With experience we become accustomed to the types of environments that we normally encounter as we navigate in the world. But how does this fundamental knowledge develop in the first place and what brain regions are involved? To examine de novo environmental learning, we created an 'alien' virtual reality world populated with landmarks of which participants had no prior experience. They learned...

The thesis presents an algorithm to detect eye blinking of a person in front of a camera. The main idea is to leverage facial landmark detectors that localize characteristic points on the face image. The eye-aspect-ratio (EAR) was introduced as a simple statistic to measure a degree of eye openness. Two methods to detect eye blinks out of the EAR signal over time were proposed: (1) a supervised...

The role of ultrasound in central neuraxial blockade has been underappreciated, partly because of the relative efficacy of the landmark-guided technique and partly because of the perceived difficulty in imaging through the narrow acoustic windows produced by the bony framework of the spine. However, this also is the basis for the utility of ultrasound: an interlaminar window that permits passag...

A large number of registration techniques rely on manually selected landmark points. A system based on neural principles has been developed to automatically extract landmark types and positional information from magnetic resonance images. A single self-organising map is used to develop the features (landmark types) so that the final landmarks represent statistically significant contour sections...