(1) Intragastric balloons are a temporary non-surgical obesity treatment that induces short-term weight loss by partially filling the stomach to achieve satiety and reduce food intake. (2) Moderate weight loss may be achieved if patients adhere to a weight-reduction program. Weight gain often recurs when the balloon is removed after six months. (3) Abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting are commo...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this prospective study was to evaluate the immediate results and the 6-month angiographic recurrent restenosis rate after balloon angioplasty for in-stent restenosis. BACKGROUND Despite excellent immediate and mid-term results, 20% to 30% of patients with coronary stent implantation will present an angiographic restenosis and may require additional treatment. The opt...

BACKGROUND Changes in the amplitude of the R wave (RWA) on the electrocardiogram (ECG) have been described during acute myocardial ischemia and infarction. However, this has not been well studied in a controlled setting. We hypothesized that significant increase in RWA occurs during early transmural myocardial ischemia. METHODS We prospectively evaluated changes in RWA in 50 patients during b...

PurposeWe sought to review our single-center experience with intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) optimization prior left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implantation evaluate differences in hemodynamic changes, clinical outcomes, and survival among those supported preoperative IABP versus who were not.MethodsWe retrospectively evaluated all adult patients (≥18 years old) receiving an LVAD at a si...

AIM To assess the efficacy and safety of balloon dilatation for the treatment of hepatic venous outflow obstruction (HVOO) following pediatric liver transplantation. METHODS A total of 246 pediatric patients underwent liver transplantation at our hospital between June 2013 and September 2016. Among these patients, five were ultimately diagnosed with HVOO. Seven procedures (two patients underw...

Temporal uncertainty in raw data can impede the inference of temporal and causal relationships between events and compromise the output of data-to-text NLG systems. In this paper, we introduce a framework to reason with and represent temporal uncertainty from the raw data to the generated text, in order to provide a faithful picture to the user of a particular situation. The model is grounded i...

In a distributed system, it is often important to detect the causal relationships between events, where event e 1 is causally before event e 2 if e 1 happened before e 2 and could possibly have aaected the occurrence of e 2. In this paper we argue that detecting causal relationships among events can be important for security, in the sense that it may be essential to the correct implementation o...