We construct statistical models to assess whether hospital size will impact the ability to identify "true" hospital ranks in pay-for-performance (P4P) programs. We use Bayesian hierarchical models to estimate the uncertainty associated with the ranking of hospitals by their raw composite score values for three medical conditions: acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF), and commun...

This paper describes an approach for real-time preparation of grasping tasks, based on the low-order moments of the target’s shape on a stereo pair of images acquired by an active vision head. The objective is to estimate the 3D position and orientation of an object and of the robotic hand, by using computationally fast and independent software components. These measurements are then used for t...

This paper presents an approach to build high resolution digital elevation maps from a sequence of unregistered low altitude stereovision image pairs. The approach first uses a visual motion estimation algorithm that determines the 3D motions of the cameras between consecutive acquisitions, on the basis of visually detected and matched environment features. An extended Kalman filter then estima...

Wearable inertial sensors have become an inexpensive option to measure the movements and positions of a person. Other techniques that use environmental sensors such as ultrasound trackers or vision-based methods need full line of sight or a local setup, and it is complicated to access this data from a wearable computer’s perspective. However, a body-centric approach where sensor data is acquire...

A 3D head modeling method from a sequence of 2D images is described. The views from which the input images are acquired are not calibrated. Therefore, an auto-calibration method for a sequence of images with small rotations and translation is developed. For this purpose, we have modified an already existing auto-calibration algorithm to incorporate known aspect ratio and skew values to make it ...

The stereotyped positions occupied by individual classes of neurons are a fundamental characteristic of CNS cytoarchitecture. To study the regulation of neuronal positioning, we injected genetically labeled neural precursors derived from dorsal and ventral mouse forebrain into the telencephalic vesicles of embryonic rats. Cells from both areas were found to participate in the generation of tele...

We propose a novel, vision-based method for robot homing, the problem of computing a route so that a robot can return to its initial “home” position after the execution of an arbitrary “prior” path. The method assumes that the robot tracks visual features in panoramic views of the environment that it acquires as it moves. By exploiting only angular information regarding the tracked features, a ...

The great majority of 121 hepatitis C virus (HCV) isolates obtained from 117 Italian patients with community-acquired infection could readily be typed by genotype-specific PCR. Subtype 1b was dominant (74 isolates); subtypes 2b, 2a, and 1a followed, with 19, 14, and 8 isolates, respectively. The six isolates that remained untyped by this method were classified as subtype 2c on the basis of sequ...

Freehand 3D ultrasound can be acquired without a position sensor by using image-based positioning methods. In-plane motion can be tracked using image registration between nearby images. Elevational probe motion can be determined from the decorrelation between images. However, a freehand scan involves rotational as well as translational motion, and this affects the decorrelation. If this effect ...

In this paper we propose a reconstruction algorithm with alignment for free-hand 3D ultrasound. A set of ultrasound images with the associated positions and orientations are stored and used to reconstruct a given region of interest (ROI). In freehand ultrasound, the inspection planes are not parallel nor uniformly spaced. The proposed reconstruction algorithm deals with this non uniform samplin...