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Background Conjoined twins are an extremely rare congenital occurrence, and anesthetic management for surgical separation presents unique challenges for anesthesiologists. Case presentation Five-month-old male pygopagus conjoined twins underwent separation surgery. We performed anesthesia induction in the supine position and surgery in the prone position. This presented a challenge because the transition from supine to prone position reversed the positional relationship between the two babies, resulting in crossing of the respiratory circuits and monitors. To solve the problem, we used anesthesia machines and monitors on the opposite side of each baby during anesthesia induction. The positional relationship between the twins and anesthesia machines and monitors normalized after the change to the prone position. Following the separation surgery, the twins were discharged without any complications. Conclusions Our method of using opposite side anesthetic machines and monitors for anesthesia induction was useful for the safe anesthetic management of pygopagus conjoined twins.

The scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) allows the tracking of fluorescent dot motion, thereby enabling the flow velocities in perimacular capillaries to be directly measured. These can serve as an important index of local retinal soundness or reflect the whole body circulation status in disorders such as diabetes. Although it is possible to perceive moving fluorescent dots with the human eye, they are so faint and unstable that it is difficult to detect them by conventional digital still-image processing methods. To solve this problem, we generated spatio-temporal images of the fluorescent dots in a capillary and applied Gabor filters tuned to the direction of the traces in order to detect them. Finally, by discriminating and integrating the output using two levels of threshold, we were able to extract their traces. Because the medium-size Gabor filter requires a considerable amount of time for two-dimensional convolution calculation, we prove that there is a certain equivalence between the Gabor filter, the radon transform, and the Hough transform. In the light of this, we propose a form of radon transform filtering that includes a radon transform Gabor filter as a very long Gabor filter. This allows a whole trace to be detected in a single step with a one-dimensional convolution, thereby shortening the processing time. In an experiment, 60% of the traces could be detected without error, which is sufficient to allow the mean flow velocity in a capillary to be measured.