STUDY DESIGN Systematic review. OBJECTIVE To compare the effectiveness and safety between iliac crest bone graft (ICBG) and local autologous bone and allograft in the lumbar spine. METHODS A systematic search of multiple major medical reference databases identified studies evaluating spinal fusion in patients with degenerative joint disease using ICBG, local autograft, or allograft in the t...

Data fusion has been identified by the Department of Defense as a critical technology for the U.S. defense industry. Data fusion requires combining expertise in two areas — sensors and information integration. Although data fusion is a rapidly growing area, there is little synergy and use of common, reusable, and/or tailorable objects and models, especially across different disciplines, e.g., d...

Acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) mediates the formation of membrane raft (MR) redox signalosomes in a process that depends on a local acid microenvironment in coronary arterial endothelial cells (CAECs). However, it is not known how this local acid microenvironment is formed and maintained. The present study hypothesized that lysosomal V1 H(+)-ATPase provides a hospitable acid microenvironment for a...

Decentralized sensor networks are collections of individual local sensors that observe a common phenomenon, quantize their observations, and send this quantized information to a central processor (fusion center) which then makes a global decision about the phenomenon. Most of the existing literature in this field consider only the data fusion aspect of this problem, i.e., the statistical hypoth...

This paper considers the problem of distributed multi-hypothesis classification in the context of wireless sensor networks. The goal is to reliably classify an underlying hypothesis at a fusion center using simple localized decisions at individual sensors. The fusion-center classification must be performed despite the presence of faults in both local sensor decisions and transmission channels b...

This paper proposes a parallel matching algorithm for feature-based stereo vision. Features are zero-crossing (ZC) points detected with various sizes of Laplacian-Gaussian filters. In order to obtain candidate intervals of disparity, the disparity histogram is computed all over the image. The image is, then, divided into small areas and the disparity histogram in each local area is computed wit...

1566-2535/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2009.09.002 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Castane García), [email protected] (M.A. Patricio), molina@ URL: http://www.giaa.inf.uc3m.es (M.A. Patricio). In this paper we present a Cooperative Surveillance Multi-Agent System (CS-MAS) architecture extended to incorporate dynamic coalition...