évaluation de la validité théorique de l'Inventaire de l'organisation de la personnalité.

Studied the psychometric properties and the theoretical validity of the French translation of the Inventory of Personality Organization (IPO; O. F. Kernberg and J. F. Clarkin, 1995). The IPO was administered to 845 males and females from a Quebec university and from the general Quebec population. Separate exploratory and 1st-level confirmatory factor analyses were performed. The results indicate a good level of conformity between IPO items and the tridimensional primary constructs of O. F. Kernberg's theoretical model of personality organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Study of the reconstruction of reflectance curves based on tristimulus values: Comparison of methods of optimization

This article presents and compares different methods applied to the reconstruction of reflectance curves. These are optimization methods such as the simplex method, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and Hawkyard's method, which is specific to colorimetry. Improvements have been made to these methods to maximize their application, notably to ensure a convergence toward the global optimum by avoiding being trapped in local optima and to obtain physically viable reflectance curves. Objective and subjective criteria were used to compare these methods; the study used textile samples (cotton fibers), with a panel of 15 samples covering the CIELAB L*a*b* space. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 27, 88–99, 2002; DOI 10.1002/col.10031     

Model independent assertions for integration of heterogeneous schemas

Due to the proliferation of database applications, the integration of existing databases into a distributed or federated system is one of the major challenges in responding to enterprises' information requirements. Some proposed integration techniques aim at providing database administrators (DBAs) with a view definition language they can use to build the desired integrated schema. These techniques leave to the DBA the responsibility of appropriately restructuring schema elements from existing local schemas and of solving inter-schema conflicts. This paper investigates theassertion-based approach, in which the DBA's action is limited to pointing out corresponding elements in the schemas and to defining the nature of the correspondence in between. This methodology is capable of: ensuring better integration by taking into account additional semantic information (assertions about links); automatically solving structural conflicts; building the integrated schema without requiring conforming of initial schemas; applying integration rules to a variety of data models; and performing view as well as database integration. This paper presents the basic ideas underlying our approach and focuses on resolution of structural conflicts.     

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.     

Procedural Riverscapes

This paper addresses the problem of creating animated riverscapes through a novel procedural framework that generates the inscribing geometry of a river network and then synthesizes matching real‐time water movement animation. Our approach takes bare‐earth heightfields as input, derives hydrologically‐inspired river network trajectories, carves riverbeds into the terrain, and then automatically generates a corresponding blend‐flow tree for the water surface. Characteristics, such as the riverbed width, depth and shape, as well as elevation and flow of the fluid surface, are procedurally derived from the terrain and river type. The riverbed is inscribed by combining compactly supported elevation modifiers over the river course. Subsequently, the water surface is defined as a time‐varying continuous function encoded as a blend‐flow tree with leaves that are parameterized procedural flow primitives and internal nodes that are blend operators. While river generation is fully automated, we also incorporate intuitive interactive editing of both river trajectories and individual riverbed and flow primitives. The resulting framework enables the generation of a wide range of river forms, ranging from slow meandering rivers to rapids with churning water, including surface effects, such as foam and leaves carried downstream.     

Total body water volumes for adult males and females estimated from simple anthropometric measurements

Individual total body water volumes for 458 adult males and 265 adult females obtained from dilution studies, together with their height, weight, and age have been selected from the literature. These values were used to derive total body water prediction equations for adults of any age. The equations that gave the best fit were for males: formula (see text) and for females: formula (see text). Numerous other linear regression equations to predict total body water from anthropometric measurements have been reported in the literature. Most apply only to restricted age groups. These, and the equations from the present study were tested on completely independent data. In all cases the equations from the present study gave the best overall results, though for women one equation designed for a specific age group, gave for that age group a marginally better fit.