Auriculotherapy is one of the main forms of treatment in Traditional Chinese Medicine, whose potential as an alternative medicine for both health evaluation and disease treatment has been reported in many cases. However, its efficacy highly relies on the accurate localization of auricular points, which are not easy to be remembered due to their complexity. To explore an efficient way of locating auricular points, this study proposed a deep learning-based method of automatically locating auricular points from auricular images. A self-collected dataset named EID was created for TCM auriculotherapy research, with 91 auriculotherapy-related landmark points manually annotated according to the Chinese national standardization. A deep neural network structure was trained for landmark detection, and a direction normalization module was proposed to compensate for the detection error caused by the difference between the left and right ears. The trained model was validated on dataset EID. An average NME of 0.0514±0.0023 was achieved, which outperformed similar works. In addition, a certain auricular area corresponding to the digestive system was segmented based on the localized landmarks, and the results were tested in real-time video streaming. The proposed work for both auricular landmark and area identification can be widely used in auriculotherapy education and applications.

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An accurate estimated date of delivery (EDD) helps pregnant women make adequate preparations before delivery and avoid the panic of parturition. EDD is normally derived from some formulates or estimated by doctors based on last menstruation period and ultrasound examinations. This study attempted to combine antenatal examinations and electronic medical records to develop a hybrid model based on Gradient Boosting Decision Tree and Gated Recurrent Unit (GBDT-GRU). Besides exploring the features that affect the EDD, GBDT-GRU model obtained the results by dynamic prediction of different stages. The mean square error (MSE) and coefficient of determination (R2) were used to compare the performance among the different prediction methods. In addition, we evaluated predictive performances of different prediction models by comparing the proportion of pregnant women under the error of different days. Experimental results showed that the performance indexes of hybrid GBDT-GRU model outperformed other prediction methods because it focuses on analyzing the time-series predictors of pregnancy. The results of this study are helpful for the development of guidelines for clinical delivery treatments, as it can assist clinicians in making correct decisions during obstetric examinations.

An accurate estimated date of delivery (EDD) helps pregnant women make adequate preparations before delivery and avoid the panic of parturition. EDD is normally derived from some formulates or estimated by doctors based on last menstruation period and ultrasound examinations. The main aim of this study was to develop a hybrid model to improve the accuracy of EDD and promote the health and safety of pregnant women and fetuses. This study attempted to combine antenatal examinations and electronic medical records to develop a hybrid model based on Gradient Boosting Decision Tree and Gated Recurrent Unit (GBDT-GRU). Besides exploring the features that affect the EDD, GBDT-GRU model obtained the results by dynamic prediction of different stages. The mean square error (MSE) and coefficient of determination (R2) were used to compare the performance among the different prediction methods. In addition, we evaluated predictive performances of different prediction models by comparing the proportion of pregnant women under the error of different days. The clinical data were collected with 33,222 pregnancy examination records from 5537 Chinese pregnant women who have given birth. Experimental results showed that the hybrid GBDT-GRU model outperformed other prediction methods with coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.84, mean square error (MSE) of 41.73. We also found that the GBDT-GRU model had a smaller deviation by comparing the bias between the actual delivery date and the EDD under different methods. In comparison with other prediction methods, the GBDT-GRU model provided better performance results. The results of this study are helpful for the development of guidelines for clinical delivery treatments, as it can assist clinicians in making correct decisions during obstetric examinations.

How to intuitively illustrate phenomena while retaining good operation experiences is a key issue in experimental learning. Virtual experiments with desktop environments, handheld devices, or headsets can show invisible phenomena for students. However, they are either visuo-tactile inconsistent in space or with heavy physical burdens, causing bad experiences. A spatial augmented reality (SAR) based circuit experiment is developed. It allows students to interact with 3D (three dimensional) printed tangible objects without wearing any devices, having low physical burdens. Objects' poses are tracked using Microsoft Azure Kinect and inertial measurement unit. Virtual phenomena are projected onto the tangible objects and tabletop accordingly. Physical input and virtual output space are completely fused from students' view. It also offers efficient operation manners to students. A questionnaire comparing user experiences between the SAR and conventional experiment reveals that the former has a better learning experience.