bariatric surgery, as a whole, is the only proven modality to manage the severely obese. the laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (lsg) is the most recent tool in the armamentarium of bariatric surgery. once used as the first-stage in a two-stage procedure for the super-obese patient, it is now used as a primary bariatric procedure. involving the resection of the greater curvature of the stomach, it...

OBJECTIVE Hartmann's procedure (HP) still remains the most frequently performed procedure in acute perforated diverticulitis, but it results in a end colostomy. Primary anastomosis (PA) with or without defunctioning loop ileostomy (DI) seems a good alternative. The aim of this study was to assess differences in the rate of stomal reversal after HP and PA with DI and to evaluate factors associat...

The paper propose a new procedure including four stages in order to preserve the desired edges during the image processing of noise reduction. A denoised image can be obtained from a noisy image at the first stage of the procedure. At the second stage, an edge map can be obtained by the Canny edge detector to find the edges of the object contours. Manual modification of an edge map at the third...

This paper is concerned with feature screening and variable selection for varying coefficient models with ultrahigh dimensional covariates. We propose a new feature screening procedure for these models based on conditional correlation coefficient. We systematically study the theoretical properties of the proposed procedure, and establish their sure screening property and the ranking consistency...

In the application of the popular maximum likelihood method to factor analysis, the number of factors is commonly determined through a two-stage procedure, in which stage 1 performs parameter estimation for a set of candidate models and then stage 2 chooses the best according to certain model selection criterion. Usually, to obtain satisfactory performance, a large set of candidates is used and...