Introduction Cholecystectomy is the common operation of the biliary tract. During cholecystectomy cystic duct can be secured with the sutures or clips. Knot tying in open surgery can be easily be learned and performed. However, knot tying becomes challenging and frustrating when performed laparoscopically. In laparoscopy there is lack of direct manual contact with tissue, therefore the sense of...

Arthroscopic reconstructive surgery in the shoulder is an extremely demanding. The advent of suture anchors, arthroscopic knot-tying techniques, and new arthroscopic instruments has greatly facilitated its development. Knowledge of the anatomy and surgical principles alone are not enough. Good visualization is critical. We describe a simple home-made device that can be very useful in improving ...

The introduction of telemanipulator systems into cardiac surgery enabled the heart surgeon to perform minimally invasive procedures with high precision and stereoscopic view. For further improvement and especially for inclusion of autonomous action sequences, implementation of force-feedback is necessary. The aim of our study was to provide a robotic scenario giving the surgeon an impression ve...

Phonetic decision-tree based acoustic modeling has been widely used in speech recognition systems. However, the assumption that all states clustered in the same leaf node share both their Gaussians and mixture weights restricts the improvement of the acoustic models. In this paper, we propose a new structure called a two-level decisiontree. With this structure we can make better use of training...

The performances of the demiphone (a context dependent subword unit that models independently the left and the right parts of a phoneme) and the triphone are compared. Continuous density hidden Markov modeling for both types of units is tested with the HTK software using decision-tree state clustering. The speech material is taken from the SpeechDat Spanish database, composed by continuous spee...

A global picture is drawn tying together most exact cosmological solutions of gravitational theories in four or more spacetime dimensions.

The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is generally asymptotically consistent but is susceptible to overfitting. To combat this problem, regularization methods which reduce the variance at the cost of (slightly) increasing the bias are often employed in practice. In this paper, we present an alternative variance reduction (regularization) technique that quantizes the MLE estimates as a post pro...