Breakage of a Lag Screw of Cephalomedullary Nail: A Technique of Removal

A broken lag screw of the cephalomedullary nail is a rare condition. Removal of the retained lag screw from the femoral head is also very challenging. This article describes a surgical technique and the modified instrument that was available in the operating room for removing the broken implant by closed technique.

Thoracic cord compression by solitary osteochondroma

 The most common form of primary extradural spinal cord tumor in adults are chordomas and sarcomas(1).  Involvement of the spinal cord from vertebral osteochondroma is indeed rare(2,4) Ladpli reported 90 cases of spinal cord tumors and osteochondroma was not found(5).  The serious neurological manifestation of vertebral osteochondroma is spinal cord compression and usually presents with slow progression of motor and/or sensory deficits(3,4,6,7) (Table 1).  We report a patient with thoracic osteochondroma who presented with sudden onset of paraplegia.

A Comparative Study of Durability of Palmleaf , Nylon and Stainless Steel Finger Trap.

 A comparative study of durability of palmleaf, stainless and nylon finger trap was done., Three sizes of finger trap were used, static traction load was applied to each finger trap while gripping the leather covered finger model.  The average mode of failure of the palmleaf finger trap were 20, 30 and 51.88 pounds in small, medium and large size respectively, no any failure was found in the stainless steel and nylon finger trap but the mode of failure of the finger model were 68.75, 66.25 and 66.65 pounds when used the stainless finger trap and 68.0, 65.0 and 64.5 pounds when used the nylon finger trap.

Image-based Navigation in Orthopaedic Surgery

Image-based navigation is recently accepted as one of the most profitable devices utilized to improve the accuracy of many procedures in orthopaedic surgery. Actually, navigation-assisted surgery systems were initially used in neurosurgery in the late 1980s. The interactive computer system is able to match the co-ordinate pre-or intraoperative images, patient’s anatomy and the surgical instruments by using tracking and registration process. The initial image-based navigation system has based upon preoperative computer tomography (CT) images and clinical application has been successfully introduced in spinal instrumentation since 1994.1-2 However, time consuming, comsplicated techniques and error in the registration process known as a pair-point matching remain the major concern and may cause CT-based navigation less popularity with time.

Rotational Alignment of Femoral Fractures : Does Fluoroscopic Assessment of the Lesser Trochanter be Helpful?

The simulation study was performed on 15 pairs of adult cadaveric femora to determine whether the size or width of the apparent lesser trochanter (ALT) from the image screen of different projection of the C-arm image intensifier will be useful or not for the prediction of rotational profile of the proximal femur. From the study, the width of ALT is smallest at the position of internal rotation and gradually increase with the decreasing degree of internal rotation to neutral AP projection. The width of ALT is gradually increase with increasing degree of external rotation projection. However from the pairs study, it wasfound that the apparent width of ALT from right femur is larger than that of the left side in almost all projection between 30 degree internal rotation to 30 degree external rotation of the C-arm. The difference of the width of ALT at internal rotation 30 degree averaged 1.9 mm and the difference at external rotation 30 degree averaged 6.2 mm. The range of difference of the width of ALT in the pairs study ranged from 0 to 24 mm. No any relationship of the difference of the width of ALT and the degree of internal or external rotation was found. There was no tendency that width of ALT can be used as a reference to each other to any degree of femoral rotation.

The H-Index

The h-index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch as a tool for determining theoretical physicists’ relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index.1The h-index is defined as follows :A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each.In other words, a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited by others at least h times. Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field ; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.