The inter-lamellar connectivity of the annulus fibrosus in the intervertebral disc has been shown to affect the prediction of the overall disc behaviour in computational models. Using a combined experimental and computational approach, the inter-lamellar mechanical behaviour of the disc annulus was investigated under conditions of radial loading. Twenty-seven specimens of anterior annulus fibro...

OBJECTIVES Mitral annuloplasty involves sewing a prosthetic ring to the mitral annulus. This involves a risk of damaging the surrounding structures in the left atrioventricular (AV) groove, particularly the left circumflex artery, which may be inadvertently sutured, causing an arterial occlusion. We have used cardiac computed tomography (CT) scans to study the three-dimensional relationship bet...

Scales (n = 552) of chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) collected in the North Pacific Ocean in May 1998 and 1999 and April 1999 were used to compare time of annulus formation between years, regions, and ages. May samples were collected from approximately the same location and time, during two years of very different ocean conditions, 1998 a strong EI Nino year and 1999 a strong La Nina year. Sea s...

We construct quasiconformal mappings in Euclidean spaces by integration of a discontinuous kernel against doubling measures with suitable decay. The differentials of mappings that arise in this way satisfy an isotropic form of the doubling condition. We prove that this isotropic doubling condition is satisfied by the distance functions of certain fractal sets. Finally, we construct an isotropic...

We show that the number of lattice points lying in a thin annulus has a Gaussian value distribution if the width of the annulus tends to zero sufficiently slowly as we increase the inner radius.

BACKGROUND To allow performance of "stand-alone" mitral annuloplasty with minimal invasiveness, percutaneous techniques consisting of delivery into the coronary sinus (CS) of devices intended to shrink the mitral valve annulus have recently been tested in animal models. These techniques exploit the anatomic proximity of the CS and mitral valve annulus in ovine or dogs. Knowledge of a detailed a...

The authors present the central capacity sharing (CCS) model and derive equations describing its behaviors to explain results from dual-task situations. The predictions of the CCS model are contrasted with those of the central bottleneck model. The CCS model predicts all of the hallmark effects of the psychological refractory period (PRP) pardigm: -1 slope of the PRP effect at short stimulus on...

Stimuli that are clearly positive or negative (hence valence-laden stimuli) have the potential to interrupt unrelated task processing. A typical example is the emotional Stroop effect (ESE) in which responding to a certain task feature (e.g., color) is delayed by the presentation of task-irrelevant valent stimuli (e.g., negative pictures) compared to valence-neutral stimuli. Here we scrutinize ...

Interpreting how far organisms within fossil assemblages may have been transported and if they all originated from the same location is fundamental to understanding whether they represent true palaeocommunities. In a three-factorial experimental design, we used an annular flume to generate actualistic sandy sediment-density flows that were fast (2 ms-1) and fully turbulent in order to test the ...

Background Imaging of the aortic annulus is paramount for the success of transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) to obviate prosthesis size mismatch. The aortic annulus is a dynamic structure with alterations of its ellipsoid shape during the cardiac cycle. The objective of this study was to investigate with cine-MRI the changes of the sagittal and coronal diameter of the aortic annulus ...