Functional simulation of sensorineural hearing impairment is an important research tool that can elucidate the nature of hearing impairments and suggest or eliminate compensatory signal-processing schemes. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the capability of an audibility-based functional simulation of hearing loss to reproduce the auditory-filter characteristics of listeners wi...

OBJECTIVE Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is one of the most reported occupational diseases internationally. The occurrence of audiometric notches is emphasized in both American and European guidelines for the diagnosis of NIHL. The aim of this study was to describe the prevalence of notched audiograms among railway personnel with and without noise exposure to better assess the usefulness of ...

Level set methods are a general and powerful technique to represent an object's boundary by the means of an implicit function that has a specific value on the boundary. This property permits the easy modeling of interfaces between different fluids that interact under prescribed/evolving conditions or that act under specified constraints. The Cactus Code is a general framework for developing com...

The cohesive crack model has been widely accepted as the best compromise for the analysis of fracture of concrete and other quasibrittle materials. The softening stress-separation law of this model is now believed to be best described as a bilinear curve characterized by four parameters: the initial and total fracture energies Gf and GF , the tensile strength f 0t , and the knee-point ordinate ...

In this paper, we attempted to estimate the auditory filter shape using both simultaneous and forward masking experiments with notched-noise masker. In simultaneous masking experiment, masked threshold of the probe signal in the presence of a notched-noise masker were measured for five normal hearing subjects. In each trial, the level of the probe signal was varied while masker level was kept a...

A collocation-quadrature method is proposed and studied for the numerical solution of a singular integral equation concerned with the two-dimensional elasticity problem of a crack at a circular cavity surface. These investigations are based on an C∗-algebra approach presented in a recent paper [5] on the numerical solution of an integral equation for the notched half-plane problem.

This paper presents the design of compact CPW-fed band notched UWB square ring antenna. The main objective of this proposed research work is to reduce the size of antenna and avoid interference between UWB and WLAN application at 5.5GHz. The antenna consists of a square-ring metal patch and 50Ω coplanar waveguide fed. The structure of the antenna is miniaturized by optimizing its square ring pr...

This work proposes a stochastic multiscale computational framework for damage modelling in 3D woven composite laminates, by considering the random distribution of manufacturing-induced imperfections. The proposed method is demonstrated to be accurate, while being simple implement and requiring modest resources. In this approach, limited number cross-sectional views obtained from micro-computed ...

BACKGROUND It was hypothesized that atrial premature contractions (APCs) originating in the pulmonary veins (PVs) or superior vena cava (SVC) can be localized by evaluating characteristics of the P wave. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-eight patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation were studied. P wave polarity and morphology of the ECGs during pacing from PVs were analyzed and compared to tho...