Long-term outcomes of omniflow II biosynthetic vascular graft in lower extremity arterial revascularization

Background: This study aims to evaluate the patency rates and long-term outcomes of femoro-popliteal bypass procedures with Omniflow II biosynthetic vascular grafts in patients with occlusive vascular disease. Methods: This retrospective, observational, clinical study included a total of 93 patients (61 males, 32 females; mean age 56.9±7.4 years; range, 43 to 83 years) who underwent femoro-popliteal bypass in which Omniflow II biosynthetic vascular grafts were used due to peripheral arterial disease. The patients were divided into two groups: 62 patients undergoing femoro-popliteal above-knee bypass and 31 patients undergoing the femoro-popliteal belowknee bypass. We evaluated preoperative clinical characteristics, postoperative graft patency rates, and other clinical results. Results: The mean follow-up was 44.9±18.8 months in the femoropopliteal above-knee bypass group and 47.3±22.3 months in the femoro-popliteal below-knee bypass group (p=0.302). The cumulative primary graft patency rates of the femoro-popliteal above-knee bypass and femoro-popliteal below-knee bypass groups at three, four, and five years were 98%, 95% and 78% and 86%, 75% and 45%, respectively (log-rank; p=0.312). The cumulative assisted graft patency rates of the femoro-popliteal above-knee bypass and femoro-popliteal below-knee bypass groups at five years were 87.9% and 65.3%, respectively (log-rank; p=0.530). Conclusion: The Omniflow II biosynthetic vascular graft is suitable for above-and below-knee femoro-popliteal bypass procedures. These grafts may be prefered due to high patency rates, low incidence of aneursym formations, and infections. ©2018 All right reserved by the Turkish Society of Cardiovascular Surgery

Investing in Indonesia's education : allocation, equity, and efficiency of public expenditures

What are the current trends and main characteristics of public education spending in Indonesia? Is education spending insufficient? Are expenditures in education efficient and equitable? This study reports the first account of Indonesia's aggregated (national and sub-national) spending on education, as well as the economic composition of education spending and its breakdown by programs. It presents estimations of the expected (average) level of education spending for a country with its economic and social characteristics. This analysis sheds light on the efficiency and equity of education spending by presenting social rates of return by level of education, by assessing the adequacy of current teacher earnings relative to other paid workers and the distribution of teachers across urban, rural, and remote regions, and by identifying the main determinants of education enrollment. It concludes that the current challenges in Indonesia are no longer defined by the need of additional spending, but rather the need to improve the quality of education services, and to improve the efficiency of education expenditures by re-allocating teachers to undersupplied regions and re-adjusting the spending mix within and between education programs for future additional spending in the sector. The study finds that poverty and student-aged labor are also significant constraints to education enrollment, stressing the importance of policies aimed at addressing demand-side factors.Education For All,Primary Education,Tertiary Education,Teaching and Learning,

The variations and degenerative changes of sacroiliac joints in asymptomatic adults

Background: The sacroiliac joint has a structure in which the direction of the load relative to the articular surface is irrational, as the joint surface is not perpendicular to the trunk load axis; it is likely to incur more degenerative changes than other weight-bearing joints. Materials and methods: This retrospective study consisted of a total of 145 cases — 104 (71.7%) men and 41 (28.3%) women — who were referred to Gaziantep University Medical Faculty Radiology Department Polyclinic for pelvic computed tomography (CT) from 2013 to 2018. The mean age was 33.5 years (range: 18–60 years). Pelvis CT images were performed according to the exclusion criteria specified by the experienced orthopaedic surgeon. Patients were excluded from the study if they were younger than the age of 18, had a condition involving the sacroiliac joint, had an endocrine disorder, or had a history of a trauma affecting the pelvis CT examination. Results: In this current study, six types of anatomic variations were detected. Iliosacral complex variation has been determined as the most common type of variation. The incidence of variations of sacroiliac joint in all cases was 28.9%. Degenerative changes were seen in 5.5% of patients fewer than 30 years of age. When it comes to the patients whose age range is 30–60, the percentage of the degenerative changes is 12.4%. In patients who were 30 years and older, the prevalence of degenerative changes increased progressively with increasing age. Conclusions: In this study, it is thought that the knowledge of variations in normal population and degenerative changes will contribute to the better understanding of normal morphological structure of sacroiliac joint and to the anatomical literature. It’s seen that there is not a statistically significant relationship between degenerative changes and anatomical variations

RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All

Standard semantic segmentation models owe their success to curated datasets with a fixed set of semantic categories, without contemplating the possibility of identifying unknown objects from novel categories. Existing methods in outlier detection suffer from a lack of smoothness and objectness in their predictions, due to limitations of the per-pixel classification paradigm. Furthermore, additional training for detecting outliers harms the performance of known classes. In this paper, we explore another paradigm with region-level classification to better segment unknown objects. We show that the object queries in mask classification tend to behave like one \vs all classifiers. Based on this finding, we propose a novel outlier scoring function called RbA by defining the event of being an outlier as being rejected by all known classes. Our extensive experiments show that mask classification improves the performance of the existing outlier detection methods, and the best results are achieved with the proposed RbA. We also propose an objective to optimize RbA using minimal outlier supervision. Further fine-tuning with outliers improves the unknown performance, and unlike previous methods, it does not degrade the inlier performance

CEP-Controlled Molecular Dissociation by Ultrashort Chirped Laser Pulses

We demonstrate and characterize that a carrier-envelope-phase (CEP)-controlled ultrashortchirped field is an efficient and robust mechanism to modify the dissociation dynamics of molecularhydrogen. Different dissociation pathways are collectively induced and their interference contributeto the kinetic energy release spectra. Chirping is able to efficiently manipulate the interferencesof different dissociation pathways. We demonstrate a linear relationship between chirp and CEP-dependence, dissociation as well as directional electron localization

Fast Ground State Manipulation of Neutral Atoms in Microscopic Optical Traps

We demonstrate Rabi flopping at MHz rates between ground hyperfine states of neutral $^{87}$Rb atoms that are trapped in two micron sized optical traps. Using tightly focused laser beams we demonstrate high fidelity, site specific Rabi rotations with crosstalk on neighboring sites separated by $8 \mu\rm m$ at the level of $10^{-3}$. Ramsey spectroscopy is used to measure a dephasing time of $870 \mu\rm s$ which is $\approx$ 5000 times longer than the time for a $\pi/2$ pulse.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Disks Surviving the Radiation Pressure of Radio Pulsars

The radiation pressure of a radio pulsar does not necessarily disrupt a surrounding disk. The position of the inner radius of a thin disk around a neutron star can be estimated by comparing the electromagnetic energy density generated by the neutron star with the kinetic energy density of the disk. Inside the light cylinder, the near zone electromagnetic field is essentially the dipole magnetic field, and the inner radius is the conventional Alfven radius. Far outside the light cylinder, in the radiation zone, $E=B$ and the electromagnetic energy density is $/c \propto 1/r^2$ where $S$ is the Poynting vector. Shvartsman (1970) argued that a stable equilibrium can not be found in the radiative zone because the electromagnetic energy density dominates over the kinetic energy density, with the relative strength of the electromagnetic stresses increasing with radius. In order to check whether this is true also near the light cylinder, we employ global electromagnetic field solutions for rotating oblique magnetic dipoles (Deutsch 1955). Near the light cylinder the electromagnetic energy density increases steeply enough with decreasing $r$ to balance the kinetic energy density at a stable equilibrium. The transition from the near zone to the radiation zone is broad. The radiation pressure of the pulsar can not disrupt the disk for values of the inner radius up to about twice the light cylinder radius if the rotation axis and the magnetic axis are orthogonal. This allowed range beyond the light cylinder extends much further for small inclination angles. We discuss implications of this result for accretion driven millisecond pulsars and young neutron stars with fallback disks.Comment: Accepted by Astrophysical Journal, final version with a minor correctio

Primary Anti-Phospholipid Antibody Syndrome: Real-World Defining Features of Rethrombosis in the Course of Disease

Objective: We aimed to identify features that allow differentiation of primary antiphospholipid syndrome (PAPS) patients that suffer recurrent thrombotic events (RTE) despite anticoagulation, from the other diagnosed PAPS patients. Methods: This was an exploratory study of anticoagulated PAPS patients attending an Autoimmune Diseases Unit (1998-2018). From 2016, anti-phospholipid antibodies and lupus anticoagulant were determined for each patient at consecutive visits, collected together with retrospective clinical characteristics, laboratory, and therapeutic markers and compared according to the occurrence of thrombotic events during follow-up. Results: Overall, two thirds of the patients were female, 93% were Caucasian, with a median age of 40 years at diagnosis, for a median time of 11.5 years in follow-up. Out of 54 patients, 10 were identified with RTE. There were no significant differences among the RTE and non-RTE patients as far as classical risk factors for clotting disorders. The RTE group was characterized by a higher proportion of younger patients, male sex and positivity for all laboratory markers, and initially and over follow-up as well as a sustained high-risk profile based on APS laboratory markers. Anticardiolipin IgG at onset was the only statistically significant marker of the RTE group. At the end of follow-up, consistent reversion to negative status was a rare event, observed in 20% of RTE vs. 25% of non-RTE patients. Conclusions: Despite therapy, we were able to identify features associated to thrombotic events in patients with PAPS. Prospectively regular clinical and laboratory monitoring might be warranted in order to treat APS more assertively.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio