Our team proposed a Reading Skills Test that assesses cognitive academic language skills from six perspectives: syntactic comprehension, referential resolution, paraphrasing, inference, matching textual and non-textual information, and reading and understanding definitions. Each test item consists of a 100-word description and a multiple-choice question that tests one of the abilities from the above six perspectives. Subjects solve the test items, which appear one after another on the browser based on item response theory. We have confirmed that this test meets the desirable properties of an assessment test and have demonstrated that the syntactic processing ability measured by this test has improved yearly from the fifth to the ninth grade. Furthermore, we found that the characteristics of the subjects as measured by this test reflect syntactic processing ability independent of vocabulary and academic knowledge.

We propose a computer-based testing environment, Reading Skill Test, to measure the effects of various types of systematic reading support systems. We prove its validity, reliability and one-dimensionality using 31,000 subjects. The effects of furigana system on the 5th to 8th grade students are analyzed using this environment. Furigana is a widely used Japanese reading support system that has been believed to be beneficial especially for pupils. Despite our expectation, we have to conclude that furigana failed to improve pupils’ reading significantly, and discuss why it did so.

Gas exchange between inhaled alveolar air and pulmonary capillary blood occurs in the lung. The relationship between ventilation and perfusion determines the global efficiency of gas exchange in the lung. The normal healthy lung maintains a regional ventilation-perfusion ratio close to unity, whereas in disease, the regional ventilation-perfusion mismatch results in inefficient gas exchange, leading to arterial hypoxemia. The original research presented in this dissertation focused on factors effecting on the regional distribution of pulmonary perfusion in supine humans, namely the effects of (1) hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction (HPV), and (2) lung tissue stretch due to tidal volume lung inflation. The work performed required an understanding of pulmonary physiology, biomechanics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and image processing. An arterial spin labeling MR sequence, combined with pulmonary proton density imaging, was used to quantify the spatial distribution of pulmonary perfusion. The alterations in the distribution of pulmonary perfusion were induced by (1) inhalation of gases of different oxygen concentration, and (2) tidal volume lung inflation. The tidal volume lung inflation study involved MR lung images obtained at different lung volumes. A deformable image registration technique, using a piecewise polynomial interpolation method, was developed to warp acquired pulmonary perfusion images into the shape of a reference lung volume such that lung images were compared based on corresponding anatomy. The main results of this work were : (1) mild global hypoxia and hyperoxia, induced by the inhalation of different fraction of inspired oxygen gas mixtures (FIO₂ = 0.125 and 0.3, respectively) do not result in changes in the heterogeneity or redistribution of pulmonary perfusion, indicating that hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction is not the major contributor affecting pulmonary perfusion heterogeneity in the normal supine human lung. (2) Tidal volume lung inflation did not cause significant changes in the spatial distribution of pulmonary perfusion; however, the fractional distribution of pulmonary perfusion was redistributed away from the nondependent region of lung at the higher lung volume, indicating that the changes in the gravitational height of the lung, which result in changes in hydrostatic pressure distribution likely contribute more significantly than the overall changes in pulmonary vasculare resistance induced by lung tissue stretch

A reading skill test to diagnose basic language skills is introduced. The test is designed to measure six component skills relevant to reading in comparison with those of state-of- the-art natural language processing technologies. The results of the first large-scale experiments using the test are reported. Surprisingly, almost half of Japanese junior high school students do no better than machines in dependency analysis. More than half of 7th grade students do no better than making random choices on questions involving inferences and definition understanding.