heart failure is common in patients with chronic renal disease, either as a complication of renal failure or from shared risk factors, or is the major cause of death in patients on dialysis. at present, end stage renal disease (esrd) patients who have systolic heart failure are considered high-risk for surgery; and nephrologists and cardiologists are reluctant to refer these patients for kidney...

The frequency-dependent characteristics of microstrip planar circuits have been previously analyzed using several full-wave approaches. All those methods directly give characteristic of the circuits frequency by frequency. Computation time becomes important if these planar circuits have to be studied over a very large bandwidth. The transmission line matrix (TLM) method presented in this paper ...

This paper describes a framework and algorithms for robust kinematic design of mechanical assemblies. The framework, developed over a period of ten years, is based on the configuration space method and supports automatic modeling, nominal and toleranced analysis, and part tolerance envelope computation of open and closed loop planar mechanisms with multiple, changing contacts. It also supports ...

The assumption of ellipsoidal flaw geometry has been widely used in calculations of the probability of structural failure conditioned on nondestructive (ND) measurements. Clearly, in most cases the flaw geometry is not ellipsoidal and in the particular case of cracks the actual geometry may deviate significantly from a degenerate ellipsoid (i.e., a planar crack with an elliptical plan-view shap...

Early detection of avalanche breakdown in an embedded planar capacitor dielectric is addressed in this paper. These failures were observed during accelerated temperature and voltage aging of embedded planar capacitors. At the time of avalanche breakdown there was a sharp drop in the value of insulation resistance. There was no trend in the values of insulation resistance before failure, making ...

The algorithms of computational geometry are designed for a machine model with exact real arithmetic. Substituting floating-point arithmetic for the assumed real arithmetic may cause implementations to fail. Although this is well known, there is no comprehensive documentation of what can go wrong and why. In this paper, we study simple algorithms for planar convex hulls and 3d Delaunay triangul...