Title Effectiveness of conservative and microdiscetomy treatment for patients with lumbar disc herniation Background Lumbar disc herniation is a common cause of the radiating leg pain and related disabilities that affects people mostly in the middle age. Patients that suffer from lumbar disc herniation respond well to conservative treatment, but for some amount of them surgery could be considered if conservative care is failed after 6 weeks. Although variety of conservative methods that common available in the treatment of lumbar disc herniation, there is conflicting evidence that one type of treatment is clearly superior to others and disagreement over superiority of either surgical intervention or longer conservative treatment for patients with persistent symptoms lasting more than 6 weeks without serious neurological deficit. Aim The main purpose of this thesis is to assess the efficacy of main types of conservative and surgery treatments of the lumbar disc herniation and factors that influence clinical outcomes in patients undergoing this treatment. Method This thesis is a literature review, reviewing articles from relevant journals and books. The relevant sources were searched and collected from database of PubMed, Cochrane library and ScienceDirect from beginning of 2012 to the middle of...

This work is focused on automatic detection of optic disc in retinal images. There is briefly described anatomy of human eye, principles of retinal imaging and also overview of the methods used for optic disc detection. The practical part describes developed procedures for optic disc detection, ie detection based on watershed transform, active contours and also on region growing technique. The main method of this work is the method of circular transformation, which as the only one allowed to detect the optic disc on the images of video ophtalmoscope and also on the high quality images from fundus cameras. This method was tested on three datasets. The average overlap 92,44 % was achieved for HRF dataset, 91,03 for DRIONS dataset and 77,36 for images of video ophtalmoscope.

The presented text deals with designing of a multilingual application and its following implementation in the C++ language. The application encrypts disk volumes with Microsoft Windows system using symmetric cryptography and password authentication, where the password security strength is verified. Securing the sensitive data is one of the important security goals in area of information technology. The symmetric cryptography uses the same key for both the encryption and the decryption and due to its speed it is suitable for the data storage encryption. For the higher security it is possible to encrypt a whole disk volume with sensitive data.

The work deals with flash technology, the history of its development, current application of this technology and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of flash memories. It describes the integration of flash technology into mass storage devices and commonly used mechanisms that suppress the flash shortcomings for such application. The next part of the work focuses on analysis of commonly used buses for flash storage devices. Based on these theoretical foundations, text presents way to develop own flash based disk. The work focuses mainly on finding the most accessible platform for connecting the disk to personal computers - USB, on PCB design for storage module in Eagle CAD and implementation of necessary firmware for MCU and VHDL design for FPGA, that provide the disk functionality. At the end the work summarizes the results and outlines the way of further development.

Steam turbine rotor is a very complicated assembly, typically consists of several rotor rows. Due to design limitations and increasing demands on the efficiency of the steam turbines, it is practically impossible to avoid all of the resonant states. The significant vibrations can occur, for example, due to passing resonance state during turbine start up or run out. In the worst case the turbine operates state is close to the resonance state of the rotor row. This leads to the significant oscillation of the bladed disk, and may results in the blade (or blade to disk joints) high cycle fatigue. These parts are highly loaded components and any cracks are unacceptable. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to damp vibration by using, for example, passive damping elements. The damping element analyzed in this thesis is a strap with an isosceles trapezoidal cross section, which is placed in the circumferential dovetail groove in the blade segmental shrouding. The sliding between the contact surfaces leads to the dissipation of energy which causes decreasing of undesirable vibrations. The main aim is to design the optimal dimensions of the strap cross-section with a view to the most effective damping of vibration for a particular turbine operating state. Considered bladed disk has 54 blades which are coupled in 18 packets by segmental shrouding. The damping element is paced in circumferential dovetail groove created in the shrouding. This type of damping element is suitable especially for damping vibrations in the axial direction and only with the mode shape with the nodal diameters. The modal properties of the bladed disk are influenced by the sliding distance. Since the friction force depends on centrifugal force acting on the damping element and on the angle of the side walls of the strap and groove, the sliding distance can be influenced by the damping element dimensions. During the optimization process the best possible size of middle width, height and angle of damping element cross-section is searched. The strap weight, contact area size and flexural stiffness of damping element can be influenced by these parameters. Their change has also impact on the size of the contact pressure and thus on the size of relative motion as well. As stated previously, the damping efficiency is influenced by the relative motion between the damping element and shrouding. Numerical simulation in time domain is very time-consuming, especially for systems containing nonlinearities. In order to verify dynamic behavior of the computational model with the passive friction element in numerical simulations, the simplified model is created. The model is created in the ANSYS environment. The main requirement imposed on this model is to have as small number of degrees of freedom as possible, so the time needed to perform the simulation is reduced to a minimum. To satisfy this requirement the simplified model is a cantilever beam with rectangular cross section. The dovetail groove is created in this model in longitudinal direction. In this groove is damping element. In addition to damping element dimensions optimization, the influence of each design variable on model dynamic behavior is studied. The results are verified experimentally. Experiment also shows other interesting results that confirm the damping element influence on the modal characteristics. The gained knowledge is used to optimize the dimensions of the damping element in the model of the bladed disk.

The main target of this work is a design of the program for border localization of the optic disc in OCT data. Part of this program is also localization of the „optic cup“ and calculation of several values that characterize optic disc. The work is also dealing with a description of the optical coherence tomography principle which is used in ophthalmology. One chapter describes some published methods of optic cup localization. Success of the program and its comparison with OCT Zeiss Stratus 3000 is evaluated at the end of the work.

Steam turbine rotor is a very complicated assembly, typically consists of several rotor rows. Due to design limitations and increasing demands on the efficiency of the steam turbines, it is practically impossible to avoid all of the resonant states. The significant vibrations can occur, for example, due to passing resonance state during turbine start up or run out. In the worst case the turbine operates state is close to the resonance state of the rotor row. This leads to the significant oscillation of the bladed disk, and may results in the blade (or blade to disk joints) high cycle fatigue. These parts are highly loaded components and any cracks are unacceptable. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to damp vibration by using, for example, passive damping elements. The damping element analyzed in this thesis is a strap with an isosceles trapezoidal cross section, which is placed in the circumferential dovetail groove in the blade segmental shrouding. The sliding between the contact surfaces leads to the dissipation of energy which causes decreasing of undesirable vibrations. The main aim is to design the optimal dimensions of the strap cross-section with a view to the most effective damping of vibration for a particular turbine operating state. Considered bladed disk has 54 blades which are coupled in 18 packets by segmental shrouding. The damping element is paced in circumferential dovetail groove created in the shrouding. This type of damping element is suitable especially for damping vibrations in the axial direction and only with the mode shape with the nodal diameters. The modal properties of the bladed disk are influenced by the sliding distance. Since the friction force depends on centrifugal force acting on the damping element and on the angle of the side walls of the strap and groove, the sliding distance can be influenced by the damping element dimensions. During the optimization process the best possible size of middle width, height and angle of damping element cross-section is searched. The strap weight, contact area size and flexural stiffness of damping element can be influenced by these parameters. Their change has also impact on the size of the contact pressure and thus on the size of relative motion as well. As stated previously, the damping efficiency is influenced by the relative motion between the damping element and shrouding. Numerical simulation in time domain is very time-consuming, especially for systems containing nonlinearities. In order to verify dynamic behavior of the computational model with the passive friction element in numerical simulations, the simplified model is created. The model is created in the ANSYS environment. The main requirement imposed on this model is to have as small number of degrees of freedom as possible, so the time needed to perform the simulation is reduced to a minimum. To satisfy this requirement the simplified model is a cantilever beam with rectangular cross section. The dovetail groove is created in this model in longitudinal direction. In this groove is damping element. In addition to damping element dimensions optimization, the influence of each design variable on model dynamic behavior is studied. The results are verified experimentally. Experiment also shows other interesting results that confirm the damping element influence on the modal characteristics. The gained knowledge is used to optimize the dimensions of the damping element in the model of the bladed disk.