Impact Loading and Functional Tissue Engineering of Articular Cartilage by Roman M. Natoli This thesis presents two advances for alleviating the problem of articular cartilage degeneration: mitigating degradative changes that follow mechanically induced injuries and growing functional neo-cartilage for diseased tissue replacement. Experiments demonstrate that cartilage subjected to a single, no...

Articular stress fracture arising from the distal end of the third metacarpal bone (MC3) is a common serious injury in Thoroughbred racehorses. Currently, there is no method for predicting fracture risk clinically. We describe an ex-vivo biomechanical model in which we measured subchondral crack micromotion under compressive loading that modeled high speed running. Using this model, we determin...

results the results showed that the highest compressive force exerted on the back was equal to 4002 n and the lowest force 1425 n. moreover, 76% of the tasks were reported to have the highest compressive force greater than the recommended limit; 72% of the tasks had an li 1 - 3 and 28% of them had an li less than 1. there was a weak direct correlation between compressive force and rwl. backgrou...

It has been suggested that deep squats could cause an increased injury risk of the lumbar spine and the knee joints. Avoiding deep flexion has been recommended to minimize the magnitude of knee-joint forces. Unfortunately this suggestion has not taken the influence of the wrapping effect, functional adaptations and soft tissue contact between the back of thigh and calf into account. The aim of ...

OBJECTIVES To assess compressive strength and effect of duration after photoactivation on the compressive strength of different dual cure bulk fill composites. METHODS Seventy-two disc shaped (4x10mm) specimens were prepared from three dual cure bulk fill materials, ZirconCore (ZC) (n=24), MulticCore Flow (MC) (n=24) and Luxacore Dual (LC) (n=24). Half of the specimens in each material were t...

We dedicate this work to Wolfgang Pompe, a very good friend and a good friend of the Materials Faculty at UCSB where he and his wife, Gisela, shared their lives and fellowship. Three different zirconia–alumina laminates, AZ50, AZ80, and AZ95, were fabricated via tape-casting thick Zr(3Y)O2 layers, dip-coating the zirconia tapes in a slurry containing a mixture of zirconia and alumina, stacking ...

Neuropathic pain following spinal cord injury (SCI) is a common problem in patients with SCI, which influences the quality of life of such patients. However, in our experiments of treatments for patients with compressive myelopathy, neuropathic pain was identified in patients with not only SCI, but also those with compressive myelopathy. The objective of this study was the evaluation of pharmac...

There have been numerous researchers that have investigated the properties of human intervertebral discs. However, there has been no attempt to characterize the effects of dynamic loading on the compressive stiffness of human lumbar intervertebral discs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop the compressive stiffness properties of lumbar intervertebral discs when subjected to vari...

203 Received in: 03/29/06; approved in: 05/24/06 INTRODUCTION Peripheral nerves injuries show both sensorial and motor functional changes, and, if not appropriately treated, they can yield an important deficit, debilitating not only patients’ quality of life, but also state systems in those cases of early retirement as a result of functional disability (1). Peripheral nerve has a well developed...

We describe a general framework –compressive statistical learning– for resource-efficient largescale learning: the training collection is compressed in one pass into a low-dimensional sketch (a vector of random empirical generalized moments) that captures the information relevant to the considered learning task. A near-minimizer of the risk is computed from the sketch through the solution of a ...