BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Annular tears and nuclear degeneration often occur concurrently, but their temporal association remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to assess whether annular tears precede nuclear degeneration and whether the evolution of nuclear degeneration is affected by presence of annular tears. MATERIALS AND METHODS From our radiology report data base, 46 patients with ...

OBJECTIVE Patch closure of the subarterial ventricular septal defect requires suture placement at the pulmonary annulus. We aimed to identify whether patch closure of subarterial ventricular septal defect would affect the growth of pulmonary annulus in comparison with that of perimembranous ventricular septal defect. METHODS Of 361 patients who underwent patch closure of ventricular septal de...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE At lumbar diskography, intradiskal lidocaine can eliminate or reduce provoked diskogenic pain. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the postdiskogram CT features of lidocaine-sensitive and lidocaine-insensitive severely painful disks. MATERIALS AND METHODS Intradiskal lidocaine was injected at 182 severely painful levels in 111 patients. Clinical records/imaging st...

The paper presents an iterative method for the computation of the near fields of single layer microstrip patch antennas. A judicious combination of the advantages of the MPIE (mixed potential integral equation) method, the FFT algorithm and the biconjugate gradient leads to an efficient numerical solution. The scheme can deal with patches of arbitrary shapes and is capable of dealing with a ver...

The morphology of telephone-cord buckles of elastic thin films can be used to evaluate the initial residual stress and interface toughness of the filmsubstrate system. The maximum out-of-plane displacement δ, the wavelength λ and amplitude A of the wave buckles can be measured in physical experiments. Through δ, λ, and A, the buckle morphology is obtained by an annular sector model established ...

Porokeratoses are uncommon hereditary or acquired keratinization disorders due to abnormal clones of keratinocytes in the epidermis. Porokeratoses have several clinical features which may occur simultaneously. A rare type is verrucous porokeratosis (VPK). Herein, we present a 47-year-old man with a 4-year history of perianal verrucous lesions and one year history of annular pruritic lesions on ...

The 17-year (1982-1998) trend in surface temperature shows a general cooling over the Antarctic continent, warming of the sea ice zone, with moderate changes over the oceans. Warming of the peripheral seas is associated with negative trends in the regional sea ice extent. Effects of the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) and the extrapolar Southern Oscillation (SO) on surface temperature ar...

[1] The effect of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) on the Northern Hemisphere wintertime stratospheric polar vortex and major, mid-winter stratospheric sudden warmings (SSWs) is evaluated using a meteorological reanalysis dataset. The MJO influences the region in the tropospheric North Pacific sector that is most strongly associated with a SSW. Consistent with this, SSWs in the reanalysis re...

Zernike polynomials are commonly used to represent the wavefront phase on circular optical apertures, since they form a complete and orthonormal basis on the unit circle. Here, we present a generalization of this Zernike basis for a variety of important optical apertures. On the contrary to ad hoc solutions, most of them based on the Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization method, here we apply the dif...

M itral annular velocities derived from pulsed tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) were recently demonstrated to complement the analysis of systolic and diastolic left ventricular (LV) performance in different clinical settings. 2 The early diastolic mitral annular velocity (E9) was found to behave as a preload independent index of relaxation. The mitral E/E9 ratio (that is, the mitral E velocity corr...