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Pullout is a very common failure mode on the use of pedicle screws. Numerous studies were completed to increase the pullout strength of pedicle screws especially for osteoporotic bones. In this study, a previously designed pedicle screw type was tested before and after fusion condition. Synthetic polyurethane foams were used in all tests. Three different grades of foams were used in tests to simulate severely osteoporotic, osteoporotic, and healthy bones. Test blocks were produced and characterized in our clinical biomechanics laboratory. Foaming of polyurethane was accepted as fusion process (bone in growth). Pedicle screw including radial holes (new design) was tested both before and after the fusion. It also exhibited remarkably higher pullout strength after fusion than before fusion and most of other alternatives stated in the literature. In total, 70% higher pullout strength was achieved with new design after fusion. On the other hand, new design did not dominate other alternatives when comparison was carried out on severely osteoporotic and healthy bones. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first study investigating the postfusion properties on synthetic foams., Research Fund of TUBITAKTurkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [111M583]; NORMMED medical devices, This study was supported by the Research Fund of TUBITAK, Project no. 111M583, and NORMMED medical devices.

Pullout is a very common failure mode on the use of pedicle screws. Numerous studies were completed to increase the pullout strength of pedicle screws especially for osteoporotic bones. In this study, a previously designed pedicle screw type was tested before and after fusion condition. Synthetic polyurethane foams were used in all tests. Three different grades of foams were used in tests to simulate severely osteoporotic, osteoporotic, and healthy bones. Test blocks were produced and characterized in our clinical biomechanics laboratory. Foaming of polyurethane was accepted as fusion process (bone in growth). Pedicle screw including radial holes (new design) was tested both before and after the fusion. It also exhibited remarkably higher pullout strength after fusion than before fusion and most of other alternatives stated in the literature. In total, 70% higher pullout strength was achieved with new design after fusion. On the other hand, new design did not dominate other alternatives when comparison was carried out on severely osteoporotic and healthy bones. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first study investigating the postfusion properties on synthetic foams., Research Fund of TUBITAKTurkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [111M583]; NORMMED medical devices, This study was supported by the Research Fund of TUBITAK, Project no. 111M583, and NORMMED medical devices.

Direction-guided structure tensor total variation (DSTV) is a recently proposed regularization term that aims at increasing the sensitivity of the structure tensor total variation (STV) to the changes towards a predetermined direction. Despite of the plausible results obtained on the uni-directional images, the DSTV model is not applicable to the multi-directional images of real-world. In this study, we build a two-stage framework that brings adaptivity to DSTV. We design an alternative to STV, which encodes the first-order information within a local neighborhood under the guidance of spatially varying directional descriptors (i.e., orientation and the dose of anisotropy). In order to estimate those descriptors, we propose an efficient preprocessor that captures the local geometry based on the structure tensor. Through the extensive experiments, we demonstrate how beneficial the involvement of the directional information in STV is, by comparing the proposed method with the state-of-the-art analysis-based denoising models, both in terms of restoration quality and computational efficiency., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, article

A common strategy in variational image recovery is utilizing the nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) property, when designing energy functionals. One such contribution is nonlocal structure tensor total variation (NLSTV), which lies at the core of this study. This paper is concerned with boosting the NLSTV regularization term through the use of directional priors. More specifically, NLSTV is leveraged so that, at each image point, it gains more sensitivity in the direction that is presumed to have the minimum local variation. The actual difficulty here is capturing this directional information from the corrupted image. In this regard, we propose a method that employs anisotropic Gaussian kernels to estimate directional features to be later used by our proposed model. The experiments validate that our entire two-stage framework achieves better results than the NLSTV model and two other competing local models, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluation., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, article

In Volume 3 of the final report, research work conducted to investigate the behavior of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) reinforcement is summarized. This study focused on the behavior of FRP reinforced concrete structures with an emphasis on bond and shear. For the bond investigation, three series of beam splice tests were performed on specimens reinforced with steel, glass FRP, and aramid FRP to determine the effect of the different types of reinforcement on bond, cracking, and deflections. The test results indicate that the use of FRP reinforcement leads to lower bond strengths and, therefore, require longer development lengths. The specimen crack widths and deflections were substantially larger for FRP specimens than steel specimens due to the significantly lower modulus of elasticity. Analysis of the test results resulted in recommendations for modifying the empirical development length equation of ACI 318- 99 design code for use with FRP reinforcement. For the shear investigation, two series of beam tests were conducted on specimens reinforced with steel, glass FRP, and aramid FRP to determine the effect of the different types of reinforcement on the concrete shear strength. All specimens did not contain transverse reinforcement. The test results indicate that the use of FRP reinforcement leads to lower concrete shear strengths than steel reinforcement for equal reinforcement cross-sectional areas (longitudinal reinforcement percentages). Analysis of the test results resulted in recommendations for the calculation of concrete shear strength. Based on the findings of this research, design and construction recommendations are provided that can be used for the design and construction of FRP reinforced bridge decks.

In Volume 3 of the final report, research work conducted to investigate the behavior of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) reinforcement is summarized. This study focused on the behavior of FRP reinforced concrete structures with an emphasis on bond and shear. For the bond investigation, three series of beam splice tests were performed on specimens reinforced with steel, glass FRP, and aramid FRP to determine the effect of the different types of reinforcement on bond, cracking, and deflections. The test results indicate that the use of FRP reinforcement leads to lower bond strengths and, therefore, require longer development lengths. The specimen crack widths and deflections were substantially larger for FRP specimens than steel specimens due to the significantly lower modulus of elasticity. Analysis of the test results resulted in recommendations for modifying the empirical development length equation of ACI 318- 99 design code for use with FRP reinforcement. For the shear investigation, two series of beam tests were conducted on specimens reinforced with steel, glass FRP, and aramid FRP to determine the effect of the different types of reinforcement on the concrete shear strength. All specimens did not contain transverse reinforcement. The test results indicate that the use of FRP reinforcement leads to lower concrete shear strengths than steel reinforcement for equal reinforcement cross-sectional areas (longitudinal reinforcement percentages). Analysis of the test results resulted in recommendations for the calculation of concrete shear strength. Based on the findings of this research, design and construction recommendations are provided that can be used for the design and construction of FRP reinforced bridge decks.