As HIV care services continue to scale-up in sub-Saharan Africa, adequate tuberculosis diagnostic capacity is vital to reduce mortality among HIV-infected persons. A structured survey was administered at 663 health facilities providing HIV care to 908,043 patients in across 9 sub-Saharan African countries to estimate the proportion of facilities and HIV patients at these facilities with access ...

This article introduces a new biomedical / open surgical instrument to assist surgeon in applying surgical clips to patient’s body tissue and blood vessel during surgical processes. The new clip delivery system is designed to better the clip’s distal advance through internal clip channel, jaw guiding track, and all other transition areas to keep surgical clip from accidental shooting out during...

The motivation for this thesis resulted from a study of semi-automated rail mounted gantry cranes at an Australian seaport container terminal. The Sequential Ordering Problem with Time Windows (SOP-TW) can arise as a subproblem of these crane operations. The SOP-TW corresponds to the task of scheduling a single crane to move a set of containers, where each container has: a fixed pick-up locatio...

The uncapacitated facility location problem aims to select a subset of facilities to open, so that the demands of a given set of customers are satisfied at the minimum cost. In this study, we present a novel multistart Drop-Add-Swap heuristic for this problem. The proposed heuristic is multiple applications of the DropAdd-Swap heuristic with randomly generated initial solutions. And the propose...

Standardbred trainers from 1 racetrack and 7 off-track training facilities were surveyed to determine the most common drugs, and prevalence of concurrent herb administration. Furosemide (on-track) and anti-inflammatory drugs (off-track) were the most common drugs administered. Among horses on-track, 9.8% received herbs compared with 13.8% off-track horses; 67% and 58% of these horses, respectiv...

Monodisperse microscale drops formed with microfluidic devices are useful for encapsulating cells, microgel particles, or even additional drops. These techniques are thus useful for applications ranging from high-throughput biology to monodisperse particle and capsule synthesis, which require encapsulation of such objects. However, it is challenging to efficiently encapsulate the objects in all...

Recent experimental developments have enabled the measurement of dynamical forces between two moving liquid drops in solution using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The drop sizes, interfacial tension, and approach velocities used in the experiments are in a regime where surface forces, hydrodynamics, and drop deformation are all significant. A detailed theoretical model of the experimental se...

We introduce a mechanism that provides an on/off switching capability in channel add-drop filter structures. These filters consist of two waveguides, a bus and a drop, coupled through a frequency-selective element. The switching functionality is achieved by incorporating materials with variable absorbing characteristics into the coupling element. When the variable material displays minimum abso...