System benchmark of CAD-CAM in the area of tool making

In the following thesis a benchmark for CAD/CAM systems in the area of tool making is explained. This benchmark is adapted to the specific requirements existing in a hot-forging company located in the region of Styria (Austria). The mid-sized company demands an improvement of the current software situation to enhance the efficiency of the CAD/CAM processes and its landscape towards future digitalization processes. Due to the broad spectrum of CAD/CAM software systems existing in today’s market, it might be challenging to choose one software system that really fits to the requirements. In order to solve this situation, a benchmark is done. Out of this benchmark, two CAD/CAM software systems were considered as future potential alternatives based on the requirements existing at the company. Then, a decision-making procedure made of five different scenarios and based on certain criteria is proposed. These five different scenarios are the combination of the current software systems existing at the Styrian forging company and the alternative software systems.<br /

Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS): A Novel Tool for Intravascular Coronary Imaging

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) arising from plaque rupture is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) combined with intravascular ultrasound (NIRS-IVUS) is a novel catheter-based intravascular imaging modality that provides a chemogram of the coronary artery wall, which enables the detection of lipid core and specific quantification of lipid accumulation measured as the lipid-core burden index (LCBI) in patients undergoing coronary angiography. Recent studies have shown that NIRS-IVUS can identify vulnerable plaques and vulnerable patients associated with increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, whereas an increased coronary plaque LCBI may predict a higher risk of future cardiovascular events and periprocedural events. NIRS is a promising tool for the detection of vulnerable plaques in CAD patients, PCI-guidance procedures, and assessment of lipid-lowering therapies. Previous trials have evaluated the impact of statin therapy on coronary NIRS defined lipid cores, whereas NIRS could further be used as a surrogate end point of future ACS in phase II clinical trials evaluating novel anti-atheromatous drug therapies. Multiple ongoing studies address the different potential clinical applications of NIRS-IVUS imaging as a valuable tool for coronary plaque characterization and predictor of future coronary events in CAD patients

784-3 Prognostic Significance of Intimal Thickening Detected by Intracoronary Ultrasound in Heart Transplant Recipients

Intracoronary ultrasound (ICUS) is a sensitive tool for the detection of intimal thickening in coronary arteries of heart transplants recipients. However, the prognostic significance of this intimal thickening has not been proven.During a one year period, 90 transplant recipients had ICUS examination at the time of their annual angiogram. For each ICUS study an intimal index (II), defined as the ratio of the plaque area to the area within the media, was measured for the most diseased segment imaged. The angiogram at the time of ICUS was reviewed for the presence of visually apparent coronary artery disease (V-CADI· Those patients (n=19) with V-CAD present at the time of ICUS were excluded from the study. The time since transplantation for the 71 pts without V-CAD ranged from 1 to 15 yrs, with a mean of 4.2 yrs and median of 3.9 yrs. The subsequent annual follow-up angiograms of the 71 patients without V-CAD at the time of ICUS were reviewed for the development of V-CAD. Mean duration of angiographic follow-up was 2.0 yrs (range 1–3 yrs).V-CAD developed on follow-up angiograms in 13 of the 71 pts. Mean time to development of V-CAD was 1.5 yrs. Forty-six patients had II&lt;0.3, 4 (9%) of whom subsequently developed V-CAD. Twenty-five patients had II ≥0.3, 9 (36%) of whom developed V-CAD. Odds ratio for future V-CAD between pts with II&lt;0.3 and II 2: 0.3 was 5.9 (95% CI 1.8 to 19.0, difference significant at p&lt;0.01 by Fisher's Exact test).In a subgroup of 22 patients more than 5 years post transplantation at the time of ICUS, 12 had II&lt;0.3 and 10 had II 2≥0.3. In this subgroup none of the 12 pts with II&lt;0.3 developed V-CAD and only 1 of the 10 with II &gt;0.3 developed V-CAD (difference not significant).Conclusion — Among patients more than 1 year and less than 5 years post-transplantation without visually apparent angiographic coronary artery disease, the presence of moderate to severe intimal thickening by ICUS is predictive of the future development of angiographically apparent CAD. Intimal thickening as detected by ICUS is of prognostic significance in patients with angiographically silent transplant coronary artery disease

Integrated Polygenic Tool Substantially Enhances Coronary Artery Disease Prediction

BACKGROUND: There is considerable interest in whether genetic data can be used to improve standard cardiovascular disease risk calculators, as the latter are routinely used in clinical practice to manage preventative treatment. METHODS: Using the UK Biobank resource, we developed our own polygenic risk score for coronary artery disease (CAD). We used an additional 60 000 UK Biobank individuals to develop an integrated risk tool (IRT) that combined our polygenic risk score with established risk tools (either the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology pooled cohort equations [PCE] or UK QRISK3), and we tested our IRT in an additional, independent set of 186 451 UK Biobank individuals. RESULTS: The novel CAD polygenic risk score shows superior predictive power for CAD events, compared with other published polygenic risk scores, and is largely uncorrelated with PCE and QRISK3. When combined with PCE into an IRT, it has superior predictive accuracy. Overall, 10.4% of incident CAD cases were misclassified as low risk by PCE and correctly classified as high risk by the IRT, compared with 4.4% misclassified by the IRT and correctly classified by PCE. The overall net reclassification improvement for the IRT was 5.9% (95% CI, 4.7–7.0). When individuals were stratified into age-by-sex subgroups, the improvement was larger for all subgroups (range, 8.3%–15.4%), with the best performance in 40- to 54-year-old men (15.4% [95% CI, 11.6–19.3]). Comparable results were found using a different risk tool (QRISK3) and also a broader definition of cardiovascular disease. Use of the IRT is estimated to avoid up to 12 000 deaths in the United States over a 5-year period. CONCLUSIONS: An IRT that includes polygenic risk outperforms current risk stratification tools and offers greater opportunity for early interventions. Given the plummeting costs of genetic tests, future iterations of CAD risk tools would be enhanced with the addition of a person’s polygenic risk

On the Internationalization of CAD Learning Through an English Glossary

Comunicació presentada al XXIX Congreso International INGEGRAF 2019 "La transformación Digital en la Ingeniería Gráfica” (20-21 Junio 2019, Logroño - La Rioja)The internationalization of higher education is an essential factor to improve the quality and efficiency of Spanish universities, providing students with the main skills, and knowledge to interact effectively in an international and multicultural work context as professionals. The internationalization of universities must be a transversal process, not exclusive of its territorial dimension, aimed at advancing towards a society and a knowledge economy that propitiate a solid and stable model of development and growth. To this end, professors in the area of Graphic Expression for Engineering at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) have developed an online glossary of specific terms in English related to the 3D modelling CAD tools used in Graphic Engineering subjects. This new online tool seeks to train students to increase their technical vocabulary in English and improve their learning and communication skills to face possible collaborations in future European projects. The glossary is introduced weekly to the students during the course. Subsequently, a survey is conducted to the students to verify the effectiveness of the training. This work collects the results and conclusions of this analysis

Multimodal T2w and DWI Prostate Gland Automated Registration

Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) is emerging as a promising tool in the clinical pathway of prostate cancer (PCa). The registration between a structural and a functional imaging modality, such as T2-weighted (T2w) and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is fundamental in the development of a mpMRI-based computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for PCa. Here, we propose an automated method to register the prostate gland in T2w and DWI image sequences by a landmark-based affine registration and a non-parametric diffeomorphic registration. An expert operator manually segmented the prostate gland in both modalities on a dataset of 20 patients. Target registration error and Jaccard index, which measures the overlap between masks, were evaluated pre-and post-registration resulting in an improvement of 44% and 21%, respectively. In the future, the proposed method could be useful in the framework of a CAD system for PCa detection and characterization in mpMRI

Open-source tool for automatic import of coded surveying data to multiple vector layers in GIS environment

This paper deals with a tool that enables import of the coded data in a single text file to more than one vector layers (including attribute tables), together with automatic drawing of line and polygon objects and with optional conversion to CAD. Python script v.in.survey is available as an add-on for open-source software GRASS GIS (GRASS Development Team). The paper describes a case study based on surveying at the archaeological mission at Tell-el Retaba (Egypt). Advantages of the tool (e.g. significant optimization of surveying work) and its limits (demands on keeping conventions for the points’ names coding) are discussed here as well. Possibilities of future development are suggested (e.g. generalization of points’ names coding or more complex attribute table creation)

A survey, review, and future trends of skin lesion segmentation and classification

The Computer-aided Diagnosis or Detection (CAD) approach for skin lesion analysis is an emerging field of research that has the potential to alleviate the burden and cost of skin cancer screening. Researchers have recently indicated increasing interest in developing such CAD systems, with the intention of providing a user-friendly tool to dermatologists to reduce the challenges encountered or associated with manual inspection. This article aims to provide a comprehensive literature survey and review of a total of 594 publications (356 for skin lesion segmentation and 238 for skin lesion classification) published between 2011 and 2022. These articles are analyzed and summarized in a number of different ways to contribute vital information regarding the methods for the development of CAD systems. These ways include: relevant and essential definitions and theories, input data (dataset utilization, preprocessing, augmentations, and fixing imbalance problems), method configuration (techniques, architectures, module frameworks, and losses), training tactics (hyperparameter settings), and evaluation criteria. We intend to investigate a variety of performance-enhancing approaches, including ensemble and post-processing. We also discuss these dimensions to reveal their current trends based on utilization frequencies. In addition, we highlight the primary difficulties associated with evaluating skin lesion segmentation and classification systems using minimal datasets, as well as the potential solutions to these difficulties. Findings, recommendations, and trends are disclosed to inform future research on developing an automated and robust CAD system for skin lesion analysis

Knowledge and Perception of Coronary Artery Disease in High-Risk Women

Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death in America and kills more women each year than all other cancers combined. While women’s level of awareness of heart disease has increased, they often do not perceive their risk of heart disease accurately, nor do they understand the importance of adopting heart-healthy behaviors to reduce risk. Objective: By implementing a combination of counseling from a health care provider and computer-based tailored education, this project aimed to test the effectiveness of using the Go Red for Women™ Heart CheckUp as an educational intervention for high-risk women to increase the accurate perception of risk, improve CAD knowledge, and increase intent to make behavioral changes. Methods and Discussion: Twenty-one women with a history of CAD, myocardial infarction, percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty, or coronary artery bypass grafting completed the Go Red for Women™ Heart CheckUp tool and rated their perception of risk from CAD and belief that they could change their risk both before and after the tool. There was an increase in perception of risk and belief in change after the tool. Qualitative data showed participants were educated about CAD. Conclusion: The Go Red for Women™ Heart Check-up tool was shown to be useful in educating high-risk women about their cardiac risk and in promoting heart-healthy behaviors