INTRODUCTION A number of different adjustable gastric bands are available for laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (LAGB). Few attempts have been made to compare the influence of band design differences for efficiency and complication rate and conflicting results have emerged from comparative studies. AIM To compare SAGB (Swedish Adjustable Gastric Band) and MiniMizer Extra adjustable gast...

from which numerical optimization of r is commenced|with respect to (i) the value of r and (ii) the probability of converging to a global minimizer of r. We expect to address these issues empirically, by extensive computational experimentation, but we have some hope of a theoretical analysis in the comparatively tractable case of 2. 3. How can Theorem 1 be exploited for global optimization? It ...

One of the challenging optimization problems is determining the minimizer of a nonlinear programming problem that has binary variables. A vexing difficulty is the rate the work to solve such problems increases as the number of discrete variables increases. Any such problem with bounded discrete variables, especially binary variables, may be transformed to that of finding a global optimum of a p...

In a simply connected two dimensional domain Ω, we consider Ginzburg-Landau minimizers u with zero degree Dirichlet boundary condition g ∈ H1/2(∂Ω;S1). We prove uniqueness of u whenever either the energy or the Ginzburg-Landau parameter are small. This generalizes a result of Ye and Zhou requiring smoothness of g. We also obtain uniqueness when Ω is multiply connected and the degrees of the vor...

Hybridization of genetic algorithms with local search approaches can enhance their performance in global optimization. Genetic algorithms, as most population based algorithms, require a considerable number of function evaluations. This may be an important drawback when the functions involved in the problem are computationally expensive as it occurs in most real world problems. Thus, in order to...

A new method for the reconstruction of two-dimensional periodic structures from scattered fareld data is presented. The approach is based on the recently developed \Methods of Variation of Boundaries" (MVB) for the solution of forward scattering problems. Here, the inverse problem is formulated as that of minimization of an appropriate nonlinear least-squares cost functional. The analytic conti...

The pure azimuthal shear problem for a circular cylindrical tube of nonlinearly elastic material, both isotropic and anisotropic, is examined on the basis of a complementary energy principle. For particular choices of strain-energy function, one convex and one nonconvex, closed-form solutions are obtained for this mixed boundary-value problem, for which the governing differential equation can b...

We develop a primal dual active set with continuation algorithm for solving the l-regularized least-squares problem that frequently arises in compressed sensing. The algorithm couples the the primal dual active set method with a continuation strategy on the regularization parameter. At each inner iteration, it first identifies the active set from both primal and dual variables, and then updates...