Sir, We read with interest the report ‘Characterization of damage in Portuguese lupus patients: analysis of a national lupus registry’ and wish to emphasize that the frequency and cumulative damage score present in a lupus patient population is also determined by the type of organ damage. In the registry study of 976 patients by Gonçalves et al., the average SDI score was 0.71 1.22 and the freq...

In this paper, we investigate the damage detection of structures seen as an optimization problem, using modal characterization to evaluate the dynamic response of the structure given a damage model. We implemented the firefly optimization algorithm with a simple numerical damage model to assess the performance of the method and its advantages for structural health monitoring (SHM). We show some...

Background Cardiac MRI (CMR) is an excellent modality for myocardial tissue characterization, allowing demonstration and quantification of myocardial damage using late Gadolinium enhancement (LGE) sequence. C Reactive Protein (CRP) has been shown to be a prognostic marker in lymphocytic myocarditis. The purpose of this study was to study the correlation between CRP levels and the extent of myoc...

Abstract Various methods are used to characterize the deterioration of mechanical properties in polymers. The focus is set on distinguishing between time‐dependent and irreversible damage two different grades polypropylene. First, digital image correlation utilized capture stress–strain behavior during monotonic tensile tests. Changes specimen volume recorded throughout experiment serve as an i...

In this paper, we present characterizations of pairs of graphs whose join graphs are 2-minimally nonouterplanar. In addition, we present a characterization of pairs of graphs whose join graphs are 2-minimally nonouterplanar in terms of forbidden subgraphs.

For the family of graphs with xed-size vertex cover k, we present all of the forbidden minors (obstructions), for k up to ve. We derive some results, including a practical nite-state recognition algorithm, needed to compute these obstructions.