OBJECTIVE To compare the performance of an extended model and a simplified prognostic model for joint damage in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) based on 3 baseline risk factors: anticyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (anti-CCP), erosions, and acute-phase reaction. METHODS Data were used from the Nijmegen early RA cohort. An extended model and a simplified baseline prediction model were develop...

Predicting earthquakes is an important issue in the study of geography. Accurate prediction of earthquakes can help people to take effective measures to minimize the loss of personal and economic damage, such as large casualties, destruction of buildings and broken of traffic, occurred within a few seconds. United States Geological Survey (USGS) science organization provides reliable scientific...

The presence of part-through cracks with limited length is one of the prevalent defects in the plate structures. Due to the slight effect of this type of damages on the frequency response of the plates, conventional vibration-based damage assessment could be a challenging task. In this study for the first time, a recently developed state-space method which is based on the chaotic excitation is ...

Predicting earthquakes is an important issue in the study of geography. Accurate prediction of earthquakes can help people to take effective measures to minimize the loss of personal and economic damage, such as large casualties, destruction of buildings and broken of traffic, occurred within a few seconds. United States Geological Survey (USGS) science organization provides reliable scientific...

Fourteen disinfectants were tested in vitro for activity against soil bacteria and fungi attached to a boot worn in New Zealand, and then eight were further evaluated on three types of field-worn footwear. From in vitro tests sodium hypochlorite (JanolaTM), calcium hypochlorite (Haz-TabTM) and a quaternary ammonium product (Trimove) gave almost complete kill of bacteria. Four disinfectants (sod...

Progressive collapse is a situation where local failure of a primary structural component leads to the collapse of adjoining members which, in turn, leads to additional collapse. Hence, the total damage is disproportionate to the original cause. The most common local failure in framed structure is assumed to be column failure. In this paper, a new approach for dynamic column removal in framed s...

Researchers have conducted finite element (FE) analyses with human models to predict injuries due to traffic accidents or falling. In most of their analyses, cortical bone was simply modeled as a general isotropic elastoplastic material. In this study, a constitutive model of cortical bone considering anisotropic inelasticity and damage evolution was developed to predict injuries more accuratel...

A novel two stage Improved Radial Basis Function (IRBF) neural network for the damage identification of a multimember structure in the frequency domain is presented. The improvement of the proposed IRBF network is carried out in two stages. Conventional RBF network is used in the first stage for preliminary damage prediction and in the second stage reduced search space moving technique is used ...