BACKGROUND: In order to determine the type and incidence of pulmonary complications associated with the placement of narrow-bore enteral feeding tubes we conducted a prospective, descriptive study in the multidisciplinary intensive care unit (ICU) of a university hospital. All patients that had narrow-bore enteral feeding tubes inserted over a 2-year period (1993-1995) were included. The study ...

Optical and nonlinear-optical properties of negativeindex nanocomposite as well as the feasibility of a design of novel photonic microdevices and all-optical data processing chips are numerically simulated. Keywords—Numerical simulation, nano materials and nanostructures, negative-index metamaterials, nanophotonics, nano and micro devices, all-optical switches, optical frequency narrow-band fil...

Wiener process with instantaneous reflection in narrow tubes of width ε ≪ 1 around axis x is considered in this paper. The tube is assumed to be (asymptotically) non-smooth in the following sense. Let V (x) be the volume of the cross-section of the tube. We assume that 1 ε V (x) converges in an appropriate sense to a non-smooth function as ε ↓ 0. This limiting function can be composed by smooth...

Inorganic precipitation reactions are known to self-organize a variety of macroscopic structures, including hollow tubes. We discuss recent advances in this field with an emphasis on experiments similar to 'silica gardens'. These reactions involve metal salts and sodium silicate solution. Reactions triggered from reagent-loaded microbeads can produce tubes with inner radii of down to 3 μm. Dist...

We present a novel surface plasmon resonance (SPR) configuration based on narrow groove (sub-15 nm) plasmonic nano-gratings such that normally incident radiation can be coupled into surface plasmons without the use of prism-coupling based total internal reflection, as in the classical Kretschmann configuration. This eliminates the angular dependence requirements of SPR-based sensing and allows ...