Panniculectomy and abdominoplasty in patients undergoing gynecologic surgery: a single center case series of 15 combined procedures.

The current obesity epidemic poses significant challenges to surgical specialists striving to safely and effectively deliver medical care. In the United States, approximately 33.3% of men and 35.3% of women are classified as obese. Pelvic surgery, especially in patients with gynecological malignancies and those who require complex surgical procedures carries additional risk because of the increased technical difficulty posed by excess abdominal wall tissues and increased difficulty in providing and maintaining exposure of the appropriate pelvic anatomy. Simultaneous panniculectomy or abdominoplasty in selected patients may provide better access and visualization of the surgical field, reduce operative difficulty, and decrease perioperative morbidity. We retrospectively reviewed our experience in 15 patients undergoing panniculectomy or abdominoplasty in conjunction with gynecologic surgery. This review was conducted after approval by the local institutional review board. Complications were analyzed, and 2 (13%) of the 15 patients were found to have major complications. The only statistically significant finding for prediction of a negative outcome was an association of hypertension and advanced age with increased risk of postoperative transfusion (P < 0.02).

Senior Aviator Medical Qualification Status.

INTRODUCTION: Aviation personnel are expensive to train and challenging for the services to retain because of lucrative opportunities in the civilian aviation sector and a desire among pilots for agency. The military services' retention efforts have typically utilized a combination of high continuation pays and longer service commitments of up to 10 years following initial training. One area that the services have overlooked in their attempts to retain senior aviators is quantifying and reducing medical disqualifications. Much as aging aircraft require increasing maintenance to retain full operational capability, so may pilots and other aircrew members. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This article reports on a prospectively collected cross-sectional research study evaluating the medical status of senior aviation personnel who reported being considered or selected for command. The study was deemed exempt from human subjects research by the Institutional Review Board and a waiver of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was granted. The study, which collected data at the Pentagon Flight Medical Clinic over 1 year, used a chart review of routine medical encounters and flight physicals to collect descriptive data. The goals of the study were to establish the prevalence of medically disqualifying conditions, assess the association between disqualifying conditions and age, and generate hypotheses for further research. Logistic regression of waiver need was performed for variables including prior waivers, waiver count, service, platform, age, and gender. ANOVA of readiness percentages vs. DoD targets were assessed between the services individually and in aggregate. RESULTS: The study demonstrated medical readiness rates among command-eligible senior aviators ranging from 74% for the Air Force to 40% for the Army with the Navy and Marine Corps in the middle. The sample was insufficiently powered to demonstrate differences in readiness between the services; however, the population as a whole was significantly below the DoD's readiness target of >90% (P = .000). CONCLUSIONS: None of the services met the DoD minimum readiness target of 90%. Markedly higher readiness was observed in the Air Force, the only service with a medical screening incorporated into its command selection process, but this difference was not statistically significant. Waivers increased with age and musculoskeletal concerns were common. A larger prospective cohort study should be considered to further elucidate and confirm the findings of this study. If further research confirms these findings, consideration should be made of screening command applicants for medical readiness.

Spontaneous Vitreous Hemorrhage in a Naval Aviator.

BACKGROUND: Spontaneous vitreous hemorrhage is uncommon in the general population. Of cases, 1020% are idiopathic or due to occult causes and a majority of the remainder are associated with diabetic disease. The evaluation and disposition of an aviator has not been reported previously. This case will document the work-up and safe return to flight of a patient.CASE REPORT: A 33-yr-old male MH-60R pilot presented with acute blurred vision in the left eye and eye pain which began at his desk. His review of systems was otherwise negative. His medical history was noncontributory. On initial examination his vital signs and external ocular exam were normal. He was immediately referred to the optometry clinic, where a dilated funduscopic examination (DFE) with scleral depression demonstrated a large floater OS composed of streaks of blood and tobacco dust. His DFE was otherwise normal with no retinal tears or vitreous detachments. On repeated DFEs, his intraoccular pressures remained normal and his hemorrhage resorbed without decreased visual acuity or field deficits. A hematologic work-up was negative. After 4 mo of observation, the patient was returned to flight status without further recurrence.DISCUSSION: No known associations exist between aeronautical duties and spontaneous vitreous hemorrhages. The stressors aviators are subjected to, such as high vibrations and increased g forces, may make them more likely to suffer intraocular microvascular damage that could lead to retinal detachment, vitreous detachment, and bleeding. Further reports are needed to determine the risks of recurrence in aviators and their differences from typical spontaneous vitreous hemorrhage patients.Wallace SA. Spontaneous vitreous hemorrhage in a naval aviator. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2020; 91(11):904907.

A hashtag recommendation system for twitter data streams.

BACKGROUND: Twitter has evolved into a powerful communication and information sharing tool used by millions of people around the world to post what is happening now. A hashtag, a keyword prefixed with a hash symbol (#), is a feature in Twitter to organize tweets and facilitate effective search among a massive volume of data. In this paper, we propose an automatic hashtag recommendation system that helps users find new hashtags related to their interests on-demand. METHODS: For hashtag ranking, we propose the Hashtag Frequency-Inverse Hashtag Ubiquity (HF-IHU) ranking scheme, which is a variation of the well-known TF-IDF, that considers hashtag relevancy, as well as data sparseness which is one of the key challenges in analyzing microblog data. Our system is built on top of Hadoop, a leading platform for distributed computing, to provide scalable performance using Map-Reduce. Experiments on a large Twitter data set demonstrate that our method successfully yields relevant hashtags for user's interest and that recommendations are more stable and reliable than ranking tags based on tweet content similarity. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that HF-IHU can achieve over 30 % hashtag recall when asked to identify the top 10 relevant hashtags for a particular tweet. Furthermore, our method out-performs kNN, k-popularity, and Naïve Bayes by 69, 54, and 17 %, respectively, on recall of the top 200 hashtags.

Lateral orbitotomy for a maxillary nerve schwannoma: case report.

Authors of this report describe a Fukushima Type D(b) or Kawase Type ME2 trigeminal schwannoma involving the right maxillary division in a 59-year-old woman who presented with intermittent right-sided facial numbness and pain. This tumor was successfully resected via a right lateral orbitotomy without the need for craniotomy. This novel approach to a lesion of this type has not yet been described in the scientific literature. The outcome in this case was good, and the patient's intra- and postoperative courses proceeded without complication. The epidemiology of trigeminal schwannomas and some technical aspects of lateral orbitotomy, including potential advantages of this approach over traditional transcranial as well as fully endoscopic dissections in appropriately selected cases, are also briefly discussed.

Spinal Stabilization Using Orthopedic Extremity Instrumentation Sets During Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan.

BACKGROUND: The Role III, Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan, was established to provide combat casualty care in theater for International Security Assistance Forces, Afghanistan National Security Forces, and local nationals during Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan. The authors describe their experience of treating unstable lumbar spine fractures with orthopedic extremity instrumentation sets from January 2007 to January 2008 and November 2010 to May 2011. METHODS: During the study periods, 15 patients comprising Afghanistan National Security Forces and local nationals presented to the medical facility for treatment of unstable lumbar spine fractures. The patients underwent surgery for either anterior corpectomy and instrumented fusion (n = 5) or posterior instrumented fusion (n = 10). Because of periodic scarcity of spinal instrumentation sets, orthopedic extremity instrumentation sets were used (Synthes Large Fragment LCP Instrument and Implant Set) for spinal stabilization. RESULTS: Immediate postoperative standing and sitting plain radiographs demonstrated no evidence of fracture progression or immediate hardware failure. One patient was seen in follow-up at 4 weeks and demonstrated construct stability on follow-up radiographs. CONCLUSIONS: In the combat environment with sparse resources, unstable spine fractures may potentially be treated using instrumentation not specifically designed for spinal implantation. This is an off-label use, and the authors do not recommend the use of these techniques as standard treatment in most medical environments.

An unusual presentation of pediatric osteoblastoma in a patient with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome: case report.

Osteoblastoma is an uncommon primary bone tumor that usually presents as a painful lesion in a long bone or in the spine. Osteoblastoma has been reported only twice in the literature in conjunction with systemic fibromatosis. The authors report the case of an 8-year-old girl with suspected Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a rare syndrome of systemic fibromatosis, who presented with a painless thoracic rib lesion that was found to be an osteoblastoma.