BACKGROUND Obstructive jaundice has been reported to influence liver elasticity, independent of liver fibrosis. The aim of our prospective study was to evaluate the changes in liver elasticity, before and after biliary drainage, in patients with obstructive jaundice, and to evaluate the correlation between elasticity measures and serum markers of liver fibrosis. METHODS This is a prospective ...

Policymakers in countries around the world are faced with rising health care costs and are debating ways to reform health care to reduce expenditures. Estimates of price elasticity of expenditure are a key component for predicting expenditures under alternative policies. Using unique individual-level data compiled from administrative records from the Chilean private health insurance market, I e...

The purpose of this article is to give a complete and general answer to the recurrent problem in continuum mechanics of the determination of the number and the type of symmetry classes of an even-order tensor space. This kind of investigation was initiated for the space of elasticity tensors. Since then, different authors solved this problem for other kinds of physics such as photoelectricity, ...

Background. It is crucial to differentiate between reactive and malignant lymphadenopathies. Elastosonography measures the elasticity of the tissue. Having a reference value for benign lymph nodes (LNs) is important in interpretation. The purpose of this study is to determine the reference elastosonography values of cervical LNs. Methods. 97 LNs were evaluated by B-mode and elastosonography. De...

In this paper, we construct new finite element methods for the approximation of the equations of linear elasticity in three space dimensions that produce direct approximations to both stresses and displacements. The methods are based on a modified form of the Hellinger–Reissner variational principle that only weakly imposes the symmetry condition on the stresses. Although this approach has been...

Fine-grained elasticity control of cloud services has to deal with multiple elasticity perspectives (quality, cost, and resources). We propose a cloud services elasticity control mechanism that considers the service structure for controlling the cloud service elasticity at multiple levels, by firstly defining an abstract composition model for cloud services and enabling multi-level elasticity c...

The non-Newtonian flow of dilute aqueous polyethylene oxide (PEO) solutions through micro-fabricated planar abrupt contraction–expansions is investigated. The small lengthscales and high deformation rates in the contraction throat lead to significant extensional flow effects even with dilute polymer solutions having time constants on the order of milliseconds. By considering the definition of t...

one of the main principles of resistance economy, is to support domestic production and limiting imports, especially in sectors where there is the possibility of import-substituting production .this requires adjustment of exact trade policies,and to achieve this, identifying the structure of imports demand function and also price and income elasticity of import demand is necessary.this necessit...