What a useful tool the vascular anomalies classification described by Wassef et al would have been during my medical training! As a pediatric resident in the 1980s, I was frequently perplexed by the many red “birth marks” I was confronted with while performing newborn and well-child examinations. Despite a reassuring nod from attendings, who offered terms like “port wine stain” and “strawberry ...

The diffuse reflectance spectrum of human skin in the visible region (400-800 nm) contains information on the concentrations of chromophores such as melanin and haemoglobin. This information may be extracted by fitting the reflectance spectrum with an optical diffusion based analytical expression applied to a layered skin model. With the use of the analytical expression, it is assumed that ligh...

One summer evening in 2004 our 11 year old son went to bed after various delaying tactics—arguments about friends who stay up later, forgetting to brush teeth, coming down for a drink of water. Shortly afterwards the dining room door opened. In he came, cupping his bleeding nose in one hand as he gripped the bridge of the nose with the other. We led him to the kitchen sink to help him clean up ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the relative efficacy of lidocaine-prilocaine and tetracaine for procedural pain in children. METHODS Systematic review was performed (MEDLINE1990-June 2001) of all studies comparing the efficacy of these 2 modalities of pain relief in children undergoing painful cutaneous procedures. Search terms included lidocaine, prilocaine, tetracaine, and anesthesia. RESULTS Eig...

The diversity and the composition of the yeast micropopulation significantly contribute to the sensory characteristics of wine. The growth of each wine yeast species is characterized by a specific metabolic activity, which determines concentrations of flavour compounds in the final wine. However, it must be underlined that, within each species, significant strain variability has been recorded. ...

BACKGROUND So far, pulsed dye lasers have been regarded as the gold standard in the treatment of port-wine stains (PWS). Recently, intense pulsed light (IPL) has been reported to achieve more pronounced fading in some patients. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the efficacy and the side effects of IPL treatment of PWS in a direct comparison to the short-pulsed dye laser (SPDL) and the long-pulsed dye la...

Laparoscopic entry is a blind procedure and it often represents a problem for all the related complications. In the last three decades, rapid advances in laparoscopic surgery have made it an invaluable part of general surgery, but there remains no clear consensus on an optimal method of entry into the peritoneal cavity. The aim of this paper is to focus on the evolution of two used methods of e...

The effectiveness of changes in practice can only be determined by comparing outcome before and after their introduction. This report presents and discusses the neonatal statistics from Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH) over the last 19 years and attempts to determine the effects of changes in practice introduced during the last year of the study period. Neonatal mortality rates have been ve...

This paper reports a standardised method termed as Stain Degradation Assessment (SDA) method, developed for the quantitative evaluation of self-cleaning efficiency of the finished fabric. The method involves (i) a standardized staining procedure to apply a uniform stain on the fabric, (ii) instrumental evaluation of photodegradation of stain in terms of K/S using a template to reduce error, and...

BACKGROUND This study investigates the safety and feasibility of transumbilical single-port laparoscopic salpingectomy (SPLS) using conventional laparoscopic instruments compared to conventional multi-port laparoscopic salpingectomy (MPLS) for surgical treatment of tubal pregnancy. MATERIAL AND METHODS We conducted a retrospective analysis of 63 patients with tubal pregnancy who underwent SPL...