rent paraesophageal hernia by means of laparoscopic hiatal reinforcement using a 12 ” 10−cm titanium−covered polypropy− lene mesh. He began to experience non− specific epigastric abdominal discomfort 10 months later. An upper endoscopy re− vealed the presence of mesh at the gas− troesophageal junction (l" Fig. 1), which was then removed endoscopically, using grasping forceps (l" Fig. 2). Since ...

In this paper, a fast path planning method by optimization of a path graph for both efficiency and accuracy is proposed. A conventional quadtree-based path planning approach is simple, robust, and efficient. However, it has two limitations. The first limitation is that many small cells are required to represent obstacles because the positions and shapes of the cells are not object-dependent and...

Existing physically based deformation techniques, such as the finite element method (FEM) and the mass-spring systems (MSS), require the deformed object to be properly meshed. This is arguably the most expensive manual intervention process. In this paper, we propose a mesh-free deformation technique where only unconnected points are involved. The idea is to develop an approximate analytical sol...