Advanced Reconstruction of Vesicourethral Support (ARVUS) during robot-assisted radical prostatectomy: first independent evaluation and review of other factors influencing 1 year continence outcomes.

PURPOSE: Anterior and posterior reconstructions of pelvic structures are used during a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy to obtain better continence outcomes. This study was conducted to evaluate the Advanced Reconstruction of Vesicourethral Support (ARVUS), a novel postprostatectomy reconstruction technique. METHODS: The study was designed as a prospective, controlled, partially randomized and blinded experiment. The statistical analysis was based on the generalized linear modeling (GLM) framework with random effects: the logit link was used to model the probability of achieving continence and the logarithmic link was used to evaluate the overall score of the International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire-Short Form (ICIQ-SF). The significance of the fixed effects and all possible two-way interactions was tested using the critical level of 0.05. RESULTS: The probability of achieving the continence significantly depends on the neurovascular bundle sparing (p < 0.001) and the time after the surgery (p < 0.001). Analogously, the expected ICIQ-SF score significantly depends on the nerve-sparing status (p = 0.035) and the time after the surgery (p < 0.001). No statistically significant difference between the unilateral or bilateral nerve sparing was found. The ARVUS technique seems to perform slightly worse with respect to the expected continence, but this difference is within the margins of random fluctuations (p = 0.715). CONCLUSIONS: The study demonstrates a significant positive association between the nerve-sparing approach and the patient's continence, however, regardless of the unilateral or bilateral approach. In terms of the continence rate, no statistically significant benefits of ARVUS were observed.

Machine vision application in animal trajectory tracking.

This article was motivated by the doctors' demand to make a technical support in pathologies of gastrointestinal tract research [10], which would be based on machine vision tools. Proposed solution should be less expensive alternative to already existing RF (radio frequency) methods. The objective of whole experiment was to evaluate the amount of animal motion dependent on degree of pathology (gastric ulcer). In the theoretical part of the article, several methods of animal trajectory tracking are presented: two differential methods based on background subtraction, the thresholding methods based on global and local threshold and the last method used for animal tracking was the color matching with a chosen template containing a searched spectrum of colors. The methods were tested offline on five video samples. Each sample contained situation with moving guinea pig locked in a cage under various lighting conditions.