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Living Donor Liver Transplantation: Surgical Techniques And Innovations, Vivian C. Mcalister

Vivian C. McAlister

A colleague and I attended a talk about a set of liver transplant experiments in mice, which the speaker had designed to undermine a commonly held immunological belief. My companion (who should have known better) afterward asked me rhetorically, "What's next? Heart transplantation in a tadpole?"

When does the awe-inspiring give way to the commonplace? Technically wonderful surgery is considered ordinary not because it is commonly done but because the holder of this opinion has no image of the technique.

Not long ago, resectional hepatic surgery was followed by the development of orthotopic liver transplantation. Although both techniques have matured …

Living-Donor Liver Transplantation: Surgical Techniques And Innovations By Tanaka, Koichi Inomata, Yukihiro Kaihara, Santoshi, Vivian C. Mcalister

Vivian C. McAlister

Living-donor liver transplantation combines the techniques of hepatic resection and transplantation. The principal difference between living donation of liver and resection is the absolute requirement in the former to maintain the integrity of the liver on each side of the dividing line. To do this, the surgeon must retain the vascular supply and drainage of both sides throughout the dissection, up to the moment of graft removal. In this book, Tanaka and colleagues take us through the surgery in a manner that is at once detailed and exciting, through the generous use of magnificent electronic photography.

Surgical Limits: The Life Of Gordon Murray By Shelly Mckellar, Vivian C. Mcalister

Vivian C. McAlister

Gordon Murray ranks as Canada’s greatest surgical pioneer, to whom history has been most unkind. Shelley McKellar has written a surgical biography that goes a long way toward explaining how this came about, and gives us a good opportunity to reassess Murray’s extraordinary career.

Fall Prevention Programs For The Elderly: A Bayesian Secondary Meta-Analysis, Joseph F. Lucke

Joseph Lucke

A secondary meta-analysis of programs to reduce falls in the elderly is undertaken to demonstrate a Bayesian analysis. The Bayesian statistical tradition is carefully distinguished from the standard Neyman-Pearson-Wald (NPW) statistical tradition. In the 12 studies, the logit effect size is used to compare treatment groups using a prevention program to control groups without a program. To contrast the Bayesian analysis, independent-effects and fixed-effect meta-analyses are first conducted in the NPW tradition. This is followed by Bayesian independent-effects and fixed-effect meta-analyses that numerically replicate the NPW results but have conceptually different interpretations. The final analyses comprise Bayesian random-effects and predictive …