purpose: to report a case of bilateral kertatoconus who presented with acute comitant esotropia after penetrating keratoplasty in the fellow eye. patient and findings: a 17-year-old male with keratoconus underwent penetrating keratoplasty in his right eye. he experienced diplopia after removal of the patch from the operated eye 12 hour postoperatively due to esotropia in his left (unoperated) e...

BACKGROUND The American College of Surgeons' Committee on Trauma's recent prehospital trauma life support recommendations against prehospital spine immobilization (PHSI) after penetrating trauma are based on a low incidence of unstable spine injuries after penetrating injuries. However, given the chronic and costly nature of devastating spine injuries, the cost-utility of PHSI is unclear. Our h...

Penetrating injuries to the orbit represent a small but very complicated portion of head injuries. Because of the close proximity to many vital structures, any penetrating orbital injury requires a multidisciplinary follow-up. Cases of penetrating injuries have flooded the literature, but no one has presented a systematic approach to the complications associated with these types of injuries. He...

Regulation of biological processes through the use of genetic elements is a central part of biological research and also holds great promise for future therapeutic applications. Oligonucleotides comprise a class of versatile biomolecules capable of modulating gene regulation. Gene therapy, the concept of introducing genetic elements in order to treat disease, presents a promising therapeutic st...

This review paper discusses two approaches for human-machine communication that use design principles that are inspired by human-human dialogue. The first method is the information state approach (Traum & Larsson, 2003) which continually updates an information state that contains all kinds of relevant information about the user and the discourse context. The theory leaves dialogue system design...

This demonstration highlights some emerging capabilities for incremental speech understanding and processing in virtual human dialogue systems. This work is part of an ongoing effort that aims to enable realistic spoken dialogue with virtual humans in multi-party negotiation scenarios (Plüss et al., 2011; Traum et al., 2008). In these negotiation scenarios, ideally the virtual humans should dem...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to compare endothelial cell counts after Descemet's stripping automated endothelial keratoplasty (DSAEK) and penetrating keratoplasty in Asian eyes. METHODS This was a retrospective study of patients from our prospective Singapore Corneal Transplant Study cohort who received corneal transplantation in 2006-2008. We compared eyes that underwent DSAEK or...

Background and Purpose: The relation between serum total cholesterol levels and stroke is controversial. The Akita Pathology Study provides data on the association of serum total cholesterol, different types of stroke, and distribution of stenosis in cerebral arteries. Methods: The data are based on 750 autopsied men aged 30 years and older who were admitted to a local hospital in northeast Jap...

BACKGROUND Traumatic diaphragmatic injury (TDI) is uncommon and has historically been identified by chest x-ray and repaired by laparotomy with nonabsorbable suture. Blunt TDI was more frequently (90%) detected on the left. With advances in imaging and operative techniques, our objective was to evaluate evolution in incidence, location, and management of TDI. METHODS The medical records of pa...