Background Wall shear stress (WSS) is the friction force that blood flow exerts on the vessel wall. It is thought to affect the function of endothelial cells and the development of atherosclerosis and aneurysms. A promising technique to measure blood flow is three-dimensional phase contrast MRI (3D PC-MRI). Due to limited spatial resolution and SNR, estimating WSS from time-resolved 3D PC-MRI i...

Quantification of CINE phase contrast (PC)-MRI data is a challenging task because of the limited spatiotemporal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The method presented in this work combines B-spline interpolation and Green's theorem to provide optimized quantification of blood flow and vessel wall parameters. The B-spline model provided optimal derivatives of the measured three-directi...

Growing public concern regarding the health of the aging civil infrastructure has spurred research in structural health monitoring (SHM). Recent advances in wireless smart sensor (WSS) technology has significantly lowered the cost of SHM systems and resulted in WSS being successfully implemented at full-scale. However, assuring accurate timesynchronized WSS nodes in a network is still a challen...

Surgically-created blood conduits used for chronic hemodialysis, including native arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs) and synthetic AV grafts (AVGs), are the lifeline for kidney failure patients. Unfortunately, each has its own limitations: AVFs often fail to mature to become useful for dialysis and AVGs often fail due to stenosis as a result of neointimal hyperplasia, which preferentially forms at t...

Structural health monitoring (SHM) using wireless smart sensors (WSS) has the potential to provide rich information on the state of a structure. However, because of their distributed nature, maintaining highly robust and reliable networks can be challenging. Assessing WSS network communication quality before and after finalizing a deployment is critical to achieve a successful WSS network for S...

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Polycythemia, a common complication of hypoxic COPD, may affect systemic vascular function by altering blood viscosity, vessel wall shear stress (WSS), and endothelium-derived nitric oxide (NO) release. Here, we evaluated the effects of hypoxia-related polycythemia on systemic endothelial function in...

In multirate digital signal processing, we often encounter decimators, interpolators and complicated interconnections of these with LTI lters. We also encounter cyclo-wide-sense stationary (CWSS) processes and linear periodically time-varying (LPTV) systems. It is often necessary to understand the effects of multirate systems on the statistical properties of their input signals. Some of these i...

BACKGROUND The success of stent implantation in the restoration of blood flow through areas of vascular narrowing is limited by restenosis. Several recent studies have suggested that the local geometric environment created by a deployed stent may influence regional blood flow characteristics and alter distributions of wall shear stress (WSS) after implantation, thereby rendering specific areas ...

The Web Services (WS) technology is currently gaining a wider and wider consensus. The features that characterise WSs, namely heterogeneity, distribution, openness, highly dynamic interactions, are some among the key characteristics of another emerging technology, that of intelligent agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). In this paper we discuss the relationships between WSs and intelligent ag...

Recommender systems have shown great potential to help users find interesting and relevant Web service (WS) from within large registers. However, with the proliferation of WSs, recommendation becomes a very difficult task. Social computing seems offering innovative solutions to overcome those shortcomings. Social computing is at the crossroad of computer sciences and social sciences disciplines...