1,028 research outputs found
Less invasive surgery of the proximal aorta : From 23rd World Congress of the World Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons. Split, Croatia. 12-15 September 2013
Oral presentation: 23rd World Congress of the World Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons. Split, Croatia. 12-15 September 2013.
Background: Partial upper sternotomy (PUS) is established less invasive approach for single and double valve surgery. Reports of aortic surgery performed through PUS are rare.
Methods: The records of 52 patients undergoing primary elective surgery on the proximal aorta through PUS between 2005 and 2011 were reviewed. Patients mean age was 57 years, 35% were in NYHA Class III or IV, 59% had recent cardiac decompensation, and 17% had pulmonary hypertension. The PUS was taken down to the 4th left intercostal space in 44 patients (85%).
Results: No conversion to full sternotomy was necessary. The aortic cross-clamp, cardiopulmonary bypass and operative times averaged 136 ± 20 min., 186 ± 36 min. and 327 ± 83 min., respectively. In eight patients, the right axillary artery was cannulated for establishing cardiopulmonary bypass; the others were cannulated centrally. All patients except one received a procedure on the ascending aorta, either replacement in 30 (58%) or reduction aortoplasty in 21 (40%). Aortic root replacement was additionally performed in 31 patients (60%), including David in 20 (38%) and Ross procedure in 6 (11.5%). The aortic arch was replaced either partially in 5 (10%) or totally in 3 (6%) patients, in moderate hypothermia employing antegrade cerebral perfusion. Additional procedures, included mitral valve repair in 15 (29%) patients and coronary grafting. Ventilation time, intensive care unit and hospital stay averaged 17 ± 12 hours, 2 ± 1, and 11 ± 9 days. Chest drainage was 470 ± 380 ml/24 hours. Permanent neurologic deficit did not occur. Wound dehiscence was observed in a single patient (2%). Thirty-day and hospital mortality were not observed.
Conclusions: Less invasive surgery on the aortic root, ascending aorta and aortic arch can be performed safely and reproducibly. Potential benefits include a minimized risk of wound dehiscence and reduced postoperative bleeding. The PUS does not compromise the quality of the operation
Second language user support
Computer users rarely experience entirely trouble-free interaction. The natural variety ofindividuals ensures that no software systems yield constantly fluent interaction for allusers. In consequence, software designers often strive to ameliorate this situation bybuilding 'user support' into their systems. User support can take different forms but,conventionally, each aims to assist the needy end-user by means of facilities directly supporting the performance of certain operations, or through supply of information thatadvises the user on available system functionality.The present paper briefly characterises a range of user support facilities before describingone requirement in greater detail. This aspect considers the needs of users whose mother-tongue is not English, but who are obliged to use English-based information systems. Inthis context, 'helping the user' must reasonably extend beyond mere advice on systemoperation to selective elucidation of information content. We regard this move as alogical extension of the user support concept, by seeking to address specific interactionneeds in a target user population. An example of this approach is described through aninformation system, in the domain of civil engineering, for native Chinese speakers ofEnglish
Energy Dependence of the Contribution of Pion Exchange to Large-Rapidity-Gap Events in Deep Inelastic Scattering
We study the energy dependence of the contribution of pion exchange to
large-rapidity-gap events in deep inelastic scattering. The results show that
this contribution can be quite significant at low energy and that the LRG
events observed by E665 collaboration in \mu Xe and \mu D interactions at 490
can be reasonably well described in terms of meson exchange. We also show
that the distribution of the maximum rapidity for all hadrons is quite
different from that for charged hadrons only and that the former exhibits also
shoulder-like structure for events at 490 similar to that at HERA.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Phys. Rev. D (in press
The narratives of Hardship: : The new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe
This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Hulya Dagdeviren, Matthew Donoghue, and Lars Meier, ‘The narratives of hardship: the new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe’, The Sociological Review, vol. 65 (2): 369-385, May 2017. The final, definitive version of record is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12403. Published by SAGE.This paper examines poverty and hardship in Europe after the 2008 crisis, using household interviews in nine European countries. A number of findings deserve highlighting. First, making a distinction between ‘the old poor’ (those who lived in poverty before as well as after the crisis) and ‘the new poor’ (thosewho fell into hardship after the crisis), we show that hardship is experienced quite differently by these groups. Second, the household narratives showed that while material deprivations constitute an important aspect of hardship, the themes of insecurity and dependency also emerged as fundamental dimensions. In contrast to popular political discourse in countries such as the UK, dependency on welfare or family was experienced as a source of distress and manifested as a form of hardship by participants in all countries covered in this study.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
On Forward J/\psi Production at Fermilab Tevatron
The D0 Collaboration has recently reported the measurement of J/\psi
production at low angle. We show here that the inclusion of color octet
contributions in any framework is able to reproduce this data.Comment: 1 page, Revtex, uses epsfig.sty, 2 postscript figure
Soft Color Interactions and Diffractive Hard Scattering at the Fermilab Tevatron
An improved understanding of nonperturbative QCD can be obtained by the
recently developed soft color interaction models. Their essence is the
variation of color string-field topologies, giving a unified description of
final states in high energy interactions, e.g., diffractive and nondiffractive
events in ep and ppbar. Here we present a detailed study of such models (the
soft color interaction model and the generalized area law model) applied to
ppbar, considering also the general problem of the underlying event including
beam particle remnants. With models tuned to HERA ep data, we find a good
description also of Tevatron data on production of W, beauty and jets in
diffractive events defined either by leading antiprotons or by one or two
rapidity gaps in the forward or backward regions. We also give predictions for
diffractive J/psi production where the soft exchange mechanism produces both a
gap and a color singlet ccbar state in the same event. This soft color
interaction approach is also compared with Pomeron-based models for
diffraction, and some possibilities to experimentally discriminate between
these different approaches are discussed.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figures, uses REVTeX. Minor changes, version to appear
in Phys. Rev.
Color Evaporation and Elastic Photoproduction at DESY HERA
The diffractive photoproduction of vector mesons is usually described
considering the two-gluon (Pomeron) exchange, non-diagonal parton distributions
and the contribution of the real part to the cross section. In this letter we
analyze the diffractive photoproduction of the at HERA using an
alternative model, the Color Evaporation Model (CEM), where the cross section
is simply determined by the boson-gluon cross section and an assumption for the
production of the colorless state. We verify that, similarly to the
case, the HERA data for this process can be well described by the CEM.
Moreover, we propose the analyzes of the ratio to discriminate between the distinct approaches.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in PRD (Brief Reports
Gluon distributions in nucleons and pions at a low resolution scale
In this paper we study the gluon distribution functions in nucleons and pions
at a low resolution scale. This is an important issue since parton
densities at low have always been taken as an external input which is
adjusted through DGLAP evolution to fit the experimental data at higher scales.
Here, in the framework of a model recently developed, it is shown that the
hypothetical cloud of {\it neutral} pions surrounding nucleons and pions
appears to be responsible for the characteristic valence-like gluon
distributions needed at the inital low scale. As an additional result, we get
the remarkable prediction that neutral and charged pions have different
intrinsic sea flavor contents.Comment: final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Discussion on several points
enlarge
Low wave-functions of pions and kaons and their parton distribution functions
We study the low wave-functions of pions and kaons as an expansion in
terms of hadron-like Fock state fluctuations. In this formalism, pion and kaon
wave-functions are related one another. Consequently, the knowledge of the pion
structure allows the determination of parton distributions in kaons. In
addition, we show that the intrinsic (low ) sea of pions and kaons are
different due to their different valence quark structure. Finally, we analize
the feasibility of a method to extract kaon's parton distribution functions
within this approach and compare with available experimental data.Comment: 13 pages, 3 postscript figures include
- …