OBJECTIVES We sought to determine the basis for restenosis within superficial femoral arteries (SFAs) and hemodialysis conduits treated with balloon-expandable stents. BACKGROUND Use of stents within coronary and peripheral vessels continues to increase exponentially. The mechanism of restenosis within stents placed at various vascular sites is not well understood. In particular, the implicat...

BACKGROUND Esophageal cancer is the seventh-most frequent cause of cancer-related deaths and it is usually diagnosed at an inoperable stage. In palliative treatment, endoscopic and non-endoscopic methods are applied to reduce dysphagia in patients with neoplastic esophageal obstruction. Because of severe complications, non-endoscopic treatment (surgery, radiotherapy, brachytherapy and chemother...

Esophageal cancer is the sixth leading cause of death from cancer worldwide [1]. Due to the esophagus distensible characteristics, patients may not recognize any symptoms until 50% of the luminal diameter is compromised explaining why cancer of the esophagus is generally associated with late presentation and poor prognosis [2]. Esophageal stents are devices used to maintain or restore the lumen...

Bayesian sparse factor models have proven useful for characterizing dependence in multivariate data, but scaling computation to large numbers of samples and dimensions is problematic. We propose expandable factor analysis for scalable inference in factor models when the number of factors is unknown. The method relies on a continuous shrinkage prior for efficient maximum a posteriori estimation ...

The Multimedia Information Presentation System (MIPS) will allow end-users to browse multimedia information presented in a user-friendly and consistent manner. In its most powerful configuration, it will allow the end-user to formulate queries which are interpreted, analysed , and despatched by the system to heterogeneous distributed external data sources, and to view a coherent and customized ...

Study Design Retrospective case series. Objective StaXx XD (Spine Wave, Inc., Shelton, CT, United States) is an expandable polyaryl-ether-ether-ketone (PEEK) wafer implant utilized in the treatment of lumbar degenerative disease. PEEK implants have been successfully used as interbody devices. Few studies have focused on expandable PEEK devices. The aim of the current study is to determine the r...

Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) has become mainstream among non-surgical treatment modalities in clinical settings for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. We have previously described the novel combination therapy of percutaneous ethanol injection and RFA (PEI-RFA) and reported that this combination therapy was more effective than RFA alone in terms of the induced volume of coagulated necr...

Background. Spinal fusion has been shown to be the preferred surgical option to reduce pain, recover function, and increase quality of life in the treatment of a variety of lumbar spinal disorders. The main goal of the present study is to report our clinical experience and results of percutaneous transforaminal endoscopic lumbar interbody fusion (PELIF) applications using the expandable spacer ...

Suspension polymerization process is commonly used to produce expandable polystyrene. In the conventional method for producing this polymer, two different initiators are added to the process at two different temperature levels. In the industrial scale, this process is time consuming and difficult to control. A new method (Multi-Stage Initiator Dosing, MID) is proposed, in which, the initiator i...