Electronic skin (e-skin) is pursued as a key component in robotics and prosthesis to confer them sensing properties that mimic human skin. For pressure monitoring, a great emphasis on piezoresistive sensors was registered due to the simplicity of sensor design and readout mechanism. For higher sensitivity, films composing these sensors may be micro-structured, usually by expensive photolithography techniques or low-cost and low-customizable molds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe propose and evaluate an automatic segmentation method for extracting striatal brain structures (caudate, putamen, and ventral striatum) from parametric (11)C-raclopride positron emission tomography (PET) brain images. We focus on the images acquired using a novel brain dedicated high-resolution (HRRT) PET scanner. The segmentation method first extracts the striatum using a deformable surface model and then divides the striatum into its substructures based on a graph partitioning algorithm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGovernments in countries with national health systems have been concerned with how to organise services so as to achieve improvements in efficiency and quality in healthcare delivery, as well as to control costs. In this study, a stochastic discrete event simulation model to study the organisation of primary and secondary care services is proposed. The model was built with reference to the context of the Portuguese NHS, was implemented in the Simul8 software program and was applied to the Portuguese Setúbal healthcare subregion (SHCR).
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