Polyp in concha bullosa: a case report and review of the literature

Polyp originating within a concha bullosa is uncommon; we report only the third such case in the English literature. A 45-year-old man presented with nasal obstruction and headache. Examination of the nose revealed right septal deviation and a hypertrophic left middle concha. Computed tomography confirmed right septal deviation and identified left concha bullosa with thickening of the mucosa covering this lesion. The lateral lamella of the affected turbinate was removed and a mass was excised. Histopathologic examination of the excised mass revealed polypoid hyperplasia. The rare finding of polyp in concha bullosa is discussed with a review of the literature. In any case of concha bullosa, computed tomography images should be carefully evaluated before surgery to check for other pathologies that might have arisen within the lesion

Image Analysis for Cystic Fibrosis: Computer-Assisted Airway Wall and Vessel Measurements from Low-Dose, Limited Scan Lung CT Images

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a life-limiting genetic disease that affects approximately 30,000 Americans. When compared to those of normal children, airways of infants and young children with CF have thicker walls and are more dilated in high-resolution computed tomographic (CT) imaging. In this study, we develop computer-assisted methods for assessment of airway and vessel dimensions from axial, limited scan CT lung images acquired at low pediatric radiation doses. Two methods (threshold- and model-based) were developed to automatically measure airway and vessel sizes for pairs identified by a user. These methods were evaluated on chest CT images from 16 pediatric patients (eight infants and eight children) with different stages of mild CF related lung disease. Results of threshold-based, corrected with regression analysis, and model-based approaches correlated well with both electronic caliper measurements made by experienced observers and spirometric measurements of lung function. While the model-based approach results correlated slightly better with the human measurements than those of the threshold method, a hybrid method, combining these two methods, resulted in the best results

Glassy Dynamics of Protein Folding

A coarse grained model of a random polypeptide chain, with only discrete torsional degrees of freedom and Hookean springs connecting pairs of hydrophobic residues is shown to display stretched exponential relaxation under Metropolis dynamics at low temperatures with the exponent $\beta\simeq 1/4$, in agreement with the best experimental results. The time dependent correlation functions for fluctuations about the native state, computed in the Gaussian approximation for real proteins, have also been found to have the same functional form. Our results indicate that the energy landscape exhibits universal features over a very large range of energies and is relatively independent of the specific dynamics.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, multicolumn, including 5 figures; larger computations performed, error bars improve

NORTH AMERICAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AS A CHANNEL OF VALUES AND MEANINGS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON LOGOS

Статья является фрагментом масштабной исследовательской программы, которая направлена на описание фундаментальных концептологических идей мировой детской литературы. Исследователи задаются вопросом о базовых векторах американской детской литературы, выявляют их идеологическую направленность, систему ценностей и взглядов. По мнению авторов, в сознании маленьких американцев родная литература формирует стремление ответить на вызовы, в противовес их избеганию, а также идею об осознанном индивидуализме, предпринимательстве и свободе.The paper is a fragment of a large-scale research program that aims to describe the fundamental conceptual ideas of world children's literature. The researchers discuss the basic vectors of American children's literature, identify its ideological orientation, the system of values and views. According to the authors, in the minds of young Americans, native literature forms such qualities as the desire to respond to challenges, rather than avoiding them, as well as the idea of conscious individualism, entrepreneurship, and freedom