Mind the gap: Robotic Mission Planning Meets Software Engineering

In the context of robotic software, the selection of an appropriate planner is one of the most crucial software engineering decisions. Robot planners aim at computing plans (i.e., blueprint of actions) to accomplish a complex mission. While many planners have been proposed in the robotics literature, they are usually evaluated on showcase examples, making hard to understand whether they can be effectively (re)used for realising complex missions, with heterogeneous robots, and in real-world scenarios. In this paper we propose ENFORCE, a framework which allows wrapping FM-based planners into comprehensive software engineering tools, and considers complex robotic missions. ENFORCE relies on (i) realistic maps (e.g, fire escape maps) that describe the environment in which the robots are deployed; (ii) temporal logic for mission specification; and (iii) Uppaal model checker to compute plans that satisfy mission specifications. We evaluated ENFORCE by analyzing how it supports computing plans in real case scenarios, and by evaluating the generated plans in simulated and real environments. The results show that while ENFORCE is adequate for handling single-robot applications, the state explosion still represents a major barrier for reusing existing planners in multi-robot applications

3D Volume Reconstruction by Serially Acquired 2D Slices Using a Distance Transform-Based Global Cost Function

Abstract. An accurate, computationally eÆcient and fully-automated algorithm for the alignment of 2D serially acquired sections forming a 3D volume is presented. The method accounts for the main shortcomings of 3D image alignment: corrupted data (cuts and tears), dissimilarities or discontinuities between slices, missing slices. The approach relies on the optimization of a global energy function, based on the object shape, measuring the similarity between a slice and its neighborhood in the 3D volume. Slice similarity is computed using the distance transform measure in both directions. No particular direction is privileged in the method avoiding global osets, biases in the estimation and error prop-agation. The method was evaluated on real images (medical, biological and other CT scanned 3D data) and the experimental results demon-strated the method's accuracy as reconstuction errors are less than 1 degree in rotation and less than 1 pixel in translation.

Current management of the gastrointestinal complications of systemic sclerosis.

Systemic sclerosis is a multisystem autoimmune disorder that involves the gastrointestinal tract in more than 90% of patients. This involvement can extend from the mouth to the anus, with the oesophagus and anorectum most frequently affected. Gut complications result in a plethora of presentations that impair oral intake and faecal continence and, consequently, have an adverse effect on patient quality of life, resulting in referral to gastroenterologists. The cornerstones of gastrointestinal symptom management are to optimize symptom relief and monitor for complications, in particular anaemia and malabsorption. Early intervention in patients who develop these complications is critical to minimize disease progression and improve prognosis. In the future, enhanced therapeutic strategies should be developed, based on an ever-improving understanding of the intestinal pathophysiology of systemic sclerosis. This Review describes the most commonly occurring clinical scenarios of gastrointestinal involvement in patients with systemic sclerosis as they present to the gastroenterologist, with recommendations for the suggested assessment protocol and therapy in each situation

Cervical external root resorption: 3-year follow-up of a case.

Contains fulltext : 69859.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Cervical external root resorption can be present in natural teeth, involving one or more teeth in the same patient. The incidence of these lesions appears random and the etiology remains unclear. Cervical external root resorption has been considered a difficult clinical situation, and its diagnosis and treatment of the defect challenging. The present report describes a case of multiple external cervical resorption lesions involving four teeth, including the history, and the clinical and radiographic findings. The treatment included surgical intervention and restoration of the defect without sacrificing the pulp. A 3-year re-evaluation of the case confirmed a stable, uneventful clinical recovery. (J. Oral Sci. 50, 487-491, 2008)

Physicians' and pharmacists' opinions regarding the E-prescription systems

The e-Prescription systems are modern and efficient prescribing tools which can affect the quality of the healthcare services. The aim of this study is to evaluate the e-Prescription systems in Greece based the users' opinions. The survey was conducted in 2019 among 157 randomly selected healthcare profesionals through an on-line survey tool. The 51.2% of the sample were pharmacists and 48.8% physicians. 80.7% believe that the e-Prescription systems are reliable. More than the half of the professionals has the view that the e-Prescription systems are useful. Regarding to the ease of use, the e-Prescription systems, seem to can not fulfill sufficiently the participants' requirements. © 2020 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press

Tomographic Image Reconstruction with a Spatially Varying Gamma Mixture Prior

A spatially varying Gamma mixture model prior is employed for tomographic image reconstruction, ensuring effective noise elimination and the preservation of region boundaries. We define a line process, modeling edges between image segments, through appropriate Markov random field smoothness terms which are based on the Student’s t-distribution. The proposed algorithm consists of two alternating steps. In the first step, the mixture model parameters are automatically estimated from the image. In the second step, the reconstructed image is estimated by optimizing the maximum-a-posteriori criterion using the one-step-late expectation–maximization and preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithms. Numerical experiments on various photon-limited image scenarios show that the proposed model outperforms the compared state-of-the-art reconstruction models. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature