BACKGROUND/AIMS To examine the correlation between radiological joint damage and serological parameters in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS This retrospective study reviewed the records of 216 patients diagnosed with RA and classified them according to disease duration: group 1, 24 months; and group 3, all patients combined. The extent of joint damage was ass...

Guided waves generated by Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) transducers are often used to detect structural damage for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. It is generally assumed that the surface-mounted PZT transducers are both undamaged and properly bonded to the host structure during usage. However, this assumption may not be valid, particularly u...

One of the yet unresolved engineering problems is forecasting the creep lives of weldment in a pragmatic way with sufficient accuracy. There are number of obstacles to circumvent including: complex material behavior, lack of accurate knowledge about the creep material behavior specially about the heat affected zones (HAZ),accurate and multi-axial creep damage models, etc. In general, creep life...

Excitation makes a great influence on the wavelet energy distribution of the response signal, this deficiency leads that the traditional structural damage identification method based on wavelet energy has a low precision. In order to solve this problem, a new structural damage identification method based on wavelet packet energy entropy (WPEE) of impulse response is presented in this paper. Fir...

In this paper, a novel approach to the characterization of structural damage in civil structures is presented. Structural damage often results in subtle changes to structural stiffness and damping properties that are manifested by changes in the location of transfer function characteristic equation roots (poles) upon the complex plane. Using structural response time-history data collected from ...

introduction and objective: alport’s syndrome (hereditary nephritis with deafness) is a familial uncommon disease that ultra-structural studies are gold standard method of its diagnosis. materials and methods:we studied 26 iranian patients suspicious of alport’s syndrome by electron microscopy. we examined 19 men and 7 women (male to female ratio was 2.7) and the average age was 1.5 years (with...

Although there is clear face validity that structural damage is related to outcome, it is difficult to prove this. Recently, more evidence became available that structural damage, as assessed on plain films, is indeed related to disease activity in clinical trials and therefore can be used to assess the effect of treatment. Also, a relationship between structural damage and outcome, mainly defi...

self-centering pier (scp) has been viewed as a remarkable accomplishment which is able to sustain major lateral loading with reduced structure damage in seismic engineering. stiffness deterioration observed in experiment is vital for the seismic performance of self-centering concrete pier. in this contribution, the associated stiffness deterioration with respect to the structural damage is mode...

Fragility curves represent the probabilities that structural damages, under various levels of seismic excitation, will exceed the specified damage states by means of earthquake intensity damage relations. Conceptual aspects related to seismic vulnerability, damage and risk evaluation are discussed first, together with a short review of the most widely used possibilities for the seismic evaluati...

This paper presents a new model updating approach for structural damage localization and quantification. Based on the Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC), a new damage-sensitive cost function is introduced by employing the main diagonal and anti-diagonal members of the calculated Generalized Flexibility Matrix (GFM) for the monitored structure and its analytical model. Then, ...