A successful multidisciplinary surgical strategy, based on preoperative localization by MRI, has been developed for the treatment of retrorectal tumours.

Patients with idiopathic trigeminal neuralgia (TN) were categorised into 3 subtypes (n = 225). Group 1 (n = 155, 68.9%) had TN without concomitant pain, group 2 (n = 32, 14.2%) had TN with intermittent concomitant pain, and group 3 (n = 39, 16.9%) had TN with autonomic symptoms. We tested 2 hypotheses: (1) that different pain profiles would be associated with the different groups; (2) that the severe pain associated with TN would impact negatively on activities of daily living and thereby result in disability as defined by the World Health Organisation. A different pain profile was found across the groups. We obtained unequivocal evidence that TN causes disability with up to 45% of patients being absent from usual daily activities 15 days or more in the past 6 months. On the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, 35.7% patients had mild-to-severe depression and over 50% were anxious. The Pain Catastrophizing Scale showed that 78% of patients had considerable negative thoughts with scores >20 and a mean score of 36.4. Prior to referral, only 54% had been prescribed carbamazepine while opioids had been prescribed in 14.6% of the patients. Prior to referral, over 80% had already been to 1 specialist centre which had not provided appropriate management. Patients with TN report varied characteristics but all result in some degree of psychosocial disability especially before adequate therapy is attained.

The noise kernel is the vacuum expectation value of the (operator-valued) stress-energy bi-tensor which describes the fluctuations of a quantum field in curved spacetimes. It plays the role in stochastic semiclassical gravity based on the Einstein-Langevin equation similar to the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor in semiclassical gravity based on the semiclassical Einstein equation. According to the stochastic gravity program, this two point function (and by extension the higher order correlations in a hierarchy) of the stress energy tensor possesses precious statistical mechanical information of quantum fields in curved spacetime and, by the self-consistency required of Einstein's equation, provides a probe into the coherence properties of the gravity sector (as measured by the higher order correlation functions of gravitons) and the quantum and/or extended nature of spacetime. It reflects the medium energy (referring to Planck energy as high energy) or mesoscopic behavior of any viable theory of quantum gravity, including string theory. The stress energy bi-tensor could be the starting point for a new quantum field theory constructed on spacetimes with extended structures. In the coincidence limit we use the method of point-separation to derive a regularized noise-kernel for a scalar field in general curved spacetimes. It is useful for calculating quantum fluctuations of fields in modern theories of structure formation and for backreaction problems in the early universe and black holes. One collorary of our finding is that for a massless conformal field the trace of the noise kernel identically vanishes. We outline how the general framework and results derived here can be used for the calculation of noise kernels for specific cases of physical interest such as the Robertson-Walker and Schwarzschild spacetimes.

For quantum fields on a curved spacetime with an Euclidean section, we derive a general expression for the stress energy tensor two-point function in terms of the effective action. The renormalized two-point function is given in terms of the second variation of the Mellin transform of the trace of the heat kernel for the quantum fields. For systems for which a spectral decomposition of the wave opearator is possible, we give an exact expression for this two-point function. Explicit examples of the variance to the mean ratioof the vacuum energy density ρ of a massless scalar field are computed for the spatial topologies of R d × S 1 and S 3 , with results of, and ∆ ′ (S 3 ) = 111 respectively. The large variance signifies the importance of quantum fluctuations and has important implications for the validity of semiclassical gravity theories at sub-Planckian scales. The method presented here can facilitate the calculation of stress-energy fluctuations for quantum fields useful for the analysis of fluctuation effects and critical phenomena in problems ranging from atom optics and mesoscopic physics to early universe and black hole physics.

In this report we discuss the impact of polarized foregrounds on a future CMBPol satellite mission. We review our current knowledge of Galactic polarized emission at microwave frequencies, including synchrotron and thermal dust emission. We use existing data and our understanding of the physical behavior of the sources of foreground emission to generate sky templates, and start to assess how well primordial gravitational wave signals can be separated from foreground contaminants for a CMBPol mission. At the estimated foreground minimum of -100 GHz, the polarized foregrounds are expected to be lower than a primordial polarization signal with tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.01, in a small patch (~ 1%) of the sky known to have low Galactic emission. Over 75% of the sky we expect the foreground amplitude to exceed the primordial signal by about a factor of eight at the foreground minimum and on scales of two degrees. Only on the largest scales does the polarized foreground amplitude exceed the primordial signal by a larger factor of about 20. The prospects for detecting an r = 0.01 signal including degree-scale measurements appear promising, with 5cr r -0.003 forecast from multiple methods. A mission that observes a range of scales offers better prospects from the foregrounds perspective than one targeting only the lowest few multipoles. We begin to explore how optimizing the composition of frequency channels in the focal plane can maximize our ability to perform component separation, with a range of typically 40 < v < 300 GHz preferred for ten channels. Foreground cleaning methods are already in place to tackle a CMBPol mission data set, and further investigation of the optimization and detectability of the primordial signal will be useful for mission design.