BACKGROUND The impact of comorbidities on patients with advanced head and neck cancer treated with major surgery has not been reported before. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed clinical charts between 2004 and 2011 at our institution and identified 185 patients with clinical stage III to IV head and neck cancer treated with major surgery. Comorbidities were scored using the Adult Comorbidit...

BACKGROUND Ultrasound-guided transversus abdominis plane (TAP) injections are increasingly being used as an alternative to traditional perioperative analgesia in the abdominal region. With the use of a "blind" TAP block technique, these procedures have had variable success in cadaver and in vivo studies. For more accurate injection with the intended medication, ultrasound guidance allows visual...

During the past years, major advances have been made in understanding the sequential events involved in neural plate patterning. Positional information is already conferred to cells of the neural plate at the time of its induction in the ectoderm. The interplay between the BMP- and the Fgf- signaling pathways leads to the induction of neural cell fates. Thus, neural induction and neural plate p...

Thermophilic actinomycetes are the primary sensitizing agents in farmer's lung disease. We compared dilution pour-plate and spread-plate methods for their usefulness in enumerating thermophilic actinomycetes in moldy silage dust and evaluated the ability of a nonquantitative gravity settling technique to recover thermophilic actinomycetes from moldy silage. Spread plates and pour plates yielded...

This study was designed to evaluate the measuring range and lowest limit of detection of Bacillus endospores in the ambient room air when the Sartorius MD8 sampler, and two different culture methods for bacterial enumeration were used. Different concentrations of bioaerosol were generated inside the test chamber filled with either the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA)-filtered air or with ...

Determination of the number of cultured bacteria is essential for scientific and industrial practice. A spread plate technique is the most common and accurate method for counting of microorganisms. However, time consuming incubation does not allow for a quick estimation of the number of bacteria in a growing culture. In the present study, the results of photometric measurements: direct optical ...

In zebrafish, neuronal differentiation progresses across the retina in a pattern that is reminiscent of the neurogenic wave that sweeps across the developing eye in Drosophila. We show that expression of a zebrafish homolog of Drosophila atonal, ath5, sweeps across the eye predicting the wave of neuronal differentiation. By analyzing the regulation of ath5 expression, we have elucidated the mec...