Study design: A case report and a review of literature. Objectives: To present the first youngest infant of a 4-month-old boy with spontaneous spinal epidural hematoma in cervicothoracic spine. Setting: National Cheng Kung University Hospital, Tainan, Taiwan. Methods: A 4-month-old boy who initially presented with irritable crying, neck stiffness, and fever followed by progressive quadriparesis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the spine disclosed a space-occupying lesion on the right posterior-lateral aspect of the cervicothoracic spinal canal. Laminectomy with reconstruction in situ from C4 to T4 was performed 5 days after the onset of symptoms. Results: The boy had gradual improvement of his neurological status. Follow-up visit 1 year later, the infant's growth and development was within normal limit without any neurological deficits; his repeat MRI showed complete fusion of each implanted lamina and well expansion of the spinal cord. Conclusions: Prompt surgical decompression is valuable, irrespective of the time interval between symptom onset and operation in infant.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate pre- and post-shunting haemodynamic changes and their correlation with the clinical results in normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). Accordingly, eleven demented patients with clinical signs suggestive of NPH received examinations of cerebral blood flow velocity (BFV) and vasomotor reactivity (VMR) by transcranial Doppler sonography with carbogen testing before and after shunt treatment. Computerized tomography (CT), clinical assessment and neuropsychological grading were performed prior to and at 3 months following surgery. A control group consisting of 10 patients was included to establish baseline data. The pre-operative CBF studies in the anterior cerebral artery (ACA) and the middle cerebral artery (MCA) revealed the NPH patients did not have significant decreases of BFVs, but had significant decreases of carbogen VMR (P < 0.05). After shunting, there were no significant changes of the BFVs as compared with the pre-shunting data. The post-shunting VMR of the ACA was significantly higher than the pre-shunting one (p < 0.05), but there was no variation in that of the MCA. Both the values of post-shunting VMR in ACA and the post-shunting increase in VMR in MCA of the 7 shunt-responsive patients who improved mentally and in other symptoms were significantly higher than those of patients without improvement (p < 0.05). In addition, the five patients with gait improvement showed significantly higher values of post-shunting VMR of ACA and the post-shunting increase of VMR for both ACA and MCA when compared with those patients without gait improvement (p < 0.05, respectively). Our study supports the view that patients with NPH had various degrees of impaired VMR in both the ACA and the MCA, but showed insignificant reduction in BFVs, indicating a compensatory mechanism of CBF over time to accommodate the subnormal state of cerebral perfusion pressure. Shunt placement would improve the VMR in responsive patients. Postoperatively, an increase of VMR tends to accompany improvement of the functional state: that in the MCA alone is associated with symptomatic improvement in mental function and that increase in VMR in both the ACA and the MCA with improvement in gait, respectively.

A capillary electrode based micro-plasma system was utilized to evaluate the photo-resist stripping effect. Argon and nitrogen micro-plasmas were, respectively, employed as the working gas and ignited under atmospheric pressure. The result showed that the latter system required a much higher breakdown voltage than the former one to keep the micro-plasma in a steady state. Nitrogen micro-plasma with the inclusion of atmospheric oxygen was relatively rich in N, O-containing varieties, which thereafter induced complex reactions, e.g. by forming C–N,O structures, with the chemical substances on the photo-resist surface and required extensive treatment time to complete the photo-resist stripping process. In contrast, the use of atmospheric argon micro-plasma was very successful in increasing the photo-resist stripping rate. It is presumable that for this particular process, a simple physical effect with reduced reaction steps is highly proficient in removing photo-resist molecules from the substrate. One may therefore adjust the composition of atmospheric micro-plasma for an effective treatment on a coating.

A novel intersubband optical transition, incorporating interband and p-type intersubband optical transition mechanisms, in a suitably designed GaSb/InAs superlattice is proposed. Such a structure utilizes the strong mixing of GaSb light-hole band with InAs conduction band and the heavy-hole to light-hole intervalence-subband transition in the GaSb/InAs superlattice to obtain a strong normal incidence photoabsorption coefficient (over 8.0×104 cm−1) at a wavelength near 10 μm.

No abstract