Aim: To provide an up-to-date review of the literature on skin-sparing mastectomy (SSM) for breast cancer (BC). The article also reviews the oncological safety, effects of radiotherapy (RT) on immediate breast reconstruction (IBR), the indications for preserving the nipple-areola complex (NAC) and the emerging role of allogenic grafts as adjuncts to implant in IBR. Methods: Review of the Englis...

Slipped-strand mispairing (SSM) has not been identified as a mechanism of phase variation in Escherichia coli. Using a reporter gene, we show that sequences that cause phase variation by SSM in Haemophilus influenzae also lead to phase variation when introduced onto the chromosome of E. coli, and the frequencies of switching are in the biologically relevant range. Thus, the absence of SSM-media...

AIM To review evidence concerning the oncological safety of performing skin-sparing mastectomy (SSM) for invasive breast cancer and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Furthermore, the evidence concerning RT in relation to SSM and the possibility of nipple preservation was considered. METHODS Literature review facilitated by Medline and PubMed databases. FINDINGS Despite the lack of randomised...

OBJECTIVES An important measure for the diagnosis and monitoring of knee osteoarthritis is the minimum joint space width (mJSW). This requires accurate alignment of the x-ray beam with the tibial plateau, which may not be accomplished in practice. We investigate the feasibility of a new mJSW measurement method from stereo radiographs using 3D statistical shape models (SSM) and evaluate its sens...

This paper proposes a novel approach of skeletonization for both binary and gray-scale images based on the Skeleton Strength Map (SSM) calculated from Euclidean distance transform. The distance transform is firstly computed based on the boundary edges, and then its gradient vector field is calculated. After that, the isotropic diffusion is performed on the gradient vector field and the SSM is c...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) simulation versus dry lab suturing practice at improving suturing performance in robotic surgery. Nineteen novice participants with no prior robotic suturing experience were randomized to two groups, VR simulation and dry lab, which consisted of inanimate training on a da Vinci Si surgical system. Each group unde...

To estimate integrated precipitable water vapour along with liquid water path and water vapour effective profile (i.e. standard atmospheric profile approximation), utilising the SSM/I and TMI radiometers, an operative procedure was developed and assessed. This procedure is based on a fast nonlinear physical inversion algorithm (PIn) developed by the authors. A large data-set of near-coincident ...

Long-term snow depth/snow water equivalent (SWE) products derived from passive microwave remote sensing data are fundamental for climatological and hydrological studies. However, the temporal continuity of the products is affected by the updating or replacement of passive microwave sensors or satellite platforms. In this study, we inter-calibrated brightness temperature (Tb) data obtained from ...

The splice sites are essential for pre-mRNA maturation and crucial for Splice Site Modelling (SSM); however, there are gaps between the splicing signals and the computationally identified sequence features. In this paper, the Locality Sensitive Features (LSFs) are proposed to reduce the gaps by homogenising their contexts. Under the skewness-kurtosis based statistics and data analysis, SSM attr...

Stomach smooth muscle (SSM) and left ventricular muscle (LVM) express the sarco(endo)plasmic reticulum Ca(2+)-ATPase (SERCA) pump gene SERCA2. Alternative splicing yields two major isoforms, SERCA2a in LVM and slow twitch muscle and SERCA2b in SSM and most other tissues. The splices have different 3'-untranslated regions (UTR) and also encode proteins that differ slightly in their COOH-terminal...