'Rheum' comes from the Greek-a 'watery discharge' (OED)-and rheumatological literature as we scan it today has had two main historical sources for its now ever faster running river of words: (a) the spa waters and hydrology from the Middle Ages onward, beautifully illustrated in mediaeval woodcuts, and (b) the more modern mainstream of general medicine itself, even more widely and more strongly...

Rapidly-flowing ice streams are an important mechanism through which ice sheets lose mass, and much work has been focussed on elucidating the processes that increase or decrease their velocity. Recent work using standard inverse methods has inferred previously-unrecognised regular patterns of high basal shear stress (‘sticky spots’ >200 kPa) beneath a number of ice streams in Antarctica and Gre...

The development of the axial skeleton is a complex process, consisting of segmentation and differentiation of somites and ossification of the vertebrae. The autosomal recessive skeletal fusion with sterility (sks) mutation of the mouse causes skeletal malformations due to fusion of the vertebrae and ribs, but the underlying defects of vertebral formation during embryonic development have not ye...

Magnetic resonance guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MRgHIFU) is a new type of minimally invasive therapy for treating malignant liver tissues. Since the ribs on the beam path can compromise an effective therapy, detecting them and tracking their motion on MR images is of great importance. However, due to poor magnetic signal emission of bones, ribs cannot be entirely observed in MR. In...

[1] Independent lithologic and structural controls in fluvial bedrock systems interact with coarse sediment transport processes to play a key role in bedrock incision processes such as abrasion. During a 3 year study on the Ocoee River in the Blue Ridge Province of the southern Appalachians, USA, we used painted tracer clasts to measure coarse sediment transport dynamics and address whether dif...

UNLABELLED Thyroid hormone, nerve growth factor (NGF) and norepinephrine (NE) and weight-bearing affect bone metabolism, yet interactions between these factors and osseous tissue have not been investigated. Therefore, the aims of the study were to measure NGF and NE concentrations in weight-bearing and non-weight-bearing bones from euthyroid (control) and hyperthyroid (HT) rats. Hyperthyroidism...

BACKGROUND We analyzed the results of surgical reduction and fixation of ribs under thoracic epidural anesthesia and analgesia (TEA) in patients who had no more than 3 consecutive rib fractures with severe displacement to examine the clinical usefulness of this method. MATERIALS AND METHODS From May 2008 to March 2010, 35 patients underwent surgical reduction and fixation of ribs under TEA. W...

We developed a method for suppression of the contrast of ribs in chest radiographs by means of a massive training artificial neural network (MTANN). The MTANN is a trainable highly nonlinear filter that can be trained by using input chest radiographs and the corresponding teacher images. We used either the soft-tissue image or the bone image obtained by use of a dual-energy subtraction techniqu...

Introduction: Cervical rib is relatively uncommon congenital abnormality that originates from the seventh cervical vertebrae and rarely from the sixth vertebrae. The purpose of this paper is to consider that this abnormal condition is an important cause of neurovascular compression at the thoracic outlet. Methods: In this study all patients who were referred to radiology departm...