33 research outputs found

    A new open reduction treatment for congenital hip dislocation: long-term follow-up of the extensive anterolateral approach.

    Get PDF
    Congenital hip dislocation, which is conservatively unmanageable, has usually been treated using open reduction. However, a long-term follow-up study of the results suggests that this procedure is unsatisfactory. Since 1973, Tanabe has used a new open reduction procedure that circumferentially dissects the joint capsule and produces sufficient concentric reduction of the femoral head in the acetabulum immediately after the surgery. Fifty-six children (65 hips) from the age of 1 to 3 years were treated by this procedure, and fifty-one of them were clinically and roentgenographically followed up from 6.3 to 12.4 years after the surgery. At the final follow-up session, all children had grown to be over 9 years of age, and no patient had clinically significant symptoms. According to Severin's classification, 33 hips were rated in Group I, and 14 hips in Group II. Another 10 hips were in Group III, and one hip was in Group IV. The incidence of avascular necrosis was 5.2 per cent. These data suggest that our procedure is more useful than the previous ones

    Indications and timing of surgery for cholelithiasis associated with valvular heart disease.

    Get PDF
    Twenty patients with cholelithiasis associated with valvular heart disease were studied to assess the need and the optimal time for cholecystectomy. Twelve patients (11 symptomatic and 1 asymptomatic patients) underwent cholecystectomy. The remaining patients were asymptomatic. The levels of the total bilirubin in 9 patients, and of LDH in 15, were higher than normal. In most of the patients, the serum transaminase levels were higher than normal, but in few cases, the levels were higher than 200 IU/l. These abnormal values, however, were not consistently observed in these patients. No clear association between the type and form of valvular heart disease was demonstrated. The type of prostheses used for valve replacement in these patients were ball, tilting disc and leaflet. No significant differences in efficacy were observed among different types of prostheses. The incidence of silent stones is high in patients with valvular heart disease and heart surgery often causes deterioration in patients with cholelithiasis. The recovery of the patients who underwent cholecystectomy before valve replacement were better than those who underwent cholecystectomy after heart surgery. In conclusion, therefore, patients showing any abnormal results in liver function tests should be assessed in detail by abdominal echography and should receive surgical treatment of biliary tract before heart surgery if necessary.</p

    Normalizing biomedical terms by minimizing ambiguity and variability

    Get PDF
    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>One of the difficulties in mapping biomedical named entities, e.g. genes, proteins, chemicals and diseases, to their concept identifiers stems from the potential variability of the terms. Soft string matching is a possible solution to the problem, but its inherent heavy computational cost discourages its use when the dictionaries are large or when real time processing is required. A less computationally demanding approach is to normalize the terms by using heuristic rules, which enables us to look up a dictionary in a constant time regardless of its size. The development of good heuristic rules, however, requires extensive knowledge of the terminology in question and thus is the bottleneck of the normalization approach.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a novel framework for discovering a list of normalization rules from a dictionary in a fully automated manner. The rules are discovered in such a way that they minimize the ambiguity and variability of the terms in the dictionary. We evaluated our algorithm using two large dictionaries: a human gene/protein name dictionary built from BioThesaurus and a disease name dictionary built from UMLS.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The experimental results showed that automatically discovered rules can perform comparably to carefully crafted heuristic rules in term mapping tasks, and the computational overhead of rule application is small enough that a very fast implementation is possible. This work will help improve the performance of term-concept mapping tasks in biomedical information extraction especially when good normalization heuristics for the target terminology are not fully known.</p
    corecore