Bone scaffolds serve a crucial role in tissue engineering, particularly in facilitating bone regeneration where natural repair is insufficient. Despite advancements in the fabrication of polymeric bone scaffolds, the challenge remains to optimize their mechanical resilience. Specifically, research on the fatigue behaviour of polymeric bone scaffolds is scarce. This study investigates the influence of pore architecture on the mechanical performance of poly-lactic-acid (PLA) scaffolds under quasi-static and cyclic compression. PLA scaffolds with a 60% porosity were fabricated using extrusion-based 3D printing in various designs: Gyroid, Lidinoid, Fischer-Koch, IWP, and Voronoi. Results demonstrated that Gyroid scaffolds had the highest compressive strength (6.6 MPa), followed by Lidinoid, Fischer-Koch, IWP, and Voronoi designs. Increased strut thickness was linked to higher compressive strength. However, normalized fatigue resistance showed a different pattern. While scaffolds resisted fatigue cycles at low strain amplitudes, fatigue damage was observed at higher strains. Voronoi structures exhibited the highest normalized fatigue performance, enduring around 58,000 cycles at 85% strain amplitude, followed by Gyroid, Fischer-Koch, Lidinoid, and IWP structures. Enhanced fatigue performance in different topologies correlated with the minimum cross-sectional area of scaffolds. Given the importance of both static and fatigue strength, the Gyroid topology emerges as the superior choice overall.

The development of multi-material filaments has enabled fused filament fabrication-based additive manufacturing to address demand for high-performance lightweight multifunctional components. In this study, polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene based filaments with metallic reinforcements of magnetic iron (MI), stainless steel (SS), bronze (Br), copper (Cu), Bismuth (Bi), and Tungsten (W) were investigated to elucidate their complex processing-structure-property relationships. The microstructure of 3D-printed materials were characterized by microscopy and analyzed to determine the metal cross-sectional area percentage and the relationship between metal reinforcement, the polymer matrix, and porosity. Compression testing was conducted in directions parallel and perpendicular to the build direction in order to evaluate the effect of orientation and metal reinforcement on the mechanical properties. 3D-printed specimens experienced either fracture through print layers or layer-wise interfacial rupture for loads applied perpendicular and parallel to the print layers, respectively. A dependence of yield strength on loading orientation was observed for Br-PLA, Cu-PLA, SS-PLA, Bi-ABS, and W-ABS; however, MI-PLA and pure ABS specimens did not exhibit this sensitivity. Metal reinforcement also influenced the magnitude of compressive yield strength, with MI-PLA and SS-PLA demonstrating increased strength over Br-PLA and Cu-PLA, while ABS demonstrated increased strength over Bi-ABS and W-ABS. These results demonstrate the importance of considering orientation in printing and applications, the trade-off between various metallic reinforcements for added multifunctionality, and the potential of these tailored polymer composites for novel 3D-printed structures.

We evaluated the effect of compression leggings with micromassage in association with physical activity on women with lipedema, not previously treated and without recent changes in body weight. The treatment resulted in an improvement in all subjective parameters, in spontaneous and evoked pain, in the volume of the limbs, in the absence of significant changes in body weight, and regardless of the duration of use, age, years of illness, the clinical stage, and body mass index (BMI). Evoked pain did not improve in areas affected by untreated lipedema; foot circumferences did not increase. We found a significant reduction in the thickness of subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) and skin evaluated in multiple points of the lower limb. Micromassage compression leggings are proposed as an integral part of conservative treatment. A method is proposed for the clinical evaluation of evoked pain, called the Progressive Pain Check (PPC), which allows for the calculation of a numerical score called the Ricolfi-Patton Score (RPS) and for the ultrasound evaluation of tissues. The method is simple and repeatable and allows for completion of the clinical evaluation of the patient at diagnosis and for an evaluation of the effects of various treatments, even applied to just one side of the body.

Dewatering is a critical step in cassava flours processing. Compression dewatering kinetics are useful to understand and design a dewatering operation. The dataset presents dewatering kinetics measured in a filtration-consolidation cell at constant pressure between 4 and 21 bar, on several cassava mashes (three batches fragmented at two particle size distributions (PSDs)). The dataset comprises, for each dewatering kinetic measurement, filtrate mass, cake height, data to estimate the pressure applied on the product (i.e. air pressure, compression force) as a function of time; and the moisture content measurements of the fresh and dewatered cassava and of the filtrate. A commented python script is included to read the dewatering experimental files and plot the kinetics Furthermore, the dataset extends its utility by including particle size distributions (PSDs) obtained from six cassava batches, subjected to several protocol variants. These data are useful for understanding the phenomena involved in cassava dewatering. They also serve as a valuable resource for researchers, designers, and operators to design cassava dewatering.

A point cloud is a representation of objects or scenes utilising unordered points comprising 3D positions and attributes. The ability of point clouds to mimic natural forms has gained significant attention from diverse applied fields, such as virtual reality and augmented reality. However, the point cloud, especially those representing dynamic scenes or objects in motion, must be compressed efficiently due to its huge data volume. The latest video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) standard for dynamic point clouds divides the 3D point cloud into many patches using computationally expensive normal estimation, segmentation, and refinement. The patches are projected onto a 2D plane to apply existing video coding techniques. This process often results in losing proximity information and some original points. This loss induces artefacts that adversely affect user perception. The proposed method segments dynamic point clouds based on shape similarity and occlusion before patch generation. This segmentation strategy helps maintain the points\' proximity and retain more original points by exploiting the density and occlusion of the points. The experimental results establish that the proposed method significantly outperforms the V-PCC standard and other relevant methods regarding rate-distortion performance and subjective quality testing for both geometric and texture data of several benchmark video sequences.

As higher spatiotemporal resolution tactile sensing systems are being developed for prosthetics, wearables, and other biomedical applications, they demand faster sampling rates and generate larger data streams. Sparsifying transformations can alleviate these requirements by enabling compressive sampling and efficient data storage through compression. However, research on the best sparsifying transforms for tactile interactions is lagging. In this work we construct a library of orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelet transforms as sparsifying transforms for tactile interactions and compare their tradeoffs in compression and sparsity. We tested the sparsifying transforms on a publicly available high-density tactile object grasping dataset (548 sensor tactile glove, grasping 26 objects). In addition, we investigated which dimension wavelet transform-1D, 2D, or 3D-would best compress these tactile interactions. Our results show that wavelet transforms are highly efficient at compressing tactile data and can lead to very sparse and compact tactile representations. Additionally, our results show that 1D transforms achieve the sparsest representations, followed by 3D, and lastly 2D. Overall, the best wavelet for coarse approximation is Symlets 4 evaluated temporally which can sparsify to 0.5% sparsity and compress 10-bit tactile data to an average of 0.04 bits per pixel. Future studies can leverage the results of this paper to assist in the compressive sampling of large tactile arrays and free up computational resources for real-time processing on computationally constrained mobile platforms like neuroprosthetics.

Compression systems based electromechanical actuators require a good understanding of their dynamics for a better performance. This paper deals with the study of the nonlinear dynamics of an electromechanical system with two rotating arms subjected to a sinusoidal excitation for fluid compression purposes. The physical model integrating two balloons to be compressed by the arms alternately is presented and the mathematical equations traducing their dynamics are established. We emphasize on the influence of some control parameters namely the supply voltage, the discontinuity position and the viscoelastic ratio on the behaviour of the angular displacement of the arms. The study is also done by neglecting the inductance in the electrical part of the system. It is obtained that while the arms exhibit periodic motion during regular movement, compression of the balloons induces a shift to multi-periodic or chaotic dynamics, occasionally reverting to periodicity. Experimental and numerical simulation results demonstrate good agreement, with the R-system approximating more experimental outcomes than the RL-system. These findings hold significant implications for various environmental applications utilizing pump technology.

Remnant vascular grafts may result in significant neurological deficits owing to compression of adjacent neural structures. We report this finding in two cases after extracorporeal membrane oxygenation decannulation and removal of an arteriovenous fistula in the upper extremity. In both cases, removal of the graft, patch arteriotomy, and external neurolysis resulted in significant recovery of neurological function. We review the preoperative workup, diagnostic studies, and technical approach to treatment in an effort to increase recognition among vascular and cardiovascular surgeons and to demonstrate a safe and effective management option through a multidisciplinary approach.

UNASSIGNED: The ulnar\'s nerve compression at the Guyon\'s canal is not a frequent entity add to it that vascular lesions are rarely involved as a causative agent of this syndrome.
METHODS: We report a case of a young male patient admitted in our department for a Guyon\'s canal syndrome due to an aneurysm of the ulnar artery and underwent a surgical decompression. Post-operative course was uneventful and the patient was satisfied with the result.
UNASSIGNED: Many etiologies are involved in the Guyon\'s canal syndrome and these etiologies can be arranged into groups. Previous treatment attempts, the duration and severity of the symptoms and the underlying etiology dictate the treatment options. Adjacent vascular enlargement is not a usual cause of Guyon\'s canal compression and a few case reports were reported in the literature. Surgical treatment by opening and releasing the roof of Guyon\'s canal and removing the aneurysm helped to achieve good outcome in most reports.
CONCLUSIONS: Guyon\'s canal syndrome is less frequent than both cubital tunnel syndrome or carpal tunnel syndrome and many causative agents have been described. Vascular lesions are not the usual cause of compressing the ulnar nerve at the wrist and through this case we spotlighted this entity as another possible etiology requiring an adequate treatment for a better outcome.

Hereditary neuropathy with liability pressure palsies (HNPP) is usually caused by compression and is an episodic, painless, recurrent hereditary neuropathy with focal motor and sensory involvement. It begins in adolescence and young adulthood. The most commonly affected nerves in HNPP are the ulnar, peroneal, radial, and median nerves. In this article, we present a 31-year-old female patient with a previously undescribed case of HNPP, which presented with wrist drop due to the trapping of the radial nerve in the spiral groove after the crow position in yoga.