Treatment Using a Long Pulsed Nd:Yag Laser with a Pulsed Dye Laser for Four Cases of Blebbed Port Wine Stains

Port wine stains (PWS) are congenital capillary malformations consisting of ectasia of capillaries and venules. At birth,lesions are flat and relatively uniform in color, but evolve with age to become raised, thickened, irregularly surfaced, and deeply colored. Therefore, it is considered optimal to begin treatment of patients at an early age. Conventional treatment modalities, such as electrocautery or excision, require considerable effort and may be cosmetically unsatisfactory. We have performed treatment of blebbed PWS of four patients using a 1,064 nm long pulsed Nd:YAG laser with a contact cooling device. According to their size, most blebs required three or fewer treatment sessions at 8-week intervals. Treatments were well tolerated by all subjects and patients showed moderate to good improvement of blebs. A 1,064 nm long pulsed Nd:YAG laser with contact cooling may be considered as a promising therapeutic option for treatment of blebbed PWS

Neural Network Parameterizations of Electromagnetic Nucleon Form Factors

The electromagnetic nucleon form-factors data are studied with artificial feed forward neural networks. As a result the unbiased model-independent form-factor parametrizations are evaluated together with uncertainties. The Bayesian approach for the neural networks is adapted for chi2 error-like function and applied to the data analysis. The sequence of the feed forward neural networks with one hidden layer of units is considered. The given neural network represents a particular form-factor parametrization. The so-called evidence (the measure of how much the data favor given statistical model) is computed with the Bayesian framework and it is used to determine the best form factor parametrization.Comment: The revised version is divided into 4 sections. The discussion of the prior assumptions is added. The manuscript contains 4 new figures and 2 new tables (32 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables

X-ray Spectroscopy of Cooling Clusters

We review the X-ray spectra of the cores of clusters of galaxies. Recent high resolution X-ray spectroscopic observations have demonstrated a severe deficit of emission at the lowest X-ray temperatures as compared to that expected from simple radiative cooling models. The same observations have provided compelling evidence that the gas in the cores is cooling below half the maximum temperature. We review these results, discuss physical models of cooling clusters, and describe the X-ray instrumentation and analysis techniques used to make these observations. We discuss several viable mechanisms designed to cancel or distort the expected process of X-ray cluster cooling.Comment: To appear in Physics Reports, 71 pages, 20 figure

Angioblastoma showing aggravation after treatment with long-pulsed Nd:YAG laser (1064 nm)

Angioblastoma usually develops in infancy or early childhood on the neck or upper trunk. It is known to be slowly progressive and benign in nature, but treatment guidelines have not yet been established. Spontaneous regression has been occasionally documented, and treatment with pulsed dye laser, excision, high-dose steroids, and interferon alpha have been successful in individual patients. Our patient experienced partial response to interferon alpha injection, and for further treatment, long-pulsed Nd:YAG laser (1064 nm) treatment was performed. However, unexpectedly, the tumor was rapidly aggravated. We report this occurrence to increase awareness of trauma-induced aggravation phenomena in angioblastoma