This paper reports the results of an investigation into the factors affecting the durability of the microtome blade used for sectioning pathology samples. Experiments were carried out to repeated sectioning of demineralized porcine ribs at a constant cutting thickness using an originally developed sectioning apparatus. Changes in cutting force, damage to the cutting edge and quality of the section due to repeated sectioning were measured, and the effects of microtome blade hardness, cutting edge angle and specimen characteristics on the durability of the microtome blade were investigated.

When red blood cells pass through a blood vessel, the cells are subject to physical stress as they pass through the tube. In addition, since there is a strong correlation between diseases and the deformability of cells, we would like to focus on the behavior of cells as they pass through the tube while under load. Therefore, in this study, we fabricated a micro-channel that corresponds to a capillary and designed a system that reproduces the phenomenon in which cells flow at low speed within the channel. This time, we will discuss the experimental system and problems of micro-channels and low-speed manipulation.

When red blood cells(RBC) pass through blood vessels, they pass through the tubes while undergoing loading. Since there is a high correlation between disease and the deformability of RBCs, we are investigating a method to load multiple RBCs simultaneously using a microfluidic channel with a constriction. In this research, we designed a system in which PDMS valves and microfluidic channels are integrated to manually load RBCs and observe their deformability. In this presentation, we will discuss the experimental system and issues of the microfluidic channel and valve mechanism.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) has been drawing increasing attention from the researchers in recent years. Motor imagery (MI) based BCI is one of the most studied categories of BCIs, which extract features from cortical activities during the imagination of various body movements. With the unique advantages of self-motivated and asynchronous protocol in MI-BCI, by translating brain activities into meaningful control commands over external devices, MI-BCIs are making the concept of mind control a reality. The performance of recent MI-BCI systems are impressive, however, the widely used MI commands are lack of mental connection to the actual movements of the external systems. To solve this issue, a new MI-BCI pipeline that implements intuitive MI commands is proposed in this article, and the performance of the system is evaluated in a 6-class classification tasks in 3D spaces. After considering natural motions in real-life scenarios that are related to directional control, we selected the variation of driving in our study. The results showed a remarkable mitigation of mental workload using the intuitive MI tasks, and the classification accuracy of the proposed system was satisfying. The successful attempt of using intuitive movements for MI-BCI proved the feasibility of the customization of MI task selection for individual research.

Recently, more and more wind instrument players are using accessories for their instruments. Instrumental accessories are custom parts that are attached to the instrument and are said to change the sound. Although many wind instrument players have experienced the benefits of these accessories, there are not many papers that physically demonstrate the sound changes. In this study, an acoustic bridge, one of the accessories, was used to investigate whether there were significant differences in pitch and volume when the acoustic bridge was worn and when it was not worn.