BACKGROUND Recent morphological analyses of vertebrae in patients with scoliosis have revealed three-dimensional (3D) deformities in the vertebral bodies. However, it remains controversial whether these deformities are secondary changes caused by asymmetrical vertebral loading or primary changes caused by aberrant asymmetrical vertebral growth. Furthermore, the difference in vertebral morpholog...

We describe a novel method to produce concave microwells utilizing solid-liquid phase change. This method, named 'ice-lithography', does not require any lithographic processes and consists of a few simple steps that yield multiple concave microwells. We demonstrated that the shape and size of the microwells can be controlled by varying substrates and vapor-collection time. Patterned wells with ...

Idiopathic scoliosis is one of the most common disabling pathologies of children and adolescents. Etiology and pathogenesis of idiopathic scoliosis remain unknown. To study the etiology of this disease we identified the cells' phenotypes in the vertebral body growth plates in patients with idiopathic scoliosis. Materials and methods: The cells were isolated from vertebral body growth plates of ...

A class < of convex bodies (c-bodies) P,Q, . . . in a k-dimensional Euclidean space R is called convex, when for all P,Q ∈ < always follows αP × βQ ∈ < [α, β ≥ 0, α+ β = 1]. Here we interpret λP (with λ > 0) to be a c-body, obtained from P through a dilatation with respect to a fixed originO of the spaceR; P ×Q refers to Minkowski addition. This property of a class of c-bodies thus not only ref...

We prove that the Fenchel dual of the log-Laplace transform of the uniform measure on a convex body in Rn is a (1 + o(1))n-self-concordant barrier. This gives the first construction of a universal barrier for convex bodies with optimal self-concordance parameter. The proof is based on basic geometry of log-concave distributions, and elementary duality in exponential families.

We prove an isoperimetric inequality for uniformly log-concave measures and for the uniform measure on a uniformly convex body. These inequalities imply the log-Sobolev inequalities proved by Bobkov and Ledoux [12] and Bobkov and Zegarlinski [13]. We also recover a concentration inequality for uniformly convex bodies, similar to that proved by Gromov and Milman [22].

In this paper, we investigate the similarity solutions for a steady laminar incompressible boundary layer equations governing the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow near the forward stagnation point of two-dimensional and axisymmetric bodies. This leads to the study of a boundary value problem involving a third order autonomous ordinary differential equation. Our main results are the existence, uni...

This paper describes the Region Occlusion Calculus (ROC-20), that can be used to model spatial occlusion and the effects of motion parallax of arbitrary shaped objects. ROC-20 assumes the region based ontology of RCC-8 and extends Galton’s Lines of Sight Calculus by allowing concave shaped objects into the modelled domain. This extension is used to describe the effects of mutually occluding bod...