20,464 research outputs found
Performance of the resurfaced hip. Part 1: the influence of the prosthesis size and positioning on the remodelling and fracture of the femoral neck
Hip resurfacing is an established treatment for osteoarthritis in young active patients. Failure modes include femoral neck fracture and prosthesis loosening, which may be associated with medium-term bone adaptation, including femoral neck narrowing and densification around the prosthesis stem.Finite element modelling was used to indicate the effects of prosthesis sizing and positioning on the bone remodelling and fracture strength under a range of normal and traumatic loads, with the aim of understanding these failure modes better.The simulations predicted increased superior femoral neck stress shielding in young patients with small prostheses, which required shortening of the femoral neck to give an acceptable implant–bone interface. However, with a larger prosthesis, natural femoral head centre recreation in the implanted state was possible; therefore stress shielding was restricted to the prosthesis interior, and its extent was less sensitive to prosthesis orientation. With valgus orientation, the implanted neck strength was, at worst, within 3 per cent of its intact strength.The study suggests that femoral neck narrowing may be linked to a reduction in the horizontal femoral offset, occurring if the prosthesis is excessively undersized. As such, hip resurfacing should aim to reproduce the natural femoral head centre, and, for valgus prosthesis orientation, to avoid femoral neck fracture
Quantum Feynman-Kac perturbations
We develop fully noncommutative Feynman-Kac formulae by employing quantum
stochastic processes. To this end we establish some theory for perturbing
quantum stochastic flows on von Neumann algebras by multiplier cocycles.
Multiplier cocycles are constructed via quantum stochastic differential
equations whose coefficients are driven by the flow. The resulting class of
cocycles is characterised under alternative assumptions of separability or
Markov regularity. Our results generalise those obtained using classical
Brownian motion on the one hand, and results for unitarily implemented flows on
the other.Comment: 27 pages. Minor corrections to version 2. To appear in the Journal of
the London Mathematical Societ
Block Crossings in Storyline Visualizations
Storyline visualizations help visualize encounters of the characters in a
story over time. Each character is represented by an x-monotone curve that goes
from left to right. A meeting is represented by having the characters that
participate in the meeting run close together for some time. In order to keep
the visual complexity low, rather than just minimizing pairwise crossings of
curves, we propose to count block crossings, that is, pairs of intersecting
bundles of lines.
Our main results are as follows. We show that minimizing the number of block
crossings is NP-hard, and we develop, for meetings of bounded size, a
constant-factor approximation. We also present two fixed-parameter algorithms
and, for meetings of size 2, a greedy heuristic that we evaluate
experimentally.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016
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Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis complicating COVID-19 in the ICU - A case report.
It is not yet known, if critically ill COVID-19 patients are prone to fungal infections. We report a 69-year-old patient without typical risk factors for invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA), who developed IPA two weeks after onset of symptoms. Our report shows that IPA may occur in critically ill COVID-19 patients
Tree-Automatic Well-Founded Trees
We investigate tree-automatic well-founded trees. Using Delhomme's
decomposition technique for tree-automatic structures, we show that the
(ordinal) rank of a tree-automatic well-founded tree is strictly below
omega^omega. Moreover, we make a step towards proving that the ranks of
tree-automatic well-founded partial orders are bounded by omega^omega^omega: we
prove this bound for what we call upwards linear partial orders. As an
application of our result, we show that the isomorphism problem for
tree-automatic well-founded trees is complete for level Delta^0_{omega^omega}
of the hyperarithmetical hierarchy with respect to Turing-reductions.Comment: Will appear in Logical Methods of Computer Scienc
First proof of concept of remote attendance for future observation strategies between Wettzell (Germany) and Concepción (Chile)
Current VLBI observations are controlled and attended locally at the radio telescopes on the basis of pre-scheduled session files. Operations have to deal with system specific station commands and individual setup procedures. Neither the scheduler nor the correlator nor the data-analyst gets real-time feedback about system parameters during a session. Changes in schedules after the start of a session by remote are impossible or at least quite difficult. For future scientific approaches, a more flexible mechanism would optimize the usage of resources at the sites. Therefore shared-observation control between world-wide telescope s, remote attendance/control as well as completely unattended-observations could be useful, in addition to the classic way to run VLBI observations. To reach these goals, the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (Bonn) have developed a software extension to the existing NASA Field System for remote control. It uses the principle of a remotely accessible, autonomous process cell as server extension to the Field System on the basis of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). Based on this technology the first completely remote attended and controlled geodetic VLBI session between Wettzell, Germany and Concepción, Chile was successfully performed over 24 hours. This first test was extremely valuable for gathering information about the differences between VLBI systems and measuring the performance of internet connections and automatic connection re-establishments. During the 24h-session, the network load, the number of sent/received packages and the transfer speed were monitor ed and captured. It was a first reliable test for the future wishes to control several telescopes with one graphical user interface on different data transfer rates over large distances in an efficient way. In addition, future developments for an authentication and user role management will be realized within the upcoming NEXPReS project
Generic Encodings of Constructor Rewriting Systems
Rewriting is a formalism widely used in computer science and mathematical
logic. The classical formalism has been extended, in the context of functional
languages, with an order over the rules and, in the context of rewrite based
languages, with the negation over patterns. We propose in this paper a concise
and clear algorithm computing the difference over patterns which can be used to
define generic encodings of constructor term rewriting systems with negation
and order into classical term rewriting systems. As a direct consequence,
established methods used for term rewriting systems can be applied to analyze
properties of the extended systems. The approach can also be seen as a generic
compiler which targets any language providing basic pattern matching
primitives. The formalism provides also a new method for deciding if a set of
patterns subsumes a given pattern and thus, for checking the presence of
useless patterns or the completeness of a set of patterns.Comment: Added appendix with proofs and extended example
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