Effective management of surgical suites require teamwork and constant adaptation. Attempts to bring computer support might deteriorate information accuracy, be inflexible and turn staff collaborative tools into administrative tools. We present OnBoard, an 84" multitouch surface application to support surgical flow management. OnBoard supports multiple users, transposes existing coordination artifacts into interactive objects, and offers interactions such as free writing or addition or rescheduling of cases. As part of a cyber-infrastructure, OnBoard enables users to benefit from real-time activity sensors in the surgical suite while offering ways to mitigate potential glitches. OnBoard was installed in a surgical suite of 12 operating rooms for 2 months that performed about 300 procedures. We observed its use, ran interviews and questionnaires and tailored the interactions according to users' needs. OnBoard suggests that tailored, flexible tools might effectively support the surgical staff and be an important part of patients' health improvement.

Cyber-physical systems have been deployed with considerable success in many industries. However, the implementation of cyber-physical systems in hospitals has been limited. By nature, in clinical operations, patient safety and consideration for health outcomes are of the utmost importance, thus possibly slowing the implementation of innovative solutions with limited history. Revenues from operating room (OR) time and surgery account for about 50% of the income of major hospitals (Erdogan et al. 2011; Cuschieri 2006), but the efficiency of OR utilization is often reported to be relatively low. Therefore, improving OR management with a cyber-physical system should be a priority. In this article, we will report on our experience implementing a cyber-physical system at Houston Methodist Hospital and discuss some of the difficulties and potential drivers for success. Our pilot study was done in the context of the management of a large suite of ORs. It uses the agile codevelopment of a cyber-physical system through an intense collaboration of clinicians and computational scientists. While technology remains the foundation of a cyber-physical system, this experience reinforced that the human factor is an important driving force behind the design that promotes user acceptance.

Purpose: in the context of minimally invasive surgery, navigation in the patients abdomen is crucial, but is also more complicated than during open procedures. While the advantages for the patient are numerous, surgeons may not always know where they are in this complex environment, and getting used to this technique takes a lot of practice. Method: we present a novel smart trocar device that provides a global positioning system for the laparoscopic instruments that are inserted through the trocars. We augment current trocars with a camera pointing towards the ceiling. At any point in time, and by using computer vision as well as projective geometry, our smart trocar can provide the position of rigid instruments. Results: with our system, we reach one-millimeter accuracy on translation and half a degree on rotation with the only limitation being the velocity of surgeons movements. But this limitation has not been an obstacle in real practice. Conclusion: the trocar can track specific landmarks found on the ceiling of the OR, and, from these, accurately determine its global position in the OR in real time. Applications of this invention are first, assessment and/or training of surgical skills second, once our system is coupled to a real-time three-dimensional simulator of patient anatomy, we envision that our system can automatically provide surgical guidance during the procedure.

The core of our novel method and system consists of augmenting the standard features of an ultrasound probe by adding functional information from real-time hemodynamic flow computation. It is well known that the quality of ultrasound (US) imaging is very much operator dependent. Our hypothesis is that combining real-time Navier-Stokes simulation with US imaging may reveal inconsistency in mass conservation along the vascular structure that shows when the US acquisition needs to be redone. Augmenting a light wireless US imaging device with robust flow simulation may reveal itself to be a valuable tool to improve the quality of diagnostic with shear stress indicators. In this paper, we describe the main concept of our cyber-physical system to augment an US probe. However robust simulation of Navier-Stokes flow in real time remains a challenging problem. The focus of this paper is on the description and efficiency results of a new parallel domain decomposition algorithm to deliver that level of performance.

A Multi-species prairie composed primarily of clonal plants can achieve different ecological functions. They can be a good source of biofuel, a mean of water purification in agriculture or a biodiversity guardian. The goal of the Virtual Prairie project is to study the fundamental mechanisms involved in the population dynamic of a prairie and the optimum engineering design of prairies serving these and other functions. Our study is a modelization and a simulation of the growth of such clonal plants in isolation or competing with each other. This study is a very compute intensive enterprise. However, it can be eventually managed as an embarrassingly parallel set of jobs. Therefore, we adapted our simulation project to run on BOINC, a platform for volunteer computing, which compute nodes are reached using the commercial Internet connections. To our knowledge, this is the first ecology project that uses volunteer computing and it is the largest simulation ever done on plant ecology. Our preliminary results show that there is no unique optimum design solution but rather different optimum solutions that can co-exist.

We have developed a novel method to measure human cardiac pulse at a distance. It is based on the information contained in the thermal signal emitted from major superficial vessels. This signal is acquired through a highly sensitive thermal imaging system. Temperature on the vessel is modulated by pulsative blood flow. To compute the frequency of modulation (pulse), we extract a line-based region along the vessel. Then, we apply Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to individual points along this line of interest to capitalize on the pulse propagation effect. Finally, we use an adaptive estimation function on the average FFT outcome to quantify the pulse. We have tested the accuracy of our method on 5 subjects with highly successful results. The technology is expected to find applications among others in sustained physiological monitoring of cardiopulmonary diseases, sport training, sleep studies, and psychophysiology (polygraph).