BACKGROUND Kinematic design is a predominant phase in the design of robotic manipulators for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, an extensive overview of the kinematic design issues for MIS robots is not yet available to both mechanisms and robotics communities. METHODS Hundreds of archival reports and articles on robotic systems for MIS are reviewed and studied. In particular, the kin...

There is experimental evidence that the non-sphericity of certain atmospheric particles can cause scattering properties different from those predicted by standard Mie theory. Numerous studies indicate the need to consider the presence of non-spherical particles in modeling the optical properties of atmospheric aerosols. On the other hand, natural aerosols show a great variety of shapes, making ...

The accent system of Modern Japanese is characterized by patterns of high and low tones which are conventionally specified for each word, and words are grouped into several classes according to their accent patterns. Put differently, words belonging to the same class exhibit the same accent pattern. Some dialects, however, permit more than one accent patterns in the same class, which will be re...

Activities related to medical innovation are accelerating and becoming increasingly important due to the demand for better and less invasive therapies, a rapidly aging population in the developed world and a globally larger population able to afford advanced medical care. Medical Innovation is occurring in the fields of pharmacy, diagnostics and therapeutic imaging, surgical products, intervent...

Many surgeons continue to actively pursue surgical approaches that are less invasive for their patients. This pursuit requires the surgeon to adapt to new instruments, techniques, technologies, knowledge bases, visual perspectives, and motor skills, among other changes. The premise of this paper is that surgeons adopting minimally invasive approaches are particularly obligated to maintain an ac...

This is a presentation of sharing endeavors at modifying and standardizing surgical procedures as well as establishing endoscopic surgical skill qualification in the field of pediatric surgery in Japan.

In our paper we describe our second collective challenge to NTCIR-6 Question Answering Challenge (QAC4). Also this time we decided to investigate the limits of the ”as automatic as possible” approach to QA. Three teams of Otaru University of Commerce, Mie University and Hokkaido University concentrated on three new question types and the last team also remodeled its WWW Verifier to cope with th...

The knowledge of droplet size distribution is very important in different medical, pharmaceutical and technical applications. Researchers in all these fields are interested in a temporally and spatially resolving two-dimensional measurement technique. A new approach for the two-dimensional determination of the droplet size is the use of two different imaging measurement techniques whose signal ...

BACKGROUND Minimally invasive surgery might greatly benefit from the Information and Communications Technologies. The objective of this work is to determine the better approach to include those technologies, in particular an e-Learning platform, into an in-person training course. METHODS An online survey was sent to all participants in any of the laparoscopic training courses at Jesús Usón Mi...

The technique of a single-port laparoscopy was developed over the last years as an attempt to lower surgical aggression and improve the aesthetic results of the minimally invasive surgery. A new robotic platform used with the da Vinci® Robotic System Single-Site System® (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, California, United States) was recently launched on the global market and is still not documen...