Measurement Error for Age of Onset in Prevalent Cohort Studies

Prevalent cohort studies involve screening a sample of individuals from a population for disease, recruiting affected individuals, and prospectively following the cohort of individuals to record the occurrence of disease-related complications or death. This design features a response-biased sampling scheme since individuals living a long time with the disease are preferentially sampled, so naive analysis of the time from disease onset to death will over-estimate survival probabilities. Unconditional and conditional analyses of the resulting data can yield consistent estimates of the survival distribution subject to the validity of their respective model assumptions. The time of disease onset is retrospectively reported by sampled individuals, however, this is often associated with measurement error. In this article we present a framework for studying the effect of measurement error in disease onset times in prevalent cohort studies, report on empirical studies of the effect in each framework of analysis, and describe likelihood-based methods to address such a measurement error.

Microstructure evolution and crystallography of directionally solidified Al2O3/Y3Al5O12 eutectic ceramics prepared by the modified Bridgman method

Large size,high-density(99.97%)and well-organized Al2O3/Y3Al5O12(YAG)eutectic ceramics were prepared by the modified Bridgman method.The evolution of the three dimensional microstructure and micropores were investigated.The diameter of the micro-pores and the porosity decreased during directional solidification.The average equivalent diam eter of the micro-pores was 2.41μm in the well-prepared eutectic ceramics.Most of the pores(98.07%)were smaller than 4μm.These data are comparable to those prepared by the optical floating zone method.The as-grown eutectic ceramics were polycrystalline,but the interfaces were well-bonded and there were no amorphous phases in the microstructure.The misfits of the different crystallographic relationships were calculated,and the bottleneck of the single-crystal preparation was identified.These results could provide theoretical guidance for the preparation of large,single-crystal Al2O3/YAG eutectic ceramics by the modified Bridgman method.

Effect of laser-discrete-quenching on bonding properties of electroplated grinding wheel with AISI 1045 steel substrate and nickel bond

To improve the bonding strength between the nickel bond and the hub of the electroplated diamond grinding wheel,a hybrid technique was proposed to combine laser prequenching steel substrate and post-electroplating nickel.To validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique,AISI 1045 substrate was nickel-coated.The bonding properties between the electroplated nickel coating and substrate with or without laser-discrete-quenching were discussed comparatively by scratch,indentation,and thermal shock tests.The results show that the prequenching treatment leads to phase transformation of AISI 1045 microstructure from the mixed pearlite and ferrite phases into the martensitic phase.Since the martensitic phase is characterized as a high corrosion resistance,the interface of substrate/coating is smooth and flat in the prequenched zone,and the coating is bonded well with the steel substrate.In contrast to the steel substrate without pre-quenching treatment,the proposed technique significantly enhanced the bonding strengths of the electroplated nickel-coating.On one hand,the average hardness of electroplated nickel-coating on the laser pre-quenched zone is increased by 18.7%,and the scratch depth with the same load become narrower and shallower.On the other hand,the coefficient of friction(CoF)and the vibration amplitude are reduced,and the coating is bonded effectively with the substrate to inhibit the crack initialization at the interface.This prevents effectively the coating from peeling off and improves significantly the thermal shock resistance property.

Time of flight improved thermally grown oxide thickness measurement with terahertz spectroscopy

As a nondestructive testing technique,terahertz time-domain spectroscopy technology is commonly used to measure the thickness of ceramic coat in thermal barrier coatings(TBCs).However,the invisibility of ceramic/thermally grown oxide(TGO)reflective wave leads to the measurement failure of natural growth TGO whose thickness is below 10μm in TBCs.To detect and monitor TGO in the emergence stage,a time of flight(TOF)improved TGO thickness measurement method is proposed.A simulative investigation on propagation characteristics of terahertz shows the linear relationship between TGO thickness and phase shift of feature wave.The accurate TOF increment could be acquired from wavelet soft threshold and cross-correlation function with negative effect reduction of environmental noise and system oscillation.Thus,the TGO thickness could be obtained efficiently from the TOF increment of the monitor area with different heating times.The averaged error of 1.61μm in experimental results demonstrates the highly accurate and robust measurement of the proposed method,making it attractive for condition monitoring and life prediction of TBCs.