The role of positron emission tomography (PET) during the past decade has evolved rapidly from that of a pure research tool to a methodology of enormous clinical potential. (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET is currently the most widely used probe in the diagnosis, staging, assessment of tumor response to treatment, and radiation therapy planning because metabolic changes generally precede the ...

Technical and scientific advances in diagnostic and therapeutic methods in the biomedical field have substantially increased the predictability and longevity of the outcomes of restorative surgical procedures. In contemporary oral implantology, bioprototyping techniques based on computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technology have proven to be valuable aids in diagno...

Short description: We developed a unified framework for percutaneous therapies utilizing localization frames and implemented an application using CT imaging and a robot. Description: The planning and execution of percutaneous therapies are very diverse. We investigated those that make use of a localization frame. When using a so called stereotacic frame, a base is rigidly attached to the patien...

In radiosurgery a moving beam of radiation is used as an ablative surgical instrument to destroy brain tumors. Classical radiosurgical systems rely on rigid skeletal xation of the anatomic region to be treated. This xation procedure is very painful for the patient and limits radiosurgical procedures to brain lesions. Furthermore, due to the necessity of rigid xation, radiosurgical treatment wit...

Proteins exist as conformational ensembles, exchanging between substates to perform their function. Advances in experimental techniques yield unprecedented access to structural snapshots of their conformational landscape. However, computationally modeling how proteins use collective motions to transition between substates is challenging owing to a rugged landscape and large energy barriers. Her...

This paper deals with constraint handling in manufacturing. It starts with a basic de nition of the constraint satisfaction problem, followed by a description of consistency enforcing and constraint guided search. Constraint handling in scheduling problems is the main topic of the paper also presenting di erent types of schedule construction methods and explaining the use of temporal constraint...

We describe and evaluate a novel optimization-based off-line path planning algorithm for mobile robots based on the Counterexample-Guided Inductive Optimization (CEGIO) technique. CEGIO iteratively employs counterexamples generated from Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers, in order to guide the optimization process and to ensure global optimization. Thi...

Radiation therapy has come a long way from treatment planning based on orthogonal radiographs with large margins around tumours. Advances in imaging and radiation planning software have led to three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy and, further, to intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT). IMRT permits sparing of normal tissues and hence dose-escalation to tumours. IMRT is the current standard...