Review of cost and surgical time implications using virtual patient specific planning and patient specific implants in midface reconstruction

Aim:Summarize the available data on midfacial virtual patient specific planning and patient specific implants,highlighting the financial costs and savings,and additionally emphasize the potential cost implications of transitioning to“in-house”virtual 3D modeling and printing.Methods:Review of current literature.Results:Current literature suggests cost benefits of virtual patient specific planning and patient specific implants in the form of improved ischemia time,better boney apposition between flaps,and reduced patient complications.This reduction of complications includes a reduction in blood loss and time spent in the intensive care unit from flap failure.Improved boney apposition results in a higher likelihood of boney union and a further reduction in failure and complications.Subjective benefits of virtual patient specific planning and patient specific implants are shown in the form of improved reconstructive surgeon mental energy.In-house production of 3D models and presurgical planning provides additional cost benefits for providers as they can produce viable models at a fraction of the price of that which is produced by industrial companies.Providers can also construct and use models in an expedient manner compared to industrial models,allowing for the opportunity to be utilized in more acute settings.The foundation of developing an in-house workflow is adequate funding,resources,and clinical volume.Facilities also must focus on appropriate quality and safety measures,as well as appropriate workflow development for adequate production of models.Conclusion:Virtual patient specific planning and patient specific implants show benefits in midfacial reconstructive outcomes,resulting in realized financial and temporal gains for both patient and provider.These gains may be enhanced by moving to in-house planning and printing.

TML:a language to specify aerial robotic missions for the framework Aerostack

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to describe the specification language TML for adaptive mission plans that the authors designed and implemented for the open-source framework Aerostack for aerial robotics.Design/methodology/approach–The TML language combines a task-based hierarchical approach together with a more flexible representation,rule-based reactive planning,to facilitate adaptability.This approach includes additional notions that abstract programming details.The authors built an interpreter integrated in the software framework Aerostack.The interpreter was validated with flight experiments for multi-robot missions in dynamic environments.Findings–The experiments proved that the TML language is easy to use and expressive enough to formulate adaptive missions in dynamic environments.The experiments also showed that the TML interpreter is efficient to execute multi-robot aerial missions and reusable for different platforms.The TML interpreter is able to verify the mission plan before its execution,which increases robustness and safety,avoiding the execution of certain plans that are not feasible.Originality/value–One of the main contributions of this work is the availability of a reliable solution to specify aerial mission plans,integrated in an active open-source project with periodic releases.To the best knowledge of the authors,there are not solutions similar to this in other active open-source projects.As additional contributions,TML uses an original combination of representations for adaptive mission plans(i.e.task trees with original abstract notions and rule-based reactive planning)together with the demonstration of its adequacy for aerial robotics.