Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) is the most common method of delivering long-term enteral feeding to patients who are unable to take adequate nutrition by mouth [1]. We sometimes encounter patients for whom it is difficult to install the mouthpiece because of limitations of their mouth opening, such as in patients with neuromuscular disorders. In such cases we had tried transnasal ins...

Ants are able to climb effortlessly on vertical and inverted smooth surfaces. When climbing, their feet touch the substrate not only with their pretarsal adhesive pads but also with dense arrays of fine hairs on the ventral side of the 3rd and 4th tarsal segments. To understand what role these different attachment structures play during locomotion, we analysed leg kinematics and recorded single...

Classifying materials from their appearance is a challenging problem, especially if illumination and pose conditions are permitted to change: highlights and shadows caused by 3D structure can radically alter a sample’s visual texture. Despite these difficulties, researchers have demonstrated impressive results on the CUReT database which contains many images of 61 materials under different cond...

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the visual cortex of visually impaired humans is active during tactile tasks. We sought to determine if this cross-modal activation in the primary visual cortex is correlated with vision loss in individuals with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited degenerative photoreceptor disease that progressively diminishes vision later in life. RP and sighted subjec...

0262-8856/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.imavis.2009.05.005 * Corresponding author. Address: IDIAP Research In Marconi 19, Martigny, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 277 217 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (B. Caputo), Hayman), [email protected] (M. Fritz), joe@n URLs: http://www.idiap.ch/bcaputo (B. Caputo), h darmstadt.de/mfritz (M. Fritz). Classifying materials from t...

Moving our fingertips toward objects to produce well-directed forces immediately upon contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. This apparently simple motion-to-force transition in fact involves a time-critical, predictive switch in control strategy. Given that dexterous manipulation must accommodate multiple mechanical conditions, we investigated whether and how this transition adapts ...

Two multi-purpose image recognition systems based on neural classification are proposed. First application is an image recognition based adaptive control system for micromechanics where the limited receptive area (LIRA) neural classifier is proposed for texture recognition of mechanically treated metal surfaces. The performance of the proposed classifier was tested on image database of 80 image...

Introduction: Most initial trials of antiadhesion technologies are currently carried out in rats or rabbits. This paper describes a simple, reliable technique for producing intraperitoneal adhesions in the mouse. This model has been validated using a hyaluronan/carboxymethylcellulose (HA/CMC) barrier (Seprafilm®; Genzyme, Somerville, NJ) currently in clinical use. Methods: Adult, FVB mice were ...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to determine the effect of blood contamination and haemostatic agent application on the shear bond strength (SBS) of different adhesives to dentin. MATERIALS AND METHODS Seventy-two extracted human molars were used in this study. Teeth were mounted acrylic in moulds. Mesial and distal surfaces were removed to obtain flat dentin surfaces (n=144) and grinded with a 600 gr...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of mechanical polishing (MP) and chemical polishing (CP) on the average surface roughness (Ra) of heat-cured (HC) and light-cured (LC) denture base acrylic resins. METHODS A total of 120 specimens (30 × 15 × 3 mm) were prepared from one HC and one LC acrylic resin. To remove nodules and gross surface irregularities, all specimens ...