Should we Remove Bullets from the Spinal Cord?

Incidental Parathyroid Disease during Thyroid Surgery: Should We Remove Them?

Aim. Despite an incidence of parathyroid "incidentalomas" of 0.2%-4.5%, only approximately 135 cases have been reported in the literature. We present eight patients in whom an incidental abnormal parathyroid gland was found during routine thyroid surgery. We have reviewed the literature and postulate whether these glands could represent further evidence of a preclinical stage of primary hyperpa...

MR studies of the spinal cord in patients with multiple sclerosis: what should we do?

In this issue of the AJNR, Rocca et al (page 1710) report a comparison of three imaging techniques for detection of plaques in patients with definite multiple sclerosis (MS). They find that a fast short tau inversion recovery (fast STIR) technique was superior to a fast spin-echo (FSE) and a magnetization transfer–prepared gradient-echo (MTGE) approach. The fast STIR images showed the largest n...

Vasopressor administration in spinal cord injury: should we apply a universal standard to all injury patterns?

Learning from the spinal cord.

The graceful control of multiarticulated limbs equipped with slow, non-linear actuators (muscles) is a difficult problem for which robotic engineering affords no general solution. The vertebrate spinal cord provides an existence proof that such control is, indeed, possible. The biological solution is complex and incompletely known, despite a century of meticulous neurophysiological research, ce...

Can We Remove the Human from Hazard Analysis?

Traditionally, hazard analysis has been a manual process performed by safety engineers following a systematic process. This has proved highly effective for existing systems. However, for Systems of Systems of the complexity now being constructed it is becoming increasingly difficult to use these conventional techniques, particularly when considering the effects of multiple concurrent and distri...