STUDY DESIGN Mechanically induced annular disruption of lumbar intervertebral discs followed by microstructural investigation. OBJECTIVE To investigate the role that elevated nuclear pressures play in disrupting the lumbar intervertebral disc's annulus fibrosus. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Compound mechanical loadings have been used to recreate clinically relevant annular disruptions in vitr...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown cross-sectional 3-dimensional (3D) transesophageal echocardiographic (TEE) measurements to severely underestimate multidetector row computed tomographic (MDCT) measurements for the assessment of aortic annulus before transcatheter aortic valve replacement. This study compares annulus measurements from 3D-TEE using off-label use of commercially available so...

Chondroitin sulphate chains on cell and extracellular matrix proteoglycans play important regulatory roles in developing systems. Specific, developmentally regulated, sulphation motifs within the chondroitin glycosaminoglycan structure may help bind, sequester or present bioactive signalling molecules to cells thus modulating their behaviour. Using monoclonal antibodies 3B3(-), 4C3, 6C3 and 7D4...

A necessary and sufficient condition is given for quasi-homogeneous polynomial Hamiltonian systems having a center. Then it shown that there exists bound on the number of limit cycles bifurcating from period annulus at any order Melnikov functions; explicit expression this in terms (n,k,s1,s2), where n degree perturbation polynomials, k first nonzero higher function, (s1,s2) weight exponent wit...

We performed real-time 3D echocardiography in sixteen sheep to compare acute geometric changes in the mitral annulus after left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD, n=8) ligation and those after left circumflex coronary artery (LCX, n=8) ligation. The mitral regurgitation (MR) was quantified by regurgitant volume (RV) using the proximal isovelocity surface area method. The mitral annulus w...

Mitral annulus calcification (MAC) is a chronic, degenerative process in the fibrous base of the mitral valve. Although MAC was initially thought to be an age-related degenerative process, there is accumulating evidence that other mechanisms, such as atherosclerosis and abnormal calcium-phosphorus metabolism, also contribute to the development of MAC. Despite its frequency, the clinical relevan...

We study Witten’s background independent open-string field theory in the presence of a constant B-field at one loop level. The Green’s function and the partition function with a constant B-field are evaluated for an annulus.