BACKGROUND AND AIMS Liver stiffness is increasingly used in the non-invasive evaluation of chronic liver diseases. Liver stiffness correlates with hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG) in patients with cirrhosis and holds prognostic value in this population. Hence, accuracy in its measurement is needed. Several factors independent of fibrosis influence liver stiffness, but there is insufficie...

UNLABELLED To present the arthroscopic surgical technique and the evaluation of the results from this technique for treating elbow stiffness. METHODS Between April 2007 and January 2010, ten elbows of ten patients with elbow stiffness underwent arthroscopic treatment to release the range of motion. The minimum follow-up was 11 months, with an average of 27 months. All the patients were male a...

This paper studied the stiffness model and characteristics of a planar 3-RPS PM with 3-DOF. The 6 × 6 form stiffness matrix of the planar 3-RPS PM is derived with both active and constrained wrenches considered. To characteristic the stiffness of the planer 3-RPS PM, two decomposition methods including the eigenscrew decomposition and the principle axes decomposition are applied to the stiffnes...

The aorta stiffens with aging, a process that is accelerated by arterial hypertension. Decreased arterial compliance is one of the earliest detectable manifestations of adverse structural and functional changes within the vessel wall. The use of different imaging techniques optimized for assessment of vascular elasticity and quantification of luminal and vessel wall parameters allows for a comp...

Measurements of biomechanical properties of arteries have become an important surrogate outcome used in epidemiological and interventional cardiovascular research. Structural and functional differences of vessels in the arterial tree result in a dampening of pulsatility and smoothing of blood flow as it progresses to capillary level. A loss of arterial elastic properties results a range of link...

an experimental study is conducted on three ½ scales, single-story, single-bay, frame specimens. the first specimen was a reinforced concrete frame with solid-brick infill. the second specimen was a reinforced concrete frame with hollow clay perforated-brick infill. the last specimen was a reinforced concrete frame without any infill. these three specimens were tested by pseudostatic method. di...

seismic base isolation are devices that used to limit the human and material damage caused by an earthquake. this devices diffuse the energy induced at the time of the earthquake before being transferred to the structure.the base isolated structures when subjected to the near-fault eathquakes which contain long-period velocity pulses that may coincide with the period of base isolated structures...

by minimizing the total potential energy function and deploying the virtual work principle, a higher-order stiffness matrix is achieved. this new tangent stiffness matrix is used to solve the frame with geometric nonlinear behavior. since authors’ formulation takes into account the higher-order terms of the strain vector, the convergence speed of the solution process will increase. in fact, bot...

This study aimed to explore the clinical significance of breast tumor tissue stiffness based on ultrasound elastographic evaluation in clinical breast cancer. Tumor tissue stiffness is mainly regulated by interactions among tumor cells, stromal cells, and extracellular matrix and was recently regarded as a representative feature of tumor microenvironment. Basic research has already revealed tha...