SUMMARYThe aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the etiology of the couples and risk of fertilization failure (FF) in conventional in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles and the effect of rescue intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) technique to offspring. A total of 2542 IVF cycles were divided into four groups according to infertile etiology: Group A -primary infertility with normal semen parameters; Group B -secondary infertility with oligoasthenozoospermia; Group C -primary infertility with oligoasthenozoospermia; and Group D -secondary infertility with normal semen parameters. The results showed that there were significant differences in incidence of FF among Group A (16.8%), Group B (20.9%), Group C (48.7%), and Group D (0.9%) (p < 0.001). Logistic regression models demonstrated that primary infertility (OR: 10.898, 95% CI: 4.651-25.583, p < 0.001) and oligoasthenozoospermia (OR: 12.215, 95% CI: 5.903-25.276, p < 0.001) were independent risk factors for FF. There were no significant differences in main outcomes between conventional ICSI and rescue ICSI. In conclusion, the patients with primary infertility and oligoasthenozoospermia might be at higher risk of FF. The rescue ICSI technique is safe and helpful for IVF cycles of FF.

Myxoma is the most common benign neoplasm of the heart. This work is the first to present an unusual left atrium and mitral valve cardiac myxoma which cannot be completely resected. This cardiac myxoma was also associated with abundant mucopolysaccharidic matrix, including mucin. Mucin gene expression is cell- and tissue-specific, with variations during cell differentiation and inflammation, and is altered during carcinogenesis. The expression of mucin genes in cardiac myxoma has never been elucidated previously. Detailed immunohistochemical analysis of MUC1, MUC2 and MUC5AC has been performed in this left atrium and mitral valve myxoma. Notably, the expressions of mucins in cardiac myxoma must be further evaluated.

Coronary arterio-venous fistula (CAVF) is a rare coronary artery anomaly. We demonstrated the rare findings of a large congenital aorto-right atrial fistula with initial presentation of heart failure symptoms. Transthoracic echocardiography and transesophageal echocardiography made the accurate diagnosis. Further haemodynamic and angiographic study proved this large CAVF with extraor-dinary oxygen saturation step-up (26%) and large pulmonary to systemic shunt (Qp/Qs 5 4.25). It was corrected by surgery because of evidence of heart failure and the possible risk of endocarditis and coronary steal effect.

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This paper presents a new lossless binary image compression method. The method consists of four stages: preprocessing, quadtree compressing, run length compressing and statistical model-based compressing. The preprocessing stage is to reduce the entropy of a binary image. In the quadtree compressing stage, a breadth first traversal (BFT) linear quadtree is used to compress the image. The run length compressing stage uses the run length method to encode the tree list and colour list of the BFT linear quadtree. The statistical model-based compressing stage applies the Huffman coding algorithm to compress the remaining data of the BFT linear quadtree further. Experimental results show that this method can provide an impressive compression result