Congenital spinal tumor in a patient with encephalocele and hydrocephalus: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Encephalocele is a rare congenital abnormality of the central nervous system, where brain tissue protrudes from a defect in the skull. Some anomalies are associated with encephalocele. However, the association of spinal teratoma and encephalocele has not been reported in the English literature.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We report the case of an Iranian girl with a history of encephalocele surgery, who, at the age of four years, developed an intramedullary spinal teratoma, and discuss the pathogenesis of this association.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an association between encephalocele and spinal teratoma.</p

Fetal intestinal transplant as an accessory enteral segment

Fetal tissue transplantation has gathered considerable interest among researchers dealing with organ transplantation. A large number of studies concerning fetal intestinal transplantation have been published in the past 2 decades, almost all of them aiming to determine the feasibility of a properly functioning fetal transplant in continuity with the host's own enteral system. This study was designed to determine the absorptive capacity of the neogut in vivo, without anastomosing the transplant to the host's intestine, and to evaluate its use as an accessory enteral segment. Intestinal segments taken from Wistar albino fetuses were transplanted subcutaneously into the abdominal wall of 20 Sprague-Dawley rats. Immunosuppression was maintained by daily cyclosporin A (Cy A) 10 mg/kg injections s.c. and evaluated by determination of serum Cy A level and T-helper/T-suppressor cell ratio. The neogut was converted into a Thiry-Vella loop 2 weeks after transplantation. A test solution composed of 20% glucose and Trophamine was perfused via the stomas; glucose and amino acid absorption gradients were calculated. The gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT) activity and mitotic index of the neogut were determined. Results were compared to those obtained from the host. There was no significant difference (P > 0.05) in glucose absorption between the neogut and the host tissue. Amino acid absorption and specific GGT activity were significantly less (P 0.05) between neogut and host intestine in mitotic index. Our data support the idea of using a transplanted fetal intestinal segment as an accessory feeding route

Thoracoscopic diaphragm plication in children and indications for conversion to open thoracotomy

Thoracoscopic plication of the diaphragm has been recently described as an alternative treatment for eventration. It is considered to be much less traumatic than the conventional method. We attempted thoracoscopic diaphragm plication on three patients. Two patients were treated successfully by the minimally invasive technique and were discharged from hospital on the second postoperative day. In the third case, the presence of a mobile intrathoracic kidney due to previous diaphragmatic hernia repair necessitated conversion to open thoracotomy. This patient was discharged on postoperative day six following an uneventful recovery. All patients are well and asymptomatic on followup. We advocate thoracoscopic diaphragm plication in children as a safe procedure with less morbidity and excellent cosmetic results

Isolation and culture of adult and fetal rabbit bladder smooth muscle cells and their interaction with biopolymers

Purpose: The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of isolation and culture of adult and fetal rabbit bladder smooth muscle cells (SMCs) and comparison of their interactions with different types of biodegradable biopolymers in cell culture

Nonadiabatic effects in gas-surface dynamics

In this chapter, we will provide the theoretical foundations on which the local-density friction approximation (LDFA) is based and examples of its application to gas–surface interaction problems. With this aim, first in Sect. 28.2 we will review the derivation of the stopping power (energy lost per unit path length) for an atom or molecule traveling through a uniform electron gas in the strong coupling limit, i. e., when its velocity is lower than the Fermi velocity of the system. Real systems present electronic density nonlinearities. For this reason in Sect. 28.3, we show how this method for calculating the stopping power has been successful to reproduce and explain experimental energy-loss measurements for ions/atoms traveling through real solids and interacting with metal surfaces. The last part of Sect. 28.3 is devoted to the description of the LDFA method that accounts for the effect of energy losses in the dynamics of thermal and hyperthermal gas particles interacting with metal surfaces. Its implementation both in molecular dynamics performed in precalculated potential energy surfaces (PESs) and in ab-initio molecular dynamics is also discussed. Finally, an overview of the knowledge acquired during last years by the application of the LDFA will be presented in Sect. 28.4. In particular, we will analyze the importance of electron–hole (e–h) pair excitations in different gas–surface elementary processes that involve atoms and molecules of practical interest, such as H, N, H2, N2, and H2O. The analysis will mostly review the results obtained for the dissociative and nondissociative adsorption, for the Eley–Rideal and hot-atom recombinations and for the scattering of these gas species on different metal surfaces. As a general conclusion, it will be shown that e–h pair excitations are typically relevant for long-lasting processes. The last part of this section will review recent applications of the LDFA to model the desorption dynamics of atoms or molecules induced by femtosecond laser pulses. A summary of this chapter is provided in Sect. 28.5.Peer reviewe