Laparoscopy for the management of impalpable testis

Background: Cryptorchidism is encountered in 21% of preterm infants, 2-4% of all full term boys and 1% of one year old boys.Objectives:To present our experience in the utilization of diagnostic laparoscopy for the management of children with impalpable testes.Method:This is a retrospective study conducted between March 2010 and December 2011. The medical records of boys with impalpable testis were reviewed. Diagnostic laparoscopic findings regarding presence, morphological state, and location of testis were analyzed. Special attention to how initial laparoscopy influenced subsequent surgical procedures and management.Results:Fifty four boys underwent laparoscopy with 76 impalpable testes. Forty testes were unilateral impalpable testes, two third of them were left sided. Thirty seven testes were intraabdominal, eight of them were atrophied and excised laparoscopically. Twenty nine of them were viable, 90% of them underwent first stage Fowler-Stephens procedure, while the rest underwent primary laparoscopic orchidopexy. Vas and spermatic vessels were seen entering inguinal canal in 25 testes. This group had immediate inguinal exploration, 22 of testes underwent orchidopexy and three orchidectomy. Fourteen boys found to blind end vas and vessels with no further treatment needed.Conclusions: Laparoscopic exploration should be performed because it accurately identifies and localizes the missing testis. In addition, it facilitates the planning of definitive surgical management of orchidopexy, staged orchidopexy or orchidectomy. So we recommend that initial laparoscopic exploration should be performed for patient with impalpable testis.Keywords:Impalpable testis, Laparoscopy, Orchidopexy, Jordan

Malaysian energy demand and emissions from the transportation sector

Road transport represents one of the greatest areas of challenge for energy efficiency. A growing percentage of petrol usage is due to consumption in the transportation sector. However, in other sectors, petrol has been recently partially or totally substituted by other fuels. The need for worldwide action to achieve energy efficiency in the transportation sector has been recognized by the agencies of the United Nations and other international governmental and non-governmental organizations. Transportation is one of the key factors for the growth and development of Malaysian economy. Currently, more than 80% of primary energy consumption based on fossil fuels and demand stays high and is supposed continually grow in the future. Even if technology developments eventually able to reduce specific consumption, world energy demand is likely to increase in line with its population. This sector also accounts for a substantial amount of air pollution in cities and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims to analyze factors influencing the pattern and emission level of energy consumption in the transportation sector of Malaysia and extrapolates the total energy demand and vehicular emissions

Arabic Text Classification Using Support Vector Machines

Text classification (TC) is the process of classifying documents into a predefined set of categories based on their content. Arabic language is highly inflectional and derivational language which makes text mining a complex task. In this paper we applied the Support Vector Machines (SVM) model in classifying Arabic text documents. The results compared with the other traditional classifiers Bayes classifier, K-Nearest Neighbor classifier and Rocchio classifier. Two experiments used to test the different classifiers. The first uses the training set as the test set, and the second uses Leave one testing method. Experimental results performed on a set of 1132 document show that Rocchio classifier gives better results when the size of feature set is small while SVM outperform the other classifiers when the size of the feature set is large enough. Classification rate exceeds 90% when using more than 4000 feature. Leave one method gives more realistic results over the use of training set as a test set

Advances in researches on the immune dysregulation and therapy of severe acute pancreatitis*

During the development and progression of severe acute pancreatitis (SAP), conspicuous immune dysregulation develops, which is mainly manifested as excessive immune response in the early stage and immunosuppression in the late stage. This process involves complex changes in a variety of immune molecules and cells, such as cytokines, complements, lymphocytes, and leukocytes. With the gradual deepening of studies on the development and progression of SAP, the role of immune dysregulation in the pathogenesis of SAP has attracted more and more attention. In this article, we review the advances in research on the immune dysregulation in SAP and the immunotherapy of this disease through exploring the formation of excessive immune response and immune suppression as well as their mutual transformation