Mass customization of medical devices and implants: state of the art and future directions

The medical field is one in which the need for customization can be clear cut, as providing tailored devices and implants for unique physiologies can provide for a better overall treatment than the use of 'off the shelf' devices and implants. Customization in the production of medical products can be roughly divided into consideration of medical devices, and of implantable parts or systems. The present paper outlines the current state of the art in both of these areas, presents details of projects that are ongoing at the University of Leeds and outlines future research directions.     

Effects of hypothalamic temperature changes on the sweat rate in Macaca mulatta

The concept of cardiac reconditioning centers for the prevention and rehabilitation of coronary patients has been tremendously successful in Germany over the past 20 years. At least 40 such centers are located throughout the country. Physicians, nurses, and physical therapists work closely together in the various facets of the rehabilitation process. The financial backing for these facilities is primarily through governmental and regional insurance companies, whose officials are apparently convinced that in the long run supporting preventive measures is financially sound. Objective data supporting their convictions come from studies such as that of Brusis, who showed that such as that of 1,500 employees was diminished by nearly 70 percent during a two-year period after cardiac reconditioning, as compared to a similar time period before the rehabilitation experience. Subjective benefits, which are extremely difficult to quantitate in meaningful terms, were nonetheless expressed by nearly all the patients with whom I conversed. Perhaps they have experienced the same feelings that Mark Twain did when he observed that "all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the Mountains breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts and healed them."     

Metal-electroceramic bonding in PZT through the selective application of laser energy

Ferrite powder has been directly bonded to the surface of poled lead zirconate titanate (PZT-4) using direct laser sintering. The resultant cohesion between the metal and ceramic is extremely good although care must be taken with the processing in order to limit the damage inflicted upon the PZT. Four point bending suggests that the strength of the processed samples has reduced to 60 MPa as compared to 76 MPa for the unprocessed ceramic. Electrical and piezoelectric measurements shows that the laser sintering had caused mechanical damage to a depth of 550 μm and thermal damage (depoling) to a depth of 800 μm.     

Language games.

Discusses the notion of languages imposing stringent restrictions on repetition, as proposed by the French essayist J. Paulhan (1941), and the relevance of this notion to psychology, in response to developments in language learning theory. (0 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reports of the DAS02 working groups

This document is a collection of four working group reports in the areas of digital libraries, document image retrieval, layout analysis, and Web document analysis. These reports were the outcome of discussions by participants at the Fifth IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems held in Princeton, NJ on 19-21 August 2002.Published online: 16 March 2004     

An Autonomous Spacecraft Agent Prototype

This paper describes the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. The architecture supports challenging requirements of the autonomous spacecraft domain not usually addressed in mobile robot architectures, including highly reliable autonomous operations over extended time periods in the presence of tight resource constraints, hard deadlines, limited observability, and concurrent activity. A hybrid architecture, NMRA integrates traditional real-time monitoring and control with heterogeneous components for constraint-based planning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration. Novel features of this integrated architecture include support for robust closed-loop generation and execution of concurrent temporal plans and a hybrid procedural/deductive executive.We implemented a prototype autonomous spacecraft agent within the architecture and successfully demonstrated the prototype in the context of a challenging autonomous mission scenario on a simulated spacecraft. As a result of this success, the integrated architecture has been selected to fly as an autonomy experiment on Deep Space One (DS-1), the first flight of NASA';s New Millennium Program (NMP), which will launch in 1998. It will be the first AI system to autonomously control an actual spacecraft.     

A STRATEGIC METAGAME PLAYER FOR GENERAL CHESS-LIKE GAMES

This paper introduces METAGAMER, the first program designed within the paradigm of Metagame-playing (Metagame). This program plays games in the class of symmetric chess-like games, which includes chess, Chinese chess, checkers, draughts, and Shogi. METAGAMER takes as input the rules of a specific game and analyzes those rules to construct an efficient representation and an evaluation function for that game; they are used by a generic search engine. The strategic analysis performed by METAGAMER relates a set of general knowledge sources to the details of the particular game. Among other properties, this analysis determines the relative value of the different pieces in a given game. Although METAGAMER does not learn from experience, the values resulting from its analysis are qualitatively similar to values used by experts on known games and are sufficient to produce competitive performance the first time METAGAMER plays a new game. Besides being the first Metagame-playing program, this is the first program to have derived useful piece values directly from analysis of the rules of different games. This paper describes the knowledge implemented in METAGAMER, illustrates the piece values METAGAMER derives for chess and checkers, and discusses experiments with METAGAMER on both existing and newly generated games.