendants tant dans la dispersion des productions du groupe que dans son évolution
When moderate hearing loss (between 40dB and 70dB of loss) occurs in the first few months of a child's life, it can cause some difficulties in language acquisition, and particularly in phonology and morphology (Briscoe et al., 2001; Norbury et al., 2001; Tuller & Delage, 2014). This thesis investigates the realizations of free grammatical morphemes in prenominal and preverbal positions in those children’s productions, by examining the influence of pragmatic, morphological, and phonological factors as well as the interaction between different levels of difficulty. Variability in the performance of children with moderate hearing loss (Halliday et al., 2017; Koehlinger et al., 2013; Moeller et al., 2010; Tomblin et al., 2015) was addressed through a comparison with the variations in normal-hearing children’s productions. A group of children with moderate hearing loss under 6 years old, and two groups of normal-hearing children, one similar in age and one younger, were recorded one or one and a half years apart in different tasks: language tests, narrative and symbolic play. The children with moderate hearing loss had difficulties in production (vocabulary, morphosyntax, and phonology) more often than they had in comprehension. In both sessions, their phonological inventory was comparable to the younger normal-hearing children one, but their transformation patterns differed. Pragmatic factors such as the discursive status of the referential expression or the type of reference had a similar impact on the average child with moderate hearing loss and the younger children. However, morphological factors such as the noun gender impacted only the production of children with moderate hearing loss. To further investigate the link between phonology and morphology, phonemes production was analysed according to the category of the produced form. It appears that, when pronouns or determiners were targeted, the forms were more often transformed than when the target was another type of prelexical morpheme. At all levels of analysis, the inter-individual variation differed from that of normal hearing children, both in its spread and in evolution