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Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text., Summary The authors present a case of a 11-year-old girl with fibrous dysplasia involving the nasal cavity and sphenoid sinus that potentially required a tracheostomy for anesthesia. The tumor was to be approached through both supraorbital and Le Fort I osteotomies. The tumor prevented nasal intubation, and the necessity of maxillomandibular fixation to reduce the osteotomized maxilla with traditional fixation prevented oral intubation. Given the age of the patient and the desire to avoid a tracheostomy scar, a decision was made to utilize custom fixation plates. Virtual surgical planning was utilized to design custom cutting guides with splints for maxillomandibular fixation. These custom maxillary orthognathic plates ensured accurate reduction of the osteotomized maxillary segment and allowed for placement of an oral endotracheal tube. Despite the oral endotracheal tube preventing maxillomandibular fixation, use of custom plates established proper occlusion as determined immediately after extubation and at postoperative visits.

On-call services provided by physicians are critical to the function of a robust healthcare delivery system, but such services are not generally accounted for by standard physician productivity metrics, such as the work relative value unit (wRVU). There is significant diversity on how physicians are compensated, if at all, for these on-call services. Simultaneously, there exists a considerable shortage, particularly in the surgical subspecialties, for on-call coverage - most commonly in rural and underserved communities. While we agree that "call" services should undergo standardized valuation, we suggest that the wRVU is an ill-posed metric for this purpose as its primary role is to value discrete physician services provided to patients. In contradistinction, "call" is a physician service to a hospital - the disproportionate beneficiary of the service. We maintain that systemic and regulatory factors undervalue physician on-call compensation relative to the hospital's value chain and lead to call shortages that impact patient care and foster inequity. Finally, we urge subspecialty professional organizations to develop guidelines for call valuation.

BACKGROUND: Critical evaluation of all aspects of combat casualty care, including mortality, with a special focus on the incidence and causes of potentially preventable deaths among US combat fatalities, is central to identifying gaps in knowledge, training, equipment, and execution of battlefield trauma care. The impetus to produce this analysis was to develop a comprehensive perspective of battlefield death, concentrating on deaths that occurred in the preYmedical treatment facility (pre-MTF) environment. METHODS: The Armed Forces Medical Examiner Service Mortality Surveillance Division was used to identify Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom combat casualties from October 2001 to June 2011 who died from injury in the deployed environment. The autopsy records, perimortem records, photographs on file, and Mortality Trauma Registry of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner Service were used to compile mechanism of injury, cause of injury, medical intervention performed, Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) score, and Injury Severity Score (ISS) on all lethal injuries. All data were used by the expert panel for the conduct of the potential for injury survivability assessment of this study. RESULTS: For the study interval between October 2001 and June 2011, 4,596 battlefield fatalities were reviewed and analyzed. The stratification of mortality demonstrated that 87.3% of all injury mortality occurred in the pre-MTF environment. Of the pre-MTF deaths, 75.7% (n = 3,040) were classified as nonsurvivable, and 24.3% (n = 976) were deemed potentially survivable (PS). The injury/physiologic focus of PS acute mortality was largely associated with hemorrhage (90.9%). The site of lethal hemorrhage was truncal (67.3%), followed by junctional (19.2%) and peripheral-extremity (13.5%) hemorrhage. CONCLUSION: Most battlefield casualties died of their injuries before ever reaching a surgeon. As most pre-MTF deaths are nonsurvivable, mitigation strategies to impact outcomes in this population need to be directed toward injury prevention. To significantly impact the outcome of combat casualties with PS injury, strategies must be developed to mitigate hemorrhage and optimize airway management or reduce the time interval between the battlefield point of injury and surgical intervention. Understanding battlefield mortality is a vital component of the military trauma system. Emphasis on this analysis should be placed on trauma system optimization, evidence-based improvements in Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines, data-driven research, and development to remediate gaps in care and relevant training and equipment enhancements that will increase the survivability of the fighting force. (J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 2012;73: S431YS437. Copyright * 2012 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins)

✓Ependymomas are glial tumors that occur most often in children. In adults, ependymomas most often appear in the spinal cord. The World Health Organization recognizes several rare ependymoma subtypes, including the giant cell ependymoma of the terminal filum. The authors describe an unusual case of a posterior fossa giant cell ependymoma in an 89-year-old man presenting with vertigo and disequilibrium. Only seven cases of this tumor have been reported in the literature to date. The authors discuss the clinical presentation, radiological findings, pathological considerations, and surgical intervention in this patient and review the relevant literature.