Edge Misalignment Research Articles

Fusing LiDAR and Photogrammetry for Accurate 3D Data: A Hybrid Approach

The fusion of LiDAR and photogrammetry point clouds is a necessary advancement in 3D-modeling, enabling more comprehensive and accurate representations of physical environments. The main contribution of this paper is the development of an innovative fusion system that combines classical algorithms, such as Structure from Motion (SfM), with advanced machine learning techniques, like Coherent Point Drift (CPD) and Feature-Metric Registration (FMR), to improve point cloud alignment and fusion. Experimental results, using a custom dataset of real-world scenes, demonstrate that the hybrid fusion method achieves an average error of less than 5% in the measurements of small reconstructed objects, with large objects showing less than 2% deviation from real sizes. The fusion process significantly improved structural continuity, reducing artifacts like edge misalignments. The k-nearest neighbors (kNN) analysis showed high reconstruction accuracy for the hybrid approach, demonstrating that the hybrid fusion system, particularly when combining machine learning-based refinement with traditional alignment methods, provides a notable advancement in both geometric accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time 3D-modeling applications.

Process advantages of laser hybrid welding compared to conventional arc-based welding processes for joining thick steel structures of wind tower

The most common welding processes when joining thick-walled steels in the industry are arc-based welding processes such as GMAW or SAW. For this purpose, the sheets are joined in multi-layer technique, which can lead to productivity losses due to high welding times. The process-specific challenges in welding thick steels using multi-layer technique relate to the high heat input from the process. Therefore, alternative welding processes are being actively sought. A suitable alternative is provided by beam-based welding processes such as the laser hybrid welding processes, which are characterized by deep penetration welds and lower heat input. With implementation of the laser hybrid welding process in the heavy industry, such as the wind tower industry, economic benefits can be reached such as the increase in productivity by reducing the layer number, and the lower consumption of filler material and energy. When comparing SAW welded 25 mm thick steels in five to six layers and single-pass laser hybrid welding, the welding time can be reduced more than 80 % and the costs of filler material, flux and energy can be saved up to 90 %. However, the industrial use of the laser hybrid welding process is still limited to applications, where the material thickness does not exceed 15 mm due to some process-specific challenges such as the sagging, sensitivity to manufacturing tolerances such as gaps and misalignment, limited filler wire mixing, and deteriorated mechanical properties resulting from high cooling rates. To overcome these challenges, a contactless electromagnetic backing based on an externally applied AC magnetic field was used. Eddy currents are induced due to the oscillating magnetic field, and an upward-oriented Lorentz force is generated to counteract the droplets formed due to gravitational forces. It allows to weld up to 30 mm thick structural steels in a single-pass with a 20-kW fiber laser system. Additionally, the gap bridgeability and the misalignment of edges were increased to 2 mm when welding 20 mm thick steels. With the aid of the AC magnetic field, a vortex was formed in the weld root, which had a positive effect on the filler wire mixing. A further significant advantage of the EM backing was the possibility to expand the process parameter window to maintain desired cooling times and mechanical properties, without suffering adverse effects concerning the root quality of the weld.

The role of asymmetric metal flow on weld formation and solidification characteristics during pulsed laser butt welding with assembly tolerance

In comparison to other laser-assisted welding techniques, the pulsed laser welding process (PLBW) provides cost-effectiveness and ease of operation while effectively connecting butt-assembled thin plates with manufacturing tolerances (both air gap and edge misalignment). A combination of numerical simulations and experimental studies was conducted to analyze the forming mechanism and solidification behavior of the weld. In this paper, a transient three-dimensional heat-flow-metallurgical model has been established for a PLBW process of mild steel plates with a thickness of 1.8 mm. The predicted weld pool profiles were consistent with the experimental findings. The finding suggested the molten metal, driven by surface tension and recoil pressure, successively generated liquid bridges on the rear and front sides of the pool. The two sheets were joined as the molten metal gradually solidified. The energy absorptivity was highly correlated with the weld pool and keyhole dynamics, and the laser energy absorbed by the metal was mainly transferred in the form of thermal convection. The kinematic features of the melt were observed by the liquid phase mass transfer rate and surface fluctuations. According to the Fourier analysis results, the molten pool oscillated at the characteristic frequency of the laser pulse frequency. The spatial and temporal distributions of solidification parameters aided in analyzing the solidification features within the pool. The asymmetric flow had a greater influence on the temperature gradient. These findings addressed the roles of PLBW on fluid flow, heat behaviors, and solidification parameters of welds with assembly tolerances, as well as the reasons for improved weld formation.

Asymmetry of keyhole and weld pool geometry in PLBW of tailor-welded steel sheets with edge misalignment: Numerical modeling and experimental validation

Edge misalignment in butt welded joints is difficult to avoid due to factors such as poor processing accuracy, the presence of assembly tolerances, and welding distortion. It reduces the performance of the joints, which is inextricably associated with molten pool behaviors during the welding process. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the edge misalignment on weld pool dynamic behaviors by developing a multi-phase CFD model to reproduce the pulsed laser beam welding (PLBW) on a couple of low-carbon steel plates with a thickness of 1.8 mm, which had been verified with experimental weld pool profiles. Both experiments and numerical simulations took into account different scales of edge misalignment. The results demonstrated that the keyhole quickly penetrated the workpiece and remained quasi-steady with the continuous emission before shutting down when the laser intensity was dropped. The flow patterns within the weld pool were characterized by a vertical downward flow near the keyhole, Marangoni flows on both the top and root surfaces, together with a flow from the higher-assembled side to the lower. Those were driven by recoil pressure, surface tension gradient, and gravity, respectively. Moreover, both the weld pool and the keyhole showed a clear inclination toward the assembled lower side, as measured by positive slopes with values ranging from 5 to 25. When the sheet edges became more misaligned, the size of the weld pool shrunk because less laser energy reached the surface of the workpiece. At the termination of the third pulse cycle, the maximum weld width at the top surface (TW) and root surface (RW), as well as the penetration depth, were reduced by 5.281 %, 25.495 %, and 2.303 %, respectively. A larger scale of weld misalignment contributed to a more inclined weld pool, marked by lower slope values.

A 2.5 GS/s 7-Bit 5-Way Time-Interleaved SAR ADC With On-Chip Background Offset and Timing-Skew Calibration

This brief presents the on-chip background offset and timing-skew calibration of the 1-then-2b/cycle time-interleaved successive-approximation-register analog-to-digital converter (TI SAR ADC). For timing-skew between sub-ADC’s sampling clocks, a comparator offset-based window detector (WD) is used to adjust the clock edge misalignment. In addition, comparator offset calibration is considered both in terms of 1) global offset (between the offset-free reference comparator and the local reference comparator in each sub-ADC) and 2) local offset (between the local reference comparator and the rest of the comparators in the same sub-ADC). The proposed calibration sufficiently suppresses noise floor and spurs, and all calibrations are performed in the background without interfering with normal ADC operation. The prototype 5-way TI SAR ADC is fabricated in a 28 nm CMOS process and occupies a 0.03 mm2 area including on-chip calibration. With the proposed calibration, the prototype achieves SNDR of 40 dB at Nyquist input and consumes 7.57 mW, leading to the Walden figure of merit ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\text {FoM}_{W}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) of 37.2 fJ/conversion-step.

Phase unwrapping algorithm based on phase edge tracking for dynamic measurement.

Phase unwrapping is an essential procedure for fringe projection profilometry (FPP). To improve measurement efficiency and reduce phase unwrapping errors (PUEs) in dynamic measurement, a phase unwrapping algorithm based on phase edge tracking is proposed, which unwraps the current wrapped phase map with the aid of the previously unwrapped one. The phase edges are accurately tracked and their trajectories are used to divide the phase map into several regions, each of which is unwrapped either temporally or spatially according to its properties. It doesn't require extra patterns for phase unwrapping once the initial unwrapped phase map is obtained, thus significantly increasing the frame rate of the 3D result. Meanwhile, it greatly reduces the PUEs caused by noise amplification and motion-induced misalignment of phase edges. Experiments prove that it is capable of retrieving the absolute phase maps of complex dynamic scenes with high unwrapping accuracy and efficiency.

Hybrid laser-arc welding of laser- and plasma-cut 20-mm-thick structural steels

It is already known that the laser beam welding (LBW) or hybrid laser-arc welding (HLAW) processes are sensitive to manufacturing tolerances such as gaps and misalignment of the edges, especially at welding of thick-walled steels due to its narrow beam diameter. Therefore, the joining parts preferably have to be milled. The study deals with the influence of the edge quality, the gap and the misalignment of edges on the weld seam quality of hybrid laser-arc welded 20-mm-thick structural steel plates which were prepared by laser and plasma cutting. Single-pass welds were conducted in butt joint configuration. An AC magnet was used as a contactless backing. It was positioned under the workpiece during the welding process to prevent sagging. The profile of the edges and the gap between the workpieces were measured before welding by a profile scanner or a digital camera, respectively. With a laser beam power of just 13.7 kW, the single-pass welds could be performed. A gap bridgeability up to 1 mm at laser-cut and 2 mm at plasma-cut samples could be reached respectively. Furthermore, a misalignment of the edges up to 2 mm could be welded in a single pass. The new findings may eliminate the need for cost and time-consuming preparation of the edges.

Investigation of the gap bridgeability at high-power laser hybrid welding of plasma-cut thick mild steels with AC magnetic support

One of the challenges of the high-power hybrid laser welding of thick steels is the sensitivity of the process of the process to manufacturing tolerances. This usually leads to a time-consuming preparation of the welding edges, such as milling. The study deals with the influence of the edge quality of milled and plasma-cut steel made of S355J2 with a wall thickness of 20 mm on the laser hybrid welded seam quality. Furthermore, the gap bridgeability and the tolerances towards edge misalignment was investigated. An AC magnet was used as backing support to prevent sagging and positioned under the workpiece, to generate an upwards directed electromagnetic pressure. The profiles of the edges and the gap on the top and root side were measured using a digital camera. Single-pass laser hybrid welds of plasma-cut edges could be welded using a laser beam power of just 13.7 kW. A gap bridgeability up to 2 mm and misalignment of edges up to 2 mm could be achieved successful. Additionally, the independence of the cutting side and the welding side was shown, so that samples were welded to the opposite side to their cutting. For evaluation of internal defects or irregularities, X-ray images were carried out. Charpy impact strength tests were performed to determine the toughness of the welds.

Frequency-Dependent Depth Map Enhancement via Iterative Depth-Guided Affine Transformation and Intensity-Guided Refinement

Recently, deep convolutional neural network sho-ws significant improvement for intensity-guided depth map enhancement. The most networks focus on either increasing depth or easing features propagation via residual learning and dense connection. However, it has not been explicitly considered yet to mitigate the artifacts caused by the differences of the distributions between the depth map and the corresponding color image, e.g., edge misalignment. In this paper, a novel depth-guided affine transformation is used to filter out the unrelated intensity features, which is further used to refine the depth features. Since the quality of initial depth features is low, the depth-guided intensity features filtering and the intensity-guided depth features refinement are iteratively performed, which progressively promotes effects of such tasks. To make full use of the iterations, all the refined depth features are dense connected followed by a 1 × 1 convolution layer. In addition, to improve the performance in the case of large upsampling factors (e.g., 16×), the depth features are enhanced from coarse to fine. In each frequency-dependent refinement of the depth features, the above iterative subnetwork as well as the residual learning are introduced. The proposed method is tested for the noise-free and noisy cases which compares against 16 state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental results show the improved performances based on the qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Study of gap and misalignment tolerances at hybrid laser arc welding of thick-walled steel with electromagnetic weld pool support system

The hybrid laser arc welding (HLAW) process provides many advantages such as improved gap bridgeability, deep penetration and misalignment of edges, that is why the process is used increasingly in industrial applications e.g. shipbuilding, power plant industry and line-pipe manufacturing. The obvious encountered problem for single pass welding in flat position is the gravity drop-out at low welding velocities. With the usage of an electromagnetic weld pool support system, which is based on generating Lorentz forces within the weld pool, wide seams followed by reduced welding velocities could be achieved in this study leading to the realization of a gap bridgeability up to 1 mm, misalignment of edges up to 2 mm and a single pass weld up to 28 mm thickness with a 20-kW fibre laser. These developments expand the boundaries of the HLAW process for different industrial applications. As a result, less accurate preparation of the edges would be sufficient, which saves time for manufacturing.

Position and Angular Misalignment Analysis for Implantable Wireless Power Transfer System Based on Magnetic Resonance

As a widely-acknowledged truth, the interval of human tissue, the breathing activity, and the body motion work together to change the relative position of the antenna. This knowledge, with detailed examination, is going to bring significant change to the transmission efficiency in the implementation of human wireless power transfer. This paper focused on the relationship of the transfer efficiency with lateral distance, vertical distance and angular (around the center and along the edge) misalignment. A new formula, which serves to connect the geometrical parameters both with the self-resonance frequency and with the Q-factor of the printed circuit board antenna, was given. Furthermore, the paper gave a significant analysis of the efficiency with lateral distance change, vertical distance change and two kinds of angular misalignments using finite element method. The experimental results showed that in the situation of vertical distance change and angular (along the edge) misalignment, the transmission efficiency drops rapidly with the displacement of antenna. However, in the situation of lateral distance change and angular (along the edge) misalignment, there were a high-efficiency distance—the lateral misalignment ≤40% of the length of the width in the lateral misalignment; and a high-efficiency angle—angular around the center misalignment ≤30o in the angular misalignment. Within the ranges, a high-efficiency space (HES) is formed in the implantable WPT system utility, and the transmission efficiency drops rapidly when the antenna is beyond the HES. This paper can provide a practical application to the antenna design and specific implementation in human implantable WPT system.

No-Reference Depth Assessment Based on Edge Misalignment Errors for T+D Images.

The quality of depth is crucial in all depth-based applications. Unfortunately, the error-free ground truth is often unattainable for depth. Therefore, no-reference quality assessment is very much desired. This paper presents a novel depth quality assessment scheme that is completely different from conventional approaches. In particular, this scheme focuses on depth edge misalignment errors in texture-plus-depth (T + D) images and develops a robust method to detect them. Based on the detected misalignments, a no-reference metric is calculated to evaluate the quality of depth maps. In the proposed scheme, misalignments are detected by matching texture and depth edges through three constraints: 1) spatial similarity; 2) edge orientation similarity; and 3) segment length similarity. Furthermore, the matching is performed on edge segments instead of individual pixels, which enables robust edge matching. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can detect misalignment errors accurately. The proposed no-reference depth quality metric is highly consistent with the full-reference metric, and is also well-correlated with the quality of synthesized virtual views. Moreover, the proposed scheme can also use the detected edge misalignments to facilitate depth enhancement in various practical texture-plus-depth-based applications.

Role of geometry and topological defects in the one-dimensional zero-line modes of graphene

Breaking inversion symmetry in chiral graphene systems, \textit{e.g.}, by applying a perpendicular electric field in chirally-stacked rhombohedral multilayer graphene or by introducing staggered sublattice potentials in monolayer graphene, opens up a bulk band gap that harbors a quantum valley-Hall state. When the gap size is allowed to vary and changes sign in space, a topologically-confined one-dimensional (1D) zero-line mode (ZLM) is formed along the zero lines of the local gap. Here we show that gapless ZLM with distinguishable valley degrees of freedom K and K$'$ exist for every propagation angle except for the armchair direction that exactly superpose the valleys. We further analyze the role of different geometries of top-bottom gated device setups that can be realized in experiments, discuss the effects of their edge misalignment, and analyze three common forms of topological defects that could influence the 1D ZLM transport properties in actual devices.

내면 용접부재의 전자세 레이저-아크 하이브리드 용접 연구

Laser-arc hybrid welding has been considered as an effective pipe girth welding process since early 2000's. Tolerance for fit-up offsets such as gap and edge misalignment is one of most important requirements in pipe girth laser-arc hybrid welding, and several approaches using parameter optimization, a laser beam scanning and an arc oscillation have been tried. However the required offset tolerance has not been fully accomplished up to now and laser-arc hybrid welding has not been widely applied in pipeline construction than expected, despite of its high welding speed and deep penetration. In this study, internal welding was adopted to ensure the offset tolerance and sound back bead. The effect of welding parameters on bead shape was investigated at the flat position. Also tolerances for gap and edge misalignment were verified as 0.5 mm and 2.0 mm, respectively. The position welding trials were conducted at several welding positions from the flat to the overhead position in a downward direction. With the fixed welding speed, arc current for gas metal arc welding current and laser output power, adequate welding voltages for gas metal arc welding were suggested for each position.

경계 잡음 제거를 위한 2단계 경계 탐색 기반의 깊이지도 전처리 알고리즘

DIBR(Depth Image Based Rendering)을 이용한 영상 합성 시에 발생하는 경계 잡음은 원래 전경 영역에 속하던 화소가 배경으로 흩어져 나와 생성된 잡음이며, 이는 주로 참조 영상과 깊이지도 간 경계 불일치나 참조 영상에서의 블러링 때문에 발생된다. 영상 합성 과정에서 발생된 홀 영역은 일반적으로 주위 화소를 이용하여 채워지게 되므로, 홀에 인접한 경계 잡음은 합성 영상의 화질을 저하시키는 주요 원인으로 작용한다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 본 논문은 깊이지도의 전처리를 이용한 새로운 경계 잡음 제거 알고리즘을 제안한다. 기존의 전처리 기법들은 경계 불일치에 따른 경계 잡음의 제거를 위해 참조 영상과 깊이지도의 경계가 일치되도록 깊이지도를 수정한다. 그러나 대부분의 기존 기법들이 신호 기울기 기반의 단순 경계 탐색 알고리즘에 기반을 두고 있어 블러링이 존재하는 경계에서는 탐색 성능의 저하가 나타난다. 제안 알고리즘은 이의 해결을 위해 2단계 경계 탐색을 이용함으로써 이행 영역과 배경 영역 간 경계를 보다 효과적으로 탐색할 수 있는 구조를 제안하였다. 실험 결과를 통해 제안 알고리즘이 기존 알고리즘에 비해 우수한 경계 잡음 제거 성능을 가짐을 보인다. The boundary noise in image syntheses using DIBR consists of noisy pixels that are separated from foreground objects into background region. It is generated mainly by edge misalignment between the reference image and depth map or blurred edge in the reference image. Since hole areas are generally filled with neighboring pixels, boundary noise adjacent to the hole is the main cause of quality degradation in synthesized images. To solve this problem, a new boundary noise removal algorithm using a preprocessing of the depth map is proposed in this paper. The most common way to eliminate boundary noise caused by boundary misalignment is to modify depth map so that the boundary of the depth map can be matched to that of the reference image. Most conventional methods, however, show poor performances of boundary detection especially in blurred edge, because they are based on a simple boundary search algorithm which exploits signal gradient. In the proposed method, a two-step hierarchical approach for boundary detection is adopted which enables effective boundary detection between the transition and background regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional ones subjectively and objectively.

Resonance Raman spectroscopy of G-line and folded phonons in twisted bilayer graphene with large rotation angles

We report the synthesis and systematic Raman study of twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) with rotation angles from below 10° to nearly 30°. Chemical vapor deposition was used to grow hexagon-shaped tBLG with a rotation angle that can be conveniently determined by relative edge misalignment. Rotation dependent G-line resonances and folded phonons were observed by selecting suitable energies of excitation lasers. The observed phonon frequencies of the tBLG superlattices agree well with our ab initio calculation.

Depth map misalignment correction and dilation for DIBR view synthesis

The quality of the synthesized views by Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map, especially the alignment of object boundaries of texture image. In practice, the misalignment of sharp depth map edges is the major cause of the annoying artifacts at the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views. Conventional smooth filter approach blurs the depth map to reduce the disoccluded regions. The drawbacks are the degradation of 3D perception of the reconstructed 3D videos and the destruction of the texture in background regions. Conventional edge preserving filter utilizes the color image information in order to align the depth edges with color edges. Unfortunately, the characteristics of color edges and depth edges are very different which causes annoying boundaries artifacts in the synthesized virtual views. Recent solution of reliability-based approach uses reliable warping information from other views to fill the holes. However, it is not suitable for the view synthesis in video-plus-depth based DIBR applications. In this paper, a new depth map preprocessing approach is proposed. It utilizes Watershed color segmentation method to correct the depth map misalignment and then the depth map object boundaries are extended to cover the transitional edge regions of color image. This approach can handle the sharp depth map edges lying inside or outside the object boundaries in 2D sense. The quality of the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views can be significantly improved and unknown depth values can also be estimated. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance for view synthesis by DIBR especially for generating large baseline virtual views.

Analyse des sclérotomies par OCT Spectral-Domain au cours des vitrectomies sans suture compliquées d’endophtalmie

Transconjunctival sutureless vitrectomy is a recent advance in vitreoretinal surgery. Some authors have reported an increased risk of postoperative hypotony and endophthalmitis and recommend the creation of oblique incisions, intended to be self-sealing, so as to reduce these risks. However, there is still a debate about the best architecture for transconjunctival sutureless incisions.We report two cases of acute endophthalmitis occurring after 23 and 25 gauge transconjunctival sutureless vitrectomy. We analyzed the scleral incisions using the anterior segment module of the Spectralis(®) OCT. To our knowledge, this is the first direct description of the appearance of sclerotomies associated with endophthalmitis.The anterior segment module of Spectralis(®) OCT permitted a high-resolution evaluation of the architecture of the scleral incisions. We found straight, gaping incisions with misaligned edges and vitreous incarceration.By way of these two case reports and a review of the literature, we discuss the contribution of anterior segment OCT in the analysis of scleral incision architecture in sutureless vitrectomy. Our findings are consistent with those reported in the literature. The presence of a direct incision, wound gap or edge misalignment are associated with an increased risk of early leakage and postoperative hypotony.The anterior segment module of the Spectralis(®) OCT is a valuable tool for non-invasive, painless and high-resolution documentation of sutureless vitrectomy incisions. It allows for causal analysis and better understanding of the conditions associated with endophthalmitis after sutureless vitrectomy.

SU‐E‐T‐777: Clinical Implementation of An Automated Segmented MLC Field Approach to Improve Safety of Radiation Treatment Delivery: Eliminating Wedges, External Shields and Physical Junction Shifts

Purpose: As part of routine quality improvement, departmental radiation therapy techniques were reviewed, and technical and operational modifications identified to enhance radiation delivery safety. Our aim was to standardize planning for conventional techniques that exhibit higher potential for delivery errors via automation without compromising plan quality. This was achieved through the use of segmented intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) fields. Methods: A segmented IMRT solution was developed to simulate common fields requiring: a) wedge‐based modulation (eg breast, rectum), b) shielding of anatomical regions (eg midline blocks, island shields) and c) junction shifts during treatment. For cases requiring more intricate beam modulation than what can be provided by a wedge‐like field, a simple inverse‐planned IMRT optimization was devised. Our approach does not depend on anatomical contours, and uses standard 3D conformal beam geometries for delivery and to define planning volumes. All planning strategies were automated using Pinnacle3 scripting to increase planning efficiency and consistency. Results: Compared to standard techniques using wedges, physical blocks, and junction shifts, the developed IMRT protocols resulted in comparable dose distributions. The implementation of scripts in Pinnacle allowed us to improve quality control, as well as planning and delivery efficiency. Delivery safety improvements were also realized. Physical junction shifts can be replaced by intra‐fraction junction feathering (whereby multiple junction shifts are nested within control points, delivered daily) to reduce the dosimetric impact of field edge misalignments and simplify delivery. Regarding physical beam modifiers, the potential for accidents involving dropped devices or errors due to device omission or misalignment is virtually eliminated. Conclusion: Radiation treatment plans that require wedges, physical blocks and junction shifts can be dosimetrically reproduced using simple segmented IMRT fields. Implementation of an MLC‐based delivery offers important benefits in both workflow efficiency and patient safety.

Intermediate-term results of a nonresectional dynamic repair technique in 662 patients with mitral valve prolapse and mitral regurgitation

A nonresectional technique has been developed for repair of mitral leaflet prolapse causing mitral regurgitation. Polytetrafluoroethylene chordae are used for correction of edge misalignment of the prolapsed mitral leaflet. New chordal length is adjusted during progressive left ventricular inflation to systolic pressure. Annular sizing is determined dynamically after leaflet edge alignment is accomplished to produce an optimal zone of predefined leaflet apposition. The aim of this study was to document the 8- to 10-year durability of this nonresectional approach. From 1983 through 2008, 1121 consecutive patients had mitral valve repair on one service. Of these, 662 had repair of mitral leaflet prolapse. From 1983 until 1998, standard quadratic leaflet resection/plication was used in 72 (11.1%) patients, similar but smaller resection in 93 (14.1%) patients, and then smaller resection and polytetrafluoroethylene chordae in 24 (3.7%) patients. All received Puig-Massana fully flexible rings (Shiley, Inc, Irvine, Calif). After 1998, no leaflet resections or valve replacements have been performed regardless of leaflet size in 566 consecutive patients. Of the 662 patients, the mean age was 62.6±14.1 years, and 424 (64.1%) patients were male. Coronary artery disease was present in 147 (22.2%) patients and 33 (5.0%) had prior coronary artery bypass. Leaflets corrected were as follows: anterior, 152 (23.0%) patients; posterior, 427 (64.5%); and both, 83 (12.5%) Common pathologic characteristics of prolapsing valves were as follows: myxomatous, 332 (50.2%) patients, degenerative, 83 (12.5%), ischemic, 31 (4.7%), and rheumatic, 29 (4.4%). Perioperative mortality was 2.9% (19/662) overall and 0.49% (2/414) for isolated repair. Freedom from reoperation at 10 years (Kaplan-Meier) was 90.1% and freedom from significant mitral regurgitation (echocardiography) was 93.9%. This study confirms that mitral regurgitation from mitral leaflet prolapse can be repaired in all cases by a nonresectional technique provided that accurate dynamic evaluation of chordal length and annular sizing is achieved. The intermediate-term results are durable.