Abstract: An implanted soft palate support and an implantation method are provided. The implanted soft palate support is a flat implant made of a material capable of being implanted into human tissues for a long time period, and includes a hard palate connecting end and a support. The hard palate connecting end has a connecting structure connected with a hard palate; the support is a flat implant capable of being inserted into a soft palate; and the hard palate connecting end is connected to the support. The implanted soft palate support can achieve the objectives of treating OSAHS and snoring by effectively lifting the collapsed soft palate during sleep and thereby reducing an upper airway obstruction condition. In particular, the soft palate support can be adjusted within a certain range to calibrate its shape and curvature event after the surgery, so as to achieve optimal treatment and comfort.

Abstract: The present invention encompasses an expression vector that is capable of generating a virus from a segmented genome. In particular, a single expression vector may be utilized to produce influenza virus in cultured cells. The expression vector can be delivered in a purified DNA form or by a suitably designed bacterial carrier to cells in culture or to animals. This invention increases the virus generation efficiency, which benefits vaccine development. The bacterial carrier harboring such a plasmid encoding an attenuated virus may be used as a vaccine against corresponding viral disease.

Abstract: A system and methods for the efficient segmentation of globally optimal surfaces representing object boundaries in volumetric datasets is provided. An optical surface detection system and methods are provided that are capable of simultaneously detecting multiple interacting surfaces in which the optimality is controlled by the cost functions designed for individual surfaces and by several geometric constraints defining the surface smoothness and interrelations. The present invention includes surface segmentation using a layered graph-theoretic approach that optimally segments multiple interacting surfaces of a single object using a pre-segmentation step, after which the segmentation of all desired surfaces of the object are performed simultaneously in a single optimization process.

Abstract: A closed contour editing method is provided for use in manually defining and changing an intravascular ultrasonic image segment consisting of a single lobe displayed on a computer screen comprises marking end points of the segment to be changed, drawing the change between the endpoints while leaving all segments displayed, calculating the three centroids for each of the three resultant segmentations of the contour and based on the results, selecting the preferred segment to close the contour while simultaneously deselecting the undesired segment.

Abstract: A method and an apparatus are provided for combining spatial and temporal filtering for blood speckle reduction in high frequency ultrasound images wherein a sequence of image frames is processed to produce a binary mask. In this mask, a first value is assigned to regions of identified blood speckles and a second value is assigned to regions of the remainder. The images are then modulated with the mask, i.e., by applying different filtering techniques to assigned blood regions and assigned nonblood (i.e., tissue) regions, the filtering techniques having been selected to optimize images for the type of feature to be highlighted based on differences in frequency sensitivity between blood and tissue. The images are preferably in polar coordinate format. The degree of blood speckle suppression can be determined based on the actual values of the pixels at the same spatial location in given frames.