1,002 research outputs found
Spinal stabilization for patients with metastatic lesions of the spine using a titanium spacer
Anterior decompression in spinal metastases of the corporal type with impending (n=5) or present (n=36) neurological complications was performed in 41 patients. For reconstruction, a titanium cylinder was inserted after spondylectomy and augmented with an anterior plate. The titanium implant can easily be adjusted to the length needed without necessitating expensive additional equipment. Outside the patient the implant is filled with polymethylmetacrylate, facilitating plate transfixation for rotational locking. There was a 30-day mortality of 9.7%. Pain relief was apparent in 38 of 41 patients (92.7%), and motor improvement was manifest in 31 of 35 cases (88.6%). Six patients did not present with any neurological symptoms pre- or postoperatively. Neurological deterioration was registered in only 1 case (2.4%). Surgical efficacy was maintained until the death of the patients. Though tumor recurrence at a different spinal level led to consecutive surgery in 5 patients, no implant dislocation occurred during the observation period (maximum 44 months), characterizing the procedure as a mechanically reliable and safe technique
Superposition in nonlinear wave and evolution equations
Real and bounded elliptic solutions suitable for applying the Khare-Sukhatme
superposition procedure are presented and used to generate superposition
solutions of the generalized modified Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation (gmKPE)
and the nonlinear cubic-quintic Schroedinger equation (NLCQSE).Comment: submitted to International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 23 pages,
2 figures, style change
Bias Analysis in Entropy Estimation
We consider the problem of finite sample corrections for entropy estimation.
New estimates of the Shannon entropy are proposed and their systematic error
(the bias) is computed analytically. We find that our results cover correction
formulas of current entropy estimates recently discussed in literature. The
trade-off between bias reduction and the increase of the corresponding
statistical error is analyzed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Lateralized occipito-temporal N1 responses to images of salient distorted finger postures
For humans as social beings, other people’s hands are highly visually conspicuous. Exceptionally striking are hands in other than natural configuration which have been found to elicit distinct brain activation. Here we studied response strength and lateralization of this activation using event-related potentials (ERPs), in particular, occipitotemporal N1 responses as correlates of activation in extrastriate body area. Participants viewed computer-generated images of hands, half of them showing distorted fingers, the other half showing natural fingers. As control stimuli of similar geometric complexity, images of chairs were shown, half of them with distorted legs, half with standard legs. The contrast of interest was between distorted and natural/standard stimuli. For hands, stronger N1 responses were observed for distorted (vs natural) stimuli from 170 ms post stimulus. Such stronger N1 responses were found for distorted hands and absent for distorted chairs, therefore likely unrelated to visuospatial processing of the unusual distorted shapes. Rather, N1 modulation over both hemispheres - but robustly right-lateralized - could reflect distorted hands as emotionally laden stimuli. The results are in line with privileged visual processing of hands as highly salient body parts, with distortions engaging neural resources that are especially activated for biological stimuli in social perception
Operative Behnadlungsstrategien bei Femurmetastasen
Weder Deckblatt noch Ihaltsverzeischnis vorhanden
Random perfect lattices and the sphere packing problem
Motivated by the search for best lattice sphere packings in Euclidean spaces
of large dimensions we study randomly generated perfect lattices in moderately
large dimensions (up to d=19 included). Perfect lattices are relevant in the
solution of the problem of lattice sphere packing, because the best lattice
packing is a perfect lattice and because they can be generated easily by an
algorithm. Their number however grows super-exponentially with the dimension so
to get an idea of their properties we propose to study a randomized version of
the algorithm and to define a random ensemble with an effective temperature in
a way reminiscent of a Monte-Carlo simulation. We therefore study the
distribution of packing fractions and kissing numbers of these ensembles and
show how as the temperature is decreased the best know packers are easily
recovered. We find that, even at infinite temperature, the typical perfect
lattices are considerably denser than known families (like A_d and D_d) and we
propose two hypotheses between which we cannot distinguish in this paper: one
in which they improve Minkowsky's bound phi\sim 2^{-(0.84+-0.06) d}, and a
competitor, in which their packing fraction decreases super-exponentially,
namely phi\sim d^{-a d} but with a very small coefficient a=0.06+-0.04. We also
find properties of the random walk which are suggestive of a glassy system
already for moderately small dimensions. We also analyze local structure of
network of perfect lattices conjecturing that this is a scale-free network in
all dimensions with constant scaling exponent 2.6+-0.1.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure
Algebraic totality, towards completeness
Finiteness spaces constitute a categorical model of Linear Logic (LL) whose
objects can be seen as linearly topologised spaces, (a class of topological
vector spaces introduced by Lefschetz in 1942) and morphisms as continuous
linear maps. First, we recall definitions of finiteness spaces and describe
their basic properties deduced from the general theory of linearly topologised
spaces. Then we give an interpretation of LL based on linear algebra. Second,
thanks to separation properties, we can introduce an algebraic notion of
totality candidate in the framework of linearly topologised spaces: a totality
candidate is a closed affine subspace which does not contain 0. We show that
finiteness spaces with totality candidates constitute a model of classical LL.
Finally, we give a barycentric simply typed lambda-calculus, with booleans
and a conditional operator, which can be interpreted in this
model. We prove completeness at type for
every n by an algebraic method
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