This paper addresses automatic skill assessment in robotic minimally invasive surgery. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are developed for individual surgical gestures (or surgemes) that comprise a typical bench-top surgical training task. It is known that such HMMs can be used to recognize and segment surgemes in previously unseen trials. Here, the topology of each surgeme HMM is designed in a data-...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine medical students' perceptions of team-based learning (TBL) according to their individual characteristics: gender, team efficacy, interpersonal understanding, proactivity in problem solving, and academic ability. METHODS Thirty-eight second-year medical students who took an integrated cardiology course participated in this study; 28 were male an...

Long-term motor skill learning has been consistently shown to result in functional as well as structural changes in the adult human brain. However, the effect of short learning periods on brain structure is not well understood. In the present study, subjects performed a sequential pinch force task (SPFT) for 20 min on 5 consecutive days. Changes in brain structure were evaluated with anatomical...

[1] A new approach to combine precipitation forecasts from multiple models is evaluated by analyzing the skill of the candidate models contingent on the forecasted predictor(s) state. Using five leading coupled GCMs (CGCMs) from the ENSEMBLES project, we develop multimodel precipitation forecasts over the continental United States (U.S) by considering the forecasted Nino3.4 from each CGCM as th...

BACKGROUND We test whether traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) about how to make an item predicts a person's skill at making it among the Tsimane' (Bolivia). The rationale for this research is that the failure to distinguish between knowledge and skill might account for some of the conflicting results about the relationships between TEK, human health, and economic development. METHODS We t...

With this PCell wrapper, MGEN layout generators appear like usual SKILL based PCells within DF II. A wrapper PCell must be created for each layout generator. The wrapper PCells just differ in the parameters declarations and the corresponding construction of the layout generator command line. The MGEN environment creates the wrapper PCells automatically. mgenlayoutcds mostran model=nreg w=1u l=1...

Improvements in motor sequence learning come about via goal-based learning of the sequence of visual stimuli and muscle-based learning of the sequence of movement responses. In young adults, consolidation of goal-based learning is observed after intervals of sleep but not following wake, whereas consolidation of muscle-based learning is greater following intervals with wake compared to sleep. W...

Robot skills are low-level motion and/or grasping capabilities that constitute the basic building blocks from which tasks are built. Teaching and recognition of such skills can be done by Programming-by-Demonstration approach. A human operator demonstrates certain skills while his motions are recorded by a datacapturing device and modeled in our case via fuzzy clustering and Takagi-Sugeno model...

Did nineteenth century technology reduce demand for skilled workers in contrast to modern technology? I obtain direct evidence on human capital investments and the returns to skill by using micro-data on individual weavers and an engineering production function. Weavers learned substantially on the job. While mechanization eliminated some tasks and the associated skills, it increased returns to...

objectives: our objective was to design an rct in order to assess the effects of adding a brief skill-based psychoeducation (pe) to routine needle and syringe programs to reduce injection and high risk sexual behaviors associated with human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) infection among referrals of drop-in centers (dics). method/design: this was a randomized control trial with the primary hypoth...