Although many skin conditions are amenable to treatment, on certain occasions dermatology and plastic surgery have not much to offer and patients are left with disfigurements. Cosmetic camouflage is a therapy that has been developed to alleviate the suffering of those who have been disfigured by a congenital or an acquired lesion and who have no other choice than living with their deformity.

The observation that force production in skeletal muscle is history-dependent has been made on many occasions. For example, Abbott and Aubert (1952) demonstrated convincingly that the steady-state force following muscle shortening is smaller and following stretching is greater than the purely isometric forces at the corresponding muscle length. These phenomena have been termed force depression ...

BACKGROUND Recruitment to clinical trials is often problematic, with many trials failing to recruit to their target sample size. As a result, patient care may be based on suboptimal evidence from underpowered trials or non-randomised studies. METHODS For many conditions patients will require treatment on several occasions, for example, to treat symptoms of an underlying chronic condition (suc...

One of the bottlenecks of current recognition (and graph matching) systems is their assumption of one-to-one feature (node) correspondence. This assumption breaks down in the generic object recognition task where, for example, a collection of features at one scale (in one image) may correspond to a single feature at a coarser scale (in the second image). Generic object recognition therefore req...

Semantic matching is a fundamental step in implementing data sharing applications. Most systems automating this task however limit themselves to finding simple (one-to-one) matching. In fact, complex (many-to-many) matching raises a far more difficult problem as the search space of concept combinations is often very large. This article presents Indigo, a system discovering complex matching in t...

In this paper, we address the problem of planning the textual organization of instructions. We take the view that natural language generation (NLG) is a mapping process of diierent levels of conceptual and textual representations. Within this framework , we consider the mapping between the text's semantic representation and its rhetorical structure. We argue that such a mapping is not direct, b...

Intravenous administration of fluids, drugs, and nutrition is very common in hospitals. Although insertion of peripheral and central cannulae and subsequent intravenous therapy are usually well tolerated, complications that prolong hospitalisation, and in some cases cause death, can arise on occasions. Additionally, many cannulae are inserted unnecessarily. This article seeks to review this are...