Objective To determine whether perioperative outcomes differ between patients undergoing concurrent compared with non-concurrent bariatric operations in the USA.Design Retrospective, propensity score matched cohort study.Setting Hospitals in the US accredited by the American College of Surgeons' metabolic and bariatric surgery accreditation and quality improvement program.Participants 513 167 p...

Restoring all facility operations after the 2001 Amerithrax attacks took years to complete, highlighting the need to reduce remediation time. Some of the most time intensive tasks were environmental sampling and sample analyses. Composite sampling allows disparate samples to be combined, with only a single analysis needed, making it a promising method to reduce response times. We developed a st...

The paper addresses the modular design of composite solving strategies for multicriteria ranking (sorting). Here a " scale of creativity " that is close to creative levels proposed by Altshuller is used as the reference viewpoint: (i) a basic object, (ii) a selected object, (iii) a modified object, and (iv) a designed object (e.g., composition of object components). These levels maybe used in v...

In-situ aluminum matrix composite is the innovation of high performance material technology and it has superior interfacial integrity and thermodynamic stability between the matrix and reinforcement. During synthesis, the ZrB2 particle is formed by exothermic reaction within the aluminum melt. As a result, small, fine and oxide free reinforcements are formed. Excessive temperature released from...

BACKGROUND Bariatric surgery is technically demanding surgery performed on high-risk patients. Previous studies using administrative databases have shown a relationship between surgeon volume and patient outcome after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB). We examined the relationship between surgeons' annual RYGB volumes and 30-day patient outcomes at 10 centers within the United States. METHODS T...

The relational model supports the view concept, but relational views are limited in structure. OODBMSs do not support the view concept, so that all applications must share the same arrangement of object classes and inheritance. We describe the Penguin system and its support for the view concept. Each application can have its own arrangement of object classes and inheritance, and these are de ne...

As many 3D on-line games appear, there is an increased need for simple and efficient techniques to create many new faces. This paper presents a new algorithm to composite 3D faces for game characters. No remeshing or segmentation of 3D models is required in our method. Our algorithm is composed of four simple steps: building a one-to-one geometric correspondence between models, local resampling...

Composite tissue loss in extremities involving neurovascular structures has been a major challenge for reconstructive surgeons. Reconstruction of large defects can only be achieved with microsurgical procedures. The success of free flap operations depends on the presence of healthy recipient vessels. In cases with no suitable donor artery and vein or in which even the use of vein grafts would n...

Predicate encryption is a new type of public key encryption that enables searches on encrypted data. By using predicate encryption, we can search keywords or attributes on encrypted data without decrypting ciphertexts. Hidden vector encryption (HVE) is a special kind of predicate encryption. HVE supports the evaluation of conjunctive equality, comparison, and subset operations between attribute...