background: pregnant patients with mechanical heart valves require anticoagulation. the risk of bleeding and embryopathy associated with oral anticoagulants must be weighed against the risk of valve thrombosis. methods: in this prospective study, undertaken between 1999 and 2009, 53 pregnancies (47 women with mechanical mitral valves; 29.8 ± 4.8 years old) were studied. patients were divided in...

introduction: even though modern technology progresses so rapidly, annals of otology are replete with so many challenging article, which often compare various types of prosthesis. since there has not been a prospective randomized clinical trial study which compares the hearing result of total ossicular replacement prosthesis made of titanium with omega connector and polycel in the literature, w...

Ongoing clinical studies on patients recently implanted with the auditory midbrain implant (AMI) into the inferior colliculus (IC) for hearing restoration have shown that these patients do not achieve performance levels comparable to cochlear implant patients. The AMI consists of a single-shank array (20 electrodes) for stimulation along the tonotopic axis of the IC. Recent findings suggest tha...

background the ability to follow the distribution and migration of biologically active cells in human is essential for the development of cell-based therapies and diagnostics. nuclear medicine imaging is widely applied in clinic as an attractive technique for in vivo wbc and stem cell tracking. the aim of this study was to evaluate prosthesis infection of a 51 years old man with previous histor...

The loss of an upper limb significantly limits the functional activities of daily living. A huge emphasis is placed on the manipulation, shape, weight, and comfort of a prosthesis, to enable its use as an inherent body part. Even with technological advances, customized upper-extremity myoelectric prosthesis remain heavy and expensive. The high cost of upper-extremity prosthesis is an especially...

The aim of this study is to determine what factors constitute a quality prosthesis and ascertain which factors affect prosthesis satisfaction. Sixty-four women who received full funding for their prosthesis and 38 women who received their hospital's usual funding were recruited. Women rated the information provided about breast prostheses very highly, with 85% reporting that it was "very good" ...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of an experimental prosthesis-control system based on the concept of extended physiological proprioception (EPP). It was originally hypothesized that EPP control effected by residual shoulder motion could be effectively applied in multifunctional prostheses for shoulder disarticulation amputees. The experimental system developed for this study util...

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to assess the auditory lateralization ability in children with (central) auditory processing disorder. Methods: Participants were divided in two groups: 15 children with Central Auditory Processing Disorder (8-10 years) and 80 normal children (8-11 years) from both genders with pure-tone air-conduction thresholds better than 20 dB HL bilaterally a...

BACKGROUND A study was designed to quantify the extent of porous osseointegration at the prosthesis-bone interface in the Prestige LP prosthesis containing a plasma-sprayed titanium coating. METHODS Using an anterior surgical approach, cervical disc arthroplasty was performed in 8 mature male goats at the C3-C4 segment, followed by implantation of the Prestige LP prosthesis. The vertebral spe...