The number of elderly patients with mandibular fracture is rapidly increasing. To improve outcome, it is important to understand the age-related characteristics of mandibular fracture. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyze the impact of atrophic change on mandibular fracture in elderly patients. The retrospective study was conducted in patients aged ≥65 years old, who underwent surgery for the treatment of mandibular fracture in our hospital from March 2006 until March 2015. Patient characteristics, such as age and gender, causes of injury, anatomic location of fracture, height of mandibular body, extent of atrophy, location of surgical sites, postoperative outcomes, and the follow-up period, were examined. Descriptive statistics were compared between atrophic and nonatrophic mandibles. The patients included 17 males and 12 females and the mean age was 71.9 years old. The average follow-up period was 6.06 months. Regarding occlusion and complications, there were no statistical differences between the atrophic and nonatrophic mandibular fractures. As major complications, nonunion occurred in 2 patients and malunion in 1 patient. There was no mortality associated with anesthesia or surgery. Atrophic and nonatrophic mandibular fractures in elderly patients can be treated successfully with surgery. There was no significant difference with respect to major complications between patients with atrophic and nonatrophic mandibular fractures.

Pretreatment of recipient site using fractional CO2 laser helped vascularization in the early stage in fat graft and solved the ischemic condition, so it improved fat survival rate.

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Polyetherimide/multi-wall carbon nanotube nanocomposite foams were fabricated and their electrical and mechanical properties characterized. The composites with 0.5–3 wt% of carbon nanotube loadings were fabricated using a solution-based method. Different foaming conditions were studied along with the residual solvent effects. It was found that the residual solvent significantly affected the mechanical properties of the nanocompsites. Electrical conductivity of the composite foams with the same wt% loading of carbon nanotubes was found to be dependent on the relative density of the foams. Foams with a higher relative density had a higher electrical conductivity. The fabricated polyetherimide nanocomposite foam is thermally stable, with a glass transition temperature close to that of the neat polyetherimide. Despite the volume expansion due to foaming, the polyetherimide nanocomposite foams achieved an electrical conductivity of 10−7 S/cm at 2 wt% carbon nanotube loading and 45% relative density. This makes them a multifunctional material for lightweight and electrostatic dissipative applications.

This paper proposes new stochastic models that describe the task processing by the Markovian software availability model with perfect debugging and study the method to evaluate the system performance for the multi‐tasking software system having several modules. We assume that the software system, which is integrated by all modules, can process multiple tasks simultaneously. Each task, which is to be processed, is assumed to have multiple subtasks that are processed by the corresponding modules of the software system. Based on these models, we derive several performance measures, such as the expected numbers of subtasks and tasks whose processes can be completed within a certain time interval and the completion probability for each subtask and task. We also discuss the impacts that the number of modules constituting the system has on such performance measures. Furthermore, we consider the notion of module dependency for evaluation of certain probabilities of our interest and study its effects on such probabilities. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate our proposed models. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.