Enhancing technology development through integrated environmental analysis: toward sustainable nonlethal military systems.

New technologies are not only critical in supporting traditional industrial and military success but also play a pivotal role in advancing sustainability and sustainable development. With the current global economic challenges, resulting in tighter budgets and increased uncertainty, synergistic paradigms and tools that streamline the design and dissemination of key technologies are more important than ever. Accordingly, a proactive and holistic approach can facilitate efficient research, design, testing, evaluation, and fielding for novel and off-the-shelf products, thereby assisting developers, end users, and other diverse stakeholders in better understanding tradeoffs in the defense industry and beyond. By prioritizing mechanisms such as strategic life-cycle environmental assessments (LCEA); programmatic environment, safety, and occupational health evaluations (PESHE); health hazard assessments (HHA); and other innovative platforms and studies early within systems engineering, various nonlethal military technologies have been successfully developed and deployed. These efforts provide a framework for addressing complex environment, safety, and occupational health risks that affect personnel, infrastructure, property, socioeconomic, and natural/cultural resources. Moreover, integrated, comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and iterative analyses involving flexible groups of specialists/subject matter experts can be applied at various spatiotemporal scales in support of collaborations. This paper highlights the Urban Operations Laboratory process utilized for inclusive and transformative environmental analysis, which can translate into advantages and progress toward sustainable systems.

Clinical importance of preoperative detection of the apical lymph node metastasis in patients with breast carcinoma.

INTRODUCTION: According to the revised staging system for breast cancer, the infraclavicular node status has become more important because the involvement of the apical nodes now changes the stage of the disease for all tumour sizes. In this study, we analysed the stage migration among our patients treated with mastectomy for breast cancer. METHODS: 44 patients who were treated with modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer in our department during 2003 were reviewed for their clinicopathological features, including the status of the axillary lymph nodes. RESULTS: 11 patients (25 percent) were reclassified as stage IIIC according to the new Tumour, Node and Metastasis (TNM) classification system of American Joint Committee on Cancer that was revised in 2002. The mean age was 40.2 years and the mean tumour size was 5 cm. CONCLUSION: Patients with breast cancer should be properly staged preoperatively for choosing appropriate individual treatment, and more accurate evaluation of the infraclavicular region for metastatic lymph nodes should be done.

Carcinomas of the thyroid and breast associated with Pendred's syndrome: report of a case.

We report herein the case of a 49-year-old woman with Pendred's syndrome who developed follicular carcinoma of the thyroid and invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of different primary neoplasms developing in a patient with Pendred's syndrome.

Reducing seroma formation with fibrin glue in an animal mastectomy model.

Mastectomy is a frequently performed surgical procedure which has some important complications that may prolong hospital stay. Seroma formation after mastectomies and axillary dissection has an incidence of 5.8-53%. A new technique for preventing seroma formation was studied in an animal mastectomy model. Radical mastectomy was performed in guinea pigs. A control group of 20 animals had no further procedure post-mastectomy other than drying the wound with sterile gauze. In the other group fibrin glue was topically applied to prevent seroma formation to the operative field. Ten days after the operation, necropsy was performed and fluid collections were drained with an 18-gauge needle. The results were statistically analysed with a Two-sample rank-sum test. A significant difference existed between Groups I and II (P < 0.00005). It is concluded that fibrin glue can be used to prevent seroma formation after mastectomies.