OBJECTIVES To study the responsiveness of a combined power Doppler and greyscale ultrasound (PDUS) score for assessing synovitis in biologic-naïve patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) starting abatacept plus methotrexate (MTX). METHODS In this open-label, multicentre, single-arm study, patients with RA (MTX inadequate responders) received intravenous abatacept (∼10 mg/kg) plus MTX for 24 w...

INTRODUCTION One of the most devastating complications of deep burn injuries to the hand and finger is the exposure of joint, tendon, and neurovascular structures. The inevitable consequence of such injuries is severe deformity, often requiring joint fusions and digital amputations. Complicating this scenario is the anatomic limitation of few local and reliable soft tissue flaps available for t...

During rehabilitation of residential buildings built in the first half 20th century, it is necessary to strengthen timber floors so they can fulfill requirements strength and serviceability according contemporary regulations. Floors made monolithic girders be most easily strengthened by forming a composite structure with reinforced concrete slab supported on trapezoidal steel sheeting, appropri...

BACKGROUND This single-blinded, three-armed randomized controlled trial aimed to compare the effects of postexercise ice-water immersion (IWI), room-temperature water immersion (RWI), and no water immersion on the balance performance and knee joint proprioception of amateur rugby players. METHODS Fifty-three eligible amateur rugby players (mean age ± standard deviation: 21.6 ± 2.9 years) were...

Composite-aluminum structures exist in aircraft generally. It is easy to cause gap between mating surfaces composite-aluminum assembled with the curing deformation of composite. The composite-aluminum, single-lap, single-bolt joints were utilized investigate influence forced assembly, liquid shim and peelable fiberglass on mechanical properties structures. A steel gasket that removed middle par...

failure in timber structures occurs mainly in crucial points such as joints areas. therefore, the idea of using composite sheets in timber joints has been intro-duced as a method in order to increase the strength and ductility behaviour of timber joints. this research aims to study the behaviour of bolted joints in poplar and pine woods, which are reinforced by two types of gfrp sheets. a singl...

A series of tensile experiments were performed on S2 glass/toughened epoxy composite strips with a center hole or a pin joint at various temperatures within the range of −60C and 125C. Four different lay-up configurations each of 24 layers: [0°], [0°/90°], [45°/−45°] and [0°/45°/90°/−45°] and four different hole diameters: 1/8”, 1/4”, 3/8”, 1/2” were used in both types of specimens. For certain...

Estimation of the parameters of Markov random field models for spatial and temporal data arises in many applications. There are computational and statistical challenges in developing efficient estimators because of the complexity of the joint distribution of the spatio-temporal models, especially when they involve hidden states that also need to be estimated from the observations. We develop co...

A classical version of the no-cloning theorem is discussed. We show that an arbitrary probability distribution associated with a (source) system cannot be copied onto another (target) system while leaving the original distribution of the source system unperturbed. For classical dynamical systems such a perfect cloning process is not permitted by the Liouvillian (ensemble) evolution associated w...