MetaAcuPoint: MetaHuman-Generated Synthetic Data for Hand Acupoint Localization

The modern education institutes play an important role in fostering professional talents, reproducing knowledge and studies, and forming the identities of certain academic fields and vocational communities. It is a matter of common knowledge that the absence of an official Korean medicine medical school during the Japanese colonial era was a severely disadvantageous factor in the aspects of academic progress, fostering follow-up personnel, and establishment of social capability. Therefore, the then Korean medicine circle put emphasis on inadequate official education institutes as the main factor behind oppression. Furthermore, as the measure to promote the continuance of Korean medicine, the circle regarded establishing civilian Korean medicine training schools as their long-cherished wish and strived to accomplish the mission even after liberation. This study looked into how the Korean medicine circle during the Japanese colonial era utilized civilian training schools to conduct the Korean medicine education conforming to modern medical school and examined how the operation of these training schools influenced the changes in the traditional Korean medicine. After the introduction of the Western medical science, the Korean medicine circle aimed to improve the quality of Korean medicine doctors by establishing modern Korean medicine medical schools. However, after the annexation of Korea and Japan, official Korean medicine medical schools were not established since policies were organized centered on the Western medical science. In this light, the Korean medicine circle strived to nurture the younger generation of Korean medicine by establishing and operating the civilian Korean medicine training schools after the annexation between Korea and Japan. The schools were limited in terms of scale and status but possessed the forms conforming to the modern medical schools in terms of education system. In other words, the civilian training schools not only adhered to the standard education of Korean medicine but also aimed to lay their foundation in the education system of the Western medical science by forming the separated curriculum including basic medical science, diagnosis, clinic, drug, and the practice of acupuncture and moxibustion. Furthermore, having contained the basic subjects of the Western medical science - physiology, anatomy, pathology, etc. - in the compulsory subjects shows perceiving the intellectual and systematic hegemony of the Western medical science and satisfying the demand of the colonial power. Such an education system was succeeded and solidified through the training sessions and the training schools operated by the local colonial governments after the 1930s. Korean medicine became different from the traditional Korean medicine through the establishment and the operation of such training schools.

Manual annotation of anatomical landmarks, such as acupuncture points or acupoints, is labor-intensive, prone to variability, and limited in clinical datasets. To overcome these constraints, this study introduces the MetaAcuPoint depth dataset (MAP-d dataset), a novel high-fidelity synthetic RGB-D dataset generated using Unreal Engine 5.4 and Epic Games’ MetaHuman avatars. The dataset provides pixel-aligned RGB-D image pairs with anatomically consistent annotations for five clinically relevant acupoints: LI4, TE3, TE5, LI10, and LI11. Reusable skeletal sockets ensure annotation reproducibility across diverse hand morphologies. Domain randomization in pose, skin tone, and skeletal structure enhances the dataset’s demographic and anatomical variability. A lightweight convolutional neural network benchmarked the dataset using RGB-only and RGB-D inputs. While absolute localization accuracy remains modest due to the model’s simplicity, depth augmentation consistently improved performance, yielding a 22.9% reduction in mean distance error and a 57.6% increase in PCK@10. These results confirm the effectiveness of the dataset design. MAP-d provides a scalable resource for developing acupoint localization models, with future potential in clinical training, augmented reality, and real-world deployment.

Electric Vehicles (EVs) have been encouraged to penetrate deeper in the vehicle market for the green transportation system. One of the key issues to promote EV industry is to deploy Battery Swapping Stations (BSSs) that can satisfy the electricity demand of EV users. Since large scale data of vehicles such as GPS locations and electricity requests can be collected, the data-driven approach can be a cost-effective and useful method to select the locations of BSSs. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework to solve the BSS location selection problem based on a large scale of GPS data of taxies in metropolitan area. The proposed solution consists of three main steps: Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based map matching and trajectory extraction, electricity consumption rate model based battery swapping demand estimation and clustering strategy based BSS location determination. Compared to the state-of-art deployment baseline, our proposed scheme is more easily to implement in reality and the mean distance error between the location that battery swapping demand is generated and the nearest BSS is reduced by 52.5% and 62.7%, which will definitely reduce the range anxiety of EV users and help improve the will of using EVs.

As the principal part of acupuncture therapy, acupuncture operators play the key role in clinical effect. There are the inevitably differences in the characteristics among different operators when delivering acupuncture, which may bring a potential impact on the therapeutic effect of acupuncture. However, this impact has not been drawn enough attention in acupuncture research, and the relevant evidences are still contradictory and partially viewed. If ignored, the quality of the relevant outcomes in research is reduced undoubtedly. In order to ensure these problems being realized by more investigators, perfect the clinical design of acupuncture research and improve the quality of acupuncture operation and research, we put forward the theory of the effects of acupuncture operator, analyzed the limitations of current researches in the aspect of the consideration by acupuncture operators and holistic cognition, and provided the corresponding solutions. It is significant in guiding clinical research and practice of acupuncture in future.

Traditional Indian medicine (TIM) and traditional Korean medicine (TKM): aconstitutional-based concept and comparison

Scientific Evidence for Korean Medicine and Its Integrative Medical Research

At present, there is still some uncertainty in the evaluation of the performance of the Fengyun 4A Lightning Mapping Imager (LMI), which is mainly limited by the detection performance of the reference detection system and the suitability of the evaluation method. In this paper, a one-to-one performance evaluation of the LMI was performed based on total lightning flash data from the lightning Low-Frequency Electric field Detection Array (LFEDA). It was found that there were significant systematic biases in the discharge results detected via LMI, with a median of −0.946 s, −0.0817°, and −0.0245° in time bias, longitude bias, and latitude bias, respectively. The evaluation results after removing the systematic biases indicated that the relative detection efficiency for flashes of LMI was 17.6%, the mean and median time errors were both 0.647 s, and the mean and median distance errors were 6.09 km and 5.02 km, respectively. The relative detection efficiency for groups of LMI was 9.8%, the mean and median time errors were 0.674 s and 0.660 s, and the mean and median distance errors were 7.19 km and 6.54 km, respectively. The detection efficiency of LMI for both flashes and groups at nighttime was significantly higher than its detection efficiency during the daytime. The relative detection efficiency for flashes of LMI at nighttime was 26.5%, while during the daytime it was 14.4%. The relative detection efficiency for groups of LMI at nighttime was 16.2%, while during the daytime it was only 7.4%. The spatial accuracy for both flashes and groups was always better during the daytime than at nighttime.

This research assesses HRNet and ResNet architectures for their precision in localizing hand acupoints on 2D images, which is integral to automated acupuncture therapy. The primary objective was to advance the accuracy of acupoint detection in traditional Korean medicine through the application of these advanced deep-learning models, aiming to improve treatment efficacy. Acupoint localization in traditional Korean medicine is crucial for effective treatment, and the study aims to enhance this process using advanced deep-learning models. The study employs YOLOv3, YOLOF, and YOLOX-s for object detection within a top-down framework, comparing HRNet and ResNet architectures. These models were trained and tested using datasets annotated by technicians and their mean values, with performance evaluated based on Average Precision at two IoU thresholds. HRNet consistently demonstrated lower mean distance errors across various acupoints compared to ResNet, particularly at a 256x256 pixel resolution. Notably, the HRNet-w48 model surpassed human annotators, including medical experts, in localization accuracy. HRNet's superior performance in acupoint localization suggests its potential to improve the precision and efficacy of acupuncture treatments. The study highlights the promising role of machine learning in enhancing traditional medical practices and underscores the importance of accurate acupoint localization in clinical acupuncture.

Context awareness is a key property for enabling context aware services. For a mobile device, the user's location or trajectory is one of the crucial contexts. One common challenge for detecting location or trajectory by mobile devices is to manage the tradeoff between accuracy and power consumption. Typical approaches are (1) controlling the frequency of usage of sensors and (2) sensor fusion technique. The algorithm proposed in this paper takes a different approach to improve the accuracy by merging repeatedly measured coarse and inaccurate location data from cell tower. The experimental result shows that the mean error distance between the detected trajectory and the ground truth is improved from 44m to 10.9m by merging data from 41 days' measurement.

As an ancient empirical medicine, acupuncture has profound theory basis and extensive clinical application. With the popularity of evidence-based medicine (EBM), rigorous challenges have been brought to acupuncture: (1) How to translate the tremendous source of evidence into an optimal treatment schema in clinical practice? (2) How to integrate the theory and methodology of the empirical medicine with that of EBM into a theory and methodology which will benefit the development of acupuncture? The aim of this chapter is to encourage reflection on the combination of the theory and methodology of EBM with the features of acupuncture so as to guide acupuncture clinical practice, health policy, and scientific research.

This paper deals with the design of (TiHfZr)(NiCoCu) high-entropy and high-temperature shape memory alloys (HE-HT-SMAs). It explains the chronology and the progress of this design starting from the experimental work of Georgi Firstov initiated in the 2015s until the advent of data-driven alloy approaches. A state-of-the-art (TiHfZr)(NiCoCu) HE-HT-SMA family is presented and enriched by a database used as input for a data-driven approach. The paper then focuses on the comparison of martensitic transformation temperatures provided by: (i) the experimental work of Firstov et al. started in 2015, (ii) other recent experimental studies and, (iii) those predicted by two numerical approaches. The first approach consists of a linear regression model proposed by Peltier et al., while the second one is proposed and enriched by Thiercelin et al. using a data-driven technique (random forest regression). The results from the data-driven approach yield accurate predictions that align with the experimental data from both the literature and previous studies. Thus demonstrating the importance of physics-informed, inspired techniques to optimize the design of future alloys, in particular HE-HT-SMAs.

If the body is not seen as a combination of cells, DNA, and proteins in East Asian medicine, the logic of treatment will differ from that of biomedicine. Descola’s monumental work on plural ontologies and their connectedness of social practices advocates ethnographic investigations of how the plurality of body-ontologies are overlapped with medical practices of various medical traditions. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork on Korean medicine in South Korea, this study examines the ontological ground of acupuncture practice. It provides a case of an emerging new acupuncture method, Mind Acupuncture, in Korean medicine as an example of ontological anthropology of medicine. This study shows that a new acupuncture practice emerges not by discovering a new entity of the universal biomedical body, but by expanding and materializing the ontological network of East Asian medicine. This study foregrounds the significance of ontology, the undeniable premise of medical practice that is socially and historically situated.

The 4<sup>th</sup> Annual Jaseng Academic conference (August 13, 2023) in Seoul, South Korea, was a pivotal event in the realm of integrative medicine. Cohosted by Jaseng Hospital of Korean Medicine and Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, over 500 professionals including Korean medicine doctors, medical doctors, doctors of osteopathic medicine, acupuncturists, researchers, and students gathered at the conference. The theme, “Perspectives on Integrative Medicine,” marked a departure from previous conference themes and embraced a multidisciplinary approach to healthcare. The event highlighted the importance of holistic patient care and cross-disciplinary collaboration within healthcare. It offered a comprehensive overview of the current state of integrative medicine approaches in manual medicine, evidence-based acupuncture treatment, and acupuncture research. The Annual Jaseng Academic conference continues to serve as a platform for healthcare professionals to exchange ideas and perspectives, and bridges the gap between diverse medical systems to promote improved patient outcome and wellbeing.

IntroductionWith the wide development of acupuncture clinical practice, acupuncture research has been conducted worldwide, of which the most common method is quantitative study. However, research questions around acupuncture cannot always...

The great development of urban built environment and the history of a city have been, historically, faced with such a dilemma at all times: intact protection of its history or urban renewal? Urban acupuncture provides another development strategy, trying to make the continuation of the original texture and the overall development of the city simultaneously. Urban acupuncture has no strict definition and universal standard model. It is a city development strategy with rich connotation and open denotation, and has quite a variety of interpretations and understandings. The idea of Manuel de Sola-Morales provides inspiration for this paper. Based on diverse literature from South Korea, Europe and China, street sculpture is found, from the perspective of culture and environment, to be used as urban catalyst to catalyze the regional development potential and influence urban regeneration. Through the research, we can find that the focus of the research and practice of urban regeneration and urban acupuncture from the perspective of environment is still the transformation of buildings and regions, the upgrading of public infrastructure, the optimization of public space and road traffic; the focus of the research and practice of urban regeneration and urban acupuncture from the perspective of culture is also very important Macro, mainly urban design. Therefore, this study boldly combines the urban acupuncture with the sculpture standing in the street, and advocates that the key acupoints of the street should be selected through sculpture for small-scale intervention or micro implantation. This paper attempts to refine the concepts of Acupuncture of sculpture and micro implantation of sculpture under the framework of urban regeneration. At the same time, it also tries to point out the new direction of urban regeneration. At the same time, it also provides some reference for the practice of urban regeneration.