BACKGROUND We tested the hypothesis that the shape of the shock waveform affects not only the defibrillation threshold but also the amount of cardiac damage. METHODS AND RESULTS Defibrillation thresholds were determined for 11 waveforms-3 ascending-ramp waveforms, 3 descending-ramp waveforms, 3 rectilinear first-phase biphasic waveforms, a Gurvich waveform, and a truncated exponential biphasi...

Background—We tested the hypothesis that the shape of the shock waveform affects not only the defibrillation threshold but also the amount of cardiac damage. Methods and Results—Defibrillation thresholds were determined for 11 waveforms—3 ascending-ramp waveforms, 3 descending-ramp waveforms, 3 rectilinear first-phase biphasic waveforms, a Gurvich waveform, and a truncated exponential biphasic ...

Given a simple polygon P without holes all of whose edges are axis-parallel, a rectilinear path in P is a path that consists of axis-parallel segments only and does not cross any edge of P. The length of such a path is defined as the number of segments it consists of and the rectilinear link distance between two points in P is defined as the length of the shortest path connecting the two points...

A directed graph is said to be upward planar if it can be draw in the plane such that every edge is a monotonically increasing curve in the vertical direction, and no two edges cross. An undirected graph is said to be rectilinear planar if it can be draw in the plane such that every edge is a horizontal or vertical segment, and no two edges cross. Testing upward planarity and rectilinear planar...

In this paper, we deal with arbitrary convex and concave rectilinear module packing using the Transitive Closure Graph (TCG) representation. The geometric meanings of modules are transparent to TCG as well as its induced operations, which makes TCG an ideal representation for floorplanning/placement with arbitrary rectilinear modules. We first partition a rectilinear module into a set of submod...

The adoption of Health IT has been argued to bring about improvements in adopting hospitals. However, examining a panel of hospitals for the adoption of IT, we find that close to 50% of hospitals that adopt a health IT system go on to stop using it during the duration of our panel.1 We find that smaller hospitals and hospitals that are located in areas that have low IT-Intensity are more likely...

The enormity of the problem of deteriorating pipeline infrastructure is widely apparent. Since a complete rebuilding of the piping system is not financially realistic, municipal and utility operators require the ability to monitor the condition of buried pipes. Thus, reliable pipeline assessment and management tools are necessary to develop long term cost effective maintenance, repair, and reha...

A new approximation heuristic for finding a rectilinear Steiner tree of a set of nodes is presented. It starts with a rectilinear minimum spanning tree of the nodes and repeatedly connects a node to the nearest point on the rectangular layout of an edge, removing the longest edge of the loop thus formed. A simple implementation of the heuristic using conventional data structures is compared wit...