Pediatric Laryngotracheal Stenosis and Airway Reconstruction: A Review of Voice Outcomes, Assessment, and Treatment Issues

Laryngotracheal stenosis is defined as a congenital or acquired narrowing of the airway. Congenital causes may include subglottic membranous or cartilaginous narrowing. Acquired causes may include trauma due to prolonged endotracheal or tracheal intubation or laryngotracheal injury. Although advances have been made over the past 30 years in reconstructive surgeries to improve airway patency in these patients, long-term laryngeal function for voice production is not well defined in this population. This review examines causes, symptoms and signs, and methods for diagnosing laryngotracheal stenosis. Surgical management procedures are briefly summarized. The current literature on voice outcomes is summarized. The predominant voice characteristics in the population are presented, although results are challenged by the heterogeneity of voice presentation and paucity of data from instrumental measures. Considerations for subjective and instrumental assessment, measures of quality of life, instrumental methods, and treatment options specific to the needs of this population are discussed. Research strategies to identify long-term outcomes of surgical and behavioral treatments in this population are posed.     

Palladium-catalyzed pseudo-domino cyclizations: An easy entry toward polycondensed pyrrolidone derivatives

A new type I palladium-catalyzed pseudo-domino process is developed, in which a single Pd-based catalytic system promotes two mechanistically unrelated, sequential catalytic cycles in chronologically distinct order. Suitable precursors undergo an allylic alkylation and a Heck coupling in sequence, affording polycondensed pyrrolidone derivatives. Depending on the starting precursors, intra/inter or doubly intramolecular processes can be obtained. The allylic alkylation process takes place always very smoothly. On the other hand, the Heck coupling turns out to be rather difficult either when the process is intermolecular, or when an intramolecular process generates polycondensed structures featuring three fused bonds connected to a common carbon atom. In such difficult cases, use of the Herrmann-Beller phosphapalladacycle allowed to catalyze the coupling. This study demonstrates also that allylic alkylations can be catalyzed by the Herrmann-Beller phosphapalladacycle.     

Vortex lattice mobility and effective pinning potentials in the peak effect region in YBCO crystals

The peak effect (PE) in the critical current density in both low and high temperature superconductors has been the subject of a large amount of experimental and theoretical work in the last few/several years. In the case of YBCO, crucial discussions describing a dynamic or a static picture are not settled. In that region of field and temperature the mobility of the vortex lattice (VL) is found to be dependent on the dynamical history. Recently we reported evidence that the VL reorganizes and accesses to robust VL configurations (VLCs) with different effective pinning potential wells arising in response to different system histories. One of the keys to understand the nature of the PE is to investigate the VL behavior in the vicinity of the various VLCs in the region of the PE. The stability of these VLCs was investigated and it was found that they have distinct characteristic relaxation times, which may be related to elastic or plastic creep processes. In this paper we review some of these results and propose a scenario to describe the PE in YBCO crystals.     

Cube factorizations of complete graphs

A cube factorization of the complete graph on n vertices, K_n, is a 3‐factorization of K_n in which the components of each factor are cubes. We show that there exists a cube factorization of K_n if and only if n ≡ 16 (mod 24), thus providing a new family of uniform 3‐factorizations as well as a partial solution to an open problem posed by Kotzig in 1979. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Unified theory of bound and scattering molecular Rydberg states as quantum maps

Using a representation of multichannel quantum defect theory in terms of a quantum Poincaré map for bound Rydberg molecules, we apply Jung's scattering map to derive a generalized quantum map, that includes the continuum. We show that this representation not only simplifies the understanding of the method, but moreover produces considerable numerical advantages. Finally we show under what circumstances the usual semi-classical approximations yield satisfactory results. In particular we see that singularities that cause problems in semi-classics are irrelevant to the quantum map.