BACKGROUND: Many medical procedures such as biopsies, spine injection, needle based aspirations, local ablation therapies are performed percutaneously (i.e., through the skin). A static [1] and adjustable [2] image overlay system was previously proposed to aid image-guided needle interventions. Increased calibration time, prone to misalignment, limited access around the patient, structural defo...

This paper presents the design of a flexible bending actuator using shape memory alloy (SMA) and its integration in attitude control for solar sailing. The SMA has advantages power-to-weight ratio light weight. mechanism models were designed developed. A neural network based adaptive controller was implemented to non-linear nature actuator. modules integrated into sail model with quaternion PD ...

The fact that the nucleus is lighter than its constituents, seems rather strange. How can whole have a smaller mass components? To get some intuition about how this possible, one look at simpler more familiar system exhibiting same phenomena; hydrogen atom. It turns out true here; atom little bit sum of constituents. This difference corresponds to ionisation energy hydrogen. observation allows ...

BACKGROUND Despite the current obesity epidemic, maternal underweight remains a common occurrence with potential adverse perinatal outcomes. METHODS We aimed to investigate the relationship between weight gain during pregnancy, and fetal growth in underweight women with low and late fertility. Women body mass index (BMI), defined according to the World Health Organization's definition, gestat...

This paper investigates height and weight differences between the two Koreas by comparing national anthropometric data published by the South Korean Research Institute of Standard and Science with United Nations survey data collected inside North Korea in 2002. For socioeconomic reasons, pre-school children raised in the developing country of North Korea are up to 13 cm shorter and up to 7 kg l...

Hierarchical scheduling is a basic technique to achieve temporal isolation between applications in high-integrity systems when an integrated approach is opted for over traditional federation. While comparatively heavyweight approaches to hierarchical scheduling have been prevailing until now, the new scheduling features of Ada 2005 enable lighter-weight techniques to be used. This will expected...

Heat transfer search (HTS) is a novel metaheuristic optimization algorithm that simulates the laws of thermodynamics and heat transfer. In this study, the HTS algorithm is adapted to truss structure optimization. Sizing optimization searches for the minimum weight of a structure subject to stress and displacement constraints. Three truss structures often taken as benchmarks in the optimization ...