3D Geometric Analysis of Tubular Objects based on Surface Normal Accumulation

This paper proposes a simple and efficient method for the reconstruction and extraction of geometric parameters from 3D tubular objects. Our method constructs an image that accumulates surface normal information, then peaks within this image are located by tracking. Finally, the positions of these are optimized to lie precisely on the tubular shape centerline. This method is very versatile, and is able to process various input data types like full or partial mesh acquired from 3D laser scans, 3D height map or discrete volumetric images. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement, contains few parameters and can be computed in linear time with respect to the number of surface faces. Since the extracted tube centerline is accurate, we are able to decompose the tube into rectilinear parts and torus-like parts. This is done with a new linear time 3D torus detection algorithm, which follows the same principle of a previous work on 2D arc circle recognition. Detailed experiments show the versatility, accuracy and robustness of our new method.Comment: in 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Sep 2015, Genova, Italy. 201

Nursing care received by older patients in Italian medical units: findings from an explorative study.

According to available evidence, when the nurse-to-patient ratio is insufficient the occurrence of accidental falls, pressure sores, malnutrition, hospital-acquired dependency in activities of daily living, infections associated with nursing practice and errors in administration of medication as well as mortality all increase. However, while several countries have established a body of evidence and policies concerning the minimum nurse-to-patient ratio, the amount of nursing care offered in Italian medical units remains under-studied. METHODS: Evaluating variability in the nurse-to-patient ratio and in the skill-mix offered, 12 medical units willing to participate were evaluated with a face-to-face interview performed by a researcher to the nurse manager of the unit. The role of the unit at the hospital level, the nurse-to-patient ratio available on a daily basis, the skill-mix and the strategies enacted in the case of patient overcrowding or understaffing were collected. RESULTS: The mission of the medical units is devoted mainly towards elderly people. The bed occupancy is high and the strategies adopted in case of patient overcrowding determine unstable environments both for medical units (extra beds) and other units (patients temporarily hosted). In the medical units, nurses attend to 5-13 patients in the morning, 7.6-14.6 in the afternoon, and 12.3-30.5 during the night. The skill-mix ranges from 43.5 % (more nursing aides than nurses are available on the ward) to 81.2 % (more nurses than nursing aides are available). CONCLUSIONS: This assessment exercise indicates that nursing care in medical units faces high workloads. Establishing national minimum standards of nursing care to be delivered towards older people admitted in Italian medical units is recommended

Precise Cross-Section Estimation on Tubular Organs

International audienc

Evaluation of Structured Collaborative Tagging for Web Service Matchmaking

Turning Web services into Semantic Web Services (SWS) can be prohibitively expensive for large repositories. In such cases collecting community descriptions in forms of structured tags can be a more affordable approach to describe Web services. However, little is understood about how tagging impacts performance of retrieval. There are neither real structured tagging systems for Web services, nor real corpora of structured tags. To start addressing these issues, in our approach, we motivated taggers to tag services in a partially controlled environment. Specifically, taggers were given application requirements and asked to find and tag services that match the requirements. Tags collected in this way were used for Web service matchmaking and evaluated within the framework of the Cross-Evaluation Track of the Third Semantic Service Selection 2009 contest. As part of the lessons learned, we explain relations between description schema (SWS, tags, flat document) and matchmaking heuristics, and performance of retrieval in different search scenarios. We also analyze reliability of tagging system performance as related to taggers/searchers autonomy. Finally, we identify threats to results credibility stemming from partial control of the tags collection process