spatial reasoning

Improved Surgical Visibility and Navigation during Endoscopic Treatment of Upper Tract Urothelial Carcinoma

Project Summary The importance of localizing and treating all upper tract urothelial cancer (UTUC) tumors during a renal sparing, endoscopic treatment is emphasized by the high risk of cancer progression from inadequate tumor treatment. Insufficient treatment necessitates kidney and ureteral removal (i.e., nephroureterectomy). Nephroureterectomy permanently compromises renal function, and increases morbidity and mortality, while negatively impacting a patient’s quality of life. In contrast, endoscopic treatment (i.e., using a laser to ablate only the tumors) improves long-term outcomes by sparing healthy kidney tissue. However, endoscopic treatment is underutilized compared to nephroureterectomy because it is difficult to accomplish. Successful endoscopic treatment is dependent on the surgeon’s ability to create a mental 3D map of the branched, intrarenal endoscopic anatomy intraoperatively from preoperative 2D imaging, which is extremely difficult. Since mental mapping relies on hand-eye coordination, memory, and spatial reasoning, it is inherently imprecise and its impact on accuracy and tumor treatment is dependent on the surgeon’s experience. To make matters worse, even when tumors are successfully visualized, the surgeon often cannot accurately assess the location of tumor margins or infer pathologic grade due to the limited field of view and depth of field (10mm and 6mm on average, respectively) of current scopes. The scopes only provide visualization of a small part of the surgical field at any instant. These inherent challenges prevent many surgeons from attempting endoscopic tumor treatment since incomplete treatment leads to a devastating, oncologic outcome. Our overall goal is to create an enhanced visualization and navigational system that makes endoscopic UTUC tumor treatment easier and more accurate for all surgeons, enabling wider utilization. Toward this goal, our specific objective in this proposal is to test the hypothesis that our system can make endoscopic UTUC surgery more accurate and efficient. To test this hypothesis, we propose three Specific Aims: Aim 1 involves the development of an automatic, real-time segmentation and grading system of UTUC tumors during endoscopic treatment. Aim 2 integrates a 3D navigational map of collecting system anatomy, which includes tumor and endoscope location, during endoscopic surgery. Aim 3 evaluates the system in patients, with zero risk to the human subjects. The endpoint of this R01 will be a fully validated enhanced visualization and navigational system for endoscopic UTUC surgery, which would provide the necessary experimental data towards a large-scale, multi-center clinical trial and future FDA approval. As our system would require only software integration to current endoscopic surgical cameras, all existing endoscopic surgical systems could in principle immediately benefit from the results of this project. In this way, we believe the success of our project will facilitate improved UTUC treatment and mitigate progression to a higher risk extirpative surgery.

How Children Design by Analogy: The Role of Spatial Thinking

Analogical reasoning is a common reasoning tool for learning and problem-solving. Existing research has extensively studied children’s reasoning when comparing, or choosing from ready-made analogies. Relatively less is known about how children come up with analogies in authentic learning environments. Design education provides a suitable context to investigate how children generate analogies for creative learning purposes. Meanwhile, the frequent use of visual analogies in design provides an additional opportunity to understand the role of spatial reasoning in design-by-analogy. Spatial reasoning is one of the most studied human cognitive factors and is critical to the learning of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). There is growing interest in exploring the interplay between analogical reasoning and spatial reasoning. In this talk, I will share qualitative findings from a case study, where a class of 11-to-12-year-olds in the Netherlands participated in a biomimicry design project. These findings illustrate (1) practical ways to support children’s analogical reasoning in the ideation process and (2) the potential role of spatial reasoning as seen in children mapping form-function relationships in nature analogically and adaptively to those in human designs.

Analogy and Spatial Cognition: How and Why they matter for STEM learning

Space is the universal donor for relations" (Gentner, 2014). This quote is the foundation of my talk. I will explore how and why visual representations and analogies are related, and why. I will also explore how considering the relation between analogy and spatial reasoning can shed light on why and how spatial thinking is correlated with learning in STEM fields. For example, I will consider children’s numbers sense and learning of the number line from the perspective of analogical reasoning.

Space for Thinking - Spatial Reference Frames and Abstract Concepts

People from cultures around the world tend to borrow from the domain of space to represent abstract concepts. For example, in the domain on time, we use spatial metaphors (e.g., describing the future as being in front and the past behind), accompany our speech with spatial gestures (e.g., gesturing to the left to refer to a past event), and use external tools that project time onto a spatial reference frame (e.g., calendars). Importantly, these associations are also present in the way we think and reason about time, suggesting that space and time are also linked in the mind. In this talk, I will explore the developmental origins and functional implications of these types of cross-dimensional associations. To start, I will discuss the roles that language and culture play in shaping how children in the US and India represent time. Next, I will use word learning and memory as test cases for exploring why cross-dimensional associations may be cognitively advantageous. Finally, I will talk about future directions and the practical implications for this line of work, with a focus on how encouraging spatial representations of abstract concepts could improve learning outcomes.

The effect of pubertal development on spatial reasoning

FENS Forum 2024

Spatial reasoning via recurrent neural dynamics in mouse retrosplenial cortex

A connectome-based fMRI study of spatial reasoning in stroke

FENS Forum 2024