The results of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and computed tomography (CT) in 18 patients with known degenerative disk disease of the lumbar spine were compared. In 60 intervertebral disk levels studied, there were 17 disks with degeneration and disk bulge, and 15 herniated disks. Final diagnoses were based on several factors, with surgical confirmation in five patients. There was good correla...

the asymmetric problem of rocking rotation of a circular rigid disk embedded in a finite depth of a transversely isotropic half-space is analytically addressed. the rigid disk is assumed to be in frictionless contact with the elastic half-space. by virtue of appropriate green's functions, the mixed boundary value problem is written as a dual integral equation. employing further mathematica...

A quadriculated disk is a juxtaposition of finitely many squares along sides forming a closed topological disk such that vertices of squares which lie in the interior of the disk belong to precisely four squares. In this paper, by a square we mean a topological disk with four privileged boundary points, the vertices. A simple example of a quadriculated disk is the n ×m rectangle divided into un...

Disk shadowing is a technique for maintaining a set of two or more identical disk images on separate disk devices. Its primary purpose is to enhance reliability and availability of secondary storage by providing multiple paths to redundant data. However, shadowing can also boost UO performance. In this paper, we contend that intelligent device scheduling of shadowed disks increases the I/O rate...

Background & Aims: The production of extended-spectrum-β-lactamases (ESBLs) is the main mechanism of resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. The outbreak of isolates simultaneously possessing several resistance mechanisms to β-lactam antibiotics caused a decrease in sensitivity of the confirmatory tests for ESBL. The aim of this study was the evaluation of the β-lactamase disk test...

The advance of high bandwidth communication technologies has created opportunites for various multimedia applications, such as video-on-demand (VOD). We consider in this chapter four types of scheduling which are required for VOD systems: viewer scheduling, stream scheduling, disk copy scheduling and disk arm scheduling. Viewer scheduling focuses on how to maximize the sharing of video streams ...

The Ultra-luminous Compact X-ray Sources (ULXs) in nearby spiral galaxies and the Galactic superluminal jet sources share the common spectral characteristic that they have extremely high disk temperatures which cannot be explained in the framework of the standard accretion disk model in the Schwarzschild metric. We examine several possibilities to solve this “too-hot” disk problem. In particula...