Air tamponade and without heavy liquid usage in pars plana vitrectomy for rhegmatogenous retinal detachment repair

AIM： To report the results of rhegmatogenous retinal detachment（RRD） repair after pars plana vitrectomy（PPV） without operative use of heavy liquid, and utilizing air tamponade in selected cases.METHODS： RRD patients without severity of proliferative vitreoretinopathy C2 or more underwent PPV without operative use of heavy liquid, and utilizing air tamponade were consecutively enrolled. Alternative postoperative facedown position or lateral position was required for 3-5 d.RESULTS： Totally 36 eyes of 36 patients（24 males, 66.7%） aged 53.8±10.9 y underwent this modified surgery. The mean number of retinal break was 2.1±1.3. Most of the eyes（29, 80.6%） had retinal detachment involving more than one quadrant. Twenty-two（61.1%） eyes with cataract had combined phacoemulsification and intraocular lens implantation. The mean follow up time was 4.6±1.8 mo. Two eyes with retinal redetachment underwent a second retinal repair surgery with silicone oil tamponade, yielding the primary reattachment rate to 94.4%（34/36）. Six（16.7%） eyes had intraocular pressure higher than 25 mm Hg. The visual acuity（logMAR） improved from 0.98±0.74 preoperatively to 0.52±0.31 postoperatively（P〈0.001）. CONCLUSION： The success rate of this modified retinal repair surgery is comparable with traditional surgery. This technique can be considered for certain retinal detachment patients, since its apparent advantages included lower surgical complications, reduced surgery expenditure, shorter time for postoperative facedown position, and avoiding silicone oil removal surgery.

Variants of Nuclear Power Plants of Small and Medium Power with Heavy Liquid-Metal Coolants

New design solutions have been proposed for a BRS-GPG type reactor circuit, which are different from transport and stationary low and medium-powered reactor installations cooled with heavy liquid-metal coolants, and which correspond to the evolutionary development of such installations. While developing these solutions, the available experience in creating and operating Soviet pilot and commercial power plants cooled with lead-bismuth coolants was used, including investigations, primarily experimental ones, carried out by team of authors in justification of a capacity range (50 - 250 MW) of low and medium-powered reactor plants with horizontal steam generators (BRS- GPG) proposed and elaborated at the NNSTU.