Novel approaches to the treatment of cervical dystonia. The concept of dual navigation control

Сervical dystonia (CD) is the most common type of focal dystonia (up to 50% of all dystonia cases). Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) injections is the treatment choice for CD. However, the effectiveness and tolerability of botulinum therapy in CD depends on the correct choice of target muscles and the accuracy of the BoNT injection. The publication presents literature data and our own clinical experience regarding the use of navigation in BoNT injections in CD.According to the majority of authors, the use of navigation equipment, such as ultrasound (US) and electromyography (EMG), definitely increases the effectiveness of CD treatment and reduces the likelihood of adverse events. For the first time, an algorithm for the diagnosis and treatment of CD is proposed, based on the use of the method of «double- (EMG and US) guided navigation», a variant for determining the comparative activity of muscles by the intensity of the EMG signal and the design of an individual «passport» of the CD. The possibilities of analyzing the US of muscles, drawing up an accurate treatment regimen, targeted administration of BoNT, and using a non-injectable EMG electrode are shown. We present 4 clinical cases demonstrating the advantages of the double- (EMG+US) guided navigation method over the EMG-guided navigation for injection. The proposed algorithm for the diagnosis and treatment of CD makes it possible to increase the effectiveness of treatment, optimize the costs of BoNT and diagnostic equipment (injection EMG needle).

An Underwater Visual Navigation Method Based on Multiple ArUco Markers

Underwater navigation presents crucial issues because of the rapid attenuation of electronic magnetic waves. The conventional underwater navigation methods are achieved by acoustic equipment, such as the ultra-short-baseline localisation systems and Doppler velocity logs, etc. However, they suffer from low fresh rate, low bandwidth, environmental disturbance and high cost. In the paper, a novel underwater visual navigation is investigated based on the multiple ArUco markers. Unlike other underwater navigation approaches based on the artificial markers, the noise model of the pose estimation of a single marker and an optimal algorithm of the multiple markers are developed to increase the precision of the method. The experimental tests are conducted in the towing tank. The results show that the proposed method is able to localise the underwater vehicle accurately.

A multi-AUV cooperative navigation method

Cooperative navigation is one of the key methods for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to obtain accurate positions when performing tasks underwater. In the realistic state-space model of the multi-AUV cooperative navigation system, where the system noise does not satisfy the additivity, it is necessary to augment the dimension of the state variables before nonlinear filtering. Aiming at the problem that the error of traditional algorithms increases linearly with the dimension of state-space, a cooperative navigation method based on Augmented Embedded Cubature Kalman filter (AECKF) algorithm is proposed. The experiment results show that the AECKF cooperative navigation algorithm has better positioning accuracy and stability than the traditional algorithm.