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.

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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.

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A reverse micellar system in supercritical carbon dioxide has been developed as a dyeing medium. Water‐soluble dyes such as reactive dyes and acid dyes could be sufficiently solubilised in the interior of a specially constituted reverse micelle. Protein fabrics, silk and wool, were satisfactorily dyed even in deep shades with conventional acid dyes without any special pretreatment. Cotton cellulose fabric was also dyed with conventional reactive dyes when the electrostatic force of repulsion between dye and cotton was eliminated. Compared to previously proposed supercritical dyeing methods, dyeing of fabrics with this system could be performed at low temperatures and pressures in a short time.

The novel 3DD system is a promising tool for providing depth perception with high resolution to laparoscopic surgeons.