HYPOTHESIS Prosthetic crural closure does not adversely influence esophageal body motility. In most patients, postoperative increased dysphagia resolves spontaneously during the first months after surgery. DESIGN Prospective randomized trial. We compared patients who underwent laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication with simple sutured hiatal closure and those who underwent laparoscopic Nissen fun...

This paper proposes a DC-mesh network that allows requesting nodes to be put into clusters while the requests are sent to a target node, as well as is easy to layout on an LSI chip. To organize the DCmesh, we use the partitioning in the word space based on the Hamming code [1]. We introduce an index scheme, (parity-value,information-value), in the word space, and map it onto a 4-D (dimensional)...

In this paper, we present a practical algorithm to extract a curve skeleton of a 3D shape. The core of our algorithm comprises coupled processes of graph contraction and surface clustering. Given a 3D shape represented by a triangular mesh, we first construct an initial skeleton graph by directly copying the connectivity and geometry information from the input mesh. Graph contraction and surfac...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study are (1) to describe the presenting symptoms, findings, and treatment and (2) to describe the self-reported improvement and function at least 6 months after presentation in women presenting to 1 urogynecology division for complications associated with synthetic vaginal mesh. METHODS Women evaluated between 2006 and 2011 were identified by diagnostic code...

aims: the installation of intravenous catheter is an unpleasant and painful experience for many patients. then, it is necessary to provide new methods to either reduce or remove pain in the patients’ injection point. the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of positioning (either sitting or lying) during the installation of intravenous catheter on pain level and the following anxiet...

we investigated contraction to noradrenaline (na) and kc1 and sensitivity of na at the level of larger vessels (thoracic aorta and vena cava; left renal artery and left renal vein; lateral saphenous artery and lateral saphenous vein and finally central ear artery and marginal ear vein) in a model devised to mimic heart failure. the model presented here is the rabbit coronary ligation model in w...

We consider nonconforming multigrid methods for symmetric positive definite second and fourth order elliptic boundary value problems which do not have full elliptic regularity. We prove that there is a bound (< 1) for the contraction number of the W -cycle algorithm which is independent of mesh level, provided that the number of smoothing steps is sufficiently large. We also show that the symme...