Whilst laparoscopic surgical simulators are becoming increasingly realistic they can not, as yet, fully replicate the experience of live surgery. In particular tissue dissection in one task that is particularly challenging to replicate. Limitation of current attempts to simulate tissue dissection include: poor visual rendering; over simplification of the task and; unrealistic tissue properties....

Spatio-temporal local feature based bag of visual words algorithm (BOVW) has shown promising results in complex human action classification. However, one key disadvantage of BOVW is geometrical unconstraint, which makes it impossible to recognize different actions with the same features but different spatial-temporal distribution of these features. In this paper, we exploit the spatio-temporal ...

This paper presents a method for building roof contour extraction from digital images taken over complex urban scenes. The proposed method is based on a snakes-based energy function that represents building roof contours in digital images, which is optimized by using the dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. As most of the building roof contours are characterized by rectilinear sides intercepting...

The precise placement of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in device configurations has been accomplished by AC dielectrophoresis using a biomimetic surfactant, dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate (i.e. AOT) dispersed SWNTs. To better serve the utilization of SWNTs/AOT for device fabrication, the dispersion of SWNTs in AOT aqueous solutions was investigated at different micellar concentrations a...

The Stokes problem describes flow of an incompressible constant-viscosity fluid when the Reynolds number is small so that inertial and transient-time effects are negligible. The numerical solution of the Stokes problem requires special care, since classical finite element discretization schemes, such as piecewise linear interpolation for both the velocity and the pressure, fail to perform. Even...

background at altnagelvin, a district general hospital in northern ireland, we have observed that a significant number of hip fracture admissions are later readmitted for treatment of other medical conditions. these readmissions place increasing stress on the already significant burden that orthopedic trauma poses on national health services. objectives the aim of this study was to review a ser...

carpal fracture-dislocation is regarded as an unusual orthopedic injury and, thus, orthopedic surgeons are less experienced in dealing with and treating these fractures and dislocations. we report a 20-year-old worker man suffering from an unusual carpal fracture-dislocation. there was trans-scaphoid fracture and lunate dislocation with other carpal proximal bones toward volar of the wrist. two...