Virtual reality surgery simulation: A survey on patient specific solution

For surgeons, the precise anatomy structure and its dynamics are important in the surgery interaction, which is critical for generating the immersive experience in VR based surgical training applications. Presently, a normal therapeutic scheme might not be able to be straightforwardly applied to a specific patient, because the diagnostic results are based on averages, which result in a rough solution. Patient Specific Modeling (PSM), using patient-specific medical image data (e.g. CT, MRI, or Ultrasound), could deliver a computational anatomical model. It provides the potential for surgeons to practice the operation procedures for a particular patient, which will improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment, thus enhance the prophetic ability of VR simulation framework and raise the patient care. This paper presents a general review based on existing literature of patient specific surgical simulation on data acquisition, medical image segmentation, computational mesh generation, and soft tissue real time simulation

A Built-In Strategy for Containment of Transgenic Plants: Creation of Selectively Terminable Transgenic Rice

Plant transgenic technology has been widely utilized for engineering crops for trait improvements and for production of high value proteins such as pharmaceuticals. However, the unintended spreading of commercial transgenic crops by pollination and seed dispersal is a major concern for environmental and food safety. Simple and reliable containment strategies for transgenes are highly desirable. Here we report a novel method for creating selectively terminable transgenic rice. In this method, the gene(s) of interest is tagged with a RNA interference cassette, which specifically suppresses the expression of the bentazon detoxification enzyme CYP81A6 and thus renders transgenic rice to be sensitive to bentazon, a herbicide used for rice weed control. We generated transgenic rice plants by this method using a new glyphosate resistant 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) gene from Pesudomonas putida as the gene of interest, and demonstrated that these transgenic rice plants were highly sensitive to bentazon but tolerant to glyphosate, which is exactly the opposite of conventional rice. Field trial of these transgenic rice plants further confirmed that they can be selectively killed at 100% by one spray of bentazon at a regular dose used for conventional rice weed control. Furthermore, we found that the terminable transgenic rice created in this study shows no difference in growth, development and yield compared to its non-transgenic control. Therefore, this method of creating transgenic rice constitutes a novel strategy of transgene containment, which appears simple, reliable and inexpensive for implementation

On the effects of the fix geometric constraint in 2D profiles on the reusability of parametric 3D CAD models

[EN] In order to be reusable, history-based feature-based parametric CAD models must reliably allow for modifications while maintaining their original design intent. In this paper, we demonstrate that relations that fix the location of geometric entities relative to the reference system produce inflexible profiles that reduce model reusability. We present the results of an experiment where novice students and expert CAD users performed a series of modifications in different versions of the same 2D profile, each defined with an increasingly higher number of fix geometric constraints. Results show that the amount of fix constraints in a 2D profile correlates with the time required to complete reusability tasks, i.e., the higher the number of fix constraints in a 2D profile, the less flexible and adaptable the profile becomes to changes. In addition, a pilot software tool to automatically track this type of constraints was developed and tested. Results suggest that the detection of fix constraint overuse may result in a new metric to assess poor quality models with low reusability. The tool provides immediate feedback for preventing high semantic level quality errors, and assistance to CAD users. Finally, suggestions are introduced on how to convert fix constraints in 2D profiles into a negative metric of 3D model quality.The authors would like to thank Raquel Plumed for her support in the statistical analysis. This work has been partially funded by Grant UJI-A02017-15 (Universitat Jaume I) and DPI201784526-R (MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE), project CAL-MBE. The authors also wish to thank the editor and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped us improve the quality of the paper.González-Lluch, C.; Company, P.; Contero, M.; Pérez Lopez, DC.; Camba, JD. (2019). On the effects of the fix geometric constraint in 2D profiles on the reusability of parametric 3D CAD models. 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Relevance Feedback for Shape-based Pathology in Spine X-ray Image Retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) has become an active research area in Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR). RF attempts to bridge the gap between low-level image features and high-level human visual perception by analyzing and employing user feedback in an effort to refine the retrieval results to better reflect individual user preference. Need for overcoming this gap is more evident in medical image retrieval due to commonly found characteristics in medical images, viz., (1) images belonging to different pathological categories exhibit subtle differences, and (2) the subjective nature of images often elicits different opinions, even among experts. The National Library of Medicine maintains a collection of digitized spine X-rays from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II). A pathology found frequently in these images is the Anterior Osteophyte (AO), which is of interest to researchers in bone morphometry and osteoarthritis. Since this pathology is manifested as deviation in shape, we have proposed the use of partial shape matching (PSM) methods for pathology-specific spinal X-ray image retrieval. Shape matching tends to suffer from the variability in the pathology expressed by the vertebral shape. This paper describes a novel weight-updating approach to RF. The algorithm was tested and evaluated on a subset of data selected from the image collection. The ground truth was established using Macnab’s classification to determine pathology type and a grading system developed by us to express the pathology severity. Experimental results show nearly 20 % overall improvement on retrievin

Design of an Ultrawideband CPW-Fed Monopole Antenna with a Band-Notch Function

In this paper, a CPW-fed monopole antenna for ultra wideband (UWB) applications using band-notch characteristics with size of (24×24×1.6 mm³ ) is presented. The antenna is designed for operation across the entire UWB from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with band-notch in 5-6 GHz, by inserting an H-shaped slot on the CPW staircase feed line. The proposed antenna has a reflection coefficient below -10 dB through the frequency band. Also, reasonable gain values and good radiation pattern over the same frequency band have been observed. Details of the proposed antenna and experimental results are discussed and parametric study is presented