BACKGROUND There are national trends of increasing incidence of morbid obesity and autologous breast reconstruction with free tissue transfer from the abdomen. The purpose of this study was to assess the safety and efficacy of free flap breast reconstruction in the morbidly obese population. METHODS A retrospective review was conducted on all patients who underwent transverse rectus abdominis...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the major mechanism responsible for spread of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic treatment has been suggested to promote HGT, either by directly affecting the conjugation process itself or by selecting for conjugations subsequent to DNA transfer. However, recent research suggests that the effect of antibiotic treatment on plasmid conjugation frequencies, and hen...

This paper presents a numerical study of local mass transfer coefficients in a 90° bend using the RNG version of k–e model to include the influence of curvature on the turbulent transport. Simulations were performed for flow through a 90°, 3-D bend for Reynolds numbers of 13500, 90000, and 390000, Schmidt numbers of 2.53 and 700 and curvature ratios of 1.5, 2, and 2.5. The differences betwe...

Ultrasound accelerates the free fatty acids esterification rate by reducing the mass transfer resistance between methanol in the liquid phase and absorbed organic species on Amberlyst®46 catalyst. The reaction rates of canola oil is three times greater than for tobacco seed oil but half the reaction rate of pure oleic acid as measured in a batch reactor. The beneficial effects of ultrasound vs....

Cancer multidrug resistance (MDR) occurs when cancer cells evade the cytotoxic actions of chemotherapeutics through the active efflux of drugs from within the cells. Our group have previously demonstrated that multidrug-resistant breast cancer cells spontaneously shed microparticles (MPs) and that these MPs can transfer resistance to drug-responsive cells and confer MDR on those cells in as lit...

Evaluating biliary excretion, a major elimination pathway for many compounds, is important in drug discovery. The bile duct-cannulated (BDC) rat model is commonly used to determine the percentage of dose excreted as intact parent into bile. However, a study using BDC rats is time-consuming and cost-ineffective. The present report describes a computational model that has been established to pred...