Maxillofacial trauma patient: coping with the difficult airway

Establishing a secure airway in a trauma patient is one of the primary essentials of treatment. Any flaw in airway management may lead to grave morbidity and mortality. Maxillofacial trauma presents a complex problem with regard to the patient's airway. By definition, the injury compromises the patient's airway and it is, therefore, must be protected. In most cases, the patient undergoes surgery for maxillofacial trauma or for other, more severe, life-threatening injuries, and securing the airway is the first step in the introduction of general anaesthesia. In such patients, we anticipate difficult endotracheal intubation and, often, also difficult mask ventilation. In addition, the patient is usually regarded as having a "full stomach" and has not been cleared of a C-spine injury, which may complicate airway management furthermore. The time available to accomplish the task is short and the patient's condition may deteriorate rapidly. Both decision-making and performance are impaired in such circumstances. In this review, we discuss the complexity of the situation and present a treatment approach

Critical Behavior of Light

Light is shown to exhibit critical and tricritical behavior in passive mode-locked lasers with externally injected pulses. It is a first and unique example of critical phenomena in a one-dimensional many body light-mode system. The phase diagrams consist of regimes with continuous wave, driven para-pulses, spontaneous pulses via mode condensation, and heterogeneous pulses, separated by phase transition lines which terminate with critical or tricritical points. Enhanced nongaussian fluctuations and collective dynamics are observed at the critical and tricritical points, showing a mode system analog of the critical opalescence phenomenon. The critical exponents are calculated and shown to comply with the mean field theory, which is rigorous in the light system.Comment: RevTex, 5 pages, 3 figure