BACKGROUND Capsular contracture remains a common and dreaded complication of breast augmentation. The etiology of capsular contracture is believed to be multi-factorial, and its causes may include biofilm formation due to implant/pocket contamination with skin flora. It has been shown that insertion funnel use reduces skin contact and potential contamination by 27-fold in a cadaver model. After...

In order to enlarge the scope of the calorimetric method for the determination of creatinine and creatine it is, I think, necessary to replace the bichromate standard with standard creatinine solutions, and in the next two papers will be described various adaptations of the method based on this principle. In connection with this work I have again gone over the subject of the preparation of crea...

BACKGROUND Public health surveillance is often concerned with the analysis of health outcomes over small areas. Funnel plots have been proposed as a useful tool for assessing and visualizing surveillance data, but their full utility has not been appreciated (for example, in the incorporation and interpretation of risk factors). METHODS We investigate a way to simultaneously focus funnel plot ...

Funnel plots are a visual tool for investigating publication and other bias in meta-analysis. They are simple scatterplots of the treatment effects estimated from individual studies (horizontal axis) against a measure of study size (vertical axis). The name “funnel plot” is based on the precision in the estimation of the underlying treatment effect increasing as the sample size of component stu...

In a field emission display panel, an insulator funnel, which is called Hop funnel, has been used to separate the cathode and the anode. Secondary electrons generated on top of the insulating surface due to the primary electron bombardment are drawn to the exit hole of the funnel by the electric field. Therefore, the energy distribution of these secondary electrons influences the quality of the...

BACKGROUND Funnel plots are widely used to investigate possible publication bias in meta-analyses. There has, however, been little formal assessment of whether a visual inspection of a funnel plot is sufficient to identify publication bias. METHODS Visual assessment of bias in a funnel plot is quantified using two new statistics: the Imbalance and the Asymmetry Distance, both intended to repl...

OBJECTIVE Publication bias undermines the integrity of published research. The aim of this paper is to present a synopsis of methods for exploring and accounting for publication bias. METHODS We discussed the main features of the following methods to assess publication bias: funnel plot analysis; trim-and-fill methods; regression techniques and selection models. We applied these methods to a we...

For m-input, m-output, finite-dimensional, linear systems satisfying the classical assumptions of adaptive control (i.e., (i) minimum phase, (ii) relative degree one and (iii) positive definite high-frequency gain matrix), two control strategies are considered: the well-known λ-tracking and funnel control. An application of the λ-tracker to systems satisfying (i)–(iii) yields that all states of...