The Libyan civil conflict : selected case series of orthopaedic trauma managed in Malta in 2014

Aim: The purpose of this series of cases was to analyse our management of orthopaedic trauma casualties in the Libyan civil war crisis in the European summer of 2014. We looked at both damage control orthopaedics and for case variety of war trauma at a civilian hospital. Due to our geographical proximity to Libya, Malta was the closest European tertiary referral centre. Having only one Level 1 trauma care hospital in our country, our Trauma and Orthopaedics department played a pivotal role in the management of Libyan battlefield injuries. Our aims were to assess acute outcomes and short term mortality of surgery within the perspective of a damage control orthopaedic strategy whereby aggressive wound management, early fixation using relative stability principles, antibiotic cover with adequate soft tissue cover are paramount. We also aim to describe the variety of war injuries we came across, with a goal for future improvement in regards to service providing.Methods: Prospective collection of six interesting cases with severe limb and spinal injuries sustained in Libya during the Libyan civil war between June and November 2014.Conclusions: We applied current trends in the treatment of war injuries, specifically in damage control orthopaedic strategy and converting to definitive treatment where permissible. The majority of our cases were classified as most severe (Type IIIB/C) according to the Gustilo-Anderson classification of open fractures. The injuries treated reflected the type of standard and improved weaponry available in modern warfare affecting both militants and civilians alike with increasing severity and extent of damage. Due to this fact, multidisciplinary team approach to patient centred care was utilised with an ultimate aim of swift recovery and early mobilisation. It also highlighted the difficulties and complex issues required on a hospital management level as a neighbouring country to war zone countries in transforming care of civil trauma to military trauma.peer-reviewe

Unintended and accidental medical radiation exposures in radiology: guidelines on investigation and prevention

This paper sets out guidelines for managing radiation exposure incidents involving patients in diagnostic and interventional radiology. The work is based on collation of experiences from representatives of international and national organizations for radiologists, medical physicists, radiographers, regulators, and equipment manufacturers, derived from an International Atomic Energy Agency Technical Meeting. More serious overexposures can result in skin doses high enough to produce tissue reactions, in interventional procedures and computed tomography, most notably from perfusion studies. A major factor involved has been deficiencies in training of staff in operation of equipment and optimization techniques. The use of checklists and time outs before procedures commence, and dose alerts when critical levels are reached during procedures can provide safeguards to reduce risks of these effects occurring. However, unintended and accidental overexposures resulting in relatively small additional doses can take place in any diagnostic or interventional X-ray procedure and it is important to learn from errors that occur, as these may lead to increased risks of stochastic effects. Such events may involve the wrong examinations, procedural errors, or equipment faults. Guidance is given on prevention, investigation and dose calculation for radiology exposure incidents within healthcare facilities. Responsibilities should be clearly set out in formal policies, and procedures should be in place to ensure that root causes are identified and deficiencies addressed. When an overexposure of a patient or an unintended exposure of a foetus occurs, the foetal, organ, skin and/or effective dose may be estimated from exposure data. When doses are very low, generic values for the examination may be sufficient, but a full assessment of doses to all exposed organs and tissues may sometimes be required. The use of general terminology to describe risks from stochastic effects is recommended rather than calculation of numerical values, as these are misleading when applied to individuals

Are patterns of fine-scale spatial genetic structure consistent between sites within tropical tree species?

JRS was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) (http://www.snf.ch/en/Pages/default.aspx) grant number PDFMP3_132479 / 1 awarded to JG. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

One Loop Renormalization of the Littlest Higgs Model

In Little Higgs models a collective symmetry prevents the Higgs from acquiring a quadratically divergent mass at one loop. This collective symmetry is broken by weakly gauged interactions. Terms, like Yukawa couplings, that display collective symmetry in the bare Lagrangian are generically renormalized into a sum of terms that do not respect the collective symmetry except possibly at one renormalization point where the couplings are related so that the symmetry is restored. We study here the one loop renormalization of a prototypical example, the Littlest Higgs Model. Some features of the renormalization of this model are novel, unfamiliar form similar chiral Lagrangian studies.Comment: 23 pages, 17 eps figure

Conformational plasticity of NaK2K and TREK2 potassium channel selectivity filters

The

Media Restrictions as the Image Formation Tool: the Case Study of Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew Popularity

We live in the world full of nice people. The media make us think so as we are surrounded by the images of sport, pop culture, fashion industry, entertainment media, and business leaders. We face them even in the news programs and the press. Of course, the photos and other visual outlets of politicians join the general publicity of personality cult. How do these people appear in the journalist media? Why are they exposed in a positive manner while the crucial role of journalism’s “watchdog” function is to demonstrate weaknesses in order to get them into political agenda and improve? We live in the world where there is a huge business of personality promotion and selling beneath the media, and this business is called celebrity branding and news management. The media skip it from exposure. Journalism too, but why? Who is in charge that people in the media become celebrities? Who, the source or the media, is related to the fact that their audience becomes attached to the celebrities and is involved into a never-ending follow-up communication with them? These questions arise when we focus on journalism’s role in the public opinion formation process in general and image management in particular. The issue may be approached by various ways, but the present article narrows the scope of analyses mainly to the issue of political environment impact on the image of the political actor. Such a choice is made due on the factor that political environment covers both the macro (institutional) and micro (content) levels of restrictions the traditional media encounter, and due to the reason that the scope of mediated politics enables the holistic view of the media field professionals (public relations practitioners, sources, and journalists) performance and its influence on the final product. The disclosure of how the personality campaign is organised in order to reach a wide coverage and depict a positive image is of cognitive value also because the case study is made with the Singapore Prime Minister’s example – the international aspect introduces the global patterns of the celebrity phenomenon and also allows to discuss the media regulation in Singapore. First of all, the present article introduces the theoretical background for the case study, then it examines the state of the media in Singapore, showing the ownership specifics, regulation peculiarities and free speech constraints arising from regulation rather than from professionalism. The psychologically fair factor is disclosed through the analysis of legal acts, especially the Internal Security Act. The spiral of silence theory explains the supporters of such political environment that enables a long-lasting positive attitude towards the Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and explains his popularity and a successful image-making job.We live in the world full of nice people. The media make us think so as we are surrounded by the images of sport, pop culture, fashion industry, entertainment media, and business leaders. We face them even in the news programs and the press. Of course, the photos and other visual outlets of politicians join the general publicity of personality cult. How do these people appear in the journalist media? Why are they exposed in a positive manner while the crucial role of journalism’s “watchdog” function is to demonstrate weaknesses in order to get them into political agenda and improve? We live in the world where there is a huge business of personality promotion and selling beneath the media, and this business is called celebrity branding and news management. The media skip it from exposure. Journalism too, but why? Who is in charge that people in the media become celebrities? Who, the source or the media, is related to the fact that their audience becomes attached to the celebrities and is involved into a never-ending follow-up communication with them? These questions arise when we focus on journalism’s role in the public opinion formation process in general and image management in particular. The issue may be approached by various ways, but the present article narrows the scope of analyses mainly to the issue of political environment impact on the image of the political actor. Such a choice is made due on the factor that political environment covers both the macro (institutional) and micro (content) levels of restrictions the traditional media encounter, and due to the reason that the scope of mediated politics enables the holistic view of the media field professionals (public relations practitioners, sources, and journalists) performance and its influence on the final product. The disclosure of how the personality campaign is organised in order to reach a wide coverage and depict a positive image is of cognitive value also because the case study is made with the Singapore Prime Minister’s example – the international aspect introduces the global patterns of the celebrity phenomenon and also allows to discuss the media regulation in Singapore. First of all, the present article introduces the theoretical background for the case study, then it examines the state of the media in Singapore, showing the ownership specifics, regulation peculiarities and free speech constraints arising from regulation rather than from professionalism. The psychologically fair factor is disclosed through the analysis of legal acts, especially the Internal Security Act. The spiral of silence theory explains the supporters of such political environment that enables a long-lasting positive attitude towards the Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and explains his popularity and a successful image-making job

Progress on adaptive optics for multimodal OCT and confocal microscopy

We present our progress on image-guided (sensor-less) adaptive optics for multi-modal imaging of retinal tissue using high numerical aperture OCT and confocal microscopy using a custom developed instrument. Images of ex vivo tissues are compared to data acquired in vivo