Rhinoplasty revision with dorsal augmentation by using PRF and temporalis fascia: case report

Background: Platelet rich fibrin (PRF) provides better healing, hemostasis, less pronounced edema and lesser resorption of the autologous augmentation material. The aim of this case report is to present a patient undergoing the 2nd revision rhinoplasty, after unsatisfactory results regarding function and esthetics. Case report: A middle-aged women, who had previously undergone rhinoplasties on two occasions in an external institution, presented with nasal dorsum irregularities, lower nasion, rocker deformity, bilateral internal and external valve insufficiency and acute nasolabial angle. The functional problem was solved by using bilateral spreader grafts and lateral crural strut grafts shaped by previously harvested septal cartilage. The reinforced lateral crura were separated from the hinge area and placed in the previously dissected alar rim pockets. The ptotic tip was reinforced by using an ANSA banner graft. The desired tip width, rotation and tip defining point position was achieved by domal creation sutures, interdomal sutures and tip position suture. Since the patient had an extremely thin skin, no tip refinement graft was used. Dorsal irregularities were to be addressed by using minor hump removal, fine drilling of residual irregularities with a diamond burr and camouflage on lay graft composed of previously harvested temporalis fascia with platelet rich fibrin matrix placed between the fascia and skin-soft tissue envelope. The patient has undergone regular follow ups since, reporting an improved function as well as a satisfactory esthetic result. Physical examination has shown normal nasal patency, uninterrupted brow tip line with smooth contours of the dorsum and normal nasolabial angle. Discussion: By reviewing the literature, most authors recommend PRF application as an addition to the diced cartilage camouflage graft for dorsal irregularities, showing superiority compared to the temporalis fascia, in terms of better healing, lesser edema, lesser resorption and smoother contours. In our case we decided to use temporalis fascia and PRF only, since the patient had an extremely thin skin, numerous minor irregularities and a lack of septal cartilage left for harvesting. It has provided a satisfactory result both subjectively and objectively upon follow up examinations by the surgeon

A Comparison of Fish Assemblages Among Five Habitat Types Within a Caribbean Lagoonal System

Fish assemblages associated with patch reefs, rubble, seagrass, algal plain, and sandy habitats types were studied at St. Croix\u27s Southeastern barrier reef lagoon using underwater visual census techniques. Higher species richness and fish density were observed over patch reefs/rubble habitat followed by seagrass, algal plain, and unvegetated sandy habitat types. Thalassoma bifasciatum, Haemulon flavolineatum, and Acanthuras chirurgus were the most common fishes in highly structured habitat types (patch reef, rubble). Halichoeres bivittatus, Sparisoma radians, newly settled grunts (l.e., Haemulon spp.), and juveniles of Ocyurus chrysurus were mainly associated with vegetated habitat types (seagrass, algal beds), while Xyrichtys martinicensis and Coryphopterus glaucofraenum were common over unvegetated sandy habitat types. Cluster analysis among backreef lagoon habitat types based on the entire fish density data showed distinct associations of fish assemblages by habitat type, regardless of season. Fish assemblages in the more structured habitat types were similar to each other but different from unstructured vegetated, and unvegetated habitat types. These results suggest that differences in fish species richness and density in the backreef lagoon are related to habitat type. The ecological importance and need for protection of backreef lagoon habitat types are discussed in relation to their potential role as nurseries for many fish species

Seasonal Patterns of Juvenile Fish Abundance in Seagrass Meadows in Teague Bay Bank Barrier Reef Lagoon, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Considerable knowledge has been gained regarding fish use of nearshore habitats such as seagrass meadows or mangrove lagoons in the Caribbean (e.g., evaluation of nursery value, trophic linkages). However, few studies have been conducted on fish recruitment to seagrass habitat around the Caribbean. Juvenile reef fish in seagrass meadows at Teague Bay, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands were surveyed from October 1998 through September 1999 using a visual census technique. Grunts (Haemulidae) were the most abundant juveniles observed (60% of all fish), followed by wrasses (Labridae, 20%) and parrotfishes (Scaridae, 13%). French grunt, Haemulon flavolineatum, were the most numerous species (59.5% of all fish), followed by slippery dick, Halichoeres bivittatus (18.5%), and bucktooth parrotfish, Sparisoma radians (10.4%). Most numerically abundant fish species demonstrated peaks in recruitment during late summer and fall. Our results imply that the functioning of seagrass beds incorporates strong seasonal patterns of small-fish abundance that need to be accommodated in any study wishing to understand their importance to fisheries

Regional early-stage entrepreneurship in the European Union

Purpose: Entrepreneurship is often viewed as a driver of the global economy. However, previous research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth shows contradictory results depending on the research settings. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how early-stage entrepreneurship - including only enterprises that are less than three and a half years old - affects regional economic growth in the European Union. Methodology: The methodology includes three methods: bivariate correlation, fixed effects regression with region and time fixed effects and spatial fixed effects regression. The panel sample consists of 273 NUTS 2 regions between 2008 and 2017. Results: The results support the hypothesis of this research and show that early-stage entrepreneurship has a mild positive effect on the economic growth of European regions. However, the potential bidirectional nature of this relationship obliterates the ability to comment on the causality of this link. The percentage of people in the active population employed in human resources in science and technology and gross fixed capital formation have a significant and impactful effect on regional GDP. Conclusion: The conclusion can be drawn that the effect of early-stage entrepreneurship on regional economic growth is conditioned by the population density of the region. Although these results show that enterprises founded in densely populated areas such as cities and metropolitan areas tend to have a larger effect on the regional economy, the results are ambiguous

Enabling preemptive multiprogramming on GPUs

GPUs are being increasingly adopted as compute accelerators in many domains, spanning environments from mobile systems to cloud computing. These systems are usually running multiple applications, from one or several users. However GPUs do not provide the support for resource sharing traditionally expected in these scenarios. Thus, such systems are unable to provide key multiprogrammed workload requirements, such as responsiveness, fairness or quality of service. In this paper, we propose a set of hardware extensions that allow GPUs to efficiently support multiprogrammed GPU workloads. We argue for preemptive multitasking and design two preemption mechanisms that can be used to implement GPU scheduling policies. We extend the architecture to allow concurrent execution of GPU kernels from different user processes and implement a scheduling policy that dynamically distributes the GPU cores among concurrently running kernels, according to their priorities. We extend the NVIDIA GK110 (Kepler) like GPU architecture with our proposals and evaluate them on a set of multiprogrammed workloads with up to eight concurrent processes. Our proposals improve execution time of high-priority processes by 15.6x, the average application turnaround time between 1.5x to 2x, and system fairness up to 3.4x.We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Alexan- der Veidenbaum, Carlos Villavieja, Lluis Vilanova, Lluc Al- varez, and Marc Jorda on their comments and help improving our work and this paper. This work is supported by Euro- pean Commission through TERAFLUX (FP7-249013), Mont- Blanc (FP7-288777), and RoMoL (GA-321253) projects, NVIDIA through the CUDA Center of Excellence program, Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2011-0067) and Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2007-60625 and TIN2012-34557 projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Spatial and temporal variation in otolith chemistry for tautog (Tautoga onitis) in Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island coastal ponds

The elemental composition of otoliths may provide valuable information for establishing connectivity between fish nursery grounds and adult fish populations. Concentrations of Rb, Mg, Ca, Mn, Sr, Na, K, Sr, Pb, and Ba were determined by using solution-based inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry in otoliths of young-of-the year tautog (Tautoga onitis) captured in nursery areas along the Rhode Island coast during two consecutive years. Stable oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotopic ratios in young-of-the year otoliths were also analyzed with isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Chemical signatures differed significantly among the distinct nurseries within Narragansett Bay and the coastal ponds across years. Significant differences were also observed within nurseries from year to year. Classification accuracy to each of the five tautog nursery areas ranged from 85% to 92% across years. Because accurate classification of juvenile tautog nursery sites was achieved, otolith chemistry can potentially be used as a natural habitat tag

Vector processing-aware advanced clock-gating techniques for low-power fused multiply-add

The need for power efficiency is driving a rethink of design decisions in processor architectures. While vector processors succeeded in the high-performance market in the past, they need a retailoring for the mobile market that they are entering now. Floating-point (FP) fused multiply-add (FMA), being a functional unit with high power consumption, deserves special attention. Although clock gating is a well-known method to reduce switching power in synchronous designs, there are unexplored opportunities for its application to vector processors, especially when considering active operating mode. In this research, we comprehensively identify, propose, and evaluate the most suitable clock-gating techniques for vector FMA units (VFUs). These techniques ensure power savings without jeopardizing the timing. We evaluate the proposed techniques using both synthetic and “real-world” application-based benchmarking. Using vector masking and vector multilane-aware clock gating, we report power reductions of up to 52%, assuming active VFU operating at the peak performance. Among other findings, we observe that vector instruction-based clock-gating techniques achieve power savings for all vector FP instructions. Finally, when evaluating all techniques together, using “real-world” benchmarking, the power reductions are up to 80%. Additionally, in accordance with processor design trends, we perform this research in a fully parameterizable and automated fashion.The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant GA 321253 and is supported in part by the European Union (FEDER funds) under contract TTIN2015-65316-P. The work of I. Ratkovic was supported by a FPU research grant from the Spanish MECD.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft