BACKGROUND Transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) is a mature approach to supraglottic cancer, while transoral robotic surgery (TORS) is emerging. The present study compared these approaches. METHODS The first 10 patients (2002-2005) given TLM were compared with the first 10 (2007-2011) given TORS for cT1-3 cN0-cN2c supraglottic cancer. RESULTS A feeding tube was used in four TLM and seven TORS...

Mobile manipulators operating in eld environments are susceptible to dangerous and costly rollover or tipover instabilities, particularly when operating over uneven terrain or when exerting large forces or moments. By monitoring the static and dynamic tipover stability margins of a mobile manipulator it is possible to predict such tipovers and take appropriate actions to prevent the tipover fro...

Monte Carlo simulations, with their inherent uncertainty, are often used to determine the bit error rate of digital communication systems operating in the presence of noise. To assess the noise margin in a system operating with an acceptable bit error rate, this noisy functional relationship must be inverted. We describe a novel technique with improved speed and comparable accuracy for estimati...

OBJECTIVE To achieve optimal depth for negative margin cones after loop electrosurgical excision procedures (LEEP) for cervical dysplasia. MATERIAL AND METHODS Retrospective cohort analysis of LEEP cones of 201 patients with cervical dysplasia during a four-year period. Analysed cones were divided into two different groups: cones with negative margins without dysplasia, and cones with margins...

BACKGROUND Minimally invasive nasopharyngectomy with the da Vinci surgical robot has been shown to be a feasible operation for salvage of recurrent nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The current case series presents the early results of robotic nasopharyngectomy. METHODS We conducted a prospective series of patients who underwent robotic nasopharyngectomy for recurrent nasopharyngeal carcinoma in a si...

We consider computational modeling of biological systems that consist of discrete components arranged into linear structures. As time advances, these components may process information, communicate and divide. We show that: (1) the topological notion of cell complexes provides a useful framework for simulating information processing and flow between components; (2) an index-free notation exploi...

In this paper, we examine the role of political connections by analyzing the short-and long-term performance of Chinese state owned enterprise (SOE) acquirers relative to private owned enterprise (POE) from 1994 to 2008. The empirical result shows that 1) SOE acquirers outperform the POE acquirer both in terms of long-run stock and operating performance; 2) announcement effect of POE acquirer t...

The paper deals with the design of the robust PID controller for real uncertain Coupled-Tank process in the frequency domain. Only the first independent tank is considered (single-input single-output system). Robust controller is designed in two ways. The first approach is performed with the Edge Theorem and the Neimark’s D -partition method for the affine model and the second one is performed ...

We have recently proposed an extension of ADABOOST to regression that uses the median of the base regressors as the final regressor. In this paper we extend theoretical results obtained for ADABOOST to median boosting and to its localized variant. First, we extend recent results on efficient margin maximizing to show that the algorithm can converge to the maximum achievable margin within a pres...

Coordination of water movement among plant organs is important for understanding plant water use strategies. The hydraulic segmentation hypothesis (HSH) proposes that hydraulic conductance in shorter lived, 'expendable' organs such as leaves and longer lived, more 'expensive' organs such as stems may be decoupled, with resistance in leaves acting as a bottleneck or 'safety valve'. We tested the...