Tactile sensation plays an important role in everyday life. While the somatosensory system has been studied extensively, the majority of information has come from studies using animal models. Recent development of high-resolution anatomical and functional imaging techniques has enabled the non-invasive study of human somatosensory cortex and thalamus. This thesis provides new insights into the ...

Crossing the hands over the midline reduces left tactile extinction to double simultaneous stimulation in right-brain-damaged patients, suggesting that spatial attentional biases toward the ipsilesional (right) side of space contribute to the patients' contralesional (left) deficit. We investigated (1) whether the position of the left hand, and its vision, affected processing speed of tactile s...

Recently the idea of covering a robot's surface with a ‘skin’ of soft tactile sensors has attracted the attention of researchers, and some human-interactive robots covered with such sensors have actually been made (Tajima et al., 2002; Kanda et al., 2002). However, most conventional tactile sensors need a large number of sensing elements and wires because every detection point needs one sensing...

Chronic pain in complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) has been linked to tactile misperceptions and deficits in somatotopic representation of the affected limb. In this study, we identify altered cognitive processing of tactile stimuli in CRPS patients that we propose marks heterogeneity in tactile decision-making mechanisms. In a case-control design, we compared middle- and late-latency somato...

UNLABELLED There are several methods for identifying carious dentinal tissue aiming to avoid removal of healthy dentinal tissue. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to test different methods for the detection of carious dentinal tissue regarding the amount of carious tissue removed and the remaining dentin microhardness after caries removal. MATERIAL AND METHODS The dentin surfaces of ...

In this paper an automatic examination robot was developed to improve the process of cancer detection, tumor localization and geometrical shape diagnosis. A uniformly distributed compressive load was applied to the top tissue surface and the resultant mechanical stress was measured that was employed for the tumor diagnosis task. The experimental examinations were performed on the soft tissue of...

This event-related functional MRI study examines the neural correlates of vibrotactile sensation within the context of different psychophysical demands. Nine subjects received vibrotactile stimuli on the right volar forearm during detection, localization, and passive tasks. In the detection task, subjects indicated the offset (end) of each stimulus by pressing a response key with their left han...

Various hallucinations are unpleasant not only for patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), but also for their caregivers. Visual hallucinations are a well-recognized problem. Auditory and other types of hallucinations are generally accompanied by visual hallucinations. Tactile hallucinations (THs) rarely occur in patients with PD.