[Hemi-atlas: report of five cases].

C1 partial aplasia is a rare congenital deformity which can produce unacceptable progressive severe torticollis. Five such cases treated in two regional Pediatric Hospitals of Argentin are presented here. There were 4 girls and 1 boy, with a mean age of 6 years; four of them had formation defect of articular mass (Villa's Area 3) causing fixed torticollis in 3 who underwent surgery.

Stab injury of the spinal cord surgically treated.

The authors report a case of thoracic spinal cord stab injury with neurologic impairment that was treated surgically after injury. A literature review and case analysis indicate that surgical extraction of foreign bodies retained within the spinal canal is indicated to avoid infection, delayed myelopathy, and neurologic loss. The amount of motor and functional recovery for incomplete injuries after spinal cord stab wound can be strikingly good despite pathologic changes to severely damaged areas, and removal of retained intraspinal metallic fragment can improve this neurologic outcome.

Clubfoot surgical treatment: preliminary results of a prospective comparative study of two techniques.

Twenty patients with 30 idiopathic resistant clubfeet were operated on by the same surgeon. The mean patient age was 7.7 months (range, 3.

Chordoma of the lumbar L2 vertebra: case report and review of the literature.

We report four new cases of chordoma of "the mobile spine", all at the L2 level. Diagnosis was often delayed due to predominantly nonspecific low back symptoms; however, neurological involvement is more frequent than in chordoma with a sacrococcygeal localization. No pathognomonic images have been described for any imaging modality, and differential diagnosis should include metastases, chondrosarcoma, and giant-cell tumor.

DECIDE: a software for computer-assisted evaluation of diagnostic test performance.

The evaluation of the performance of clinical tests is a complex problem involving different steps and many statistical tools, not always structured in an organic and rational system. This paper presents a software which provides an organic system of statistical tools helping evaluation of clinical test performance. The program allows (a) the building and the organization of a working database, (b) the selection of the minimal set of tests with the maximum information content, (c) the search of the model best fitting the distribution of the test values, (d) the selection of optimal diagnostic cut-off value of the test for every positive/negative situation, (e) the evaluation of performance of the combinations of correlated and uncorrelated tests.