Characteristics of Pediatric Nasal Foreign Body Cases That Required Multiple Removal Procedures: A Single Tertiary Medical Center Cross-Sectional Study.

OBJECTIVES: Removal of nasal foreign bodies in children should be completed as few numbers of times as possible to reduce the burden on the child. This study aimed to reveal the characteristics of pediatric nasal foreign body cases that required multiple removal procedure and to investigate the appropriate removal method for each shape of foreign body. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed patients who visited a pediatric emergency department because of nasal foreign body from November 1, 2018, to October 31, 2020. We compared the characteristics of patients, foreign bodies, and treatment between the success and failure groups in the first removal procedure. Moreover, we described the detail of patients in the failure group. We also showed final successful removal methods according to the shape of the foreign bodies. RESULTS: We included 104 children in our analysis. Between the success and failure groups in the first removal procedure, there was no statistically significant difference in the characteristics of patients and foreign bodies but a significant difference in the removal method ( P < 0.001). In the failure groups, the most frequent number of times required for removal is 2 and the most common methods in the first removal procedure was the parent's kiss, most of which were performed on spherical foreign bodies in younger children, Finally, only 7 cases (6.7%) failed to remove the foreign body. According to the shape of the foreign bodies, the percentage of forceps and clamps used for successful removal was high in every shape. CONCLUSIONS: There was a significant difference in the removal method between the success and failure groups in the first removal procedure, but finally, most foreign bodies were removed by emergency physicians. Therefore, further research is needed to determine the appropriate removal method for each patient and foreign body.

Computer-aided liver surgical planning system using CT volumes.

In this paper, we presented our newly developed computer-aided liver surgical planning system for patient-specific treatments by using the patient's CT volumes. The system is composed of three modules, liver segmentation, vessel extraction, and visualization & interaction modules. It can prepare a virtual environment for patient-specific liver surgical planning and simulations. We also developed an original visualization library, which is based on GPU (graphics processing unit) computing for real-time interaction and visualization. The effectiveness of our system was evaluated by surgeons with liver surgery simulations.