Port Placement Planning in Robot-Assisted Coronary Artery Bypass

Properly selected port sites for robot-assisted coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) improve the efficiency and quality of these procedures. In clinical practice, surgeons select port locations using external anatomic landmarks to estimate a patient's internal anatomy. This paper proposes an automated approach to port selection based on a preoperative image of the patient, thus avoiding the need to estimate internal anatomy. Using this image as input, port sites are chosen from a grid of surgeon-approved options by defining a performance measure for each possible port triad. This measure seeks to minimize the weighted squared deviation of the instrument and endoscope angles from their optimal orientations at each internal surgical site. This performance measure proves insensitive to perturbations in both its weighting factors and moderate intraoperative displacements of the patient's internal anatomy. A validation study of this port site selection was performed. cardiac algorithm also Six surgeons dissected model vessels using the port triad selected by this algorithm with performance compared to dissection using a surgeon-selected port triad and a port triad template described by Tabaie et al., 1999. With the algorithm-selected ports, dissection speed increased by up to 43% (p = 0.046) with less overall vessel trauma. Thus, this algorithmic approach to port site selection has important clinical implications for robot-assisted CABG which warrant further investigation.     

Orphan gene finding—an exon assembly approach

This paper introduces an algorithm for finding eukaryotic genes. It particularly addresses the problem of orphan genes, that is of genes that cannot, based on homology alone, be connected to any known gene family and to which it is therefore not possible to apply traditional gene finding methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first algorithm that attempts to compare in an exact way two DNA sequences that contain both coding (i.e. exonic) and non-coding (i.e. intronic and, possibly, intergenic) parts. The comparison is performed following an algorithmical model of a gene that is as close as possible to the biological one (we consider in this paper the “one ORF, one gene” problem only). A gene is seen as a set of exons that are pieces of an assembly and are not independent. The algorithm is efficient enough: although the constants are higher than for usual sequence comparison, its time complexity is proportional to the product of the sequences lengths while its space complexity scales linearly with the length of the smallest sequence.     

From the Hough Transform to a New Approach for the Detection and Approximation of Elliptical Arcs

The edges of simple geometrical (e.g., manufactured) parts can generally be approximated sufficiently accurately by straight-line segments and elliptical arcs in order, for example, to carry out a dimensional analysis of these parts, such as required by inspection tasks. Hough transforms are robust methods for the detection of straight-line segments but are not directly suitable for the detection of elliptical arcs, for which the processing time and memory space necessary are too important. We present in this paper a new method which allows the determination of the parameters of elliptical arcs (or of ellipses) by use of a two-dimensional discretized parameter space defined similarly to the usual Hough space. This new method allows both the detection and characterization of ellipses whose major and minor axis lengths can be as small as four pixels long or of elliptical arcs with a small angular aperture.     

An Implicit Multistage Integration Method Including Projection for the Numerical Simulation of Constrained Multibody Systems

To be efficient, the simulation of multibody system dynamics requires fast and robust numerical algorithms for the time integration of the motion equations usually described by Differential Algebraic Equations (DAEs). Firstly, multistep schemes especially built up for second-order differential equations are developed. Some of them exhibit superior accuracy and stability properties than standard schemes for first-order equations. However, if unconditional stability is required, one must be satisfied with second-order accurate methods, like one-step schemes from the Newmark family.Multistage methods for which high accuracy is not contradictory with stringent stability requirements are then addressed. More precisely, a two-stage, third-order accurate Implicit Runge–Kutta (IRK) method which possesses the desirable properties of unconditional stability combined with high-frequency dissipation is proposed.Projection methods which correct the integrated estimates of positions, velocities and accelerations are suggested to keep the constraint equations satisfied during the numerical integration. The resulting time integration algorithm can be easily implemented in existing incremental/iterative codes. Numerical results indicate that this approach compares favourably with classical methods.     

GEAMAS: A Generic Architecture for Agent-Oriented Simulations of Complex Processes

This paper's object is to present the results of the GEAMAS project which aims at modeling and simulating natural complex systems. GEAMAS is a generic architecture of agents used to study the behavior emergence in such systems. It is a multiagent program meant to develop simulation applications. Modeling complex systems requires to reduce, to organize the system complexity and to describe suitable components. Complexity of the system can then be tackled with an agent-oriented approach, where interactions lead to a global behavior. This approach helps in understanding how non-determinist behavior can emerge from interactions between agents, which is near of self-organized criticality used to explain natural phenomena. In the Applied Artificial Intelligence context, this paper presents an agent software architecture using a model of agent. This architecture is composed of three abstract levels over which the complexity is distributed and reduced. The architecture is implemented in ReActalk, an open agent-oriented development tool, which was developed on top of Smalltalk-80. To illustrate our purpose and to validate the architecture, a simulation program to help in predicting volcanic eruptions was investigated. This program was run over a period of one year and has given many satisfying results unattainable up to there with more classical approaches.     

Environmental Fatigue and Static Behavior of RC Beams Strengthened with Carbon-Fiber-Reinforced Polymer

Many countries around the world have tremendous needs to repair and strengthen their transportation infrastructure. Almost everywhere, traffic loads have reached levels largely exceeding design expectations. Northern countries also experience severe winter conditions that are combined with an extensive use of deicing salts and accelerate structural deterioration. In Canada, the extent of deterioration has prompted many authorities, including the federal and provincial governments, to investigate the potential use of fiber-reinforced polymer products to extend the life of their existing structures. However, it is widely recognized that the large-scale implementation of these products is often impaired by the lack of data on their durability. This paper presents an experimental project undertaken in order to assess the durability of reinforced concrete beams externally strengthened with two types of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP). The beams were first exposed to either wet-dry cycles or continuous immersion in water and then were loaded in fatigue. Finally, they were tested quasi-statically under four-point bending up to failure. The test results presented here provide some insights on the potential long-term performance of CFRP-strengthened beams exposed to severe environmental conditions.     

Metallic Conductive Nanowires Elaborated by PVD Metal Deposition on Suspended DNA Bundles

Metallic conductive nanowires (NWs) with DNA bundle core are achieved, thanks to an original process relying on double‐stranded DNA alignment and physical vapor deposition (PVD) metallization steps involving a silicon substrate. First, bundles of DNA are suspended with a repeatable process between 2 µm high parallel electrodes with separating gaps ranging from 800 nm to 2 µm. The process consists in the drop deposition of a DNA lambda‐phage solution on the electrodes followed by a naturally evaporation step. The deposition process is controlled by the DNA concentration within the buffer solution, the drop volume, and the electrode hydrophobicity. The suspended bundles are finally metallized with various thicknesses of titanium and gold by a PVD e‐beam evaporation process. The achieved NWs have a width ranging from a few nanometers up to 100 nm. The electrical behavior of the achieved 60 and 80 nm width metallic NWs is shown to be Ohmic and their intrinsic resistance is estimated according to different geometrical models of the NW section area. For the 80 nm width NWs, a resistance of about few ohms is established, opening exploration fields for applications in microelectronics.     

Real‐time hybrid control of electrohydraulic active suspension

Electrohydraulic actuators are an attractive choice for active suspension, because these systems provide a high power‐to‐weight ratio. However, their dynamics are highly nonlinear. In addition, the use of one simple controller for both position and force is complicated, because there is a compromise between them in the case of active suspension. Most existing controllers do not efficiently fulfill the requirements, because only one state variable is considered. In this paper, we address these problems by developing a new hybrid controller for both position and force and implementing it in a real‐time test bench. Our goal is to control the vertical position of the passenger seat while tracking the force transmitted to passengers and keeping it within tolerable and comfortable limits. Therefore, the proposed controller is a combination of two controllers. Its flexible structure redirects the control signal to control the proper controlled state variable. The real‐time results of the newly designed hybrid controller are compared with those obtained using a classical proportional integral derivative controller, because this is the most widely used controller in the industry. As expected, the proposed controller demonstrates better performance in real‐time operation. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incremental Branching Programs

We propose a new model of restricted branching programs specific to solving GEN problems, which we call incremental branching programs. We show that syntactic incremental branching programs capture previously studied models of computation for the problem GEN, namely marking machines (Cook, S.A. in J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 9(3):308–316, 1974) and Poon’s extension (Proc. of the 34th IEEE Symp. on the Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 218–227, 1993) of jumping automata on graphs (Cook, S.A., Rackoff, C.W. in SIAM J. Comput. 9:636–652, 1980). We then prove exponential size lower bounds for our syntactic incremental model, and for some other variants of branching program computation for GEN. We further show that nondeterministic syntactic incremental branching programs are provably stronger than their deterministic counterpart when solving a natural NL-complete GEN sub-problem. It remains open if syntactic incremental branching programs are as powerful as unrestricted branching programs for GEN problems. A preliminary version of this paper appears as (Gál, A., Koucky, M., McKenzie, P., Incremental branching programs, in Proc. of the 2006 Computer Science in Russia Conference CSR06. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3967, pp. 178–190, 2006). A. Gal supported in part by NSF Grant CCF-0430695 and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. M. Koucky did part of this work while being a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, Canada and at CWI, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Supported in part by NWO vici project 2004–2009, project No. 1M0021620808 of MŠMT ČR, grants 201/07/P276, 201/05/0124 of GA ČR, and Institutional Research Plan No. AV0Z10190503. P. McKenzie supported by the NSERC of Canada and the (Québec) FQRNT.