PURPOSE To study the effect of drain suction pressure on drainage volume, decrease in haemoglobin level, blood transfusion, and wound complications following total knee arthroplasty. METHODS Primary total knee arthroplasty for degenerative osteoarthritis was performed in 60 (49 female and 11 male) patients. Patients were randomised for high-pressure (600 mm Hg) or low-pressure (350 mm Hg) pos...

We demonstrate the use of Ant Colony System (ACS) to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem associated with collection of recycling waste from households, treated as nodes in a spatial network. For networks where the nodes are concentrated in separate clusters, the use of k-means clustering can greatly improve the efficiency of the solution. The ACS algorithm is extended to model the use...

The state of the art on Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management is based on the domestic separation of materials produced. After domestic separation, the resident has to transfer the separated materials to the MSW manager through the hands of collection workers. It is exactly at this stage that an end-use product changes its status and property becomes waste. This paper analyzes and compares the...

This paper is a continuation of a previous article (part II).1 Our object here, and in part IV (in preparation), is to illustrate, by explicit numerical calculation, two rather different aspects of the problem under discussion. In the present article, we will consider the rate ofspontaneous fluctuation in the length of a myosin cross-bridge, assuming that it must stretch by an a -, (or helixext...

The aim of this paper is to propose dynamic logic as a cotmnon logical framework to describe and identify the most relevant formal characteristics of multi-language logical architectures (MLA) in order to investigate the expressive power of the knowledge bases that can be built upon them. In general, a MLA allows to build knowledge bases as a set of units with initial local theories written in ...

We posed six clinical questions (CQ) on preoperative biliary drainage and organized all pertinent evidence regarding these questions. CQ 1. Is preoperative biliary drainage necessary for patients with jaundice? The indications for preoperative drainage for jaundiced patients are changing greatly. Many reports state that, excluding conditions such as cholangitis and liver dysfunction, biliary dr...

Progressive care units are increasingly common in hospitals in the United States. These units are often used to bridge the gap between intensive care units and medical-surgical units, with the goal of providing cost-effective, high-quality, safe care. Although progressive care units today may seem to provide care for a wide variety of patients, these patients do share certain typical features: ...

Congestive heart failure is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world. The primary objective of the left ventricular assist device (LVAD) bridge-to-myocardial recovery is the regeneration of functional myocardial tissues and the reversal of myocyte dysfunction. The nontransplant candidates—approximately 5 million patients in the United States—tend to be older with more medical como...

This paper presents a case study of photovoltaic (PV) system design at Hwangji Youchang facility in Korea, to power an electrical aerator for natural purification of acid mine drainage. The aerator was designed as 13 units with air flow capacity of 60 L/min at the oxidation pond by considering the characteristics of incoming drainage. Site evaluation was conducted to identify a suitable locatio...

Enabling surgeon-educators to themselves create virtual reality (VR) training units promises greater variety, specialization, and relevance of the units. This paper describes a software bridge that semi-automates the scene-generation cycle, a key bottleneck in authoring, modeling, and developing VR units. Augmenting an open source modeling environment with physical behavior attachment and colli...