Purpose: The Nuss procedure for pectus excavatum has rapidly gained acceptance among pediatric surgeons. We present the results and lessons learned from our initial 50 patients undergoing the minimally invasive pectus repair. Patients and methods: After obtaining Internal Review Board approval, we retrospectively reviewed patients undergoing the Nuss procedure from April 1998 to September 2002....

Simulations predict that the dark matter halos of galaxies should have central cusps, while those inferred from observed galaxies do not have cusps. We demonstrate, using both linear perturbation theory and n-body simulations, that a disk bar, which should be ubiquitous in forming galaxies, can produce cores in cuspy CDM dark matter profiles within five bar orbital times. Simulations of forming...

implant-supported craniofacial prostheses are made to restore defective areas in the face and cranium. this clinical report describes a technique for fabrication of an orbital prosthesis with three adjacent implants in the left lateral orbital rim of a 60-year-old woman. selection of appropriate attachment system (individual magnetic abutments versus bar-clip attachment) for implant-supported o...

In this article, we utilise the non-relativistic potential model to calculate mass-spectra of all bottom [ $$bb][{\bar{b}}{\bar{b}}$$ ] and heavy-light $$bq][{\bar{b}}{\bar{q}}$$ (q = u,d) tetraquark states in diquark–antidiquark approximation. The four-body problem is reduced into two body by numerically solving $$Schr\ddot{o}dinger$$ equation using a Cornell-inspired along with relativistic c...

The PSD-95/Discs-large/ZO-1 homology (PDZ) domain protein, protein interacting with C kinase 1 (PICK1) contains a C-terminal Bin/amphiphysin/Rvs (BAR) domain mediating recognition of curved membranes; however, the molecular mechanisms controlling the activity of this domain are poorly understood. In agreement with negative regulation of the BAR domain by the N-terminal PDZ domain, PICK1 distrib...

This paper proposes a method to autonomously extract stable visual landmarks from sensory data. Given a 2D occupancy map, a mobile robot rst extracts vertical line features which are distinct and on vertical planar surfaces, because they are expected to be observed reliably from various viewpoints. Since the feature information such as the position and the length includes uncertainties due to e...

Segmentation is the most challenging part of the Arabic handwriting recognition, due to the unique characteristics of Arabic writing that allows the same shape to denote different characters. In this paper, an off-line Arabic handwriting recognition system is proposed. The processing details are presented in three main stages. Firstly, the image is skeletonized to one pixel thin. Secondly, tran...

In PLoS Biology, volume 5, issue 3: Figue 8A was published without a scale bar. The corrected fi gure is as follows. The legend remains the same.

Aim: To biomechanically analyze two fixation techniques in polyurethane hemi-mandibular body fractures, using a universal testing machine. Methods: The study employed 10 polyurethane hemi-mandible replicas, which simulated simple fractures of the mandibular body, divided into two groups: one group comprised 5 hemi-mandibles with two 2.0 mm system plates in the tension and compression zones, whi...