BACKGROUND Although local anaesthesia for knee arthroscopy is a well-documented procedure, arthroscopy under local anaesthesia is often interrupted because of intolerable discomfort and pain. Warming local anaesthetic solutions may increase its anaesthetic effect. We tested whether intra-articular injection of warmed lidocaine solution could improve intraoperative anaesthetic and postoperative ...

Helsgaun has introduced and implemented the lower tolerances (α-values) for an approximation of Held-Karp’s 1-tree with the purpose to improve the Lin-Kernighan’s Heuristic (LKH) for the Symmetric TSP (STSP). The LKH appears to exceed the performance of all STSP heuristic algorithms proposed to date. In this paper we improve the Helsgaun’s LKH based on an approximation of Zhang and Looks’ backb...

This paper presents a novel method for interest region description. We adopted the idea that the appearance of an interest region can be well characterized by the distribution of its local features. The most well-known descriptor built on this idea is the SIFT descriptor that uses gradient as the local feature. Thus far, existing texture features are not widely utilized in the context of region...

Recently spatial pyramid matching (SPM) with scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor has been successfully used in image classification. Unfortunately, the codebook generation and feature quantization procedures using SIFT feature have the high complexity both in time and space. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an approach which combines local binary patterns (LBP)...

Background Randomised control clinical trials of acupuncture have been hampered by the challenges of assessing it as a complex intervention. Controlling for and separating placebo effects whilst identifying its efficacy as a treatment can be difficult [1]. The comparison of acupuncture to other complex interventions has been recommended to assess the effectiveness of acupuncture against other i...

In this paper, we present an evolutionary algorithm application to partitioning VLSI circuits on subcircuits with minimal number of connections between them. The algorithm is characterized by a multi-layer chromosome structure. Due to this structure, the partition of circuits is possible without applying a repair mechanism in the algorithm. The test circuits chosen from literature and created r...

The shapes of pulse profiles, especially their variations with respect to observing frequencies, are very important to understand emission mechanisms of pulsars, while no previous attempt has been made in interpreting the complicated phenomenology. In this paper, we present theoretical simulations for the integrated pulse profiles and their frequency evolution within the framework of the invers...

Image-level classification from hyperspectral images (HSI) has seldom been addressed in the literature. Instead, traditional classification methods have focused on individual pixels. Pixel-level HSI classification comes at a high computational burden though. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline for classification at image-level, where each band in the HSI is considered as a separate image...

This paper considers the identification of large-scale 1D networks consisting of identical LTI dynamical systems. A new subspace identification method is developed that only uses local input-output information and does not rely on knowledge about the local state interaction. The identification of the local system matrices (up to a similarity transformation) is done via a low dimensional subspac...

The Cuachy problem for the 3D vortical flow of ideal barotropic fluid is considered. It is shown that the solution of the Cauchy problem is unique, if one considers seven dynamic equations for seven dependent variables: the density ρ, the velocity v and Lagrangian variables ξ = {ξ 1 , ξ 2 , ξ 3 }, labeling the fluid particles. If one considers only the closed (Euler) system of four equations fo...