BACKGROUND Transient elastography is a novel, noninvasive method for staging liver fibrosis. We compared elastography with histologic methods among hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-HCV-coinfected participants in an urban, predominantly black study population. METHODS Participants recruited from the AIDS Linked to the Intravenous Experience and the Johns ...

AIMS Elastic properties of large arteries have been shown to deteriorate with age and in the presence of atherosclerotic vascular disease. In this study, the performance of ultrasonographic strain measurements was compared with conventional measures of vascular stiffness in the detection of age-dependent differences in the elastic properties of the common carotid artery (CCA). METHODS AND RES...

STUDY DESIGN Clinical measurement. OBJECTIVE To determine the validity and reliability of measures obtained using a custom-made device for assessing ankle dorsiflexion motion and stiffness. BACKGROUND Limited dorsiflexion has been implicated in the evolution of foot pain in a number of clinical populations. Assessment of ankle dorsiflexion range of motion (ROM) is, therefore, commonly perfo...

Background Aortic stiffness is an important risk factor in the development of cardiovascular disease. Early detection of stiffening is important so that appropriate medical and behavioural interventions can be implemented. Applanation tonometry pulse wave velocity is the current non-invasive reference standard but this only provides spatially-averaged measurements. Local measurements may be mor...

OBJECTIVES To study the association between impaired fasting glucose (IFG) and arterial stiffness in older adults. DESIGN Cross-sectional population-based study. SETTING The Rotterdam Study, a Dutch population-based cohort study. PARTICIPANTS Two thousand nine hundred eighty-seven subjects aged 60 and older. MEASUREMENTS Arterial stiffness assessed by measuring common carotid arterial d...

In this paper, a real-time composite fatigue life prognosis framework is proposed. The proposed methodology combines Bayesian inference, piezoelectric sensor measurements, and a mechanical stiffness degradation model for in-situ fatigue life prediction. First, the composites stiffness degradation is introduced to account for the composites fatigue damage accumulation under cyclic loadings and a...

We study connections between vibrational spectra and average nearest neighbor number in disordered clusters of colloidal particles with attractive interactions. Measurements of displacement covariances between particles in each cluster permit calculation of the stiffness matrix, which contains effective spring constants linking pairs of particles. From the cluster stiffness matrix, we derive vi...

The aim of the present work is to estimate the vertical forces and to identify the unknown dynamic parameters of a vehicle using the sliding mode observers approach. The estimation of vertical forces needs a good knowledge of dynamic parameters such as damping coefficient, spring stiffness and unsprung masses, etc. In this paper, suspension stiffness and unsprung masses have been identified by ...

Fibromyalgia is a common musculoskeletal pain disorder associated with mood disorders. Antidepressants, particularly tricyclics, are commonly recommended treatments. Randomized, controlled trials of antidepressants for treatment of fibromyalgia were reviewed by methodology, results, and potential predictors of response. Twenty-one controlled trials, 16 involving tricyclic agents, were identifie...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Understanding the mechanical properties of chromatin is an essential step towards deciphering the physical rules of gene regulation. In the past ten years, many single molecule experiments have been carried out, and high resolution measurements of the chromatin fiber stiffness are now available. Simulations have been used in order to link those measurements with structu...