Application of Design Structure Matrix to Simulate Surgical Procedures and Predict Surgery Duration.

Background: The complexities of surgery require an efficient and explicit method to evaluate and standardize surgical procedures. A reliable surgical evaluation tool will be able to serve various purposes such as development of surgery training programs and improvement of surgical skills.

Objectives: (a) To develop a modeling framework based on integration of dexterity analysis and design structure matrix (DSM), to be generally applicable to predict total duration of a surgical procedure, and (b) to validate the model by comparing its results with laparoscopic cholecystectomy surgery protocol.

Shape memory polymer nanocomposites for application of multiple-field active disassembly: experiment and simulation.

Active disassembly (AD) uses innovative materials that can perform a designed disassembly action by the application of an external field. AD provides improvements over current disassembly processes by limiting machine or manual labor and enabling batch processing for end-of-life products. With improved disassembly operations, more reuse of components and purer recycling streams may be seen.

Applying axiomatic design methodology for guideline revision.

We are investigating the use of axiomatic design (AD) as a principled approach to the revision of guidelines. AD models guidelines in a modular and hierarchical manner and captures interactions be-tween modules. To test this approach we applied AD to encode segments of three guidelines and their revised versions.