BACKGROUND Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) has been administered since the 1990s and is now one of the major treatments for breast cancer. It can achieve extremely positive results in some patients. Whether NAC affects immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) using an expander, however, remains unclear. METHODS A retrospective study was performed at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) hosp...

BACKGROUND The authors aimed to quantify overall patient satisfaction with three breast reconstruction techniques and identify factors that have influenced satisfaction. METHODS Two hundred sixty-eight questionnaires were mailed at least 6 months after immediate breast reconstruction to consecutive breast reconstruction patients over a 3-year period. A second questionnaire was sent out 9 mont...

We aimed to evaluate a new technique for intraoral expansion of soft tissue with a self-inflatable expander in rabbits. We placed a self-inflatable soft tissue expander bilaterally in eight rabbits under the periosteum of the mandible through an extraoral approach. The expander was left to self-inflate for two weeks, after which the animals were killed and specimens collected for histological e...

An optical system called the optical expander is described and investigated. The optical expander electro-optically expands an optical Boolean pattern encoded in d bits into an optical pattern of size N bits. It is assumed that d is equal to c log(2)N for some constant c, and each expanded pattern is orthogonal to the others. Two different architectures to implement the optical expander are des...

The refrigeration cycle with the thro~tling device has moe work power consumption and less refrigeration capacity than tha~ with the expander. It is S':Jggested that substituting the expander for the throttling device in the refrigeration cycle should be the efficient way for saving the energy of the refrigeration system. Up to now, the design and ~anufacturing of the two-phase expander seems t...

A compact multicolor beam illuminator and a compact multicolor beam expander are presented. The illuminator performs the dual task of demultiplexing a narrow red-green-blue (RGB) input beam into three separate beams, each of a different color, and expanding them to yield three separate magnified plane waves. The beam expander expands a narrow RGB input beam into a single magnified RGB plane wav...

Overview If ALIGNs or NOTIFYs are corrupted, but they are replaced in the data stream by expander(s) with valid ERROR primitives, the elasticity buffer of an expander or the frame recipient could overflow at a later time. If the expander determines that its elasticity buffer is full and it is expecting an ALIGN, it should be allowed to delete the invalid dword (assuming it might have been an AL...

Families of expander graphs are sparse graphs such that the number of vertices in each graph grows yet each graph remains difficult to disconnect. Expander graphs are of great importance in theoretical computer science. In this paper we study the connection between the Cheeger constant, a measure of the connectivity of the graph, and the smallest nonzero eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian. We sh...

In the present article, a model of scroll expander will be introduced. This model is able to evaluate the performance of a given machine with influence of the geometry. Several losses are also included by the model such as internal leakages, heat transfers or mechanical losses. The forces generated by the gas pressure on the involutes can also be calculated. That expander model is used in order...

Four different ways of obtaining low-density parity-check codes from expander graphs are considered. For each case, lower bounds on the minimum stopping set size and the minimum pseudocodeword weight of expander (LDPC) codes are derived. These bounds are compared with the known eigenvalue-based lower bounds on the minimum distance of expander codes. Furthermore, Tanner’s parity-oriented eigenva...