\n\nMethods: We reviewed the outcome of seventy-four bilateral Ilizarov tibial lengthenings for short stature in thirty-seven patients. The mean age at the time of surgery was 21.7 years (range, thirteen to thirty-one years), and the mean duration of follow-up was forty-five months. Proximal ZD1839 migration of the fibula was assessed with changes in the malleolar tip distance.
A valgus change of 5 in the tibiotalar angle was regarded as ankle valgus deformity following tibial lengthening.\n\nResults: The average length gain was 6.9 cm (range, 4.7 to 11.5 cm), and the average lengthening index was 1.5 mo/cm. Valgus deformity developed in six ankles (8%) and fibular nonunion developed in ten (14%). Proximal migration of the lateral malleolus of mm was related to valgus talar tilting. Bifocal tibial lengthening, rapid distraction rate of the fibula (>1 mm per day), and development of a fibular
nonunion were factors associated with proximal migration of the distal end of the fibula of mm, which suggests that regenerated bone of poor quality in the distraction gap may cause proximal migration of the distal end of the fibula following tibial lengthening.\n\nConclusions: PKC412 nmr Proximal migration of the distal end of the fibula following tibial lengthening may occur even with the use of an llizarov ring fixator. This migration seems to be caused by collapse of regenerated bone of poor quality or fibular nonunion. Proximal migration of mm is associated with the risk of valgus talar tilting. Surgeons should consider earlier intervention with bone-grafting if there are conditions that compromise regenerated bone formation in the fibular distraction gap, such as can occur with extensive tibial lengthening by bifocal corticotomy.\n\nLevel of Evidence: Therapeutic Level III. See Instructions to Authors for selleck a complete description of levels of evidence.”
“Iterative decoding of an irregular variable-length coding (IrVLC) scheme
concatenated with precoded fast frequency-hopping (FFH) M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) is considered. We employ EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts to investigate the three-stage concatenation of the FFH-MFSK demodulator, the rate-1 decoder, and the outer IrVLC decoder. The proposed joint source and channel coding scheme is capable of operating at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in Rayleigh fading channels contaminated by partial-band noise jamming (PBNJ). The IrVLC scheme is composed of a number of component variable-length coding (VLC) codebooks employing different coding rates that encode particular fractions of the input source symbol stream. These fractions may be chosen with the aid of EXIT charts to shape the inverted EXIT curve of the IrVLC codec so that it can be matched with the EXIT curve of the inner decoder.