Summary Background. Volumetric pollen traps are commonly used to assess pollen exposure. These traps are well suited for estimating the regional mean airborne pollen concentration but are likely not to provide an accurate index of personal exposure. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that hair sampling may provide different pollen counts from those from pollen traps, especially when the po...

This paper presents a physics-of-failure (PoF)-based prognostics and health management approach for effective reliability prediction. PoF is an approach that utilizes knowledge of a product’s life cycle loading and failure mechanisms to perform reliability design and assessment. PoF-based prognostics permit the assessment of product reliability under its actual application conditions. It integr...

a 55-year-old man presented with pain in the left flank for the last 8 months with history of significant weight loss. the pain was relieved on assuming a knee-chest position. on clinical examination the patient was afebrile with mild tenderness in the left hypochondrium. there was no icterus or lymphadenopathy. the spleen was palpable 6 cm below the costal margin and was firm and non-tender. t...

Background The occult neurological disorders are an important cause of constipation in children. This study aimed to evaluate the spinal canal and lumbosacral by ultrasound in pediatric constipation to better identifying neurological causes of constipation. Materials and Methods In this case-control study, 100 children with constipation (age range 1 to 14 years) without previously known chronic...

Background: Adrenal hematoma is a very rare acquired cause of neonatal hypertension. In this study, we report a case of neonatal hypertension associated with adrenal hematoma. A male neonate was immediately transferred to our neonatal intensive care unit after delivery due to meconium aspiration. He needed to be on mechanical ventilation support. During his hospital stay, hospital records showe...

This paper proposes a new method for comparing clusterings both partitionally and geometrically. Our approach is motivated by the following observation: the vast majority of previous techniques for comparing clusterings are entirely partitional, i.e., they examine assignments of points in set theoretic terms after they have been partitioned. In doing so, these methods ignore the spatial layout ...

Timed Failure Propagation Graphs (TFPGs) are used in the design of safety-critical systems as a way of modeling failure propagation, and to evaluate and implement diagnostic systems. TFPGs are mostly produced manually, from a given dynamic system of greater complexity. In this paper we present a technique to automate the construction of TFPGs. It takes as input a set of failure mode and discrep...

ABSTRACT Inconel 718 is a difficult-to-cut nickel-based superalloy commonly used in aerospace industry. This paper presents an experimental study of the tool wear propagation and cutting force variations in the end milling of Inconel 718 with coated carbide inserts. The experimental results showed that significant flank wear was the predominant failure mode affecting the tool life. The tool fla...

This paper developed extensions to the existing research so that reliability assessment based on degradation modeling can address new problem domains that previously did not meet the required assumptions and modeling constraints. Degradation modeling is based on probabilistic modeling of a failure mechanism degradation path and comparison of a projected distribution to a pre-defined failure thr...