Percutaneous gastrostomy is a useful palliative technique for treatment of patients with bowel obstructions in advanced ovarian carcinoma. A description of the technique is presented along with a review of ten cases in which the procedure was used at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute at Houston. In all patients, the procedure was well tolerated and associated with little morbidity. In applicable cases, percutaneous gastrostomy appears to be superior to both nasogastric suction and operative gastrostomy for palliation of small bowel obstruction in terminal ovarian cancer.

In this paper, we present a fully tunable system able to generate mode localization between a 170 000 Q-factor quartz crystal microbalance at 1 MHz and a digital device (field programmable gate array) simulating in real time the presence of an identical and weakly-coupled second resonator. Indeed, this method allows to precisely select each parameter value and thus to reach the optimal configuration with the maximum sensitivity to perturbations. In addition, this design gives a perfect adaptability to the geometry of the piezoelectric resonator, that allows to work with much higher frequencies and Q-factors than conventional cantilevers or tuning-forks usually selected for the design of mode-localized sensors. The experimental sensitivities reached in this work are at least two orders of magnitude higher than the ones found in the literature, which is promising for the design of a new generation of ultrasensitive sensors based on Anderson localization.

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