BACKGROUND A patient with multiple open lumbar procedures, the most recent of which was complicated by symptomatic pulmonary embolus, underwent placement of an inferior vena cava filter (IVCF). Two years after placement, she developed low back pain with radicular symptoms. CT of the lumbar spine demonstrated vertebral body erosion from the IVCF strut. In this brief report, we describe L2 verteb...

UNLABELLED We set out to assess the efficacy of radiofrequency-induced intradiscal nucleoplasty in reducing pain in symptomatic patients with MRI-defined lumbar disc herniation and their satisfaction with the procedure. We compared the patients' pain intensity and severity of disability scores before and after undergoing the procedure in a retrospective questionnaire. These patients reported st...

RNA folding is viewed here as a map assigning secondary structures to sequences. At fixed chain length the number of sequences far exceeds the number of structures. Frequencies of structures are highly nonuniform and follow a generalized form of Zipf’s law: we find relatively few common and many rare ones. By using an algorithm for inverse folding, we show that sequences sharing the same struct...

Prostatic cancer is the second most common cancer among North American men and the second leading cause of cancer deaths. It may be incidental or contribute to the cause of mechanical back pain. With such high mortality associated with metastasis, early detection is essential for appropriate medical management. Chiropractors are often consulted for back pain of mechanical origin and are in a po...

STUDY DESIGN A cross-sectional comparative study between chronic low back pain (CLBP) patients and healthy control subjects. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate reorganization in the sensory cortex by comparing cortical activity due to mechanosensory stimulation of the lumbar spine in CLBP patients versus a control group by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). ...

HYDRAstor is a scalable, secondary storage solution aimed at the enterprise market. The system consists of a back-end architectured as a grid of storage nodes built around a distributed hash table; and a front-end consisting of a layer of access nodes which implement a traditional file system interface and can be scaled in number for increased performance. This paper concentrates on the back-en...

OBJECTIVES The STarT Back Tool has good predictive performance for non-specific low back pain in primary care. We therefore aimed to investigate whether a modified STarT Back Tool predicted outcome with a broader group of musculoskeletal patients, and assessed the consequences of using existing risk-group cut-points across different pain regions. SETTING Secondary analysis of prospective data...

Epidural injections for chronic low back pain are controversial, and their effectiveness is debated. Although epidural injections are considered a minor procedure with low morbidity, catastrophic complications may occur. We describe a case of prosthetic valve endocarditis secondary to an epidural abscess after epidural injection to alert clinicians to this unusual association.

We introduce a new approach to absolute continuity of laws of Poisson functionals. It is based on the energy image density property for Dirichlet forms and on what we call the lent particle method which consists in adding a particle and taking it back after some calculation. AMS 2000 subject classifications: Primary 60G57, 60H05 ; secondary 60J45,60G51

In 2000 nearly 3,700 New Zealand 15 year-old secondary students took part in PISA 2000 (Programme for International Student Assessment1), a two-hour assessment to measure their reading, mathematical and scientific literacy (definitions of these literacies for PISA can be found on the back page). This same assessment was given to a sample of 15 year-old students in 31 other participating countries.