As many patients with severe corneal disease are not even considered as candidates for a human graft due to their high risk of rejection, it is essential to find ways to reduce the chance of rejection. One of the options is proper matching of the cornea donor and recipient for the Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA), a subject of much debate. Currently, patients receiving their first corneal allogra...

The evolutionary history of a set of species is commonly represented by a phylogenetic tree. Often, however, the data contain conflicting signals, which can be better represented by a more general structure, namely a phylogenetic network. Such networks allow the display of several alternative evolutionary scenarios simultaneously but this can come at the price of complex visual representations....

Reticulate evolution is a fundamental process in the evolution of certain groups of taxa. Consequently, conflicting signals in a data set may not be the result of sampling or modelling errors, but due to the fact that reticulation has played a role in the evolutionary history of the species under consideration. Assuming that our initial data set is correct, a fundamental problem is to compute t...

AIMS To report on the use of Biobrane, a synthetic skin substitute, as a temporary wound cover in patients with severe burn. In particular we wished to examine the role of Biobrane in maintaining a healthy wound bed following surgical excision and identify factors associated with regrafting. METHODS A retrospective case series review was performed on patients with severe burns (≥ 20% TBSA), a...

BACKGROUND The aim of this work was to describe the indications, complications, and outcomes of penetrating keratoplasty (PKP) in Saudi Arabia. METHODS In a retrospective, noncomparative interventional case series, the medical records of patients who underwent PKP from January 2000 to December 2008 and had a minimum follow-up of 6 months were reviewed. All corneas were obtained from eye banks...

The purpose of this postmarket surveillance registry was to document the efficacy of a vascular prosthesis coated with metallic silver in high-risk patients undergoing vascular reconstructions. Patency (primary endpoint) and freedom from graft infection (secondary endpoint) data were assessed at a minimum of 12 months in patients with significant co-morbidity and/or confirmed graft infections o...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether graft survival over a 5-year follow-up period using corneal tissue from donors older than 65 is similar to graft survival using corneas from younger donors. DESIGN Multicenter prospective, double-masked, controlled clinical trial. PARTICIPANTS One thousand ninety subjects undergoing corneal transplantation for a moderate-risk condition (principally Fuchs' dyst...

Popular methods for exploring the space of rooted phylogenetic trees use rearrangement moves such as rNNI (rooted Nearest Neighbour Interchange) and rSPR (rooted Subtree Prune and Regraft). Recently, these moves were generalized to rooted phylogenetic networks, which are a more suitable representation of reticulate evolutionary histories, and it was shown that any two rooted phylogenetic networ...

purpose: to investigate the risk factors of wound dehiscence and lens extrusion following blunt trauma in patients with penetrating keratoplasty (pk) as well as the results of treatment. methods: in a retrospective case series, 7 eyes of 7 patients including 6 male and one female subjects were investigated. all cases received primary care at the time of referral and then underwent secondary rep...