BACKGROUND Chronic widespread muscoloskeletal pain (CWP) is prevalent in the general population and associated with high health care costs, so understanding the risk factors for chronic pain is important for both those affected and for society. In the present study we investigated the underlying etiological structure of CWP to understand better the association between the major clinical feature...

A novel Bayesian network methodology has been developed to enable the prediction of fatigue fracture of cardiac lead medical devices. The methodology integrates in-vivo device loading measurements, patient demographics, patient activity level, in-vitro fatigue strength measurements, and cumulative damage modeling techniques. Many plausible combinations of these variables can be simulated within...

The relationships between the fatigue crack growth rate ( d a / d N ) and stress intensity factor range ( Δ K ) are not always linear even in the Paris region. The stress ratio effects on fatigue crack growth rate are diverse in different materials. However, most existing fatigue crack growth models cannot handle these nonlinearities appropriately. The machine learning method provides a flexibl...

Solder joint fatigue failure is a serious reliability concern in area array technologies, such as flip chip and ball grid array packages of integrated-circuit chips. The selection of different substrate materials could affect solder joint thermal fatigue life significantly. The mechanism of substrate flexibility on improving solder joint thermal fatigue was investigated by thermal mechanical an...

In the aerospace and aviation sectors, the damage tolerance concept has been applied widely so that the modeling analysis of fatigue crack growth has become more and more significant. Since the process of crack propagation is highly nonlinear and determined by many factors, such as applied stress, plastic zone in the crack tip, length of the crack, etc., it is difficult to build up a general an...

Ultrasonic in situ monitoring of metal alloys has been successfully demonstrated for determining the presence and size of fatigue damage within a stracture. Ultrasonic techniques, however, only provide an estimate of the state of the stracture at that time and do not predict the remaining fatigue life. On the other hand, a statistical crack propagation approach, which models the expected remain...

In this study, a novel structural fatigue prognosis method is developed to provide prompt, informed fatigue damage predictions of the structures based on strain gauge measurements at remote locations. The method is based on the structural responses reconstruction at the hot spots and a mechanism-based fatigue crack growth formulation. The structural responses measured from usage monitoring syst...

Women who are diagnosed with breast cancer can experience an array of psychosocial difficulties; however, social support, particularly from a spouse, has been shown to have a protective function during this time. This study examined the ways in which a woman’s daily mood, pain, and fatigue, and her spouse’s marital satisfaction predict the woman’s report of partner support in the context of bre...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect UV irradiation on fatigue life a bulk semi-crystalline polymer. Low-density polyethylene samples exposed different doses were tested. Fatigue indicator based dissipated energy per cycle found present best correlation with experimental results. A master curve unifying results for as-received and UV-aged materials obtained when subtracting...

BACKGROUND Fatigue is a commonly encountered symptom of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease, associated with significant psychological and functional morbidity and poor quality of life. Preliminary studies on the treatment of fatigue from the cancer and multiple sclerosis literature suggest that psychostimulants may be effective in reducing fatigue. OBJECTIVE To compare the efficacy of...