A preliminary study of the correlation between acupuncture points (acupoints) for the treatment of eye disorders suggested by ancient Oriental literature and the corresponding brain localization for vision described by Western medicine was performed by using functional MRI (fMRI). The vision-related acupoint (VA1) is located in the lateral aspect of the foot, and when acupuncture stimulation is performed there, activation of occipital lobes is seen by fMRI. Stimulation of the eye by directly using light results in similar activation in the occipital lobes by fMRI. The experiment was conducted by using conventional checkerboard 8-Hz light-flash stimulation of the eye and observation of the time-course data. This was followed by stimulation of the VA1 by using the same time-course paradigm as visual light stimulation. Results obtained with 12 volunteers yielded very clean data and very close correlations between visual and acupuncture stimulation. We have also stimulated nonacupoints 2 to 5 cm away from the vision-related acupoints on the foot as a control, and activation in the occipital lobes was not observed. The results obtained demonstrate the correlation between activation of specific areas of brain cortices and corresponding acupoint stimulation predicted by ancient acupuncture literature.

With the proliferation of digital media such as digital images, digital audio, and digital video, robust digital watermarking and data hiding techniques are needed for copyright protection, copy control, annotation, and authentication. While many techniques have been proposed for digital color and grayscale images, not all of them can be directly applied to binary text images. The difficulty lies in the fact that changing pixel values in a binary document could introduce irregularities that are very visually noticeable. We propose a new method for data hiding in binary text documents by embedding data in the 8-connected boundary of a character. We have identified a fixed set of pairs of five-pixel long boundary patterns for embedding data. One of the patterns in a pair requires deletion of the center foreground pixel, whereas the other requires the addition of a foreground pixel. A unique property of the proposed method is that the two patterns in each pair are dual of each other --changing the pixel value of one pattern at the center position would result in the other. This property allows easy detection of the embedded data without referring to the original document, and without using any special enforcing techniques for detecting embedded data.

Based on our fMRI study, it appears that understanding the effects of acupuncture within a neuroscience-based framework is vital. Further, we have proposed the broad sense-HPA axis hypothesis which incorporates the experimental results.