Posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF), as recommended with bilateral lumbar interbody cages and pedicle screw fixation, has increased the successful fusion rate to nearly 100%. Presently, a unilateral approach to the disc space with a variant of PLIF, the trans-foraminal interbody fusion is often used. There are few clinical studies of unilateral interbody fusion. The clinical and fusion res...

BACKGROUND Interbody fusion surgery has been considered by many to be a treatment of choice for instability in lumbar degenerative disc disease. A posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) has the advantages of spinal canal decompression, anterior column reconstruction, and reduction of the sagittal slips from a single posterior approach. The PLIF using double cage was a standard practice till m...

Scalar imaging techniques are widely used in fluid mechanics, but the effects of imaging system blur on the measured scalar gradients are often inadequately considered. Depending on the flow condition and imaging system used, the blurring can cause unacceptable errors in gradient related measurements, which are much larger than those for the scalar itself. Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence (PLI...

We report the first experiment carried out on an in situ setup, which allows for detection of CO(2) from catalytic CO oxidation close to a model catalyst under realistic reaction conditions by the means of planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) in the mid-infrared spectral range. The onset of the catalytic reaction as a function of temperature was followed by PLIF in a steady state flow react...

OBJECTIVES To compare the influence of posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) and transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) on adjacent segment degeneration (ASD). METHODS The study was carried out in the Traumatology and Orthopedics Laboratory, Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Medical School, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China, between December 2013 and November 2014. A norm...

AIM The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the Topping-off technique in preventing the aggravation of degeneration caused by adjacent segment fusion. METHODS Clinical parameters of patients who underwent L5-S1 posterior lumbar interbody fusion + interspinous process at L4-L5 (PLIF + ISP) with the Wallis system (Topping-off group) were compared retrospectively with those of patien...

Degenerative spondylolisthesis has long been recognized as a cause of chronic low back pain and sciatica. Extensive anatonmical and embryological studies have not fully explained the cause of this painful condition. The mechanism of pain in degenerative spondylolisthesis has been confirmed by demonstrating the disc lesion pre-operatively by X-rays and MR imaging followed by surgical treatment i...

We report on high-speed CH planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) imaging in turbulent diffusion flames using a multimode-pumped optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The OPO is pumped by the third-harmonic output of a multimode Nd:YAG cluster for direct signal excitation in the A-X (0,0) band of the CH radical. The lasing threshold, conversion efficiency, and linewidth are shown to depend on ...

The authors review and compare posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) with transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF). A review of the literature is performed wherein the history, indications for surgery, surgical procedures with their respective biomechanical advantages, potential complications, and grafting substances are presented. Along with the technical advancements and improvements ...

We study the problem of mining and summarizing multiple time series effectively and efficiently. We propose PLiF, a novel method to discover essential characteristics (“fingerprints”), by exploiting the joint dynamics in numerical sequences. Our fingerprinting method has the following benefits: (a) it leads to interpretable features; (b) it is versatile: PLiF enables numerous mining tasks, incl...