Effects of laparoscopic vs open abdominal surgery on costs and hospital readmission rate and its effect modification by surgeons' case volume.

Background: Laparoscopy provides a minimally invasive alternative to open abdominal surgery. Current data describing its association with hospital readmission and costs in relation to surgeon laparoscopic case volume is limited to smaller databases and subsets of operations.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study of 23,285 adult abdominal operations from 2007 to 2015 compares 30-day readmission rate and costs between laparoscopic and open abdominal operations and examines effect modification by surgeon laparoscopic case volume.

Inguinal hernia containing a native orthotopic kidney.

We report a rare case of an inguinal hernia containing part of a native kidney and present a review of the literature with regard to urological findings in patients with inguinal hernias. This case involves an elderly man with known bilateral inguinal hernias with an incidental radiographic finding of a large right inguinal hernia containing the inferior pole of the right kidney. The patient was not symptomatic from the hernia and given his overall frailty, no surgical intervention was offered.

Diagnosis of sepsis from a drop of blood by measurement of spontaneous neutrophil motility in a microfluidic assay.

Current methods for the diagnosis of sepsis have insufficient precision, causing regular misdiagnoses. Microbiological tests can help diagnose sepsis but are usually too slow to have an impact on timely clinical-decision making. Neutrophils have high sensitivity to infections, yet measurements of neutrophil surface markers, genomic changes, and phenotype alterations have had only a marginal effect on sepsis diagnosis.

PhaP is involved in the formation of a network on the surface of polyhydroxyalkanoate inclusions in Cupriavidus necator H16.

Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) inclusions are polymeric storage inclusions formed in some bacterial species when carbon levels are high but levels of another essential nutrient, such as nitrogen, are low. Though much is known about PHA synthesis, little is known about inclusion structure. In this study, atomic force microscopy (AFM) was employed to elucidate the structure of PHA inclusions at the nanoscale level, including the characterization of different layers of structure.