Prostate cancer is a multifocal disease in 76–87% of patients [1,4,8]. Typically, 3 separate foci of cancer are seen in a prostate which has been surgically removed, but there may be as many as twelve [1,4, 8]. Standard prostate biopsies cannot reliably detect these foci [7]. Ultrasound imaging, in expert hands, has a receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.6 in determining whether a region...

Laparoscopic surgical procedures require precise hand and eye coordination based on a 2-dimensional representation of 3-dimensional space. Currently, no metric exists to guide the educational process while surgeons are still on the learning curve. In this paper, we propose to identify and qualify the patterns of movements recorded from the da Vinci robotic surgical system (Intuitive Surgical, S...

Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) are new generations of public key cryptosystems that have a smaller key size for the same level of security. The exponentiation on elliptic curve is the most important operation in ECC, so when the ECC is put into practice, the major problem is how to enhance the speed of the exponentiation. It is thus of great interest to develop algorithms for exponentiation...

Endotracheal Intubation (ETI) is an airway procedure commonly used to secure the airway for a variety of medical conditions. Proficiency in ETI procedures requires significant clinical experience and insufficient data currently exists describing the physical ergonomics of successful direct laryngoscopy. The research objectives of this study were to examine how ETI time, error and practitioner b...

This paper presents a high-level parametric approach for synthesis of novel human animation sequences from short clips data. The parametric approach generates motions according to user-defined high-level motion parameters, such as speed, slope and direction, while maintaining the quality and realism of captured motions, and preserving the motion constraints. The approach allows simultaneous con...

EVALUATE EXPERIENCES NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE PROFICIENCY IN ADVANCED FIBEROPTIC INTUBATION SKILLS ---CAN WE ACCELERATE THE LEARNING CURVE WITH SIMULATOR TRAINING? Xinyuan Duan December 1,2010 Fiberoptic intubation skills (FOI) are critical in reducing the anesthesia related morbidity and mortality in clinical settings. The purpose of the study was to prove that the simulator can train a novice to ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the ability of the widely used ACR set of criteria (both list and tree format) to diagnose RA compared with expert opinion according to disease duration. METHODS A systematic literature review was conducted in PubMed and Embase databases. All articles reporting the prevalence of RA according to ACR criteria and expert opinion in cohorts of early (<1 year duration) or est...

BACKGROUND In prognostic research, prediction rules are generally statistically derived. However the composition and performance of these statistical models may strongly depend on the characteristics of the derivation sample. The purpose of this study was to establish consensus among clinicians and experts on key predictors for persistent shoulder pain three months after initial consultation in...

We observe that expert surgeons performing MIS learn to minimize their tool path length and avoid collisions with vital structures. We thus conjecture that an expert surgeon's tool paths can be predicted by minimizing an appropriate energy function. We hypothesize that this reference path will be closer to an expert with greater skill, as measured by an objective measurement instrument such as ...

This paper presents a systems viewpoint for developing an advanced decision support system for aircraft safety inspectors. Research results from a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sponsored project to use neural network and expert systems technology to analyze aircraft maintenance databases are summarized. One of the main objectives of this research is to define more refined "alert" indica...