Tadashi Nakano

• Ph.D
• Professor at Osaka Metropolitan University

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a general-purpose simulation platform for multicellular molecular communication systems. Built on an agent-based model, the platform offers flexibility to simulate diverse multicellular systems, such as cancer spheroids and vascular-like networks. It incorporates efficient algorithms...

This paper explores mobile molecular communication, where bio-nanomachines interact and coordinate movement using signal molecules in aqueous environments. In the system studied, a sender emits periodic pulses of signal molecules that propagate through the environment, while a receiver observes these pulses to determine the sender’s direction. We p...

Recently, the application of deep neural networks to detect anomalies on medical images has been facing the appearance of noisy labels, including overlapping objects and similar classes. Therefore, this study aims to address this challenge by proposing a unique attention module that can assist deep neural networks in focusing on important object fe...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that severely affects motor function, especially gait, requiring accurate diagnosis and assessment instruments. This study presents Dense Multiscale Sample Entropy (DM-SamEn) as an innovative method for diminishing feature dimensions while maintaining the uniqueness of signal features. DM-SamEn em...

In molecular communication, information can be encoded on the concentration gradient of signal molecules, making gradient detection an important issue. This letter considers a biologically inspired method for a cluster of bio-nanomachines to perform collective gradient detection. It develops a mathematical model of the collective gradient detection...

Abstract - The electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) identifies clients for organizations that maintain privacy and security. It automates the process and reduces the costs associated with manual KYC processes such as paper handling, physical storage, and manpower. A systematic review of identification systems is essential to provide a comprehensiv...

Cell clusters and networks that interconnect them are key components of emerging applications such as 6G wireless molecular communication systems, drug delivery and tissue regeneration. This paper discusses empirical, analytical and simulation-based approaches towards understanding how spatially distributed cells aggregate to form cell clusters and...

The charity sector impacts society significantly in many areas, including providing education, healthcare, hunger relief, drinking water, disaster relief, environmental preservation, and assistance to underserved people. The existing charity organizations have numerous limitations, such as poor management, high operation costs, and a lack of transp...

The maintenance of superior quality standards in wine is of paramount importance to both wine producers and consumers. However, traditional approaches to assessing wine quality are characterized by protracted processes and the involvement of specialists with a comprehensive understanding of taste profiles and the determinants of wine quality. In th...

The Digital Identity Decentralized System on Blockchain (DIDSB), a decentralised system for digital identity management, leverages the features of blockchain technology to provide a novel solution to the challenges of identity management. The DIDSB framework classifies entities into three distinct categories, namely identity providers, service prov...

The arrival of blockchain technology brings the possibilities for transparency, accountability, and efficiency in various applications including the charity. In this paper, we used the smart contract for charity works in a public blockchain. In traditional system, donors have minimum visibility and accountability into the donation fund. In this pro...

Controlling a spatio-temporal structure that groups of bio-nanomachines form is a key objective for engineering innovative applications such as artificial organs and biological robots. Our previous work aimed to create a large-scale system of bio-nanomachines and developed a collective rotational motion model to describe their behavior. The main id...

Creating a large-scale functional system from a group of bio-nanomachines is a key objective for engineering innovative applications. This paper aims to create a large-scale system of bio-nanomachines and proposes a collective rotational motion model to describe their behaviour. The proposed model is based on the notion that spinning objects are st...

Cell migration plays an important role in multicellular organism development. The cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum is a useful model organism for the study of cell migration during development. Although cellular ATP levels are known to determine cell fate during development, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Here, we report that...

Introduction Digital communication theories have been well-established and extensively used to model and analyze information transfer and exchange processes. Due to their robustness and thoroughness, they have been recently extended to the modeling and analyzing data flow, storage, and networking in biological systems. Methods This article analyse...

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) comprises four nucleotides and twenty amino acids (a combination of nucleotides) that generate living organisms’ structures. These discrete components, jointly with DNA characteristics and functions, allow understanding the DNA as a digital component. Thus, when DNA is considered an organic digital memory, it becomes a c...

Molecular Communication is evolving as a supra-discipline of bioinspired information and communication technologies. The next breakthroughs in molecular communication will greatly depend on the deep understanding of complex diseases, epitomized by brain malignancies. This will be achieved by delineating underlying cellular and sub-cellular processe...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, held in September 2021. Due to the safety concerns and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, BICT 2021 took place online in a live stream. BICT 2021 aims to provide a world-leading and multidi...

Molecular communications essentially analyze the transmission of the information at the nano level in cells, the smart devices that constitute our bodies. This emerging field uses traditional communication systems elements and maps them to molecular signaling and communication found inside and outside the body. Hence, molecular communications’ fund...

Many animals can detect the multi-frequency signals from their external surroundings. The understanding for underlying mechanism of signal detection can apply the theory of vibrational resonance, in which the moderate high frequency driving can maximize the nonlinear system's response to the low frequency subthreshold signal. In this work, we study...

Networks of bio-nanomachines that communicate through molecular communication are expected to perform complex functionalities within biological systems. The natural history of malignant tumors can be defined by the evolution of growing bio-nanomachine networks within an interplay between proliferation or self-renewal (Grow) and invasion (Go) potent...

Binary concentration shift keying in molecular communication is a modulation technique that transforms binary information onto the concentration of molecules. Transmitter releases a pre-specified number of molecules into the environment according to the information it wishes to transmit to receiver. In this paper, we consider binary concentration s...

Cells communicate with each other via the transmission and reception of signal molecules. In this paper, we test our hypothesis that random cell motion can enhance cell-cell communication. We first conducted cell-tracking experiments to obtain motility parameters of endothelial cells, and then used the molecular communication framework to obtain th...

Multicellular organisms contain various differentiated cells. Fate determination of these cells remains a fundamental issue. The cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum is a useful model organism for studying differentiation; it proliferates as single cells in nutrient‐rich conditions, which aggregate into a multicellular body upon starvation,...

Cancer cells collectively form a large-scale structure for their growth. In this article, we report that HeLa cells, epithelial-like human cervical cancer cells, aggressively migrate on Matrigel and form a large-scale structure in a cell-density-dependent manner. To explain the experimental results, we develop a simple model in which cells interact...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, held in Shanghai, China, in July 2020. Due to the safety concerns and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, BICT 2020 took place online in a live stream. BICT 2020 aims to provide a world-lead...

Multiple measurements of the concentration of molecules serve as a useful technique to enable bio-nanomachines to reliably extract information encoded in the concentration of molecules. In this paper, we develop mathematical models to examine the impact of multiple measurements of the concentration of molecules on the performance of mobile molecula...

Epidemic information dissemination is a promising technique for delivering messages in sparse mobile networks. This paper considers epidemic information dissemination in mobile molecular communication and conducts data-driven simulations. In the data-driven simulations, bio-nanomachines move based on experimentally observed cell trajectories while...

The multi-frequency hybrid signal is an important stimulus from the external environment on the neuronal networks for detection. The mechanism of the detection may be understood by the vibrational resonance, in which the moderate intensity of high-frequency force can amplify the response of neuronal systems to the low-frequency signal. In this pape...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the emerging research area of mobile molecular communication. In mobile molecular communication, sender and receiver bionanomachines as well as associated nodes in the environment exhibit dynamic behavior in the sense that they are mobile and communicate while they move. This paper presents a model of m...

Molecular communications (MolCom) has been established as one of the novel interdisciplinary research themes with strong impact on science and technology in the last five years. For this reason, in 2016 the European Project CIRCLE (Coordinating European Research on Molecular Communications) started organizing an annual event, named Workshop on Mol...

In recent years, robots are increasingly used in many fields such as the entertainment and nursing, but robot design that concentrates on establishing rapport with humans has not been studied satisfactorily. Therefore, if we elucidate how to improve rapport between robots and humans, we can provide more human-friendly robot service in the future. I...

Understanding the process of how bio-nanomachines form spatiotemporal patterns is a key to developing practical applications of molecular communication such as biomolecular sensing, targeted drug delivery and tissue regeneration systems. In this paper, we develop a simple mobility model for bio-nanomachines and investigate how bio-nanomachines move...

Neuronal spiking patterns, which are of fundamental importance for the understanding of information processing in neural systems, can be generated in response to different stimuli. We here investigate in detail the stimulus-induced spiking patterns in a biologically plausible neuron model in which the oxygen concentration and the dynamical concentr...

The authors of this paper have been involved in molecular communication since its conception. The authors describe their decade-and-a-half long personal journey of the molecular communication research and share their observations and thoughts on how the molecular communication research started and expanded to flourish. They also share their thought...

This paper describes a novel design and wet laboratory implementation of reliable end-to-end molecular communication. In the reliable end-to-end molecular communication described in this paper, source and destination bio-nanomachines exchange molecular packets through intermediate bio-nanomachines that are capable of packet replication. A source bi...

We propose a novel communication-inspired model of contagion phenomena and mitigation strategies by establishing the one-to-one correspondence between the essential components comprising information transmission and epidemic spreading. We then present the notions of normalized ensemble-average prevalence (NEAP) and prevalence delay profile (PDP) to...

We propose a new computing-inspired bio-detection framework called touchable computing (TouchComp). Under the rubric of TouchComp, the best solution is the cancer to be detected, the parameter space is the tissue region at high risk of malignancy, and the agents are the nanorobots loaded with contrast medium molecules for tracking purpose. Subseque...

This letter investigates the impact of noise on the functionality of channel switches in molecular communication networks. The channel switches considered in this letter are designed based on a set of biological cells that propagate frequency-encoded Ca <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2...

This paper develops a graph-based model of mobile molecular communication systems to study the spatio-temporal dynamics of bio-nanomachine concentration in a complex environment such as the human circulatory system. We first consider the steady-state problem under the assumption that background flows are absent, and show that, at steady-state, bio-...

In this paper, we propose a demodulation technique, the increase detection algorithm (IDA), to improve the reliability of concentration-encoded diffusion-based molecular communication. The proposed demodulation technique detects an increase (i.e., a relative concentration value) in molecule concentration to demodulate information as opposed to dete...

This paper provides author’s personal retrospective on molecular communication research. The author has been involved in molecular communication from its conceptualization to the establishment as a scientific discipline and its flourishing today. Based on his personal journey, the author describes the history of molecular communication research and...

This paper explores dynamic properties of oscillating and propagating patterns in concentration of the information molecule and proposes a new modulation scheme for molecular communication. In the proposed modulation scheme, information molecules transmitted from a sender bio-nanomachine propagate in the environment, chemically react with the molec...

This paper presents a mathematical model of molecular communication networks where mobile bio-nanomachines coordinate their motion by using non-diffusive surface-bound molecules for detecting and localizing spatially distributed targets in the environment. The mathematical model assumes that bio-nanomachines release two types of molecule: repellent...

Externally controllable molecular communication is expected to expand the capability of molecular communication by allowing conventional devices placed in the external environment to control the location and timing of molecular communication processes taking place in the molecular communication environment. In this paper, we consider externally con...

This paper proposes a leader-follower-based model of mobile molecular communication networks for target detection applications. The proposed model divides application functionalities of molecular communication networks into two types of mobile bio-nanomachine: leader and follower bio-nanomachines. Leader bio-nanomachines distribute in the environme...

Recent advancements in biological nanomachines have motivated the research on nanorobotic sensor networks (NSNs), where the nanorobots are green (i.e., biocompatible and biodegradable) and touchable (i.e., externally controllable and continuously trackable). In the former aspect, NSNs will dissolve in an aqueous environment after finishing designat...

Epidemic information dissemination is one of the promising techniques for delivering messages in sparse mobile networks. This paper proposes an epidemic information dissemination method for molecular communication among mobile bio-nanomachines. We first develop a model of the proposed epidemic information dissemination method by which mobile bio-na...

In this chapter, we extend the static bionanosensor networks described in Chap. 2 to dynamic bionanosensor networks by using autonomous and mobile bionanosensors. The specific problem considered in this chapter is to detect targets and track the targets as they move. First, we discuss how autonomous and mobile bionanosensors cooperate using two typ...

In the last chapter of this book, we give a brief summary of what has been discussed in previous chapters. We also point out important research efforts that are currently underway as well as future research challenges that need to be addressed.

This chapter considers static bionanosensor networks for detecting target signals that may appear in the monitoring environment. The key problem considered in this chapter is to determine the number of bionanosensors that need to be distributed in the monitoring environment in order to meet application-dependent goals (e.g., in terms of the probabi...

Interconnecting bionanosensor networks and conventional devices is of considerable interest to realize the emerging concept of the Internet of NanoThings (IoNT) and the Internet of BioNanoThings (IoBNT) [1]. In this chapter, we consider interfacing mobile bionanosensors and external devices that can control the mobility of bionanosensors via molecu...

RNA can be used as a high-density medium for data storage and transmission; however, an important RNA process -- replication -- is noisy. This paper presents an error analysis for RNA as a data transmission medium, analyzing how deletion errors increase in a collection of replicated DNA strands over time.

RNA can be used as a high-density medium for data storage and transmission; however, an important RNA process - replication - is noisy. This paper presents an error analysis for RNA as a data transmission medium, analyzing how deletion errors increase in a collection of replicated DNA strands over time.

In modern communication systems, noise represents the source of errors that disturb useful information signals for communication. In biological systems, however, noise plays important roles for their functions. In this position paper, we point out that, in designing and engineering molecular communication systems, noise may be removed as in traditi...