1,721,078 research outputs found

    Implementation and Assessment of an Augmented Training Curriculum for Surgical Robotics

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    The integration of high-level assistance algorithms in surgical robotics training curricula may be beneficial in establishing a more comprehensive and robust skillset for aspiring surgeons, improving their clinical performance as a consequence. This work presents the development and validation of a haptic-enhanced Virtual Reality simulator for surgical robotics training, featuring 8 surgical tasks that the trainee can interact with thanks to the embedded physics engine. This virtual simulated environment is augmented by the introduction of high-level haptic interfaces for robotic assistance that aim at re-directing the motion of the trainee's hands and wrists toward targets or away from obstacles, and providing a quantitative performance score after the execution of each training exercise.An experimental study shows that the introduction of enhanced robotic assistance into a surgical robotics training curriculum improves performance during the training process and, crucially, promotes the transfer of the acquired skills to an unassisted surgical scenario, like the clinical one

    Evolutionary game theory analysis for understanding the decision-making mechanisms of governments and developers on green building incentives

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    10.1016/j.buildenv.2020.106972Building and Environment106972-106972complete

    Improving Surgical Robotics Training with Haptic Virtual Fixtures: An Experimental Study

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    The lack of high-level assistive control strategies in the field of teleoperated surgical robots has been linked to intra-operative injuries and increased fatigue experienced by practitioners. Virtual Fixtures analogous to the one proposed in this study may be beneficial for the patient's safety and the outcome of the operation; this work aims at evaluating their effectiveness in the context of surgical training. Tracking the position and orientation of a teleoperated surgical instrument with respect to a reference trajectory - planned in the pre-operative phase - allows one to compute and apply feedback forces to the manipulators held by the practitioner, which will provide haptic guidance towards an improved surgical performance. This high-level control strategy is here tested on a suturing task emulated in a virtual environment, where a group of participants was evaluated on the distance and angle error committed during the execution with and without assistance. The assistive modality proposed here is able to reduce the average error committed in the execution of the virtual suturing task: virtual fixtures and other similar assistance mechanisms may be most beneficial in the surgical training scenario, improving the learning curve and achieving better performances

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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