Introduction: Umbilical hernia in adults poses a challenge to the surgeon. Understanding the anatomical and pathological intricacies of the hernia is pivotal in evolving a good repair. A multitude of repairs have been tried for repair of umbilical hernias. However none of them have withstood the test of time. Objective: The study aims at evolving a technique which provides mesh reinforced anato...

Background: The use of a bipedicled transverse rectus abdominis myocutaneous (TRAM) flap in breast reconstructions has required the prophylactic use of mesh in the lower seg ment of the hypogastrium, because of the frequency of bulging and herniations in the middle to long term. This study aims to record a technical procedure routinely used in breast recons­ tructions: bipedicled TRAM flap with...

In the theory of supervised learning, the identical assumption, i.e. the training and the test samples are drawn from the same probability distribution, plays a crucial role. Unfortunately, this essential assumption is often violated in the presence of selection bias. Under such condition, the standard supervised learning frameworks may suffer a significant bias. In this thesis, we use the impo...

We present a method for batch Q-learning when some of the data are missing. Our approach uses Bayesian multiple imputation to build Q-functions using all of the observed data. This is safer than using complete case analysis, i.e. throwing out incomplete training samples, because it can avoid non-response bias when possible. We also present a method for assessing confidence in the learned Qfunct...

Cooperative communications have been demonstrated to be effective in combating the multiple fading effects in wireless networks, and improving the network performance in terms of adaptivity, reliability, data throughput, and network lifetime. In this paper, we investigate the use of cooperative communications for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in resourceconstrained wireless sensor netwo...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the shear behavior hollow ferrocement beams self-compacting mortar reinforced with various types metallic (steel wire mesh) and non-metallic (fiber glass reinforcement. experimental program consists casting eight dimensions 150×225×2000 mm, 50 mm thickness a polystyrene cork core 50×125 mm. parameters were type reinforcement number layers mesh. result...

BACKGROUND Abdominal bulge after retroperitoneal dissection occurs at a rate of 1% to 56%. Injury to the T11 and T12 nerves is thought to result in abdominal musculature denervation, laxity, and symptomatic abdominal bulge. This complication has become more prevalent because the retroperitoneal approach for spinal surgery has become the preferred approach in specific lumbar and thoracic cases. ...

Hyper-heuristics can be identified as methodologies that search the space generated by a finite set of low level heuristics for solving search problems. An iterative hyper-heuristic framework can be thought of as requiring a single candidate solution and multiple perturbation low level heuristics. An initially generated complete solution goes through two successive processes (heuristic selectio...