Background: Rupture into the biliary ducts is the most frequent complication of hydatid liver disease. In endemic areas of Echinococcus granulosus, development of jaundice in a patient with liver cyst is initially suspected to have hydatid cyst. Case Presentation: A 48 year-old woman with history of asymptomatic hydatid liver cysts was admitted to the emergency department with right upper qu...

Epidemiological studies link habitual snoring and stroke, but mechanisms involved are poorly understood. One previously advanced hypothesis is that transmitted snoring vibration energy may promote carotid atheromatous plaque formation or rupture. To test whether vibration energy is present in carotid artery walls during snoring we developed an animal model in which we examined induced snoring (...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The ability to discriminate between ruptured and unruptured cerebral aneurysms on a morphological basis may be useful in clinical risk stratification. The objective was to evaluate the importance of inflow-angle (IA), the angle separating parent vessel and aneurysm dome main axes. METHODS IA, maximal dimension, height-width ratio, and dome-neck aspect ratio were evaluat...

A random fuse network, or equivalently a 2d spring network with quenched disorder, is submitted to a constant load and thermal noise, and studied by numerical simulations. Rupture is thermally activated and the lifetime follows an Arrhenius law where the energy barrier is reduced by disorder. Due to the non-homogenous distribution of forces from stress concentration at microcracks’ tips, spatia...

We introduce a model for microtubule (MT) mechanics containing lateral bonds between dimers in neighboring protofilaments, bending rigidity of dimers, and repulsive interactions between protofilaments modeling steric constraints to investigate the influence of mechanical forces on hydrolysis and catastrophes. We use the allosteric dimer model, where tubulin dimers are characterized by an equili...

Single molecule force spectroscopy probes the strength, lifetime, and energetic details of intermolecular interactions in a simple experiment. A growing number of these studies have reported distinctly nonlinear trends in rupture force with loading rate that are typically explained in conventional models by invoking complex escape pathways. Recent analyses suggested that these trends should be ...

A direct measurement of the potential energy surface that characterizes individual chemical bonds in complex materials has fundamental significance for many disciplines. Here, we demonstrate that the energy profile for metallic single-atom contacts and single-molecule junctions can be mapped by fitting ambient atomic force microscope measurements carried out in the near-equilibrium regime to a ...

Using a multi-scale computational approach, we determine the effect of introducing a small fraction of high-strength connections between cross-linked nanoparticles. The nanoparticles' rigid cores are decorated with a corona of grafted polymers, which contain reactive functional groups at the chain ends. With the overlap of neighboring coronas, these reactive groups can form weak labile bonds, w...

Dynamic force spectroscopy and steered molecular simulations have become powerful tools for analyzing the mechanical properties of proteins, and the strength of protein-protein complexes and aggregates. Probability density functions of the unfolding forces and unfolding times for proteins, and rupture forces and bond lifetimes for protein-protein complexes allow quantification of the forced unf...