Application of Different Anastomotic Methods for a Patient with Crohn\u27n Disease : Long-term Endoscopic Appearances of Hand-sewn Versus Biofragmentable Anastomosis Ring Method

After resection for ileocecal or ileocolonic Crohn\u27s disease (CD), anastomotic recurrence is common, and roughly one half of the cases who undergo hand-sewn anastomoses require further surgery for suture line recurrence. The other anastomoses methods, stapled anastomoses, had been compared with that of patients having hand-sewn anastomoses. But the type of anastomosis, whether stapled or hend-sewn, did not affect the rates of symptomatic or operative recurrence. A compression anastomosis device consisting of a biofragmentable anastomosis ring (VALTRAC^[○!R]) is used with new anastomosis methods, and no fragments remain in the anastomosis unlike with other anastomotic materials. There have been few reports regarding the employment of VALTRAC^[○!R] methods for anastomoses of patients with CD. We reported a 30-year-old male with a 14-year history of CD. In 1991, he was referred to our hospital for surgery because of stenoses of the ileum and terminal ileum, and underwent ileocecal resection. Ileocolic anastomosis was performed with a hand-sewn method. In 1996, the patient was referred to our hospital again for surgery because of an ileoileal fistula and multiple stenoses in the ileum and the anastomosis. Resection of the previous anastomosis was performed. Next, ileocolic anastomosis was performed using a VALTRAC^[○!R] method. Comparisons of the long-term appearance of two different anastomoses (one hand-sewn and the other done by VALTRAC^[○!R] methods) of the same portion of the intestine in the patient were reported herein

Masking and Mixing Adversarial Training

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performances in various computer vision tasks, they often misclassify with malicious samples, a.k.a. adversarial examples. Adversarial training is a popular and straightforward technique to defend against the threat of adversarial examples. Unfortunately, CNNs must sacrifice the accuracy of standard samples to improve robustness against adversarial examples when adversarial training is used. In this work, we propose Masking and Mixing Adversarial Training (M2AT) to mitigate the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. We focus on creating diverse adversarial examples during training. Specifically, our approach consists of two processes: 1) masking a perturbation with a binary mask and 2) mixing two partially perturbed images. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 dataset demonstrate that our method achieves better robustness against several adversarial attacks than previous methods

Direct measurement of radiation exposure dose to individual organs during diagnostic computed tomography examination

Ionizing radiation from Computed tomography (CT) examinations and the associated health risks are growing concerns. The purpose of this study was to directly measure individual organ doses during routine clinical CT scanning protocols and to evaluate how these measurements vary with scanning conditions. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dosimeters were surgically implanted into individual organs of fresh non-embalmed whole-body cadavers. Whole-body, head, chest, and abdomen CT scans were taken of 6 cadavers by simulating common clinical methods. The dosimeters were extracted and the radiation exposure doses for each organ were calculated. Average values were used for analysis. Measured individual organ doses for whole-body routine CT protocol were less than 20 mGy for all organs. The measured doses of surface/shallow organs were higher than those of deep organs under the same irradiation conditions. At the same tube voltage and tube current, all internal organ doses were significantly higher for whole-body scans compared with abdominal scans. This study could provide valuable information on individual organ doses and their trends under various scanning conditions. These data could be referenced and used when considering CT examination in daily clinical situations

Child Rearing Policies and Economic Growth

平成28年度 学生懸賞論文受賞作 優秀賞要

Controlling Electronic States of Few-walled Carbon Nanotube Yarn via Joule-annealing and p-type Doping Towards Large Thermoelectric Power Factor

Flexible, light-weight and robust thermoelectric (TE) materials have attracted much attention to convert waste heat from low-grade heat sources, such as human body, to electricity. Carbon nanotube (CNT) yarn is one of the potential TE materials owing to its narrow band-gap energy, high charge carrier mobility, and excellent mechanical property, which is conducive for flexible and wearable devices. Herein, we propose a way to improve the power factor of CNT yarns fabricated from few-walled carbon nanotubes (FWCNTs) by two-step method; Joule-annealing in the vacuum followed by doping with p-type dopants, 2,3,5,6-tetrafluo-7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane (F4TCNQ). Numerical calculations and experimental results explain that Joule-annealing and doping modulate the electronic states (Fermi energy level) of FWCNTs, resulting in extremely large thermoelectric power factor of 2250 mu Wm(-1) K-2 at a measurement temperature of 423K. Joule-annealing removes amorphous carbon on the surface of the CNT yarn, which facilitates doping in the subsequent step, and leads to higher Seebeck coefficient due to the transformation from (semi) metallic to semiconductor behavior. Doping also significantly increases the electrical conductivity due to the effective charge transfers between CNT yarn and F4TCNQ upon the removal of amorphous carbon after Joule-annealing

Experimental verification of a gain reduction model for the space charge effect in a wire chamber

A wire chamber often suffers significant saturation of the multiplication factor when the electric field around its wires is strong. An analytical model of this effect has previously been proposed [Y. Arimoto et al., Nucl. Instrum. Meth. Phys. Res. A 799, 187 (2015)], in which the saturation was described by the multiplication factor, energy deposit density per wire length, and one constant parameter. In order to confirm the validity of this model, a multi-wire drift chamber was developed and irradiated by a MeV-range proton beam at the University of Tsukuba. The saturation effect was compared for energy deposits ranging from 70 keV/cm to 180 keV/cm and multiplication factors 3×103 to 3×104⁠. The chamber was rotated with respect to the proton beam in order to vary the space charge density around the wires. The energy deposit distribution corrected for the effect was consistent with the result of a Monte Carlo simulation, thus validating the proposed model

Sub-nanometric High-Entropy Alloy Cluster: Hydrogen Spillover Driven Synthesis on CeO2 and Structural Reversibility

High-entropy alloy (HEA) nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted significant attention as promising catalysts owing to the various unique synergistic effects originating from the nanometer-scale, near-equimolar mixing of five or more components to produce single-phase solid solutions. However, the study of sub-nanometer HEA clusters having sizes of less than 1 nm remains incomplete despite the possibility of novel functions related to borderline molecular states with discrete quantum energy levels. The present work demonstrates the synthesis of CeO2 nanorods (CeO2-NRs) on which sub-nanometer CoNiCuZnPd HEA clusters were formed with the aid of a pronounced hydrogen spillover effect on readily reducible CeO2 (110) facets. The CoNiCuZnPd HEA sub-nanoclusters exhibited higher activity during the reduction of NO by H2 even at low temperatures compared with the corresponding monometallic catalysts. These clusters also showed a unique structural reversibility in response to repeated exposure to oxidative/reductive conditions, based on the sacrificial oxidation of the non-noble metals. Both experimental and theoretical analyses established that multielement mixing in quantum-sized regions endowed the HEA clusters with entirely novel catalytic properties.Hashimoto N., Mori K., Matsuzaki S., et al. Sub-nanometric High-Entropy Alloy Cluster: Hydrogen Spillover Driven Synthesis on CeO2 and Structural Reversibility. JACS Au , (2023); https://doi.org/10.1021/jacsau.3c0021

Piperidinium-Based Ionic Liquids as an Electrolyte Solvent for Li-Ion Batteries: Effect of Number and Position of Oxygen Atom in Cation Side Chain on Electrolyte Property

ArticleJournal of The Electrochemical Society. 167(7): 174101 (2019)journal articl