4 research outputs found
Patient-Specific Implants in Musculoskeletal (Orthopedic) Surgery
Most of the treatments in medicine are patient specific, aren’t they? So why should we bother with individualizing implants if we adapt our therapy to patients anyway? Looking at the neighboring field of oncologic treatment, you would not question the fact that individualization of tumor therapy with personalized antibodies has led to the thriving of this field in terms of success in patient survival and positive responses to alternatives for conventional treatments. Regarding the latest cutting-edge developments in orthopedic surgery and biotechnology, including new imaging techniques and 3D-printing of bone substitutes as well as implants, we do have an armamentarium available to stimulate the race for innovation in medicine. This Special Issue of Journal of Personalized Medicine will gather all relevant new and developed techniques already in clinical practice. Examples include the developments in revision arthroplasty and tumor (pelvic replacement) surgery to recreate individual defects, individualized implants for primary arthroplasty to establish physiological joint kinematics, and personalized implants in fracture treatment, to name but a few
SemNet: the knowledge representation of lolita
Many systems of Knowledge Representation exist, but none were designed specifically for general purpose large scale natural language processing. This thesis introduces a set of metrics to evaluate the suitability of representations for this purpose, derived from an analysis of the problems such processing introduces. These metrics address three broad categories of question: Is the representation sufficiently expressive to perform its task? What implications has its design on the architecture of the system using it? What inefficiencies are intrinsic to its design? An evaluation of existing Knowledge Representation systems reveals that none of them satisfies the needs of general purpose large scale natural language processing. To remedy this lack, this thesis develops a new representation: SemNet. SemNet benefits not only from the detailed requirements analysis but also from insights gained from its use as the core representation of the large scale general purpose system LOLITA (Large-scale Object-based Linguistic Interactor, Translator, and Analyser). The mapping process between Natural language and representation is presented in detail, showing that the representation achieves its goals in practice