AIM Surgical approach to the upper thoracic spine diseases is challenging since anterior interventions to this region are quite complicated with the presence of major vascular elements or important visceral and soft-tissue structures. MATERIAL AND METHODS Operative technique was performed initially on eight cadavers and then on three consecutive patients. Costotransvesectomy was performed on ...

Low-velocity firearms represent the majority of civilian gunshot wounds to the hand, yet much of the literature is based on high-velocity injuries. The authors reviewed their treatment regimen for civilian gunshot wounds to the hand and offer a treatment algorithm that emphasizes early debridement and fracture stabilization. They also address the economic impact on society. The authors reviewed...

BACKGROUND Coronary artery stabilization and retraction have been a crucial problem in beating heart bypass surgery. Conventional methods such as looping and suspension of the target artery carry risk of coronary artery damage. Above all, these methods do not aid in retraction in coronary arteriotomy. METHODS Five mongrel dogs were used in this study. After intratracheal general anesthesia, m...

This paper presents the first deterministic selfstabilizing network orientation algorithms. We present three protocols for arbitrary and asynchronous networks. All the protocols set up a chordal sense of direction in the network. The protocols are self-stabilizing, meaning that starting from an arbitrary state, the protocols are guaranteed to reach a state, in which all edge labels (assigned to...

We study the supergravity hybrid inflation model of Ref. [1] in the presence of a modulus field. The η-problem is solved by a shift symmetry for the inflaton, which protects the inflaton mass even in the presence of the modulus field. Inflation is (nearly) unaffected by moduli stabilization, provided the scale of supersymmetry breaking in the post-inflation vacuum is small. Therefore the model ...

We estimate the impacts of various types of government payments to U.S. agriculture on different components of farm household consumption. Using 2003 to 2005 data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS), we show that marginal rates of consumption differ by consumption category and income source, including different types of farm program payments. The results suggest that farm ho...

when the orbital altitude of a small satellite is near-earth, passive stabilization can be considered. the purpose of this paper is to combine the passive gravity gradient and aerodynamic stabilization methods together so that all the three axes stabilizations can be obtained. in this regard, the set of nonlinear equations of motion will be solved numerically with specified initial condition. t...

This paper considers the quadratic stabilization problem of multi-input planar switched systems. Based on some basic lemmas, some uniformly quadratic stabilization criteria are established. Furthermore, an example is given to illustrate our results in this

We determined the added enthalpic and entropic contributions of protective osmolytes to the folding of a model peptide into its native beta-hairpin state. In contrast to entropically driven steric "crowding", this study shows that sugars and polyols can act as protective osmolytes by primarily diminishing the unfavourable enthalpic contribution to folding.