BACKGROUND Left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients frequently leads to the development of congestive heart failure. We evaluated changes in echocardiographic parameters among CKD patients with LV diastolic dysfunction. METHODS We examined 70 ambulatory patients with CKD at stages 3-5 and 26 patients without CKD as a control group. Standard echocard...

In this letter, we introduce medical-grade quality of service (QoS) for wireless healthcare applications. We first investigate the basic QoS requirements of medical applications. We point out that the conventional QoS metric of the packet error rate (PER) is insufficient for evaluating the QoS level of medical applications. The most critical concern in medical-grade QoS is whether the received ...

Three post-launch calibration methods are used to examine the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) microwave imager (TMI) on-orbit performance. The first method is a statistical analysis of TMI ocean observations that reveals a systematic along-scan error. The second method is an intercomparison of TMI and SSM/I observations that shows a warm bias in TMI. The last method is an analysis of...

Drawbeads are applied in the deep drawing process to improve the control of the material flow during the forming operation. These drawbeads can be replaced by an equivalent drawbead in simulations of the deep drawing process. In this paper the implementation of an equivalent drawbead model in a finite element code is described. This equivalent drawbead takes not only the drawbead restraining fo...

Low qualified rate and inferior quality frequently occurring in the general deep drawing process of a certain box-shaped part, now use hydroforming to optimize forming process, in order to study the effect of hydroforming for improving the quality and formability, purposed five process schemes: general deep drawing, active hydroforming, passive hydroforming, general deep drawing combined with a...