Degree of Asymmetry Between Patients With Complete and Incomplete Cleft Lips

Introduction: Surgical outcomes for patients with complete cleft lips are not as ideal as those achieved for milder phenotypes. We hypothesized that in addition to the greater width of the cleft, patients with complete cleft lip and palate exhibit a greater degree of hypoplasia and asymmetry. Methods: Stereophotographs of 14 infants with unrepaired unilateral complete and 14 with incomplete cleft lips were measured using Vectra imaging software (Canfield Imaging). Unpaired t tests were used to compare measured asymmetry between groups. Measurements included nasion to endocathion, sn-sbal, subnasale to alare (sn-al), subnasale to crista philtra, subalare to crista philtra (sbal-cphi), chelion to crista philtra, lateral lip element fullness, medial lip element fullness (mef), and non-cleft lip fullness. Duplicate measurements allowed Pearson correlation to be used to determine intra-rater reliability. Statistical significance was set at P < .05. Results: Degree of asymmetry of the nasal base, sn-al, and sn-sbal was significantly greater for patients with complete clefts ( P = .0001, P = .0001). Hypoplasia of the lateral lip element was seen when comparing lateral and mef ( P = .04, P = .004) and lateral lip height (sbal-cphi’’; P = .002). The degree of cupid’s bow asymmetry did not differ between groups ( P = .23). Intrarater reliability was high for all facial measures, ranging from 0.70 to 0.99. Conclusions: More severe, complete cleft lips demonstrate statistically significant greater asymmetry in surgically relevant dimensions. There was greater width of the nasal base. Vertical asymmetry of cupid’s bow was unaffected by cleft severity, but that asymmetry was greater in patients with complete clefts due to hypoplasia of the lateral lip element. This may contribute to the less favorable results in these patients.

Production asymmetry of open charm mesons within unfavoured ragmentation scenario

We consider unfavoured light quark/antiquark to D meson fragmentation. We discuss nonperturbative effects for small transverse momenta. The asymmetry for D+ and D- production measured by the LHCb collaboration provides natural constraints on the parton (quark/antiquark) fragmentation functions. We find that already a fraction of $q/\overline q \to D$ fragmentation probability is sufficient to account for the measured asymmetry. Large D-meson production asymmetries are found for large xF which is related to dominance of light quark/antiquark $q/\overline q \to D$ fragmentation over the standard c → D fragmentation. As a consequence, prompt atmospheric neutrino flux at high neutrino energies can be much larger than for the conventional c → D fragmentation. The latter can constitute a sizeable background for the cosmic neutrinos claimed to be observed recently by the IceCube Observatory.

MCD Observed by Photoemission on the 2p Lines of Iron Films Under an External Applied Field.

ABSTRACTCircular Dichroic X-ray Photoemission Spectroscopy (CDXPS) experiments have been performed on the 2p core level spectra of polycrystalline Fe film which was magnetized by a low excitation field. The ability to perform the CDXPS experiments in a non remanent mode at a photon energy of 2100 eV opens new and interesting possibilities for the MCD technique in the study of surface and interface Magnetism. Our work on this polycrystalline iron gives some new insights into the understanding of the MCD Mechanism. First results show a similar angular variation for the measured asymmetry, as those observed on a Fe bcc (100) single crystal remanently magnetized in the [100] direction. Our results make clear that the parameters governing the behaviour of the asymmetry factor (A) are not completely described by the relative direction of the Magnetization (M) with the polarization vector of the incident beam (q) and the direction of detection of the photoelectrons (z). The specific outcoming of this work is to clearly show that this behaviour of A is not connected to the crystalline structure of the film for our geometries.