Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a typical ethnomedicine derived from the practice of ancient Chinese herbal medicine through several thousand years of empirical testing and refinement, has been successfully used in taming various kinds of diseases [ 1].
At the same time, this symposium was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book "The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique" by Russell and Burch in 1959 in which the 3Rs principle (that is, Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement) has been coined and introduced to foster the development of alternative methods to animal testing.
Essentially every stage of normal neural circuit development, from axon outgrowth and guidance to activity-dependent homeostasis and refinement, has been studied in the frog tadpole, making it an ideal model to determine what happens when any of these stages are compromised.
From aspects of China's ancient written language to teriyaki burgers and high-heeled sneakers, Japanese borrowings and refinements have been inventive and alluring.
Since then, a number of modifications and refinements have been made to stereotaxic devices, procedures, and atlases, and these advances have significantly improved the utility of stereotaxy.
Obstacles to automating this process include technical difficulties in translating annotations into proper biochemical activities, and also the fact that methods for model refinement have been designed and applied separately for each type of experimental data.
In particular, theoretical and real rates of convergence of the implemented algorithms, including adaptive refinement, have been compared and computational costs have been evaluated.
First and foremost, essentially every stage of normal neural development, from neurogenesis and differentiation to axon pathfinding, synapse maturation and circuit refinement, has been studied in detail in Xenopus tadpoles (Cline and Kelly, 2012; Sanes et al., 2012).
