Three-dimensional measurement technique to assess implant position and orientation after total knee arthroplasty.

The performance of implant placement technologies are often evaluated based on their achieved post-operative implant alignment. Therefore accurate assessment techniques are necessary to compare pre-operatively planned implant positions with the corresponding post-operatively placed implant positions in total knee arthroplasty. This paper describes a CT based 3D measurement method for evaluation of implant positioning accuracy comparing post-operative implant position to the corresponding pre-operative planned implant position using 3D virtual models.

Clinical review: Intensive insulin therapy in critically ill patients: NICE-SUGAR or Leuven blood glucose target?

Context: Hyper- and hypoglycemia are associated with increased mortality of critically ill patients, but whether this association is causal remains unclear. Early randomized-controlled studies compared insulin infusion targeting "age-normal" blood glucose levels, labeled intensive insulin therapy, with an approach that considered hyperglycemia as a beneficial adaptation. These studies found benefits with maintaining normoglycemia.

Collagen production in cardiac fibroblasts during inhibition of angiotensin-converting enzyme and aminopeptidases.

Objective: To determine whether lisinopril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor, and bestatin, an aminopeptidase inhibitor with broad specificity, could affect collagen production in control and transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta1-treated cardiac fibroblasts.

Design And Methods: Cardiac fibroblasts from passage 2 from normal male adult rats were cultured to confluency, incubated with or without 600 pmol/l TGF-beta1 for 2 days in serum-free Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium and then incubated with the test products (lisinopril or bestatin) for 1 day in this medium with added ascorbic acid, beta-aminoproprionitrile and tritiated proline. Soluble collagen was measured in the conditioned medium and non-soluble collagen in the cell layer.

The ubiquitously expressed pICln protein forms homomeric complexes in vitro.

Endothelial cells contain a cell-volume sensitive chloride conductance with biophysical properties similar to those of a ubiquitously expressed chloride current that is activated by cell swelling. The latter current has been associated with the ICln protein (pICln) which may be the chloride channel itself or, alternatively, a channel regulator. We were therefore interested in whether pICln is involved in the endothelial volume-sensitive chloride current.

Plant regeneration through direct somatic embryogenesis from protoplasts of banana (Musa spp.).

We report the isolation and regeneration of protoplasts from an embryogenic banana (Musa spp.) cell suspension culture initiated from in vitro proliferating meristems. A high yielding isolation method (up to 6×10(7) protoplasts.