Objective To investigate the association between velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI), a common finding after cleft palate repair, and various risk factors, including cleft width.Methods We performed a retrospective cohort study of patients with isolated cleft palates repaired from 2003 to 2008 at a tertiary children's hospital. Patients were observed postoperatively for development of VPI and pa...

OBJECTIVES (1) To define the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) of the Velopharyngeal Insufficiency (VPI) Effects on Life Outcomes (VELO) instrument, and (2) to test for the change in quality of life (QOL) after VPI surgery. STUDY DESIGN Prospective observational cohort. SETTING VPI clinic at a tertiary pediatric medical center. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Children with VPI and their...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to analyse and validate the prognostic impact and effect of the initial recurrence site of lymphovascular and visceral pleural invasion (VPI) on survival outcomes for Stage I non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). METHODS We retrospectively reviewed 433 patients undergoing resection of Stage I NSCLC. The relationship between the clinicopathological background and t...

OBJECTIVES To modify the existing 45-item Velopharyngeal Insufficiency (VPI) Quality-of-Life (QOL) instrument (VPIQL), to assess the modified instrument for reliability, and to provide further validation. DESIGN Validation convenience sample from a previously conducted pilot study. SETTING Two academic tertiary referral medical centers. PARTICIPANTS Deidentified data were used from 29 pat...

The incidence and response properties of nociresponsive neurons, their locations relative to spinothalamic terminals, and their relations to cytoarchitectonic borders were studied in the lateral thalamus of the squirrel monkey. Nociceptive neurons were found in ventral posterior inferior nucleus (VPI), in the lateral and medial nuclei (VPL and VPM) of the ventral posterior complex (VP = VPL + V...

This paper presents a new routing algorithm for a wireless ATM LAN. The LAN combines positive aspects of connection-oriented and datagram communications schemes in its usage of the ATM VP/VC concept. In this scheme, a set of VPI trees, rooted at each node in the LAN, are preestablished. This has the effect of emulating “connectionless” networking which simplifies handoffs and other mobility man...

Value Pursuit Iteration (VPI) is an approximate value iteration algorithm that finds a close to optimal policy for reinforcement learning problems with large state spaces. VPI has two main features: First, it is a nonparametric algorithm that finds a good sparse approximation of the optimal value function given a dictionary of features. The algorithm is almost insensitive to the number of irrel...

Despite new treatment options in lung cancer, there is still a need for better biomarkers to assist in therapy decisions. Angiogenesis has been associated with tumour growth and dissemination, and the vascular proliferation index (VPI) is a valuable prognostic marker in other tumours. Nestin, a marker of immature endothelium, was previously applied in combination with Ki67 for proliferating end...