Although several studies have suggested that cortical alterations underlie such age-related visual deficits as decreased acuity, little is known about what changes actually occur in visual cortex during healthy aging. Two recent studies showed changes in primary visual cortex (V1) during normal aging; however, no studies have characterized the effects of aging on visual cortex beyond V1, import...

Intraventricular hydrodynamics plays an important role in evaluating cardiac function. Relationship between diastolic vortex and left ventricular (LV) filling is still rarely elucidated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the evolution of vortex during diastole in hyperthyroidism (HT) and explore the alteration of hydromechanics characteristics with sensitive indexes.Forty-three patients dia...

The addition of polymer dielectric films to silicon wafers is useful in producing stress reduction layers and interconnect structures for chip-scale packaging as well as 3D wafer stacks. The use of lower cure temperature materials offers several advantages including a lowered thermal budget on devices that are sensitive to electrical performance change with temperature. Unfortunately, enough st...

Resumo Introdução: Glomerulopatias são a terceira causa de doença renal crônica (DRC) com necessidade diálise no Brasil. Distúrbio mineral e ósseo (DMO) é uma das complicações da DRC está presente já nos estágios iniciais. A avaliação espessura médio-intimal carótidas (EMIC) vasodilatação fluxo-mediada (VFM) maneiras não invasivas do risco cardiovascular. Hipótese: Pacientes glomerulopatias pri...

Although full-field measurement techniques have been well established, material characterization from these data remains challenging. Often, no closed-form solution exists between measured quantities and sought parameters. In this paper, a novel approach to determine the stiffness of thin curved membranes is proposed, based on virtual fields method (VFM). Utilizing Kirchhoff-Love shell theory, ...

2. PPPs also bring fiscal risks. These need to be mitigated and managed. To address these challenges, governments usually try to introduce PPP legal and institutional reforms to develop technically sophisticated PPP ecosystems that identify, structure and eventually only pursue PPP proposals that can maximize value-for-money (VfM) to tax-payers. These ecosystems exist to carry transactions from...

A Variable-Fidelity Modeling (VFM) method has been developed as an efficient and accurate aerodynamic data modeling strategy. In this approach, a set of CFD methods with varying degrees of fidelity and computational expense is exercised to reduce the number of expensive high-fidelity computations. Kriging-based bridge functions are constructed to match the lowand high fidelity CFD data. The met...

The article depicts the international scientific project-DEMoB.inc. which aims to develop a European tool kit for assessing quality of care provided by long-term psychiatric and social care facilities. Positive aspects of rehabilitation of people with profound and chronic mental disturbance, as well as health care system shortcomings leading to patients' social exclusion, abuse and violation of...

Derived by combining data from the CloudSat radar and the CALIPSO lidar, the so-called radar-lidar geometrical profile product (RL-GeoProf) allows for characterization of the vertical and spatial structure of hydrometeor layers. RL-GeoProf is one of the standard data products of the CloudSat Project. In this paper we describe updates to the RL-GeoProf algorithm. These improvements include a sig...