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Introduction: Skill and Formalisation
Published in Johan Berglund, Why Safety Cultures Degenerate, 2016
The exploration of human skill and what methods can be utilised to support experience-based knowledge are essential to this study. From this viewpoint, the analogical and critical thinking of operatives and plant personnel, gathered from hands-on experience as well as training, becomes an essential constituent of dynamic safety cultures.12 Revolving around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, the objective is to arrive at some measures of practical application, which can help to improve and broaden quality work and the uses of training and further education in high-risk activities; to prevent technological risk, general deteriorations of safety and quality. When we talk of degeneration we usually refer to the state or process of decline; in terms of biology, degeneration usually means some sort of evolutionary decline, or loss of function, for instance in an organism or a species. In physical degeneration certain functions in cells or tissues are reduced, impairments which can be reversible. The same may well be true with regard to safety cultures and the quality of work place organisations in general, in which case degeneration is likely to transpire in the form of a worsening of moral qualities, or other qualities and faculties that characterise a certain group of people or a culture. When something degenerates it gets worse by some means. Likewise, degeneration is generally undesirable, a sort of antithesis to development and incremental change; from the Latin word degenerare, it originally means “to be inferior to one’s ancestors”.13
Pathology
Published in John A Plumb, Health Maintenance Of Cultured Fishes, 1994
Degeneration is a broad term which refers to a retrogressive process in which cells or tissues deteriorate, usually with a corresponding degree of functional inhibition. In the process of cellular degeneration, cells go through biochemical alterations and functional abnormalities that finally result in morphologic change. The degree and progress of the degeneration varies with the type and number of cells affected, the nature of the injurious agent, and the quantity (intensity) and duration of the injury. Degeneration of cells and tissues can be reversible and can change from a retrogressive to a progressive process with affected cells being restored to normal, if the injurious cause is removed before necrosis (death) of the cells occurs.
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Published in Splinter Robert, Illustrated Encyclopedia of Applied and Engineering Physics, 2017
[biomedical, chemical, electromagnetism, mechanics] The following factors affecting skeletal muscle strength and performance can be identified. Gender, age, training experience, muscle strength, and fatigue all affect strength performance. Muscles in humans makes up 40%–43% of the total body weight in men on world-wide average; and respectively, 23%–25% statistically averaged in women. For a healthy, average height woman who weighs 62 kg, 7 kg is composed of bones, 16 kg of organs and skin, 16 kg of fat, and 23 kg of muscles. Both male and female can develop muscular strength at the same rate, although due to hormones, namely testosterone, male muscles have a greater potential for strength. As humans mature, strength increases. However, roughly by age 30 (depending on a broad range of boundary conditions, including training and consumption of food, as well as natural and artificial chemicals), muscles start to degenerate. The degeneration is a reversible process but continuous training is required. The length of time devoted to training and the type of training regiment influence muscle strength. The initial length of the muscle fibers and the insertion length affect the amount that muscles can lift and support. Fatigue relates to the condition that the muscle does not allow for the same amount of power output. Fatigue is highly variable and is influenced by the intensity and duration of the contractile activity, by whether the muscle fiber is using aerobic or anaerobic metabolism, by the composition of the muscle, and by the fitness level of the individual. Most experimental evidence suggests that muscle fatigue arises from excitation–contraction failure of control neurons and neuromuscular transmission. The ability for muscle to change its length or lengthwise tension has been shown by the process of contraction. The underlying factor is the exchange of energy from the blood stream with the muscle cells (see Figure M.162).
Application of microcomputed tomography to calculate rat intervertebral disc volume as a surrogate measure of degeneration
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 2023
David J. Lillyman, Evie C. Barnett, Tyler J. Miller, Rebecca A. Wachs
In humans, the primary causes of IVD degeneration are age, environmental factors, and trauma (Chan et al. 2006). These factors serve to decrease nutrient flow to the IVD, triggering cellular senescence and apoptosis, and creating a catabolic feedback loop resulting in IVD degeneration (De Geer 2018). Two hallmarks of IVD degeneration measured regularly to diagnose disc degeneration are disc water loss and height loss. Disc water content is usually measured using magnetic resonsnance imaging (MRI) and quantified using defined grading schemes like the Pfirrmann grading system (Griffith et al. 2007). Disc height loss is thought to result from a compromise of the AF, which acts as a hydrostatic barrier between the hydrated NP and surrounding tissue (Sun and Leong 2004). Clinically, disc height loss is measured using X-ray imaging using a process that normalises the IVD space to the length of adjacent vertebral bodies. This measurement, known as the disc height index (DHI), is the gold standard for assessing IVD degeneration using X-ray imaging (Inoue et al. 1999). While this metric is useful in humans, X-ray imaging exhibits poor spatial resolution in the sub millimetre range, limiting the utility of the DHI in rodent models, where IVDs heights range from 100–1600 µm (O’connell et al. 2007; Lin and Tang 2017; Newton et al. 2020). Additionally, measuring DHI using radiographs is limited by errors introduced by subjective choices made by experimenters concerning sample orientation, measurement selection, measurement location, etc. (Lai et al. 2007). Despite these limitations, DHI is widely used in rat and mouse models because no other robust method has been established (Daly et al. 2016).