OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this article is to retrospectively evaluate the long-term clinical results of balloon dilation in the treatment of benign anastomotic strictures after esophagectomy and to identify factors associated with stricture recurrence. MATERIALS AND METHODS. From January 1996 to June 2011, a total of 309 sessions of balloon dilation were performed in 155 patients with benign anastomotic strictures after esophagectomy. Long-term clinical effectiveness was assessed using the following variables: technical and clinical success, complications, and patency rates. Factors independently related to recurrence were evaluated with the Cox model. Tested variables were age, sex, operation type, postoperative anastomotic leakage, balloon size, length of stricture, time to postoperative stricture development, complications, and neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy. RESULTS. The mean follow-up period was 37 months (range, 1–159 months). Overall clinical success was achieved in 153 patients (99%) after a single...

4 Gb/s/pin 32 bit 512 Mb GDDR4 (Graphics Double Data Rate 4) SDRAM was implemented by using an 80 nm CMOS process. It employs a data bus inversion (DBI) coding to overcome the bottleneck of a parallel single-ended signaling, a power consumption of I/O, power supply noise, and crosstalk. Both DBI AC and DC modes are combined to a single circuit by eliminating the feedback path of a conventional DBI AC circuit while achieving high-speed operation. The proposed DBI circuit uses an analog majority voter insensitive to mismatch for small area and delay. R_onmiddot tuning further improves the voltage and time margin by adding a user-supplied offset to auto-calibrated R_onmiddot. In addition, a dual duty cycle corrector (DCC) is used to reduce duty error and jitter by averaging two outputs of two DCCs. Measured results show that DBI DC coding reduces the peak-to-peak jitter from 65.5 ps to 44.5 ps and the voltage fluctuation from 183 mV to 115 mV at the data rate of 4 Gb/s with the 2 V.

Background and study aims: It is known that metal stent placement is safe, easy, and effective for the treatment of malignant colorectal obstruction, but these stents are associated with delayed complications of tumor ingrowth and stent migration. The aim of this study was to prospectively investigate the technical feasibility, clinical effectiveness, and safety of a dual-design colorectal stent (consisting of an outer stent and an inner bare nitinol stent) in patients with malignant colorectal obstruction. Patients and methods: Placement of the dual stent using a 4.5-mm stent delivery system was attempted in 151 patients with malignant colorectal obstruction, either before surgery (n = 50) or for palliation (n = 101). Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to identify risk factors associated with complications. Results: Stent placement was technically successful in 145/151 patients (96 %). Of the patients who had a technically successful placement, bowel obstruction resolved within 2 days after stent placement in 48/50 (96 %) of the patients in the bridge-to-surgery group and in 87/95 (92 %) of the patients in the palliative group. Perforation occurred in 16 patients, incomplete stent expansion in eight patients, stent migration in four patients, tumor overgrowth in five patients, severe rectal pain in five patients, and bleeding in eight patients. Complete obstruction was the only significant risk factor for perforation (odds ratio 6.88, 95 % CI 2.04 - 23.17, P = 0.002). In the palliative group, the median survival was 152.0 days and the mean survival was 263.8 days. Conclusions: The dual stent with a 4.5-mm stent delivery system is easy to insert, safe, and reasonably effective for the palliative treatment of malignant colorectal obstruction. However, a great deal of care is needed in its deployment because of the high rate of perforation.