BACKGROUND Routine viral load monitoring of patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART) is not affordable in most resource-limited settings. METHODS A cross-sectional study of 496 Ugandans established on ART was performed at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Kampala, Uganda. Adherence, clinical and laboratory parameters were assessed for their relationship with viral failure by multivariate log...

STUDY DESIGN Pedicle screw strength or load to failure was biomechanically evaluated, and the geometric characteristics of pedicle screw instrumentation systems were compared. OBJECTIVES To compare the features of pedicle screw systems, and to demonstrate the failure point of the polyaxial pedicle screw head. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Many pedicle screw instrumentation systems are currentl...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this in vitro study was to determine the load and deflection at failure of different lingual retainers bonded with composite to enamel in a standardized three-point bending test. The results were rationalized with finite element analysis (FEA) models. MATERIALS AND METHODS Four types of multistranded wires, Dead Soft Respond, Twisted ligature, Penta-One, Gold-plated Penta...

Tiedo Tinga (Associate) professor Netherlands Defence Academy & University of Twente [email protected] The Netherlands The key issue of maintenance is finding the optimal balance between minimizing the effects of failing (sub-) systems on the one hand, and minimizing the maintenance costs on the other. For critical systems, where failures have serious consequences in terms of costs, safety, envir...

As grow as the data-intensive applications in cloud computing day after day, data popularity in this environment becomes critical and important. Hence to improve data availability and efficient accesses to popular data, replication algorithms are now widely used in distributed systems. However, most of them only replicate the static number of replicas on some requested chosen sites and it is ob...

Software-intensive systems often exhibit dimensions in size and complexity that exceed the scope of comprehension of system designers and analysts. With this complexity comes the potential for undetected errors in the system. While software often causes or exacerbates this problem, its form can be exploited to ameliorate the difficulty in what is referred to as a survivability architecture. In ...

This article investigates the effect of contact ageing on fretting damage of an epoxy-based cathodic electro-deposited coating for use on automotive seat slide tracks (made of cold-rolled high strength steel). Static normal load was induced at the contact between the coating and an AISI52100 ball for a certain duration. It was identified that plastically deformed contact area increased logarith...

This paper explores the use of artificial neural networks in predicting the failure load of castellated beams. 47 experimental data collected from the literature cover the simply supported beams with various modes of failure, under the action of either central single load, uniformly distributed load or two-point loads acting symmetrically with respect to the center line of the span. The data ar...