Abdominal trauma and pelvic injury in the growth period

Children with pelvic fractures usually are polytraumatized. Concomitant abdominal and pelvic injuries are not uncommon. Medical records and X-rays of 54 children, in which a pelvic fracture was diagnosed at our institution from 1974-1993, were reviewed. Children ages < or = 16 years and treated as in-patients were included in this study. The fractures were classified according to the AO-Classification. 47 patients (87.0%) had concomitant injuries. The mean Polytrauma Score was 23.7 (mean Injury Severity Score 30.5). Nine Children sustained an open pelvic fracture with rectal and/or vaginal tear. 15 genitourinary lesions were found in 13 children. 18 patients underwent laparotomy. A large pelvic/retroperitoneal hematoma was found in 11 cases. There were 7 liver lacerations, 7 splenic injuries, 2 mesenteric tears, 2 kidney injuries and 1 small bowel lesion. Eight children (14.8%) died with 5 of them due to retroperitoneal or/and abdominal bleeding complications. A recent follow-up examination (81.8%) with a mean follow-up of 11.3 years showed that long-term morbidity usually was attributed to pelvic concomitant injuries.     

Dependence of the driving force of the sodium pump on rate of transport

The driving force for active transport of Na+ in the isolated toad bladder, ENa, was measured as the reciprocal slope of the change in conductance with change in short-circuit current after stimulation with antidiuretic hormone. The base-line short-circuit current was altered by change in ambient Na+ concentration or addition of amiloride, maneuvers which alter availability of Na+ at the site of active transport. In the absence of a chemical gradient for Na+ across the bladder, ENa was found to be inversely related to the rate of Na+ transport, a finding incompatible with the simple electrical analogue that has been proposed for the system. The results provide additional support for the view that ENa measured in this way has both energetic and kinetic components.     

Ultrasound findings in hepatitis

A retrospective study of ultrasound images of the liver in patients with hepatitis was undertaken. Two distinct ultrasound patterns were detected. In acute hepatitis, the predominant findings were accentuated brightness and more extensive demonstration of the portal vein radicle walls and overall decreased echogenicity of the liver. Chronic hepatitis primarily revealed decreased brightness and number of portal vein radicle walls and verall increased liver echogenicity. In addition, the pathological severity closely paralleled these ultrasound patterns. A prospective study confirmed the same acute hepatitis ultrasound findings with close correlation to the clinical severity. These distinct ultrasound patterns will help to evaluate patients with suspected acute and chronic hepatitis and more accurately define intrahepatic causes of jaundice.     

The comparative histopathology of primary and secondary lesions in murine salmonellosis

In a primary infection, Swiss-Webster mice were injected i.p. with 10(2) or 10(3) virulent Salmonella typhimurium. Multiple microscopic acute abscesses with predominantly polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMNs) were seen in the liver and the spleen beginning on the 4th day after infection. By the 7th day, these lesions had become enlarged and were gradually transformed into granulomas with central necrosis and peripheral mononuclear cells. The animals usually died within 12 days with massive systemic infection and degeneration of the tissues. In contrast, it was necessary to inoculate 10(6) virulent salmonella i.v. into mice immunized with avirulent S. thphimurium in order to initiate microscopically observable lesions in the liver and the spleen. These secondary lesions were characterized by the early appearance of minute granulomas composed almost entirely of histiocytic cells. They remained small and isolated, usually without central necrosis. Subsequent regression of the lesions and regeneration of normal tissue occurred after the 2nd week following infection. The animals usually survived such a challenge infection.     

Pharmacokinetics and metabolic disposition of 14C-metronidazole-derived radioactivity in rat after intravenous and intravaginal administration

Urinary metabolites and the pharmacokinetics of radioactivity derived from 14C-metronidazole (14C-MTZ) were determined after intravenous (iv) or intravaginal (ivg) administration of 10 mg/kg to adult rats. Following iv or ivg administration, the disappearance of 14C from blood followed the kinetics of a two-compartment open-system model. The blood half-lives of 14C during the beta-phase were 10.9 +/- 1.6 and 13.6 +/- 4.2 hr, after iv and ivg administration, respectively. After ivg application, the MTZ-derived radioactivity was detected in tail blood at 5 min, peaked at 1 hr, declined rapidly to 6 hr and more slowly thereafter. The vaginal absorption half-life of 14C-MTZ was 0.28 +/- 0.09 hr. About 12% of the administered dose remained in the vagina after 1 hr and 1.5% after 24 hr. At 24 hr, the tissue distribution and concentration of 14C were similar in iv and ivg dosed rats, the highest 14C concentration being present in the kidneys and lowest in the fat. The percentages of the dose excreted in 24 hr in the urine and feces were 58 and 15 after iv administration, compared to 37 and 40 after the ivg route, respectively. Unchanged 14C-MTZ and five of its metabolites were detected in the urine irrespective of the route of administration. The results show that metronidazole is rapidly absorbed through the vaginal mucosa of the rat and the metabolism and excretion of this chemotherapeutic agent are influenced by the route of administration.     

SQUIDs on the Base of Strained YBCO Films

Strained films of YBCO in which stresses caused by mismatching of film and substrate lattices and thermal expansion coefficients are frozen by quenching are grown on substrates LAO (1 0 0) by laser ablation method. Critical current in these films is suppressed about 2–3 orders of magnitude. The strained films have unusual temperature dependences with the minimum at the temperature range of 55–57~K. In spite of granular films with the same critical current the strained films are stable to thermocycles. DC-SQUIDs are manufactured on the base of the strained films with the sensitivity by flux up to 4.5 mk ₀/ Hz.     

Thyroid carcinoma after high-dose external radiotherapy for Hodgkin's disease: report of three cases

Three patients (two female and one male), who had received mantle irradiation for Hodgkin's disease eight, ten, and twelve years previously, developed papillary thyroid carcinoma. The radiation doses to the necks overlying the site of thyroid cancers were 3000, 4000, and 4100 rads, respectively. It has been stated that there is no risk of developing thyroid cancer with such high doses of external irradiation but apparently this complication will be encountered in a small number of patients.     

An optimized hybrid remote display protocol using GPU-assisted M-JPEG encoding and novel high-motion detection algorithm

In this paper, we design a novel hybrid remote display for mobile thin-client system. The remote frame buffer (RFB) protocol and motion JPEG (M-JPEG) protocol are assigned to handle remote display tasks in the slow-motion region and high-motion region, respectively. Graphic processing units (GPU) are utilized to do a part of a real-time JPEG compression task. A novel quality of experience (QoE)-based high-motion detection algorithm is also proposed to reduce the network bandwidth consumption and the server-side computing resource consumption. The continuity of screen delivery remains whenever the JPEG compression is applied to different screen regions. The proposed hybrid remote display approach has many good features which have been justified by comprehensive simulation studies.     

M:N object matching between image and map object data sets by means of latent semantic analysis

In this article, we propose a method to find corresponding object-set pairs between image and map polygon object data sets by means of latent semantic analysis. Latent semantic analysis assigns each polygon object of both data sets to feature vectors in a continuous geometric space in which the similarities between the vectors are proportional to the priorities to constitute a corresponding object-set pair. Thus, object clusters can be obtained by applying an agglomerative hierarchical clustering to the feature vectors. These object clusters are separated into object-set pairs according to the data sets to which the objects belong and are evaluated with a geometric matching criterion to find corresponding object-set pairs. We applied the proposed method to the segmentation result of a composite image with six normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) images and a forest inventory map. The proposed method was compared to a graph-embedding-based method. The results showed that the proposed method found more corresponding object-set pairs with a similar accuracy in terms of shape similarities and shared information of found pairs.