Laparoscopic splenectomy: comparison between anterior and lateral approaches.

AIM: Splenectomy, except for a traumatic purpose, is now performed through a laparoscopic approach. There are mainly two ways for laparoscopic total or partial splenectomies. For the classic anterior dissection of the splenic vessels, patient is placed in supine position and five ports are required to elevate the spleen and proceed to vessel divisions. With a lateral approach of the pedicle, patient is placed in lateral decubitus position and three ports are sufficient, because gravity help to provide traction on the splenic ligaments and to present hilar vessels and pancreas tail. The aim of our study was to compare surgical complications of those two approaches of laparoscopic splenectomy in children. METHODS: We reviewed 84 medical records of patient operated on for hematological disease between January 1993 and December 2009. RESULTS: There were 47 anterior and 37 lateral approaches. Sex, disease, median age, operative time, blood lost or hospital stay, and associated laparotomy were not different between the two groups. Operative complications included hemorrhage (5), bowel injury (1), diaphragmatic wound (1), pancreas tail section (1), and parietal hematoma (1) in the anterior group (9 cases) versus 1 hemorrhage in the lateral group (P<.02). There were five laparotomies owing to surgical complications in the anterior group, and none in the lateral group. CONCLUSION: Splenectomy through laparoscopic approach is an effective technique. Lateral dissection of the vessels provides less operative complications in children

Case Studies In Performance Modelling And Simulation Of Distributed Information Systems

This paper has described the simulation model of the EDPEPPS environment. The modularity of the model allows a re-configuration of the parallel platform (e.g. the resource layer can be extended to model other networks such as Fast Ethernet of FDDI). The toolset supports graphical design, performance prediction through modelling and simulation, and visualisation of predicted program behaviour. The success of the toolset depends mainly on the accuracy to predict performance. Therefore, the user will be able to compare design alternatives. The validation of the entire model is based on the COMMS1 benchmark and the parallelisation of the H.261 algorithm. The parallel platform parameters have been obtained by measuring the real system. Currently, there is a tool which supports the automatic evaluation of these parameters. A useful feature is to predict performance on hypothetic machines where resources can be increased as well as to perform scalability analysis. During a real execution, it is difficult to control the external workload affecting the performance of a parallel application. In the simulation context, external workload generated by other applications requiring computation power or communication facility can be controlled. Reference

EDPEPPS: An Environment for the Design and Performance Evaluation of Portable Parallel Software

. This paper describes an environment for performance-oriented design of portable parallel software. The environment consists of a graphical design tool based on the PVM communication library for building parallel algorithms, a state-of-the-art simulation engine and a visualisation tool for animation of program execution and visualisation of platform and network performance measures and statistics. The toolset is used to model a virtual machine composed of a cluster of workstations interconnected by a local area network. The simulation model used is modular and its components are interchangeable which allows easy re-configuration of the platform. The model is validated using experiments on the COMMS1 benchmark from the Parkbench suite, and a standard image processing algorithm with maximum errors of 1% and 10% respectively. 1 Introduction A major obstacle to the widespread adoption of parallel computing in industry is the difficulty in program development due mainly to lack of parall..

Hedonic estimates of agricultural landscape values in suburban areas

This paper analyses the relationship between housing prices and suburban agriculture zones endowments using the hedonic price methods. We use spatially referenced housing and land-use date to capture the effect of rural amenities around the house location in the area of Angers (France). Results indicate that put higher value on diversified landscapes rather than on unified ones. The proximity to vegetables, grasslands and vineyards do not have a significant impact on house prices while the proximity to forests has a positive impact. This impact differs following the shape of the forest