BACKGROUND: The objective of this work was to decellularize artificial tissue without using surfactant solutions. For this purpose, supercritical carbon dioxide was used as the extraction medium.

The present data suggest that NIRS is a feasible tool for assessing brain activation during endoscopic surgical tasks, and may have a large impact on the future development of teaching, training, and assessment methods for endoscopic surgical skills.

No abstract

In the scal year of 1998, The Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) of Japan launched a national 5-year project called the Humanoid Robotics Project. As a part of this project, we are developing a novel humanoid robot telexistence (tel-existence)system to assist and cooperate with people. This paper describes a newly developed telexistence cockpit for humanoid robot control, and shows a technical demonstration to evaluate the developed cockpit and the robot. A human operator controls the robot within the remote cockpit as if he or she were inside the robot itself. The telexistence cockpit consists of three subsystems: a three-dimensional (3D) audio/ visual display subsystem, a telexistence master subsystem, and a communication subsystem between the cockpit and the robot. A series of real images are captured by cameras mounted on the robot and presented on the visual display, and the human operator in the cockpit observes them with a sensation of real-time presence. He or she can intuitively control the arms and hands of the slave robot through the telexistence master subsystem with force feedback.