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Background and Purpose: Currently, most studies combine the small bowel transit examination with gastric emptying time examination. There are significant drawbacks to this method. The radiotracer does not enter the small intestine in a bolus and the starting time for transit in the duodenum is difficult to define. This makes the result unreliable. In this study, we used a commercial enteric capsule containing radioactive charcoal to solve these problems.Materials and Methods: Activated charcoal powder was mixed with Tc-99m pertechnetate and loaded to the enteric capsule which can resist gastric acid and dissolve only in the small intestine. In-vitro stability experiment was performed by immersing these capsules in a colorless phosphate buffer of variable pH which mimicked the condition in stomach and small intestine. In addition, ten healthy Chinese volunteers were included for in-vivo experiment. Anterior and posterior views of abdomen were obtained at regular 30-minute intervals until the eighth hour after administration of the radioactive enteric capsule. Small bowel transit time was calculated.Results: The enteric capsule remained intact for at least 480 minutes in the solution mimicking gastric content (pH = 3.0) and disrupted at a mean duration of 227.2 minutes at a pH of 6.8 and at a mean duration of 212.4 minutes at a pH of 7.4 in the solution mimicking pancreaticobiliary secretions. In nine of ten volunteers, the small bowel transit time was between 30 to 270 minutes with a mean transit time of 140 min. In one volunteer, we failed to detect the exact time of small bowel transit because the capsule remained in the stomach throughout the study for up to 8 hours.Conclusions: We consider activated charcoal labeled with Tc-99m pertechnetate using an enteric capsule as the carrier to be a potential radioactive marker for small bowel transit study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a 71-year-old man who underwent closure of an ileostomy and had a fever seven days post surgery. Both Tc-99m(V)-dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) and gallium-67 citrate scans showed increased tracer accumulation in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. Tc-99m(V)-DMSA scintigraphy can be a rapid alternative tool in the detection of wound infection in patients after ileostomy closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a method to solve the resource allocation and test scheduling problems together in order to achieve concurrent test for core-based System-On-Chip (SOC) designs is presented. The primary objective for concurrent SOC test is to reduce test application time under the constraints of SOC pins and peak power consumption. The methodology used in this paper is not limited to any specific Test Access Mechanism (TAM). Additionally, it can also be applied to SOC budgeting at design phase to predict a tradeoff between test application time and SOC pins needed. The contribution of this paper is the formulation of the problem as a well-known 2-dimensional bin-packing problem. A best-fit heuristic algorithm is adopted to achieve optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology to insert scan paths in a functional Register Transfer Level (RTL) specification of a design that can exploit existing functional paths between sequential elements in the original circuit for establishing scan chains. The primary objective for RTL scan insertion is to reduce the time taken for DFT, and thus reduce the time to market. Additionally, building scan chains at the functional RT-Level is expected to reduce the total area overhead introduced by full scan without compromising the fault coverage achieved. In addition, it often eliminates the delay associated with the additional multiplexer as a part of a conventional scan-cell in high performance designs. Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the above objectives while also achieving higher fault coverages for most of the benchmark circuits considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective hepatic and renal angiography were performed in seven patients with clinically significant haemorrhage from vascular lesions caused by percutaneous transhepatic drainage (3 cases) and percutaneous nephrostomy catheteres (4 cases). We demonstrated hepatic artery pseudoaneurysms in 2 patients, a hepatoportal fistula in 1, renal artery pseudoaneurysms in 3 and both an arteriovenous fistula and a pseudoaneurysym of reneal artery in 1. A tamponade effect of the drainage catheter, preventing extravasation of contrast medium was seen in one patient. We superselectively catheterised the injured artery and performed transacterial embolisation in all cases using coil spring emboli in 6 and Gelfoam cubes in 1. Postembolisation angiography was carried out ti check the location of the embolic material and patency of the remaining arterial supply. Bleeding was controlled in 6 of the 7 patients after 4, 7, 15, 23, 26, 27 months of follow-up. One patient rebled after a month, an operation was performed and she died of sepsis 2 weeks later. Transarterial embolisation was a safe, life-saving procedure in these cases of haemorrhage due to percutaneous drainage catheters, avoiding surgical intervention in this particulary high-risk patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]