This paper addresses automatic skill assessment in robotic minimally invasive surgery. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are developed for individual surgical gestures (or surgemes) that comprise a typical bench-top surgical training task. It is known that such HMMs can be used to recognize and segment surgemes in previously unseen trials. Here, the topology of each surgeme HMM is designed in a data-...

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of...

McFarland and Crouch (2002) reported substantial positive correlations (a) between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and response speed and (b) between IATs assessing racism or self-esteem and ostensibly unrelated control IATs. Using an IAT measure in millisecond-difference score format, they concluded that the IAT was confounded with general cognitive ability. A reanalysis of these data usin...

In the early 1990s, a set of new techniques for manipulating mouse DNA allowed researchers to 'knock out' specific genes and observe the effects of removing them on a live mouse. In animal behaviour genetics, questions about how to deploy these techniques to study the molecular basis of behaviour became quite controversial, with a number of key methodological issues dissecting the interdiscipli...

The purpose of this study was to compare performance factors of youth soccer players according to position. A total of 101 high school soccer players were selected and were classified into goalkeeper (n=7), defense (n=37), midfield (n=39), and forward (n=18) positions. All subjects were subjected to the Wingate test for anaerobic capacity, shuttle run test for aerobic capacity, and pass, kick, ...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to a salient event—where salience can be defined simply as an end-of-task reward, or as a more sophisticated heuristic (e.g., an intrinsically interesting event (Singh et al., 2004)). The goal of each skill in the chain is to reach a state where its successor skill can ...

Little is known about the cognitive demands that underlie surgical performance. Several studies have suggested that spatial ability plays a substantial role in surgical skill. An example of a skill in which spatial cognition appears to be of importance is the use of the angled laparoscope. This paper describes a virtual environment designed to assess and train the use of the angled laparoscope....

Current methods for manual evaluation of surgical skill yield a global score for the entire task. The global score does not inform surgical trainees about where in the task they need to improve. We developed and evaluated a framework to automatically generate an objective score for assessing skill in maneuvers (circumscribed segments) within a surgical task. We used an existing video and kinema...

ABSTRACT THE IMPACT OF NURSING SKILL MIX ON THE OUTCOMES OF HOSPITALIZED ADULT SURGICAL PATIENTS Danielle Altares Sarik Ann Kutney-Lee Rates of harm to surgical patients remain largely unchanged despite decades of initiatives to address safety concerns, while wide variations in mortality and failure to rescue (FTR) persist between hospitals. Despite the critical role that registered nurses (RNs...