Long term follow up results of sequential left internal thoracic artery grafts on severe left anterior descending artery disease

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Purpose</p> <p>Several alternative procedures have been proposed to achieve complete revascularization in the presence of diffuse left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) disease. With the extensive use of internal thoracic artery grafts in coronary artery bypass procedures, sequential anastomosis of the left internal thoracic artery (LITA) to LAD has gained popularity in these challenging cases. The long term results of sequential LITA to LAD anstomosis were examined in this study.</p> <p>Patients and Methods</p> <p>In order to determine the long term results of the sequential revascularization of LAD by LITA graft, 41 out of 49 patients operated between January 2001 and December 2005 were selected for control coronary arteriography. The median period for control coronary arteriography was 64 months.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Seventy five anastomoses were found to be fully patent (91,46%) among the 82 sequential LITA anastomoses (41 LITA grafts) on the LAD at a median follow-up period of 64 months (53 to 123 months). Among the 41 LITA grafts used for this purpose, 36 were found intact (complete patency of the proximal and distal anastomoses) (87,8%). Two LITA grafts (4 anastomoses) were found to be totally occluded (4,87%). The proximal anastomosis of the LITA graft was observed to be 90% stenotic in one patient (1,21%). In one patient tight stenosis of the distal anastomosis line was observed (1,21%), while in another patient 70% narrowing of LITA lumen after the proximal anastomosis was detected (1,21%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We strongly beleive that sequential LITA grafting of LAD is a safe alternative in the presence of severe LAD disease to achieve complete revascularization of the anterior myocardium with patency rates not much differing from conventional single LITA to LAD anastomosis.</p

Assessment of the requisites of microbiology based infectious disease training under the pressure of consultation needs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Training of infectious disease (ID) specialists is structured on classical clinical microbiology training in Turkey and ID specialists work as clinical microbiologists at the same time. Hence, this study aimed to determine the clinical skills and knowledge required by clinical microbiologists.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study was carried out between June 1, 2010 and September 15, 2010 in 32 ID departments in Turkey. Only patients hospitalized and followed up in the ID departments between January-June 2010 who required consultation with other disciplines were included.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 605 patients undergoing 1343 consultations were included, with pulmonology, neurology, cardiology, gastroenterology, nephrology, dermatology, haematology, and endocrinology being the most frequent consultation specialties. The consultation patterns were quite similar and were not affected by either the nature of infections or the critical clinical status of ID patients.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results of our study show that certain internal medicine subdisciplines such as pulmonology, neurology and dermatology appear to be the principal clinical requisites in the training of ID specialists, rather than internal medicine as a whole.</p

Modified query expansion through generative adversarial networks for information extraction in e-commerce

This work addresses an alternative approach for query expansion (QE) using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the effectiveness of information search in e-commerce. We propose a modified QE conditional GAN (mQE-CGAN) framework, which resolves keywords by expanding the query with a synthetically generated query that proposes semantic information from text input. we train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model as the generator to produce keywords and use a recurrent neural network model as the discriminator to classify an adversarial output with the generator. with the modified CGAN framework, Various forms of semantic insights gathered from the query-document corpus are introduced to the generation process. We leverage these insights as conditions for the generator model and discuss their effectiveness for the query expansion task. our experiments demonstrate that the utilization of condition structures within the mQE-CGAN framework can increase the semantic similarity between generated sequences and reference documents up to nearly 10% compared to baseline models

Infection Agents Detected with Wound Culture in Patients with Diabetic Foot who will Undergo Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment

AIM: We aimed to obtain the knowledge of appropriate antibiotic therapy and to make a contribution to improving treatment efficacy by conducting a microbiological study of diabetic foot ulcers. METHOD: 30 patients (18 male and 12 female) with diabetic foot ulcer applying to our center for hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) treatment in 2010 were enrolled in this study. The wounds were graded according to Meggitt-Wagner classification system. Wound cultures were obtained before starting antibiotic therapy and HBO treatment. Phoenix system (Becton Dickinson, USA) and Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion antibiotic sensitivity testing were used in order to detect the antimicrobial susceptibility of the infection agents. The number of HBO sessions, glycemic control and treatment results were assessed. RESULTS: Mean age of the patients was 61.3 years (range: 35-83). 24 patients had a good glycemic control and 6 patients had not. The patients were given 5 to 55 HBO sessions (mean: 20). Of the 30 patients 19 (63.33%) recovered from the infection but 11 (36.67%) have not responded to the treatment. 14 different infectious agents were detected in diabetic foot ulcers we examined. Gram-positive agents were isolated in 12 (40%) out of 30 wound cultures and gram-negative agents were isolated in 18 (60%) wound culture. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was predominantly isolated and the other agents isolated were enterococcus faecalis, klebsiella pneumoniae, staphylococcus aureus and escherichia coli. CONCLUSION: The outcomes can not represent the general population rates due to the restriction factors. They give only an idea about the probability of infectious agent spectrum in diabetic foot ulcers and their antibiotic susceptibility. We want to attract attention to the fact that although pseudomonas aeruginosa infections are mostly encountered in hospital, they can also be acquired from the community and it will be useful to develop appropriate antibiotic policies and treatment protocols. [TAF Prev Med Bull 2012; 11(2.000): 205-210

In vitro efficacy of hyperbaric oxygen therapy against Leishmania tropica promastigotes and amastigotes

Aim: To assess the efficiency of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy on L. tropica, which is the major causative agent of cutaneous leishmaniasis in Turkey