Introduction: The accuracy of patient positioning plays an important role for radiotherapy tasks. Short and automated Quality Assurance (QA) programs are becoming one of the challenging tasks in Radiotherapy. The current study, investigates the accuracy of treatment couch positioning with four degrees of freedom (4DoF) using a fast and accurate method based on an image acquired...

A system for automated quality assurance in radiotherapy of a therapist's registration was designed and tested in clinical practice. The approach compliments the clinical software's automated registration in terms of algorithm configuration and performance, and constitutes a practical approach for ensuring safe patient setups. Per our convergence analysis, evolutionary algorithms perform better...

Rotational beds, prone position, and semi-recumbent position have been proposed as procedures to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). Rotational therapy uses a special bed designed to turn continuously, or nearly continuously, the patient from side to side; specific designs include kinetic therapy and continuous lateral rotation therapy. A meta-analysis of studies evaluating the effec...

Positioning the surgical patient requires special attention from the entire surgical team because anesthetized or sedated patients are not able to reposition themselves when needed to relieve discomfort or alert team members of the need for repositioning. Perioperative nurses must pay attention to positioning details and the possibility of injury at all times during the patient's procedure. Thi...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect on patient outcome of a teaching package for nurses designed to improve the positioning of stroke patients. DESIGN Cluster randomized controlled trial with six-month follow-up. SETTING Ten stroke rehabilitation hospital units located within one UK inner city region. These were randomized to control or intervention group. SUBJECTS A sample of 120 patients a...

H.M. Ross et al. (eds.), Minimally Invasive Approaches to Colon and Rectal Disease: Technique and Best Practices, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1581-1_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Key Points • Position patients in a manner to pad all pressure points and maximize gravity’s effects, while avoiding nerve damage and undue traction. • Appropriate abdominal access should be based on pa...

In this paper we present a system that uses Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology to correct the position of a patient in respect to a previously acquired reference surface. A ToF sensor enables the acquisition of a 3-D surface model containing more than 25,000 points using a single sensor in real time. One advantage of this technology is that the high lateral resolution makes it possible to accurate...

In the last years, Virtual Reality medical simulators are gaining importance, training new physicians in a safe environment. In order to improve the trainees’ skills, these applications let them perform a specific medical procedure in different virtual patients with different anatomical variation. Typically, virtual patients are generated from medical imaging data sets, such as MRI (magnetic re...

The main hindrance to the diffusion of proton therapy facilities is the high cost for gantry installations. An alternative technical option is provided by fixed-beam treatment rooms, where the patient is rotated and translated in space with a robotic arm solution to enable beam incidence from various angles. The technological efforts based on robotic applications made up to now for patient posi...