Introduction: Implant stability is usually measured with resonance frequency analysis (RFA) and damping capacity assessment (DCA). This study aimed to measure primary and secondary stabilities using 3 devices that are based on these methods, namely; RFA (Osstell^®) and DCA (Periotest^® and AnyCheck^®) to assess the correlations of the measurements obtained by these devices and the correlations between implant stability and insertion torque. Material and Methods: This observational prospective study included 35 dental implants. The implant stability was measured using the 3 devices. Mann–Whitney U

This study aimed at evaluating the torsional capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) beams externally wrapped with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) materials. An analytical model was described and used as a new computational procedure based on the softened truss model (STM) to predict the torsional behavior of RC beams strengthened with FRP. The proposed analytical model was validated with the existing experimental data for rectangular sections strengthened with FRP materials and considering torque-twist relationship and crack pattern at failure. The confined concrete behavior, in the case of FRP wrapping, was considered in the constitutive laws of concrete in the model. Then, an efficient algorithm was developed in MATLAB environment t

Objective: The approximate life span of a silicone maxillofacial prosthesis is as short as1.5–2 years of clinical service, then a new prosthesis should be fabricated. The most common reasonfor re-making the prosthesis is silicone mechanical properties degradation. The aim of this studywas to assess some mechanical properties of VST-30 silicone for maxillofacial prostheses after addi-tion of intrinsic pigments.Methods: Two types of intrinsic pigments (rayon flocking and burnt sienna); each of them wasincorporated into silicone. One hundred and twenty samples were prepared and split into 4 groupsaccording to the conducted tests (tear strength, hardness, surface roughness, and tensile strengthand elongation percentage) with 30 samples for ea

Reinforced concrete (RC) slabs strengthened with carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) and subjected to flexural actions may experience many types of failure, including FRP debonding, FRP rupture and concrete crushing. Of these different types of failure modes, FRP debonding stands out as the most predominant type of failure because of its dependence on the relatively weak bond interface between the soffit of the RC member and the FRP sheet attached to it. Many anchorage systems have been developed to enhance the performance of strengthened systems, one of which is the hybrid anchor, which combines the effects of patch anchors and spike anchors. Hybrid anchors have shown significant enhancement when used with RC members subjected to shear

Objectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamm

This paper proposes a hybrid speech enhancement estimator that integrates the Perceptually-motivated Karhunen–Loève Transform (PKLT) with the Dual-Masking Harmonic-based (DMH) algorithm in a unified framework termed PKDMH. The main novelty lies in combining perceptual subspace projection with harmonic-residual suppression, enabling the system to jointly remove noise while preserving speech-relevant spectral cues. PKLT first performs perceptual subspace projection and suppresses inaudible components, after which DMH eliminates remaining broadband and harmonic residuals. The proposed PKDMH system was evaluated using the TIMIT dataset contaminated with five noise types: White, Pink, F16, Airport, and Car noise—across five SNR leve