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Drones spotted over Camp Pendleton in California posed no threat to operations: report
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said after the House Intelligence Committee's classified briefing on New Jersey drones, she's not concerned about any threat and it's irresponsible to scare the public. Drones spotted flying over Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California over the past week posed no threat to operations at the installation, according to reports. James C. Sartain told The Warzone that between Dec. 9 and 15, "there were six instances of unmanned aerial systems (UAS)" seen entering the airspace over Camp Pendleton. Sartain also said the UAS did not pose any threat to installation operations. The publication also learned from base personnel that countermeasures to take out the drones were not necessary as air and ground operations were not impacted.
Automatic Search for Photoacoustic Marker Using Automated Transrectal Ultrasound
Wu, Zijian, Moradi, Hamid, Yang, Shuojue, Song, Hyunwoo, Boctor, Emad M., Salcudean, Septimiu E.
According to [2], 11.6% of men will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime, with approximately a 20% death rate in the United States. Radical prostatectomy is a popular surgical approach to treat PCa by removing the entire prostate gland since 1905 [3,4]. In clinical practice, the traditional open radical prostatectomy (ORP) has almost been replaced by laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RLP) [5]. As a minimally invasive surgical procedure for PCa, RLP significantly reduces blood loss, hospitalization duration, and postoperative complications [6]. However, the long learning curve associated with laparoscopic procedures limits the application of RLP [7]. Robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy (RALP) has been demonstrated [5] to shorten this learning curve by leveraging the wristed instruments and the 3-D endoscopic camera of the telerobotic surgical system, usually the da Vinci surgical system, to achieve intuitive operation [8]. However, the endoscopic camera cannot localize the prostate lesions nor visualize the sub-surface anatomy of the prostate gland. Therefore, a complementary medical imaging modality is necessary to facilitate RALP.
Gen. Milley warns West Point graduates of 'increasing' risk of global war, 'robotic tanks'
Gen. Mark Milley tells graduates of the US Military Academy to prepare West Point military academy graduates to prepare for increasingly dangerous world. Gen. Mark Milley told cadets graduating from U.S. Military Academy West Point Saturday to be prepared for increasing risk of global conflict and a host of new weapons technologies in their careers. "The world you are being commissioned into has the potential for a significant international conflict between great powers. And that potential is increasing, not decreasing," Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the cadets at the 2022 commencement ceremony in West Point, New York. "And right now, at this very moment, a fundamental change is happening in the very character of war. We are facing right now two global powers, China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities, and both who fully intend to change the current rules based order," Milley said.
Automatic Speaker Independent Dysarthric Speech Intelligibility Assessment System
Tripathi, Ayush, Bhosale, Swapnil, Kopparapu, Sunil Kumar
Dysarthria is a condition which hampers the ability of an individual to control the muscles that play a major role in speech delivery. The loss of fine control over muscles that assist the movement of lips, vocal chords, tongue and diaphragm results in abnormal speech delivery. One can assess the severity level of dysarthria by analyzing the intelligibility of speech spoken by an individual. Continuous intelligibility assessment helps speech language pathologists not only study the impact of medication but also allows them to plan personalized therapy. It helps the clinicians immensely if the intelligibility assessment system is reliable, automatic, simple for (a) patients to undergo and (b) clinicians to interpret. Lack of availability of dysarthric data has resulted in development of speaker dependent automatic intelligibility assessment systems which requires patients to speak a large number of utterances. In this paper, we propose (a) a cost minimization procedure to select an optimal (small) number of utterances that need to be spoken by the dysarthric patient, (b) four different speaker independent intelligibility assessment systems which require the patient to speak a small number of words, and (c) the assessment score is close to the perceptual score that the Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) can relate to. The need for small number of utterances to be spoken by the patient and the score being relatable to the SLP benefits both the dysarthric patient and the clinician from usability perspective.