Three dimensional heat-induced echo-strain imaging is a potentially useful tool for monitoring the formation of thermal lesions during ablative therapy. Heat-induced echo-strain, known as thermal strain, is due to the changes in the speed of propagating ultrasound signals and to tissue expansion during heat deposition. This paper presents a complete system for targeting and intraoperative monit...

BACKGROUND A paucity of data exists on mitral valve (MV) deformation during the cardiac cycle in man. Real-time 3-dimensional (3D) echocardiography now allows dynamic volumetric imaging of the MV, thus enabling computerized modeling of MV function directly in health and disease. METHODS AND RESULTS MV imaging using 3D transesophageal echocardiography was performed in 10 normal subjects and 10...

AIMS left ventricular (LV) mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) has emerged as a therapeutic target using cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in chronic heart failure patients. Current methods used to evaluate LVMD are technically challenging and do not assess all the components of LVMD simultaneously. We analysed real-time 3D speckle tracking (3DST) echocardiography as a novel method to assess L...

This research work aimed to develop smart multifunctional composites via a process for uniformly dispersing carbon nanotubes (CNT) on an orthogonal three-dimensional (3D) woven glass fabric with minimised filtering effect. These could detect strain under tensile and flexural loading by the piezoresistive response of infused CNT network. Conventional vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding was m...

Background 3D cine displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) directly encodes tissue displacement into MR phase data, providing a comprehensive 3D view of cardiac motion and strain. Unfortunately, 3D cine DENSE motion analysis presently requires manually delineated anatomy. An automated analysis would reduce interobserver variability, improve measurement throughput, and simplify data...

The modification of the electronic and chemical properties of Pt(111) surfaces by subsurface 3d transition metals was studied using density-functional theory. In each case investigated, the Pt surface d-band was broadened and lowered in energy by interactions with the subsurface 3d metals, resulting in weaker dissociative adsorption energies of hydrogen and oxygen on these surfaces. The magnitu...

This paper presents a new registration framework for estimating myocardial motion and strain from multiple views of 3D ultrasound sequences. The originality of our approach resides in the estimation of the transformation directly from the multiple views rather than from a single view or a reconstructed compounded sequence. This allows us to exploit all spatio-temporal information available in t...

Soft materials featuring both 3D free-form architectures and high stretchability are highly desirable for a number of engineering applications ranging from cushion modulators, soft robots to stretchable electronics; however, both the manufacturing and fundamental mechanics are largely elusive. Here, we overcome the manufacturing difficulties and report a class of mechanical metamaterials that n...

OVERVIEW: Silicon semiconductor (MOSFET: metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor) dimensions are approaching the nanometer scale. The gate electrode size has already been reduced to 50 nm or less for the most advanced 90-nm technology nodes, and for the 65-nm nodes the size is expected to be 25 nm. A new guideline to replace the scaling rule is needed, and making use of the strain eff...

Tissue engineered heart valves are a promising alternative for current heart valve replacements. However, the mechanical properties of these valves are insufficient for implantation at the aortic position [1]. Collagen orientation is important to improve the mechanical properties of tissue engineered valves. Two-photon laser-scanning microscopy allows us to study the influence of strain on coll...