Abstract: Welcome to JeFaPaTo, the Jena Facial Palsy Tool! This powerful tool is designed to assist in various medical and psychological applications by providing accurate facial feature extraction and analysis. It combines the requirements of a medical environment with the possibilities of modern computer vision and machine learning. Our goal is to allow medical professionals to use state-of-the-art technology without needing to write custom algorithms. We provide the libraries and an interface to the commonly used mediapipe library of Google, a powerful tool for facial landmark extraction, and now even offers the distinction into facial movements. Additionally, our software can be extended to include new methods and algorithms. We are interested in human blinking behavior and scrutinize it with high temporal videos using the EAR-Score (Eye-Aspect-Ratio) to detect blinking and eye closure. This feature is used to analyze patients with facial palsy blinking behavior.

Abstract: Einleitung: Der emotionale Gesichtsausdruck (EG) ist essentiell für soziale Interaktionen und die Kommunikation. Dessen Dynamik ist interdisziplinär für die Evaluation von Erkrankungen vielversprechend, die Studienlage jedoch limitiert. Ziel war die Entwicklung eines Paradigmas zur Quantifizierung der Dynamik des EG und deren Mediation durch den Emotional-Contagion (EC)-Effekt. Methode: EGs von 5 Basisemotionen reaktiv auf explizite motorische Zielvorgaben wurden mit einem 3-D-Kamerasystem aufgezeichnet (N = 31) und durch maschinelles Lernen analysiert. Reaktionsbeginn (onset timestamp), maximale Intensität und deren Zeitpunkt (apex value, apex timestamp) wurden analysiert. Zur Exploration von EC wurden verschiedene Stimuli (Abbildungen von EGs und emotionalen Adjektiven) präsentiert: Die Hypothese war, dass die Imitation von EGs EC induzieren, die Prozesse sich mutuell verstärken würden und dies durch einen früheren onset- und apex timestamp sowie höheren apex value repräsentiert würde. Ergebnisse: Die Hypothese wurde für alle Parameter für Freude und Angst und den apex timestamp für überraschung bestätigt, bei dem apex value für Wut widerlegt. Dies deutet an, dass EC potentiell die Dynamik moduliert, dessen Induktion jedoch (sozio)kognitiven Kontrollprozessen unterliegt. Respektive scheinen die Verarbeitung von EGs durch semantisch-konzeptuelle verbale Informationen moduliert und linguistische und emotionale Reize potentiell interagierend prozessiert zu werden. Weitere Analysen zeigten im Widerspruch zu der Universalitätshypothese des EG inter- und intraindividuelle Varianzen der Mimik. Schlussfolgerung: Die Methodik bietet große Chancen in der Diagnostik und Therapie von Fazialisparesen verschiedener ätiologie und der postoperativen Nachsorge von Fazialisrekonstruktionen. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GU-463/12-1)

Abstract: Small cursorial birds display remarkable walking skills and can negotiate complex and unstructured terrains with ease. The neuromechanical control strategies necessary to adapt to these challenging terrains are still not well understood. Here, we analyzed the 2D- and 3D pelvic and leg kinematic strategies employed by the common quail to negotiate visible steps (upwards and downwards) of about 10%, and 50% of their leg length. We used biplanar fluoroscopy to accurately describe joint positions in three dimensions and performed semi-automatic landmark localization using deep learning. Quails negotiated the vertical obstacles without major problems and rapidly regained steady-state locomotion. When coping with step upwards, the quail mostly adapted the trailing limb to permit the leading leg to step on the elevated substrate similarly as it did during level locomotion. When negotiated steps downwards, both legs showed significant adaptations. For those small and moderate step heights that did not induce aerial running, the quail kept the kinematic pattern of the distal joints largely unchanged during uneven locomotion, and most changes occurred in proximal joints. The hip regulated leg length, while the distal joints maintained the spring-damped limb patterns. However, to negotiate the largest visible steps, more dramatic kinematic alterations were observed. There all joints contributed to leg lengthening/shortening in the trailing leg, and both the trailing and leading legs stepped more vertically and less abducted. In addition, locomotion speed was decreased. We hypothesize a shift from a dynamic walking program to more goal-directed motions that might be focused on maximizing safety.

Abstract: One of the main reasons for a half-sided facial paralysis is caused by a dysfunction of the facial nerve. Physicians have to assess such a unilateral facial palsy with the help of standardized grading scales to evaluate the treatment. However, such assessments are usually very subjective and they are prone to variance and inconsistency between physicians regarding their experience. We propose an automatic non-biased method using deep features combined with a linear regression method for facial palsy grading index prediction. With an extension of the free software tool Auto-eFace we annotated images of facial palsy patients and healthy subjects according to a common facial palsy grading scale. In our experiments, we obtained an average grading error of 11%

Abstract: Background: To evaluate the face-specific quality of life after hypoglossal-facial jump nervesuture for patients with long-term facial paralysis. Methods: A single-center retrospective cohort study was performed. 41 adults (46% women; median age: 55 years) received a hypoglossal-facial jump nerve suture. Sunnybrook and eFACE grading was performed before surgery and at a median time of 42 months after surgery. The Facial Clinimetric Evaluation (FaCE) survey and the Facial Disability Index (FDI) were used to quantify face-specific quality of life after surgery. Results: Hypoglossal-facial jump nerve suture was successful in all cases without tongue dysfunction. After surgery, the median FaCE Total score was 60 and the median FDI Total score was 76.3. Most Sunnybrook and eFACE grading subscores improved significantly after In surgery. Younger age was the only consistent independent predictor for better FaCE outcome. Additional upper eyelid weight loading further improved the FaCE Eye comfort subscore. Sunnybrook grading showed a better correlation to FaCE assessment than the eFACE. Neither Sunnybrook nor eFACE grading correlated to the FDI assessment. Conclusion: The hypoglossal-facial jump nerve suture is a good option for nerve transfer to reanimate the facial muscles to improve facial motor function and face-specific quality of life.

Abstract: In motion science, biology and robotics animal movement analyses are used for the detailed understanding of the human bipedal locomotion. For this investigations an immense amount of recorded image data has to be evaluated by biological experts. During this time-consuming evaluation single anatomical landmarks, for example bone ends, have to be located and annotated in each image. In this paper we show a reduction of this effort by automating the annotation with a minimum level of user interaction. Recent approaches, based on Active Appearance Models, are improved by priors based on anatomical knowledge and an online tracking method, requiring only a single labeled frame. In contrast, we propose a one-shot learned tracking-by-detection prior which overcomes the shortcomings of template drifts without increasing the number of training data. We evaluate our approach based on a variety of real-world X-ray locomotion datasets and show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art concepts for the task at hand.

Abstract: The essential task of verifying person identities at airports and national borders is very time-consuming. To accelerate it, optical character recognition for identity documents (IDs) using dictionaries is not appropriate due to the high variability of the text content in IDs, e.g., individual street names or surnames. Additionally, no properties of the used fonts in IDs are known. Therefore, we propose an iterative self-supervised bootstrapping approach using a smart strategy to mine real character data from IDs. In combination with synthetically generated character data, the real data is used to train efficient convolutional neural networks for character classification serving a practical runtime as well as a high accuracy. On a dataset with 74 character classes, we achieve an average class-wise accuracy of 99.4%. In contrast, if we would apply a classifier trained only using synthetic data, the accuracy is reduced to 58.1%. Finally, we show that our whole proposed pipeline outperforms an established open-source framework.

Abstract: 5 patients with facial paralysis received a home-based electrostimulation (ES) with charge-balanced biphasic triangular impulses 3x5min twice a day. Before the first ES, and every 4 weeks during the ES, all patients underwent regular needle electromyography (EMG), ultrasound and 3D-video measurements. Additionally, stimulation settings, patients? home-stimulation diaries and parameters were recorded. No patient reported relevant adverse events linked to ES. Training with optimized electrode positioning was associated with stable and specific zygomaticus muscle activation, accompanied by a reduction of the necessary minimum pulse duration from 250 to 70ms per phase within 16 weeks. Even before reinnervation, objective 3D-videos, sonography, MRI, and patient-related parameters (FDI, FaCE) improved significantly compared to the pre-stimulation situation. Preliminary results suggest that ES home-based training is beneficial for patients with denervated facial muscles in reducing muscle atrophy, maintaining muscle function and improving facial symmetry. A lack of relevant adverse events shows that such ES is safe. The patients showed excellent compliance with the protocol and rated the stimulation easy and effective.

Abstract: Annotated training data is the enabler for supervised learning. While recording data at large scale is possible in some application domains, collecting reliable annotations is time-consuming, costly, and often a project's bottleneck. Active learning aims at reducing the annotation effort. While this field has been studied extensively for classification tasks, it has received less attention for regression problems although the annotation cost is often even higher. We aim at closing this gap and propose an active learning approach to enable regression applications. To address continuous outputs, we build on Gaussian process models -- an established tool to tackle even non-linear regression problems. For active learning, we extend the expected model output change (EMOC) framework to continuous label spaces and show that the involved marginalizations can be solved in closed-form. This mitigates one of the major drawbacks of the EMOC principle. We empirically analyze our approach in a variety of application scenarios. In summary, we observe that our approach can efficiently guide the annotation process and leads to better models in shorter time and at lower costs.

Abstract: In this paper we present our approach to visualizing a phase transition of barium titanate as contribution to the IEEE Visualization Contest 2012. The visualization is based on data sets from a molecular dynamics simulation of a barium titanate crystal comprising 625.000 atoms. The scenario is a phase transition between paraelectric (cubic) and ferroelectric (tetragonal) phase. The goal of the visualization is to give insight into the evolution of polarization domains during 900 picoseconds of simulation time. The development of polarization domains is captured by vector quantization of dipole moments computed from the lattice cells. Due to strong thermal vibrations of the atoms, the domain evolution is quite noisy. This noise can be reduced through temporal smoothing and a clustering technique that allows for a small number of differently polarized cells within a domain. In this way, domains of reasonable size are identified and a global visualization of the phase transition