This study was to evaluate the effect of stress on the intervertebral disc and facet joint after implantation of device for intervertebral assisted motion (DIAM). Nine fresh human lumbar (L1-L5) cadavers were studied. The stress on L3-4, adjacent intervertebral disc and facet joints was measured in four groups. The cadavers in Group 1 were measured without special treatment; the lumbar discecto...

A global study of the vertical structures of the clouds of tropical mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) has been carried out with data from the CloudSat Cloud Profiling Radar. Tropical MCSs are found to be dominated by cloud-top heights greater than 10 km. Secondary cloud layers sometimes occur in MCSs, but outside their primary raining cores. The secondary layers have tops at 6–8 and 1–3 km. H...

Chronic spine pain poses a peculiar diagnostic and therapeutic challenge due to multiple pain sources, overlapping clinical features and nonspecific radiological findings. Facet joint injection is an interventional pain management tool for facet-related spinal pain that can be effectively administered by a radiologist. This technique is the gold standard for identifying facet joints as the sour...

Reflection coefficients are observed in nature to have stochastic behavior that departs significantly from the white noise model. Conventional deconvolution methods, however, assume reflectivity to be a white noise process. In this paper we analyze the deconvolution process, study the implications of the assumption of white noise, and show that the conventional operator can recover only the whi...

PURPOSE Gene therapy trials for inherited photoreceptor disorders are planned. Anatomical metrics to select the best candidates and outcomes are needed. Adaptive optics (AO) imaging enables visualization of photoreceptor structure, although analytical tools are lacking. Here we present criteria to assess residual photoreceptor integrity in achromatopsia (ACHM). METHODS Two AOSLOs, at the Medi...

BACKGROUND Therapeutic lumbar facet joint interventions are implemented to provide long-term pain relief after the facet joint has been identified as the basis for low back pain. The therapeutic lumbar facet joint interventions generally used for the treatment of low back pain of facet joint origin are intraarticular facet joint injections, lumbar facet joint nerve blocks, and radiofrequency ne...

A computational method is developed whereby the reflectivity of low-energy electrons from a surface can be obtained from a first-principles solution of the electronic structure of the system. The method is applied to multilayer graphene. Two bands of reflectivity minima are found, one at 0-8 eV and the other at 14-22 eV above the vacuum level. For a free-standing slab with n layers of graphene,...

Layered reflectivity sequences have spectral signatures (impulse responses) in accordance with timefrequency transformations. These signatures are filtered by a source under the convolutional definition of a seismogram. Spectral signatures of wedge models indicate that thin layers have preferred source bandwidths needed to produce either a tuned reflection or separate interface reflections. Sou...