The Africa Temporal Scalp Flap: A Novel Flap for Facial Reconstruction.

Although a number of flaps exist for nasal reconstruction, severe scarring of the forehead after burn injury led to the development of a novel two-stage flap based on the superficial temporal artery. The Africa Temporal Scalp (ATS) flap is composed of an axial ascending part on the superficial temporal artery, and a descending anterior extension for reconstruction of the midface. This is a retrospective analysis of all patients who underwent ATS flap surgery on the MV Africa Mercy. During the 7.5-year period, the ATS flap was applied to 45 facial reconstructions, with a median age of 28 years (range 19 months to 51 years). The main indications were previous burn injury (n = 27, 60%) and noma (n = 15, 33.3%). The majority of the flaps were used to reconstruct the lower third of the nose (n = 39, 86.7%), and the remaining six were for the lips or cheek. Experience allowed for earlier division than 3 weeks depending on the length of the flap, and the recipient site. There was one partial flap loss, one infection requiring revision, and two injuries to frontal branch of the facial nerve. The ATS flap is a novel two-stage flap that has proved especially versatile when forehead flaps are unavailable for nasal reconstruction due to extensive forehead scarring. The ATS flap reliably provides ample supple skin, and the donor site is effectively obscured from view, located in the periphery of the face.

Note: A technique to capture and compose streak images of explosive events with unpredictable timing.

The authors describe a method to capture optical data and construct digitized streak images for analysis of high-speed phenomena with unpredictable timing by using a high-speed video camera and software routines. Advances in high-speed video camera technology have led to development of cameras with frame rates (1 x 10(6) frames per second) and spatial resolution (1280 x 800 pixels) suitable to capture fast phenomena, such as detonation in high explosives (< or = 10 km s(-1)), on small enough scales to be convenient for laboratory experiments. Further, relatively long-duration recordings (> or = 1 s) are maintained in a rolling buffer in volatile memory allowing the entire frame sequence to be recorded pretrigger, thus obviating the need for precisely located diagnostic triggers. The method described was used to capture the progression of luminous reaction during the deflagration-to-detonation transition of the HMX-based (octahydro-1, 3, 5, 7-tetranitro-1, 3, 5, 7-tetrazocine) plastic bonded explosive (PBX) formulation during cookoff.