Surgery for atrial fibrillation using radiofrequency catheter ablation

AbstractObjectiveWe present the results obtained in 40 patients with chronic atrial fibrillation using direct intraoperative radiofrequency to perform atrial fibrillation surgery.MethodsBetween April 1995 and June 2002, 40 patients underwent surgery for atrial fibrillation using radiofrequency ablation and cardiac surgery at the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery of the University of Bologna. There were 8 men and 32 women with a mean age of 62 ± 11.6 years (range: 20 to 80 years).ResultsConcomitant surgical procedures were: mitral valve replacement (n = 13), mitral valve replacement plus tricuspid valvuloplasty (n = 11), combined mitral and aortic valve replacement (n = 8), and combined mitral and aortic valve replacement plus tricuspid valvuloplasty (n = 5). Moreover, 1 patient underwent tricuspid valvuloplasty plus atrial septal defect repair, another required aortic valve replacement plus coronary artery bypass graft, and a third underwent aortic valve replacement. After the mean follow-up time of 16.5 ± 2.5 months survival was 92.8% and the overall cumulative rate of sinus rhythm was 88.5%.ConclusionsWe conclude that the radiofrequency ablation procedure is a safe and effective means of curing atrial fibrillation with negligible technical and time requirements, allowing recovery of the sinus rhythm and atrial function in the great majority of patients with atrial fibrillation who underwent cardiac surgery (88.5% of our study population)

Attosecond spectroscopy of bio-chemically relevant molecules

Understanding the role of the electron dynamics in the photochemistry of bio-chemically relevant molecules is key to getting access to the fundamental physical processes leading to damage, mutation and, more generally, to the alteration of the final biological functions. Sudden ionization of a large molecule has been proven to activate a sub-femtosecond charge flow throughout the molecular backbone, purely guided by electronic coherences, which could ultimately affect the photochemical response of the molecule at later times. We can follow this ultrafast charge flow in real time by exploiting the extreme time resolution provided by attosecond light sources. In this work recent advances in attosecond molecular physics are presented with particular focus on the investigation of bio-relevant molecules

Book Review: \u3ci\u3eSuperstitious Regimes\u3c/i\u3e by Rebecca Nedostup

Superstitious Regimes is an interdisciplinary work that sheds new light on the interaction between the state-body and the religion-body in early twentieth-century China, with a focus on the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Nedostup develops her analysis from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. The author underlines shifts and continuities between a few historical periods: Sun Yat-sen’s time, the early years of the Nanjing Decade, the late years of the Nanjing Decade, and the post-Nanjing Decade. Nedostup’s interdisciplinary study is of interest for a large readership: students and scholars of Chinese studies, Chinese politics, Chinese religions, and Chinese history would all benefit from reading this book, both for its contents and for the research methodologies that the author adopted

Stochastic simulation of soil particle-size curves in heterogeneous aquifer systems through a Bayes space approach

We address the problem of stochastic simulation of soil particle-size curves (PSCs) in heterogeneous aquifer systems. Unlike traditional approaches that focus solely on a few selected features of PSCs (e.g., selected quantiles), our approach considers the entire particle-size curves and can optionally include conditioning on available data. We rely on our prior work to model PSCs as cumulative distribution functions and interpret their density functions as functional compositions. We thus approximate the latter through an expansion over an appropriate basis of functions. This enables us to (a) effectively deal with the data dimensionality and constraints and (b) to develop a simulation method for PSCs based upon a suitable and well defined projection procedure. The new theoretical framework allows representing and reproducing the complete information content embedded in PSC data. As a first field application, we demonstrate the quality of unconditional and conditional simulations obtained with our methodology by considering a set of particle-size curves collected within a shallow alluvial aquifer in the Neckar river valley, Germany

Planck intermediate results. XII: Diffuse Galactic components in the Gould Belt system

Peer reviewe

Planck intermediate results XV : A study of anomalous microwave emission in Galactic clouds

This article has an erratum: DOI 10.1051/0004-6361/201322612ePeer reviewe