INTRODUCTION Access to orthodontic services for children enrolled in Medicaid is limited nationwide. Orthodontists cite low fee reimbursement as a significant barrier to Medicaid participation. The purpose of this study was to examine, under a specific set of practice assumptions, the simulated effect on profitability of treating patients covered by Medicaid in orthodontic practices in North Ca...

We present a novel approach for point-set implicit surface sampling that is able to rapidly distribute particles over the surface of 3D objects. Our methods benefit from the inner structure of a MPU implicit to obtain a near-optimal initial distribution, with higher densities in areas of higher complexity. The adequate number of particles to effectively sample the surface is determined almost a...

We study the problem of Upward Point-Set Embeddability, that is the problem of deciding whether a given upward planar digraph D has an upward planar embedding into a point set S. We show that any switch tree admits an upward planar straight-line embedding into any convex point set. For the class of k-switch trees, that is a generalization of switch trees (according to this definition a switch t...

Multiresolution representations of 3D surfaces make it possible to concentrate the efforts of a modification at the appropriate level of detail. This paper introduces a multiresolution representation for point-set surfaces. At each level, the point set is smoothed and downsampled, and the geometric details are encoded along the smoothed surface normal. The resulting structure is only slightly l...

recently, cho et al. [y. j. cho, r. saadati, s. h. wang, common xed point theorems on generalized distance in ordered cone metric spaces, comput. math. appl. 61 (2011) 1254-1260] dened the concept of the c-distance in a cone metric space and proved some xed point theorems on c-distance. in this paper, we prove some new xed point and common xed point theorems by using the distance in ordere...

Traditional methods of testing such valves in BP Amoco group companies conform to the recognised industry standard API 576, and the usual procedure requires that all PSVs are removed from the plant periodically so that their condition can be evaluated in a workshop. Prior tore-installation valves are then "pop" tested on a test bench. On steam boilers the bench set pressure must also be proven ...

It is often practical to measure how linear a certain ordered set of points is. We are interested in linearity measures which are invariant to rotation, scaling, and translation. These linearity measures should also be calculated very quickly and be resistant to protrusions in the data set. No such measures exist in literature. We propose several such measures here: average sorted orientations,...

We study the problem of computing the diameter of a  set of $n$ points in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space for a fixed dimension $d$, and propose a new $(1+varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm with $O(n+ 1/varepsilon^{d-1})$ time and $O(n)$ space, where $0 < varepsilonleqslant 1$. We also show that the proposed algorithm can be modified to a $(1+O(varepsilon))$-approximation algorithm with $O(n+...