The influence of digital media on the success of a health care unit.

Healthcare marketing extended in a surprising way, being indispensable to any healthcare unit that wishes to carry out its work by focusing on the needs and desires of patients. In the context of the medical activity taking more and more a commercial direction, the perception of the public about the profession of a physician should be considered, a perception which can be very easily negatively influenced by unethical marketing strategies. The notion of reputation refers to the perception of a group of people over a person or an entity, based on several criteria.

A full skin defect model to evaluate vascularization of biomaterials in vivo.

Insufficient vascularization is considered to be one of the main factors limiting the clinical success of tissue-engineered constructs. In order to evaluate new strategies that aim at improving vascularization, reliable methods are required to make the in-growth of new blood vessels into bio-artificial scaffolds visible and quantify the results. Over the past couple of years, our group has introduced a full skin defect model that enables the direct visualization of blood vessels by transillumination and provides the possibility of quantification through digital segmentation.

Adaptive and automated ambiance surveillance and event detection for Ambient Assisted Living.

In this paper, we discuss an event detection system using a wireless sensor network in the Ambient Assisted Living context. The sensors measure the environment in which the patients live, not vital parameters of the patient him- or herself, which is important in order to respect the privacy and informational self-determination of the patient. The major difficulties of the given setup with sensors in the environment are that the measurements are taken in an irregular fashion (as opposed to regular sampling) and that some of the sensors may be unreliable.

Segmentation of retinal vessels with a hysteresis binary-classification paradigm.

Vessel segmentation in photographies of the retina is needed in a set of computer-supported medical applications related to diagnosis and surgery planning. Considering each pixel in an image as a point in a feature space, segmentation is a binary classification problem where pixels need to be assigned to one of two classes: object and background. We describe a paradigm of hysteresis-classifier design that we apply to the problem of vessel segmentation.

Video-based measuring of quality parameters for tricuspid xenograft heart valve implants.

Defective heart valves are often replaced by implants in open-heart surgery. Both mechanical and biological implants are available. Among biological implants, xenograft ones-i.

Ex vivo method to visualize and quantify vascular networks in native and tissue engineered skin.

Background And Aims: Neovascularization plays a pivotal role in tissue engineering and tissue regeneration. However, reliable technologies to visualize and quantify blood vessel networks in target tissue areas are still pending. In this work, we introduce a new method which allows comparing vascularization levels in normal and tissue-engineered skin.