Sharif Digital Repository

Loess soil layers in semi-arid to arid areas have been deposited through the accumulation of aeolian sediments, resulted in a special metastable and open structure being usually unsaturated in nature. Since naturally occurred loess is widespread, it has been recently considered as a promising resource for constructing earth-fill structures. However, due to different microstructures of intact and recompacted loess, different responses to hydraulic and mechanical loading would be expected. Up to now, the hydro-mechanical behavior of loess from different perspectives has not been linked to its microstructural characteristics. The current research, therefore, aims to provide insight into the... 

Referring to mortality increasment having sprung from atherosclerosis, work on treatment of coronary heart disease seems to be necessary. Stent implementation is one of stenosis treatment. Stent deployment has been done during past two decades, but clinical evidence showed that because of some weakness in designing and implementing, restenosis occurs again. Material, structure and coating texture of stent are the designing criteria beside stent implementation importance. Thus a lot of activities have been done in this area to improve performance of these applications. Nowadays a lot of companies' researchers try the best to get better their products; consequently there is different types of... 

Endothelial cells cover the inner surface of blood vessels. In response to different physical (such as reactive hyperemia-RH) and pharmacological stimuli, they maintain homeostasis by changing the vascular diameter (by releasing chemical agents like nitric oxide). The endothelium inability to respond to metabolic need (endothelial dysfunction) is an early marker of cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. Flow mediated dilation (FMD) measurement using ultrasound imaging (FMD-US) has been established as a standard method for assessing the endothelial function. Recently, a less skilled-operator demanding method has been proposed based on the photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal changes... 

Inability of endothelial cells in responding to metabolic needs (endothelial dysfunction,) is a sign of heart diseases like atherosclerosis and vascular stenosis. Recently, a new method using finger PPG signal has been proposed to determine endothelial function in response to reactive hypertension (RH.) PPG-based endothelial function assessment results are not fully correlated with ultrasound FMD tests, and this is because of some auto-regulation phenomena in the fingertip. It is expected that such problems will not exist in larger arteries, like the radial artery. The goal of this project is to acquire the PPG signal from the radial artery as it is proportional to blood volume changes in... 

Fracture and Matrix permeability systematically change because production time of gas and oil reservoirs is very long and pore pressure, temperature and in-situ stresses continously change in reservoirs.This parameters have an important role in determination and development of wells according to the permeability distribution.The main factors in determination of fracture permeability values is normal and shear stiffness that parameters such as roughness, opening, closure, aperture and asperities influence this factor.In this thesis, we try to investigate the influence of this parameters on fracture permeability according to the normal and shear stresses.Also we want to investigate the... 

The endothelial (the artery inner lumen cells) function is associated with cardiovascular risk factors. Its assessment methods can be classified into the two groups of invasive and noninvasive ones. The most widely used method among the current non-invasive tests employed in research settings is flow-mediated dilation (FMD). This technique measures endothelial function by inducing reactive hyperemia via the temporary arterial occlusion and measuring the resultant relative increase in the blood vessel diameter via ultrasound. The high price and large size of the device, and being operator dependent are the limitation of this method. In this work, we propose using the photoplethysmogram (PPG)... 

Flow Mediated Dilation (FMD) is a non-invasive method for endothelial function assessment providing an index extracted from ultrasonic B-mode images. Although utilized in the research community, the difficulty of its application and high cost of ultrasonic device prevent it from being widely used in clinical settings. In this study we show that substituting the ultrasonic device with more easily handled and low cost photoplethysmography and electrocardiography is possible. We introduce new indices based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) and show that they are correlated with the ultrasound-based FMD index. To this end, conventional ultrasound FMD test was carried... 

Cardio Vascular Diseases (CVD) is currently the most important cause of mortality in the world. Coronary artery disease (CAD-with 3 major epicardial vessels) is one of the significant CVD. Coronary angiography remains the gold standard for identifying the presence and absence of stenosis due to CAD. It is performed by inserting a catheter into the coronary artery, directly injecting radiopaque contrast material there and recording radiographic images in different view of arteries. Images of this invasive way show severity and area of stenosis.
A sign of CAD is endothelial dysfunction (inner artery layer) in peripheral arteries like the brachial artery. Due to a significant correlation... 

According to the World Health Organization, about 35% of deaths worldwide are due to cardiovascular diseases, therefore the evaluation of vascular endothelial function has great prognostic and diagnostic value for cardiovascular diseases. The conventional noninvasive method for endothelial function evaluation is the measurement of flow-mediated dilation in brachial artery using ultrasound imaging (FMD-US). As the accuracy of FMD-US depends on the operator's skill and the resolution of the ultrasound images, this method has not been adopted. In this work, we propose to use a low cost, easily-accessible surrogate signal, the photoplethysmogram (PPG) to implement the FMD test. Whereas previous...