INTRODUCTION The device closure of atrial septal defects has evolved over the years. In the early days of transcatheter occlusion, balloon sizing was used to choose an appropriate sized device. We postulate that balloon sizing does not value-add to the procedure and is unnecessary. MATERIALS AND METHODS Patients who had balloon sizing, with (Group 1, n = 38) or without (Group 2, n = 21) atria...

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) is now globally recognized by pipeline operators as a significant threat to the safe and efficient operation of their systems. Onshore natural gas, oil and refined products line pipe steels have all been susceptible to this form of environmentally assisted cracking, which can develop as either low or high pH SCC. Over the years, the pipeline industry has develope...

One aspect that has mostly been overlooked in traditional economic lot-sizing is the implication of decisions on manual tasks and workload. Although lot-sizing decisions can have a significant impact on required manual material handling and on human performance, works that consider ergonomic aspects in lot-sizing are rare. This paper presents a model that integrates ergonomic aspect in terms of...

A bushing bearing was required between the aluminum connecting rod and the wrist pin to reduce wrist pin bearing wear in a severe application. The bushing could not be machined after assembly and precise control of bearing clearance was achieved by re-sizing (using a mandrel) after assembly. Re-sizing was a critical operation. Too much re-sizing would loosen the bushing pressfit while too littl...

We evaluate the effectiveness of statistical gate sizing to minimize circuit power. We develop reliable posynomial models for delay and power that are accurate to within 5-10% of 130nm library data. We formulate statistical sizing as a geometric program, accounting for randomness in gate delays. For various ISCAS-85 circuits, statistical sizing at a 99.8% target yield provides 25% power reducti...

We address the problem of generating mesh sizing functions from a set of points with specified sizing values. The sizing functions are shown to be maximal and K-Lipschitz, with arbitrary parameter K provided by the user. These properties allow generating low complexity meshes with adjustable gradation. After constructing an additively weighted Voronoi diagram, our algorithm provides fast and ac...

The aims of the present study were to develop and validate a new obesity-specific, parent-proxy measure of health-related quality of life (HRQOL), Sizing Them Up. Participants included 220 obese youth (M(age) = 11.6 years, 68% female, 53% African American, M(BMI) = 36.7) and their primary caregivers (88% mothers). Primary caregivers completed a demographics questionnaire and two HRQOL measures:...

OBJECTIVE We evaluated the current use and fit of structural firefighting gloves and developed an improved sizing scheme that better accommodates the U.S. firefighter population. BACKGROUND Among surveys, 24% to 30% of men and 31% to 62% of women reported experiencing problems with the fit or bulkiness of their structural firefighting gloves. METHOD An age-, race/ethnicity-, and gender-stra...

Gate sizing is used to increase the performance and/or decrease the area and/or power dissipation of CMOS circuits. There has been extensive work on gate sizing introducing several different methods, producing mixed results in solving speed, size of benchmark circuits and accuracy. These papers however rarely make comparisons between solving methods and usually only use small benchmarks. We int...