Management of facial paralysis following treatment of neurosurgical tumours

The purpose of this study is to present our experience on improving the quality of life of patients with facial paralysis due to an operated intracranial tumour, by performing minimally invasive static reanimation procedures. We reviewed the clinical information pertaining to neurosurgical patients with facial paralysis that underwent static reanimation. The study included 11 patients with complete facial nerve paralysis of all nerve branches, that reported different primary complaints upon presentation. The performed procedures consisted of gold plate insertion into the superior eyelid, inferior eyelid ectropion correction or suture suspension. The functional results were favourable in all cases and the resulting appearance was acceptable. The choice of the different techniques used is discussed. Good outcomes are possible using static reanimation with an adequate adaptation of the techniques to the main patient complaint

Lookahead Widening

We present lookahead widening, a novel technique for using existing widening and narrowing operators to improve the precision of static analysis. This technique is both self-contained and fully-automatic in the sense that it does not rely on separate analyzes or human involvement. We show how to integrate lookahead widening into existing analyzers with minimal effort. Experimental results indicate that the technique is able to achieve sizable precision improvements at reasonable costs

Data Homogenization Method for Heterogeneous Sensors Applied to Reinforcement Learning

In autonomous navigation and route planning, the data obtained by the different sensors play a significant role. On the one hand, more data will lead to faster learning of the behavioral policy. On the other hand, agents equipped with different sensors will need more computing power to process the data, thus requiring more robust equipment and increasing the cost of implementation. In addition, the complexity of the algorithms increases as different types of data, i.e., data with different structures, have to be synchronized. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of homogenization and synchronization of data provided by heterogeneous sensors. Furthermore, it presents a novel method of estimating data in order to provide the agent with a 360-degree view of the environment, similar to that provided by a laser. The method’s performance compares the different behavioral policies obtained by different viewing angles of a camera with the policy obtained by a laser. The data obtained from the different viewing angles of each sensor are used in a path planning algorithm, which was designed to use a single 24-scan laser as an input source. The results show that the proposed method is robust since the behavior policies can be reused regardless of the viewing angle with which the sensor (camera) is provided. Furthermore, the proposed novel algorithm achieves an average efficiency of 68% and 94% using a 90 and 360-degree camera, respectively

Broadband enhanced fluorescence using Zinc-Oxide nanoflower arrays

ZnO nanostructures were fabricated into flower-like nanoscale arrays by the hydrothermal growth of ZnO nanowires onto a self-assembled monolayer of polystyrene spheres on a glass substrate. Fluorescent molecules conjugated with streptavidin were incubated on glass with 3-(glycidoxypropyl) trimethoxysilane (GPTS) modified and biotinylated bovine serum albumin (bBSA) attached (GPTS–bBSA), aligned ZnO nanorod arrays and ZnO nanoflower arrays, respectively. An enhancement factor of up to 45 was obtained from ZnO nanoflower arrays, compared to less than 10 for the aligned nanorods. More importantly, using the same substrate, we observed a broadband fluorescence enhancement. The level of enhancement obtained from the nanoflower arrays is comparable with that from Metal Enhanced Fluorescence. The broadband nature of this process makes it an attractive alternative for fluorescent based device development