Despite steady improvement in the laser treatment of port wine stains (PWS), hypertrophic scarring remains a serious side-effect in approximately 10% of patients. The tunable dye laser (577 nm) has been shown to cause selective vascular destruction in normal and PWS skin. We have treated ten patients using a tunable dye laser (577 nm, 300 mu sec) resulting in clearing of the PWS without any evidence of hypertrophic scarring. Treatment requires no anesthesia or wound care, and there were no postoperative infections.

Tracheo-innominate artery fistula is a highly lethal complication after tracheostomy. A 37-year-old man who had undergone a tracheostomy 14 years earlier because of dysphagia after brain surgery had a tracheo-innominate artery fistula with exsanguinating hemorrhage from his tracheostomy site. After temporary control of the bleeding, a stent graft was implanted in the innominate artery through the brachial artery. The patient recovered uneventfully and remained well 14 months after the procedure, with no sign of infection. Endovascular stent grafting may be the treatment of choice for patients with tracheo-innominate artery fistula.

Bronchial artery infusion therapy has been performed in a total of 27 patients by a selective catheterization technique chiefly as surgical adjuvant chemotherapy. A major antitumor agent chosen for this study was Mitomycin C. There was apparent tumor regression on the chest roentgenograms in 14 of 27 cases. The extent of tumor shrinkage ranged from 75% at maximum to 36% at minimum in 2 dimensional measurements on the x‐ray films. The patients were treated 1 to 4 times in a period of 2 days to 2 weeks. Observation periods after final infusion were limited to the term of preoperation. Subjective complaints were improved by the treatment. No serious side effects and very few complications were experienced. The authors would like to point out that the extent of tumor shrinkage may be related to the frequency of the infusion, and distant survival rate seemed to be better with the patients who received cancer resection after having recurrent infusion than with the patients having only one infusion.

Dislocation-free InP and GaAs crystals have been grown by liquid encapsulation by means of an ’’impurity doping’’ procedure. It was found that grown-in dislocations were diminished when the crystals were pulled from melts to which certain kinds of impurities were added. The impurity effect on grown-in dislocation density was examined for Zn, S, and Te in InP, and Zn, S, Te, Al, and N in GaAs. It was found that these impurities were effective for reducing the grown-in dislocation density, except for Zn in GaAs. The effectiveness of impurities for reducing the dislocation density of the crystals was ascribed to the strength of the bonds formed between the substitutional impurity atoms and host crystal atoms surrounding the impurity atoms. The anomaly of Zn in GaAs was presumed to originate from the interstitial Zn.