Band 8, Heft 1

Technology has rarely attempted to simulate a CN exam. NERVE simulates a life-size virtual patient (VP), using speech recognition with a Nintendo Wiimote� serving as a virtual hand, ophthalmoscope, and eye-chart. This study assesses the introductory reception, ability to identify the CN lesion, and students' preference of NERVE. Our goal is to evaluate the responses from medical students, residents, and clinicians using the Neurological Examination Rehearsal Virtual Environment (NERVE), a cranial nerve (CN) exam simulator. Medical College of Georgia participants from a variety of medical specialties, including 9 clinicians, 7 residents, and 8 MS3 and 4s, 20 MS 2s, and 25 MS 1s performed a CN examination on a VP. There were no statistically significant differences in measures related to the actual performance of the exam, the controller, overall benefit of the experience, use of technology or satisfaction with the technology. Even with technical limitations, overall medical student's reported NERVE having educational value. Residents had the lowest rate of correct CN identification, indicating they could be the group that most benefits from repeat exposure to CN exams. Medical students and clinicians were the best groups at identifying the correct deficit for our simulation. The next step is to assess NERVE's capability to teach students and residents the cranial nerve exam.

This paper describes a methodology for discovering and resolving protein names abbreviations from the full-text versions of scientific articles, implemented in the PRAISED framework with the ultimate purpose of building up a publicly available abbreviation repository. Three processing steps lie at the core of the framework: i) an abbreviation identification phase, carried out via domain-independent metrics, whose purpose is to identify all possible abbreviations within a scientific text; ii) an abbreviation resolution phase, which takes into account a number of syntactical and semantic criteria in order to match an abbreviation with its potential explanation; and iii) a dictionary-based protein name identification, which is meant to select only those abbreviations belonging to the protein science domain. A local copy of the UniProt database is used as a source repository for all the known proteins. The PRAISED implementation has been tested against several known annotated corpora, such as the Medstract Gold Standard Corpus, the AB3P Corpus, the BioText Corpus and the Ao and Takagi Corpus, obtaining significantly high levels of recall and extremely fast performance, while also keeping promising levels of precision and overall f-measure, in comparison to the most relevant similar methods. This comparison has been carried out up to Phase 2, since those methods stop at expanding abbreviations, without performing any entity recognition. Instead, the entity recognition performed in the last phase provides PRAISED with an effective strategy for protein discovery, thus moving further from existing context-free techniques. Furthermore, this implementation also addresses the complexity of full-text papers, instead of the simpler abstracts more generally used. As such, the whole PRAISED process (Phase 1, 2 and 3) has been also tested against a manually annotated subset of full-text papers retrieved from the PubMed repository, with significant results as well.

Protein fold recognition using machine learning-based methods is crucial in the protein structure discovery, especially when the traditional sequence comparison methods fail because the structurally-similar proteins share little in the way of sequence homology. Many different machine learning-based fold classification methods have been proposed with still increasing accuracy and the main aim of this article is to cover all the major results in this field.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) seems to be now the best way to model and simulate brain structures and functions. SNNs give also possibilities to better understanding of mechanism that are responsible for consciousness and abstract thinking. Furthermore they can also change our look on information processing and modern computing. Most common software implementations need great computing power and because of that they are not suitable for real time applications. Additionally, biological neurons process information in parallel which is impossible with simulation on conventional computer. Thus we present alternative way to implement models of SNNs incorporating FPGAs. In this paper we compared most common models that are used to implement SNNs in reconfigurable hardware and also we made review of recent works that were done in this subject.

The main objective of this article is to present the basic stages of creating a computer simulation of medication release from an undegraded carrier. Additionally, an innovative approach was presented to the construction of a porous material used for making the carrier for the medication. The programme presented here is based on Cellular Automata, used as a tool for modelling physical, chemical and biological phenomena which change in time. The results of in-silico calculations have been compared with empirical results.

Movement of six-legged robot is considered. The robot is built to conduct research on the control of different modes of walking with a particular focus on switching from one mode to another. The robot parameters are identified from real-time control experiments. A number of identical servo motors are responsible for the mobility of the hexapod. Therefore, in addition to the construction of hexapod and its control system and the ability to generate different gaits, it is important to create a simulation model of the hexapod including servo motors. The full state observer for the servo motor is an integral part of this model. Forward and backward kinematics of the robot legs is implemented. The six node Toda-Rayleigh lattice model is created and numerically simulated. The lattice is applied as the robot controller. Three different modes of robot gait are achieved. The algorithm used for the gait mode change is equipped with parameters that are experimentally chosen.

The human spine is definitively one of the most important parts of a living body. From biomechanical point of view, this organ is the most complicated structure, and a dynamic analysis of its motion still requires more detailed models be created. The aim of this study is to build an accurate computer model of the geometry of the spine and insert it into available skeleton models, used in Vicon. Up to now such models were simplified and that is why they were not sufficient for research of detailed motion of the spine. The paper describes the process of creating models of the vertebrae. During research, authors simultaneously used two techniques: 3D scanning of the vertebrae and computed modeling in 3D graphics software. A universal data format: .obj used to keep the information about surface shape of an object, its colour, texture etc. is presented in detail. In a discussion on Vicon data formats and relations between them, several file types are taken under consideration: marker files: .mkr, global model parameters files: .mp, files of the model structure: .mod. But first of all, step-by-step instructions of how to connect the files with geometrical objects for the visualization purposes, are presented.

Services provided by governmental and the health sectors in Sweden are increasingly being digitalized. This includes use of information technology (IT) to search healthcare information, electronic booking for consultation and other health-related services. The use of health services is growing among the senior citizens and it is therefore important to investigate how electronic (e-health services) are used and how they are suited to the senior citizens. The objective of the study was to review the health related e-services and identify those that are for the elderly population. The study was divided into three phases. First a literature review was undertaken followed by a questionnaire in the second phase. Finally qualitative observations with focus on usability were carried out in the third phase. An overview of the available health related e-services is reported and those that are used by the senior citizens were identified. The result showed a large and growing use of health related e-services by internet savvy senior citizens. An increased and more varied use of the available services could be achieved with a targeted marketing. The investigated health related e-services were perceived as relatively user-friendly, nevertheless senior citizens and the patients in general would benefit from an enhancement and continuous review of the usability of the provided e-services.

The most important task that could improve the efficacy of managing the prostate cancer (PCa) is to develop the technique which will be able to detect an existing PCa even in cases when currently used methods are insufficient. It is supposed that the perfusion computed tomography technology (p-CT) can improve the diagnosis of early PCa. Unfortunately, the perfusion prostate images are very difficult to analyze especially for doctors who are not enough experienced with such a kind of images. Therefore there is a need to find a computational method which could help the doctors to make the decision whether the prostate cancer exists or not and (if the results are positive) to correctly point out the cancerous region. In research which results are presented in the paper we analyzed a great number of prostate images derived from over 50 patients with proven or suspected PCa. We propose the new method, named "life-belt" which has significant potential for identifying cancerous regions.

The article presents the results of the research on the changes in voice quality caused by tonsillectomy. It was carried out in a group of 20 patients (12 male and 8 female). The voice was recorded on a E-MU 0404 USB sound card with a 24-bit A/C AK5385A convertor. Having analyzed the pronunciation of prolonged Polish vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/ and /u/, the researchers defined a set of parameters which differentiate the pronunciation before and after tonsillectomy. The results show that the differences in pronunciation might be observed due to dynamic properties of the articulatory track. Additional researches emphasize the usefulness of such recordings applying external E-MU 0404 USB sound card in the clinical environment.