The authors suggest that the small bowel be assessed in all appendectomy cases for a pathological Meckel's diverticulum.

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are biopolyesters produced by bacteria as intracellular granules under metabolic stress conditions. Many carbon sources such as alkanes, alkenes, alcohols, sugars, fatty acids can be used as feedstock and thus a wide variety of polyesters and monomer units can be potentially synthetized. The work presented here describes the process to chemically modify such biopolymers in order to render them readily available for the preparation of bio-molecular conjugates as promising new classes of biocompatible biomaterials. Such hybrid biomaterials belong to the rapidly growing class of biocompatible polymers, which are of great interest for medical and therapeutic applications. In this work, the biosynthesis of a new PHA homopolymer and the chemical modification, an epoxidation reaction, are described.

Resumen• Introducción: la laringectomía casi total es una técnica quirúrgica relativamente poco difundida en nuestro medio. Resulta difícil encontrar una indicación debido al auge de los protocolos de preservación de órgano y la inclusión de pacientes con cáncer avanzado de laringe en protocolos de tratamiento con quimio-radioterapia concomitante.• Propósitos: nuestro trabajo describe la experiencia preliminar con los primeros casos operados haciendo énfasis en los resultados funcionales y complicaciones.• Material y métodos: se realiza una revision de los primeros 11 casos operados en nuestro país con la técnica de la laringectomía casi-total. Se exponen los resultados funcionales y oncológi-cos, así como la frecuencia de complicaciones de las series más importantes, así como de nuestros casos.• Resultados: de 11 pacientes operados, 8 lograron una rehabilitación funcional fonatoria. La broncoaspiración, complicación más temida, apareció en sólo dos casos y su recuperación fue espontánea en pocos días.• Conclusiones: se concluye que la laringectomía casi-total forma parte del arsenal quirúrgico en el tratamiento de las neoplasias laríngeas y faringolaringeas, siendo una técnica que, dada la experiencia a nivel internacional, se considera como una opción estándar con indicaciones muy precisas.

Infrastructure is a significant factor in economic growth for systems of government. In order to increase economic productivity, maintaining infrastructure quality is essential. One of the elements of infrastructure is roads. Roads are means which help local and national economies be more productive. Furthermore, road damage such as potholes, debris, or cracks is the cause of many on-road accidents that have cost the lives of many drivers. In this paper, we propose a system that uses Convolutional Neural Networks to detect road degradations without data pre-processing. We utilize the state-of-the-art object detection algorithm, YOLO detector for the system. First, we developed a basic system working on data collecting, pre-processing, and classification. Secondly, we improved the classification performance achieving 97.98% in the overall model testing, and then we utilized pixel-level classification and detection with a method called semantic segmentation. We were able to achieve decent results using this method to detect and classify four different classes (Manhole, Pothole, Blurred Crosswalk, Blurred Street Line). We trained a segmentation model that recognizes the four classes mentioned above and achieved great results with this model allowing the machine to effectively and correctly identify and classify our four classes in an image. Although we obtained excellent accuracy from the detectors, these do not perform particularly well on embedded systems due to their network size. Therefore, we opted for a smaller, less accurate detector that will run in real time on a cheap embedded system, like the Google Coral Dev Board, without needing a powerful and expensive GPU.