SUMMARY Removal of an intact, inflated tissue expander can result in uncontrolled spillage of expander contents on the drapes, surgeons, staff, or patient. The technique described has been used for the past 4 years to eliminate these spillage concerns. It is simple and inexpensive using common disposable supplies found in any operating room. An irrigating syringe is modified by cutting away its...

A series of failures of a radial inflow hot gas expander driving a centrifugal compressor in a nitric acid plant plagued the second author’s former company over a 24 year period. The 19,000 hp single-stage radial inflow expander inlet and discharge blade tips would fail in service, destroying the inlet nozzle vanes and expander wheel, and causing extensive damage to the rotor, bearings, seals, ...

Construction 7.1 (Margulis [Mar]) Fix a positive integerM and let [M ] = {1, 2, . . . ,M}. Define the bipartite graph G = (V,E) as follows. Let V = [M ]2∪ [M ]2, where vertices in the first partite set are denoted (x, y)1 and vertices in the second partite set are denoted (x, y)2. From each vertex (x, y)1, put in edges to (x, y)2, (x, x+ y)2, (x, x+ y+1)2, (x+ y, y)2, and (x+ y+ 1, y)2, where a...

In many areas of imaging science, it is difficult to measure the phase of linear measurements. As such, one often wishes to reconstruct a signal from intensity measurements, that is, perform phase retrieval. In this paper, we provide a novel measurement design which is inspired by interferometry and exploits certain properties of expander graphs. We also give an efficient phase retrieval proced...

We show that for integers k ≥ 2 and n ≥ 3, the diameter of the Cayley graph of SLn(Z/kZ) associated to a standard two-element generating set, is at most a constant times n ln k. This answers a question of A. Lubotzky concerning SLn(Fp) and is unexpected because these Cayley graphs do not form an expander family. Our proof amounts to a quick algorithm for finding short words representing element...

BACKGROUND Immediate postmastectomy breast reconstruction in morbidly obese patients represents a challenge because neither prosthetic nor abdominal-based options may be suitable. METHODS This study compared a previously published cohort of immediate prosthetic reconstruction of 346 patients (511 breasts) of whom 49 patients (67 breasts) were morbidly obese (defined as a body mass index > 35)...

We propose a new scalable algorithm that can compute Personalized PageRank (PPR) very quickly. The Power method is a state-of-the-art algorithm for computing exact PPR; however, it requires many iterations. Thus reducing the number of iterations is the main challenge. We achieve this by exploiting graph structures of web graphs and social networks. The convergence of our algorithm is very fast....

In graph theory there are intimate connections between the expansion properties of a graph and the spectrum of its Laplacian. In this paper we define a notion of combinatorial expansion for simplicial complexes of general dimension, and prove that similar connections exist between the combinatorial expansion of a complex, and the spectrum of the high dimensional Laplacian defined by Eckmann. In...

The notion of graph expansion was introduced as a tool in coding theory by Sipser and Spielman, who used it to bound the minimum distance of a class of low-density codes, as well as the performance of various iterative decoding algorithms for these codes. In spite of its usefulness in establishing theoretical bounds on iterative decoding, graph expansion has not been widely used to design codes...

The Alon-Roichman theorem states that for every ε > 0 there is a constant c(ε), such that the Cayley graph of a finite group G with respect to c(ε) log |G| elements of G, chosen independently and uniformly at random, has expected second largest eigenvalue less than ε. In particular, such a graph is an expander with high probability. Landau and Russell, and independently Loh and Schulman, improv...