The origin and relations of the anterior choroidal artery: an anatomical study

There has recently been an increase in surgical interventions to the inferior temporal lobe. The aim of the present study is to examine the anatomical structure and relations of the anterior choroidal artery, which extends to this region. A mixture of latex and ink was injected into the internal carotid and basilar arteries of 15 brains from fresh cadavers. In 18 out of 30 cases (60%) the anterior choroidal artery arose from the posteroinferior aspect of the internal carotid artery, in 8 (22.2%) from the posterolateral aspect and in 4 (2%) from its anterior part. The diameter of the anterior choroidal artery was 0.94 mm on average (0.7-1.2) and the average distance from the posterior communicating artery was 5.3 mm (3.8-8 mm); its distance to the bifurcation of the carotid was found to be 4.0 mm on average (2.2-8 mm). The cisternal segment of the anterior choroidal artery and the optic tract formed a neurovascular bundle. The branches arising from the plexal segment supply the lateral geniculate body, the thalamus and the optic tract. The resulting knowledge of the neurovascular relations of the anterior choroidal artery provides a safe surgical approach to the inferior temporal lobe

Narrow-Band Microwave Filter Using High-Q Groove Gap Waveguide Resonators With Manufacturing Flexibility and No Sidewalls

This paper presents a new type of narrow band filter with good electrical performance and manufacturing flexibility, based on the newly introduced groove gap waveguide technology. The designed third and fifth-order filters work at Ku band with 1% fractional bandwidth. These filter structures are manufactured with an allowable gap between two metal blocks, in such a way that there is no requirement for electrical contact and alignment between the blocks. This is a major manufacturing advantage compared to normal rectangular waveguide filters. The measured results of the manufactured filters show reasonably good agreement with the full-wave simulated results, without any tuning or adjustments

Numerical Prepackaging with PMC Lid - Efficient and Simple Design Procedure for Microstrip Circuits Including the Packaging

The paper presents an efficient method for the design of printed microstrip circuit with packaging in mind, referred to as numerical prepackaging with a perfectly magnetic conductive (PMC) lid. The method comprises making the design including the packaging from the start by using a PMC lid, rather than first designing the open-aired circuit; and thereafter, considering the packaging effect and the often required retuning of the circuits themselves. The advantage is that no parallel plate modes can propagate between the perfect electric conductor (PEC) ground plane and the PMC lid plate if the spacing is smaller than an effective quarter of wavelength. This provides a limited computational volume so that the computation time is significantly reduced in the case of the finite element method (FEM) or the finite difference time domain method (FDTD). By using numerical packaging with PMC lid, the ideal PMC lid has to be realized afterwards e.g. by using a lid of nails, which is a minor task as compared to existing approaches

Demographics Factors and Perception of Brand Consciousness: A Cross-Sectional Study of Basic Clothing Brands in Karachi Pakistan

The purpose of this study is to investigate the purchasing power of Pakistani consumers and to recognize the key elements of branding conditions that affect consumers' buying habits against the latest fashion items. The aim of the study is to identify the importance of clothing brands according to demographic factors, including gender, income, age, and education. We applieddescriptive analysis; chi-square and correlation test were used to analyze the collected sample size of 500 surveyed real-time shoppers selected through non-probability convenience sampling bases from 40 different malls and outlets which are selected through randomly. A research questionnaire was prepared to determine the demographic factors and branded clothes preferences that have an impact on Pakistani consumer’s choices.The study concluded that the demographic factor age hasa significant association with preferences of branded clothes. The demographic factors such as gender, income, and education have an insignificant association with preferences of branded clothes. The results revealed that more or less 50% respondent of all age groups agreed that brand is quite important while considering and purchasing clothes. Strong brand preferences of age group between 18-25(17%), followed by 36-45 (14%), 26-35 (13%), 46 years and above almost 10%. The correlation results concluded that the preferences of branded clothes significantly correlates with price and reference group whereas insignificantly relates with retailer efforts and promotional incentives.We further concluded that age is the vital demographic indicator for stitched garment marketers as well as reference group and price must be considered because both variables are positive and significant influences on branded clothes preferences according to our research findings. DOI: 10.7176/IKM/9-6-02 Publication date:June 30th 201

Re-factoring based program repair applied to programming assignments

Automated program repair has been used to provide feedback for incorrect student programming assignments, since program repair captures the code modification needed to make a given buggy program pass a given test-suite. Existing student feedback generation techniques are limited because they either require manual effort in the form of providing an error model, or require a large number of correct student submissions to learn from, or suffer from lack of scalability and accuracy. In this work, we propose a fully automated approach for generating student program repairs in real-time. This is achieved by first re-factoring all available correct solutions to semantically equivalent solutions. Given an incorrect program, we match the program with the closest matching refactored program based on its control flow structure. Subsequently, we infer the input-output specifications of the incorrect program's basic blocks from the executions of the correct program's aligned basic blocks. Finally, these specifications are used to modify the blocks of the incorrect program via search-based synthesis. Our dataset consists of almost 1,800 real-life incorrect Python program submissions from 361 students for an introductory programming course at a large public university. Our experimental results suggest that our method is more effective and efficient than recently proposed feedback generation approaches. About 30% of the patches produced by our tool Refactory are smaller than those produced by the state-of-art tool Clara, and can be produced given fewer correct solutions (often a single correct solution) and in a shorter time. We opine that our method is applicable not only to programming assignments, and could be seen as a general-purpose program repair method that can achieve good results with just a single correct reference solution

Bed of Springs for Packaging of Microstrip Circuits in the Microwave Frequency Range

After the use of the bed of nails for removing cavity modes in microstrip circuit packages, we propose herein a new version of this periodic structure, based on helices (springs) instead of nails. This new structure, named bed of springs, is much more compact, and this allows its use at low frequencies where the bed of nails is not suitable as it is too bulky due to the required height of the nails (pins). The bandwidth of the proposed structure turns out to be similar to the case of bed of nails. Parametric studies are presented as a design tool and a demonstrator is manufactured and measured

sCR1sLeX reduces lung allograft ischemia-reperfusion injury but does not ameliorate acute rejection

Background: Combined inhibition of complement and leukocyte adhesion by sCR1sLeX reduces lung allograft dysfunction up to 24 h. In the present study its effect on graft function and acute rejection was evaluated up to 5 days after experimental transplantation. Methods: Orthotopic single left lung transplantation was performed in 35 male rats (Brown Norway to Fischer 344) after a total ischemic time of 20 h. Two groups were assessed after 1, 3, and 5 days post-transplant, respectively (n=5 per group and time point): controls vs. recipients which received 10 mg/kg sCR1sLeX 15 min prior to reperfusion. In addition, five animals received 10 mg/kg per day sCR1sLeX for 5 days. For blood gas analysis of the graft, the contralateral lung was occluded for 5 min to assess graft function. Lung grafts were flushed, and histological grading was performed in blinded fashion according to the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation criteria. Results: Graft PaO2 in recipients treated with sCR1sLeX was superior on day 1 (383±118 vs. 56±15 mmHg; P≪0.0001) and day 3 (446±48 vs. 231±108 mmHg; P≪0.0001). Five days after transplantation, no difference in PaO2 was found (61±28 vs. 83±31 mmHg; P=0.59). Repeated treatment with sCR1sLeX for 5 days did not improve PaO2 (64±5 mmHg; P=0.65 vs. control; P=0.93 vs. sCR1sLeX). At any time point, there was no difference in the degree of rejection between groups. Conclusions: In this model sCR1sLeX provided marked improvement of graft function up to 3 days, but inhibition of both complement system and selectin dependent leukocyte adhesion failed to protect against acute rejectio

Consumer Demographics and Self-Medication: A Cross-Sectional Study of Karachi City in Pakistan

The purpose of this study is to find the statistical relationship between self-medication and demographic characteristics. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the local settings of Karachi. A total of 210 individuals participated in the study. The data was collected through self-administered questionnaire. SPSS.20 was used for data analysis. This software help in data management from above mentioned sources, and statistical analysis of the data. Chi-square and Phi and Cramer’s V test was used to measure attitude of consumer towards self medications. The study shows that 82% of the surveyed people practice self-medication, mostly for minor illnesses. The common reasons for self-medication as stated by the respondents are prior experience, convenience, and recommendation. The majority of the respondent regarded self-medication as an acceptable practice and a short-term cure to the illness. Finally, there is no statistical relationship between self-medication and demographic characteristics of the population. The sample size that has been taken is small. Thus it is possible that the results do not give the exact image of the population. Moreover, responses of the participants could be inaccurate, as participants may not have been able to correctly recall past events. Key    Words: Self-medication,        Over     the    Counter     medicines      (OTC),      Minor            illness, Prior  experience, Convenience. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/11-14-04 Publication date:May 31st 201

Neurovascular relationship between abducens nerve and anterior inferior cerebellar artery

We aimed to study the neurovascular relationships between the anterior inferior cerebellar artery (AICA) and the abducens nerve to help determine the pathogenesis of abducens nerve palsy which can be caused by arterial compression. Twenty-two cadaveric brains (44 hemispheres) were investigated after injected of coloured latex in to the arterial system. The anterior inferior cerebellar artery originated as a single branch in 75%, duplicate in 22.7%, and triplicate in 2.3% of the hemispheres. Abducens nerves were located between the AICAs in all hemispheres when the AICA duplicated or triplicated. Additionally, we noted that the AICA or its main branches pierced the abducens nerve in five hemispheres (11.4%). The anatomy of the AICA and its relationship with the abducens nerve is very important for diagnosis and treatment. (Folia Morphol 2010; 69, 4: 201-203

The relationship of the parotid duct to the buccal and zygomatic branches of the facial nerve; an anatomical study with parameters of clinical interest

There have been studies concerning the protection of the facial nerve during plastic surgery intended for the parotid gland. The close relationship between the parotid duct and the buccal and zygomatic branches of the facial nerve is studied here. The dissections were performed on 10 fixed cadavers at the Anatomy Dissection Laboratory of Ankara University in 2004. The reference points used for surgery of this region were taken into consideration as the landmarks for morphometric measurements. In 7 of the cases the zygomatic branch was double and in 3 it was single. In 4 of the 7 cases with a double zygomatic branch both superior and inferior branches crossed the parotid duct. In the remaining 3 cases the superior branches of the zygomatic nerve coursed through the zygomatic major and minor muscles. In 9 of all the cases the zygomatic branch of the facial nerve crossed the duct anteriorly and in one it did so posteriorly (case 10). The buccal branch was single in 4 of the cases and double in 6. Among these one of the most precise measurements was the distance between the lateral canthus and the intersection point of the zygomatic branch and the duct with a coefficient of variation of 9.9%. With the use of this reliable measurement the intersection point of the zygomatic branch and the duct may be estimated to be within 5.16 ± 1.01 centimetres of the lateral canthus. Facial nerve paralysis is the most important complication of superficial face surgery and the anatomy of this region must thus be taken into detailed consideration by surgeons