Transjugular intrahepatic portocaval shunt (TIPS) is performed in patients with symptomatic Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS) who do not have repairable hepatic veins. We report the case of a patient who had an inferior vena cava (IVC) stent placed previously as part of the management for BCS, and who subsequently required TIPS. The TIPS tract was created through the strut of the previously placed IVC...

BACKGROUND Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunts (TIPS) have been used to control symptomatic portal hypertension in patients awaiting liver transplant. Although their role in pretransplantation patients is well established, their role in posttransplantation patients is unclear. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective analyses were performed for 18 liver-transplant recipients who underwent TIPS f...

BACKGROUND Since its introduction, transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) has been extensively used for treatment of portal hypertension. We report a decade of experience with particular emphasis on characterizing post-TIPS hepatic encephalopathy (HE). AIM To determine the frequency of clinically evident or minimal HE post-TIPS, identify predisposing factors and determine the im...

This paper suggests to enhance the concept of tool tips by presenting translucent preview bitmaps. The basic idea is to give the user a preview of what would happen when a certain operation is invoked. We have implemented two prototypes to evaluate the concept. One provides WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool tips for documents and applications on the desktop. The second one is an appli...

This paper presents a robotic anchoring module, a sensorized mechanism for attachment to the environment that can be integrated into robots to enable or enhance various functions such as robot mobility, remaining on location or its ability to manipulate objects. The body of the anchoring module consists of two portions with a mechanical stiffness transition from hard to soft. The hard portion i...

A commonly overlooked aspect of conservation planning assessments is that wildlife managers are increasingly focused on habitats that contain non-native species. We examine this management challenge in the Gila River basin (150,730 km(2)), and present a new planning strategy for fish conservation. By applying a hierarchical prioritization algorithm to >850,000 fish records in 27,181 sub-watersh...

Research and development functions are fundamental drivers of value creation in technology-based enterprises. Successful R&D is a function of invention and R&D management. This paper studies R&D management issues from the perspective of their effect on value creation. The particular issues studied are: (i) How does one attach a value to a particular proposed R&D activity, and (ii) how does one ...

This paper proposes a pair of single or multi D.O.F. robot fingers with soft and deformable tips that can pinch an object stably in a dynamic sense with the aid of realtime sensory feedback. To realize dynamic stable pinching, a practical method of using optical devices is proposed for measuring both the maximum displacement of finger-tip deformation and the relative angle between the object su...