OBJECTIVE The purposes of this study were to measure the orthodontic forces generated by thermoplastic aligners and investigate the possible influences of different activations for lingual bodily movements on orthodontic forces, and their attenuation. METHODS Thermoplastic material of 1.0-mm in thickness was used to manufacture aligners for 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6 mm activations for lingu...

A new high speed and potentially economical method of creating a composite material and structures therefrom is tested. The method consists of spinning composite fibers from a melt blend of a thermoplastic with a liquid crystal polymer (LCP). Discontinuous fibrils of the LCP are formed in situ during the spinning process. These composite fibers are aligned and placed in a mold and heated to mel...

This work investigates the increase in surface dose caused by thermoplastic masks used for patient positioning and immobilization. A thermoplastic mask is custom fit by stretching a heated mask over the patient at the time of treatment simulation. This mask is then used at treatment to increase the reproducibility of the patient position. The skin sparing effect of mega-voltage X-ray beams can ...

Marking menus have many benefits, including fast selection time, low error rate and fast transition to expert mode, but these are mitigated by a practical limit of 8 items per menu. Adding hierarchical levels increases capacity, but at the expense of longer selection times and higher error rates. In this paper we introduce Extended Marking Menus, a variant of marking menus that increases their ...

InfiniBand System Area Networks using link-level flow control can experience congestion spreading, where one bottleneck link causes traffic to block throughout the network. End-to-end congestion control using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) packet marking has the potential to solve this problem. In this paper, we develop and evaluate ECN mechanisms for switches with input-buffered config...

landfill is the major method of solid waste disposal in developing countries. to protect soil andgroundwater from contamination, anti-seepage systems have to be installed in landfills. however, during theconstruction of anti-seepage system, many factors can result in holes in geomembrane liners. for the purpose of improving construction quality, the construction company needs to find the leaks ...

BACKGROUND Surgical site marking is one important cornerstone for the principles of safe surgery suggested by the WHO. Generally it is recommended that the attending surgeon performs the surgical site marking. Particularly in the case of same day surgery, this recommendation is almost not feasible. Therefore we systematically monitored, whether surgical site marking can be performed by trained ...

This paper calls for a reexamination of the Marking Theory of HPSG, which in its standard form involves a considerable amount of dedicated formal machinery, but which proves to be inapplicable for most types of grammatical marking. As an alternative, it is demonstrated that head-marker phrases can be reanalyzed as head-complement structures, with the marking element treated as the syntactic hea...

Thermoplastics are highly attractive substrate materials for microfluidic systems, with important benefits in the development of low cost disposable devices for a host of bioanalytical applications. While significant research activity has been directed towards the formation of microfluidic components in a wide range of thermoplastics, sealing of these components is required for the formation of...