OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the intra and inter-rater reliability of pelvic floor muscle (PFM) dynamometric measurements for maximum and average strengths, as well as endurance. METHOD A convenience sample of 18 nulliparous women, without any urogynecological complaints, aged between 19 and 31 (mean age of 25.4 ± 3.9) participated in this study. They were evaluated using a...

This study was a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effect of treating women with stress or mixed urinary incontinence (SUI or MUI) by diaphragmatic, deep abdominal and pelvic floor muscle (PFM) retraining. Seventy women were randomly allocated to the training (n = 35) or control group (n = 35). Women in the training group received 8 individual clinical visits and followed a specifi...

We undertook this work to compare the treatment efficacies and the changes of quality of life after pelvic floor muscle (PFM) exercise and the functional electrical stimulation (FES)-biofeedback treatment, both of which are being widely used as conservative treatment methods for female urinary incontinence. We randomly selected 60 female incontinence patients who visited our department and divi...

Domains of remnant polarization can be written into ferroelectrics with nanoscale precision using scanning probe nanolithography techniques such as piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM). Understanding the structural effects accompanying this process has been challenging due to the lack of appropriate structural characterization tools. Synchrotron X-ray nanodiffraction provides images of the doma...

The mini-Wright peak flow meter (MPFM) has been evaluated, and the results obtained from it show a strong positive correlation (r=0.970) with the Wright's peak flow meter (PFM). MPFM measurements, however, were biased to be about 38 1/min higher than PFM measurements (95% confidence limits 31.01/min to 45.01/min). Between instrument variation was found (F--ratio 3.67 with 9 and 81 degrees of fr...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of hot pressing on the shear bond strength of a Au-Pt-Pd alloy-porcelain composite. METHODS Several metal-porcelain composites specimens were produced by two different routes: conventional porcelain fused to metal (PFM) and hot pressing. In the latter case, porcelain was hot pressed onto a polished surface (PPPS) as well as a rou...

Feature transformation aims to reduce the effects of channeland handset-distortion in telephone-based speaker verification. This paper compares several feature transformation techniques and evaluates their verification performance and computation time under the 2000 NIST speaker recognition evaluation protocol. Techniques compared include feature mapping (FM), stochastic feature transformation ...

PURPOSE The purposes of this study were to: (1) evaluate the retention rates of occlusal sealants in children in an urban school-based sealant program run by a County Health Department in Alabama; and (2) assess the clinical benefits of this sealant program by comparing caries experience of a group of participants and nonparticipants. METHODS The records of 2,097 children (mean age=8.1 +/- 1....

Regulatory sequence detection is a fundamental challenge in computational biology. The transcription process in protein synthesis starts with the binding of the transcription factor (TF) to its binding site. These binding sites are short DNA segments that are called motifs. Different sites can bind to the same factor. This variability in binding sequences besides their low information content a...