Free fibula flap is routinely used for mandibular reconstructions. For contouring the flap, multiple osteotomies should be shaped to reproduce the native mandibular contour. The bone segments should be fixed using a reconstructive plate. This plate is usually manually bent by the surgeon during surgery. This method is efficient, but during reconstruction it is complicated to reproduce the compl...

Pregnancy in women with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) has been linked with an increased incidence of adverse foetal outcomes when compared to women without haemoglobinopathies (HbAA). There's a paucity of data into foetal outcomes for infants born to women with SCD. Customised growth charts have been demonstrated to be better than population-based growth charts at identifying unhealthy small babies...

The formation and operation of dynamic and open virtual organisations is a central concern in business-to-business e-commerce. Virtual organisations enable partner companies to develop and manufacture customised products with low costs and rapid delivery. Agent-based architectures are an effective platform for such virtual organisations because they provide mechanisms to allow organisations to ...

An ontology defines a common vocabulary that facilitates the sharing of information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and their relations. In the Grid environment (GE) where so many different implementations are available, the need for semantic matching based on a defined ontology becomes increasingly important. Especially for service dis...

BACKGROUND Retreatments are sometimes necessary to correct residual or induced refractive errors following refractive surgery. Many different combinations of primary treatment methods and retreatment techniques have been studied, however, few studies have investigated wavefront-optimized (WFO) technology for retreatment following primary refractive surgery. This study aimed to report the outcom...

PURPOSE We sought to determine whether laser subepithelial keratomileusis (LASEK) and photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) are effective methods for correcting amblyopiogenic refractive errors in children. METHODS Thirty-six eyes in 35 amblyopic children, who ranged in age from 4 to 16 years (mean, 8.4 years), received treatment for large magnitude ametropia. Seventy-two percent (25/35) of the c...

The existing acute shortage of good quality donor corneas in a developing country like India, prompted us to attempt customised component corneal transplantation. Using this surgical strategy, one corneoscleral button was used for three recipients. Anterior and posterior lamellar discs were used for anterior lamellar keratoplasty and Descemet's stripping endothelial keratoplasty in patients wit...

As part of a general framework for the development of global information systems, we include support for the development of aural interfaces. The framework uses an object-oriented database for the management of application, document content and presentation data. The access layer is based around an XML server and XSLT for document generation from default and customised templates. Specifically, ...

In this paper we examine how the adoption of EDI can increase the flexibility of a modular supply chain of organisations to match customised demand, and how expected costs and benefits of such the adoption are distributed among these organisations. Within a modular supply chain, organisations form process module networks in response to customised demand. These networks indicate in what order pr...

Automated assembly of microsystems is often characterised by small batch sizes combined with high product diversity. This characteristics demand a large number of endeffectors. In the last years in particular grippers have been developed for automatic assembly of hybrid microsystems. These have been optimised for a specific task and have one thing in common: there is no compatible interface. Fr...