Ventral hernia repairs are among the most frequently performed surgical procedures. The variations of repair techniques are multiple and outcome has been unacceptable. Despite the high volume, it has been difficult to obtain sufficient data to provide evidence for best practice. In order to monitor national surgical quality and provide the warranted high volume data, the first national ventral ...

In spontaneous speech, speakers segment their speech into intonational phrases, and make repairs to what they are saying. However, techniques for understanding spontaneous speech tend to treat these events as noise, in the same manner as they handle out-of-grammar constructions and misrecognitions. In our approach, we advocate that these events should be explicitly modeled. We modify the speech...

One of the characteristics of spontaneous speech is the abundance of speech repairs, in which speakers go back and repeat or change something they have just said. In other work [7], we proposed a language model for speech recognition that can detect and correct speech repairs in English. In this paper, we show that this model works equally as well on a Japanese corpus of spontaneous speech. The...

Repair of inguinal hernia is one of the commonest operations performed by surgeons around the world. The treatment of this common problem has seen an evolution from the pure tissue repairs to the prosthetic repairs and in the recent past to laparoscopic repair. The fact that so many hernia repairs are practiced is a testimony to the fact that probably none is distinctly superior to the other. T...

Inguinal hernia is a very common problem. Surgical repair is the current approach, whereas asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic hernias may be good candidate for watchful waiting. Prophylactic antibiotics can be used in centers with high rate of wound infection. Local anesthesia is a suitable and economic option for open repairs, and should be popularized in day-case setting. Numerous repair m...

Several studies have noted that increasing age is a significant factor for diminished rotator cuff healing, while biomechanical studies have suggested the reason for this may be an inferior healing environment in older patients. Larger tears and fatty infiltration or atrophy negatively affect rotator cuff healing. Arthroscopic rotator cuff repair, double-row repairs, performing a concomitant ac...