A two staged treatment procedure for the difficult to treat bladder neck contractures with concomitant incontinence. In the search of a solution to a complex problem

Objective: To examine the efficacy of a two staged treating strategy with the use of a non-permanent urethral ALLIUM® stent for the management of recurrent bladder neck stenosis and subsequently the use of an artificial sphincter AUS800® by AMS for the management of the incontinence. Materials and Methods: We progressively identified patients eligible for the study creating a population of cases with recurrent bladder neck stenosis and concomitant incontinence occurring after the last intervention for the stenosis. Efficacy for the treatment of the stenosis was defined as no recurrence both prior and post to the sphincter placement and efficacy for the treatment of the incontinence was defined as continence (0-1pads) after the sphincter placement. Results and Limitations: 14 white males with a mean age of 66.21, ranging from 59 to 73 years consisted the population of the study. All patients had severe stress incontinence following the last transurethral resection. The efficacy of the treatment of the bladder neck stenosis was 93% (13/14) while the efficacy for the treatment of the incontinence was 100%. A single patient had a recurrent bladder neck stenosis after the artificial sphincter placement and was treated with transurethral resection using a long pediatric 13 F resectoscope at 12 months. Our limitations is the absence of a control group and the small number of patients enrolled, with a relatively short time of follow up. Conclusions: In our series we propose the use of a non-permanent urethral ALLIUM® stent for 6 months in order to control the growth of fibrotic scar tissue, a further 6 months follow up for recurrence, and then placement of an artificial sphincter. The results are very promising both on stabilizing the vesicourethral stenosis, and on patient safety and tolerability

5G-IANA - D2.1 Specifications of the 5G-IANA architecture

<p>This deliverable has the objective to provide the outcomes of the activities performed in Work Package (WP) 2 "Specifications". The activities included the design of the 5G-IANA Automotive Open Experimentation Platform (AOEP) and the requirements specification of each architecture layer. The specified 5G-IANA architecture capitalizes on the 5G prospect of being a unified multi-service platform by orchestrating Vertical Services based on virtualized network slices and coordination of distributed edge-to-cloud deployment.</p><p>The 5G-IANA AOEP aims to provide an open and flexible experimentation platform to third-parties developers (e.g., SMEs) that want to develop new 5G-based services devoted to the Automotive vertical. The availability of an easy-to-use experimentation environment can facilitate the launch of new services creating new market opportunities. Moreover, 5G-IANA will actively address the configuration of the 5G network (e.g., network slicing, edge resources, etc.) with the objective of supporting in the best way the requirements of the new services. In this way, it will be also possible to verify if the current 5G implementation can adequately satisfy the highly demanding performance requirements of Automotive services.</p&gt