Query: Polarization Reconfigurable Aperture-Fed Patch Antenna and Array

Relevant passages:
A Reconfigurable Antenna With Frequency and Polarization Agility <=SEP=> A new antenna with both frequency and polarization reconfigurability is presented. The antenna consists of a square microstrip patch with a single probe feed located along the diagonal line. The center of each edge of the patch is connected to a shorting post via a p-i-n diode for polarization switching and two varactor diodes for frequency tuning. By switching between the different states of the p-i-n diodes, the proposed antenna can produce radiation patterns with horizontal, vertical, or 45° linear polarization. By varying the dc bias voltage, the operating frequency of each polarization of the antenna can be independently tuned. The frequency tuning range is from 1.35 to 2.25 GHz (|S11| <; -10 dB) for either horizontal or vertical polarization and from 1.35 to 1.9 GHz for the 45° linear polarization. Measured results on frequency tuning ranges and radiation patterns agree well with numerical simulations.

Microstrip Antennas <=SEP=> Microstrip antennas have been one of the niost innovative topics in antenna theory and design in recent years, and are increasingly finding application in a wide range of modern microwave systems. This paper begins with a brief overview of the basic characteristics of microstrip antennas, and then concentrates on the most significant developments in microstrip antenna technology that have been made in the last several years. Emphasis is on new antenna configurations for improved electrical performance and manufacturability, and advances in the analytical modeling of microstrip antennas and arrays.

Wideband Circular Polarization Reconfigurable Antenna <=SEP=> This communication introduces a polarization reconfigurable wideband circularly polarized (CP) antenna, which consists of four radiating arms connected to a reconfigurable feeding network. The four radiating arms excited by the feeding network are able to generate wideband CP waves with bidirectional radiation patterns in free space. In order to increase the gain and obtain a broadside radiation pattern, the proposed antenna is placed above a metallic reflector with the distance of quarter wavelength at the center frequency. In addition, polarization reconfigurability is realized by utilizing PIN diodes in the feeding transmission lines such that left-handed circular polarization (LHCP) and right-handed circular polarization (RHCP) modes can be selectively excited by controlling the on/off states of the PIN diodes. The proposed antenna exhibits a wide impedance bandwidth of 80% and an overlapped axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 23.5% for both modes. The antenna gain is stable across the operating bandwidth with the peak gain of 4.8 dBic. The antenna has a wide AR beamwidth of 90°. The presented work is suitable for GPS, CNSS, or RFID applications.

of Aperture Coupled Microstrip Antennas : History , Operation , Development , and Applications <=SEP=> 

Reconfigurable Antennas <=SEP=> Reconfigurable antennas change polarization, operating frequency, or far-field pattern in order to cope with changing system parameters. This paper reviews some of the past and current technology applicable to reconfigurable antennas, with several examples of implementations. Mechanically movable parts and arrays are discussed, as well as more-recent semiconductor-component and tunable-material technologies applicable to reconfigurable antennas.

High Beam Steering in Fabry–Pérot Leaky-Wave Antennas <=SEP=> A high-gain low-profile Fabry-Perot (FP) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) presenting one-dimensional high beam steering properties is proposed in this letter. The structure consists of a ground plane and a varying inductive partially reflective surface (PRS). A microstrip patch antenna is embedded into the cavity to act as the primary feed. As design examples, antennas are designed to operate at 9.5 GHz. Subwavelength FP cavities with fixed overall thickness of λ0 /6 (where λ0 is the free-space operating wavelength) are fabricated and measured. The impact of varying the PRS inductance is analyzed. It is shown that a high beam steering angle from broadside toward endfire direction close to 60 can be obtained when judiciously designing the inductive grid of the PRS.

Giving voice to office customers: Best practices in how office handles verbatim text feedback <=SEP=> Microsoft Office users submit hundreds of thousands of pieces of verbatim feedback per month. How can an engineer or manager in Office find the signal in this data to make business decisions? This paper presents an overview of the Office Customer Voice (OCV) system. OCV combines classification, on-demand clustering and other machine learning techniques with a rich web UI to solve this problem. In this paper, we describe the different types of feedback received. Next, we outline the architecture used to build OCV. We then detail the text processing, classification and clustering done to reason on the data. Finally, we present challenges, future plans, and best practices that may be relevant to other teams analyzing customer feedback. We argue that this multi-pronged approach to handling customer feedback presents a pattern that other organizations can use to mature their handling of customer feedback.

Evaluating data storage structures of MapReduce <=SEP=> MapReduce framework and its open-source implementation Hadoop, a scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure for big data analysis on large clusters, can achieve different performance with different data storage structures. This paper evaluates the performance about three kinds of data storage structures of MapReduce, namely row-store, column-store, and RCFile. The evaluating experiments are designed to test three data storage structures in terms of data loading time, data storage space, and query execution time. The experimental results show that RCFile data storage structure can achieve better performance in most cases.

An Optimal Algorithm for Mutual Exclusion in Computer Networks <=SEP=> An algorithm is proposed that creates mutual exclusion in a computer network whose nodes communicate only by messages and do not share memory. The algorithm sends only 2*(N 1) messages, where N is the number of nodes in the network per critical section invocation. This number of messages is at a minimum if parallel, distributed, symmetric control is used; hence, the algorithm is optimal in this respect. The time needed to achieve mutual exclusion is also minimal under some general assumptions. As in Lamport's "bakery algorithm," unbounded sequence numbers are used to provide first-come firstserved priority into the critical section. It is shown that the number can be contained in a fixed amount of memory by storing it as the residue of a modulus. The number of messages required to implement the exclusion can be reduced by using sequential node-by-node processing, by using broadcast message techniques, or by sending information through timing channels. The "readers and writers" problem is solved by a simple modification of the algorithm and the modifications necessary to make the algorithm robust are described.

M2U-Net: Effective and Efficient Retinal Vessel Segmentation for Resource-Constrained Environments <=SEP=> In this paper, we present a novel neural network architecture for retinal vessel segmentation that improves over the state of the art on two benchmark datasets, is the first to run in real time on high resolution images, and its small memory and processing requirements make it deployable in mobile and embedded systems. The M2U-Net has a new encoder-decoder architecture that is inspired by the U-Net. It adds pretrained components of MobileNetV2 in the encoder part and novel contractive bottleneck blocks in the decoder part that, combined with bilinear upsampling, drastically reduce the parameter count to 0.55M compared to 31.03M in the original U-Net. We have evaluated its performance against a wide body of previously published results on three public datasets. On two of them, the M2U-Net achieves new state-of-the-art performance by a considerable margin. When implemented on a GPU, our method is the first to achieve real-time inference speeds on high-resolution fundus images. We also implemented our proposed network on an ARM-based embedded system where it segments images in between 0.6 and 15 sec, depending on the resolution. Thus, the M2U-Net enables a number of applications of retinal vessel structure extraction, such as early diagnosis of eye diseases, retinal biometric authentication systems, and robot assisted microsurgery.

GIS METHODS IN TIME-GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH: GEOCOMPUTATION AND GEOVISUALIZATION OF HUMAN ACTIVITY PATTERNS <=SEP=> Over the past 40 years or so, human activities and movements in space-time have attracted considerable research interest in geography. One of the earliest analytical perspectives for the analysis of human activity patterns and movements in spacetime is time geography. Despite the usefulness of time geography in many areas of geographical research, there are very few studies that actually implemented its constructs as analytical methods up to the mid-1990s. With increasing availability of geo-referenced individual-level data and improvement in the geo-computational capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to operationalize and implement time-geographic constructs. This paper discusses recent applications of GIS-based geo-computation and three-dimensional (3-D) geo-visualization methods in time-geographic research. The usefulness of these methods is illustrated through examples drawn from the author’s recent studies. The paper attempts to show that GIS provides an effective environment for implementing timegeographic constructs and for the future development of operational methods in time-geographic research.

SHiP: Signature-based Hit Predictor for high performance caching <=SEP=> The shared last-level caches in CMPs play an important role in improving application performance and reducing off-chip memory bandwidth requirements. In order to use LLCs more efficiently, recent research has shown that changing the re-reference prediction on cache insertions and cache hits can significantly improve cache performance. A fundamental challenge, however, is how to best predict the re-reference pattern of an incoming cache line.
 This paper shows that cache performance can be improved by correlating the re-reference behavior of a cache line with a unique signature. We investigate the use of memory region, program counter, and instruction sequence history based signatures. We also propose a novel Signature-based Hit Predictor (SHiP) to learn the re-reference behavior of cache lines belonging to each signature. Overall, we find that SHiP offers substantial improvements over the baseline LRU replacement and state-of-the-art replacement policy proposals. On average, SHiP improves sequential and multiprogrammed application performance by roughly 10% and 12% over LRU replacement, respectively. Compared to recent replacement policy proposals such as Seg-LRU and SDBP, SHiP nearly doubles the performance gains while requiring less hardware overhead.

Radio frequency identification: technologies, applications, and research issues <=SEP=> A radio frequency identification (RFID) system is a special kind of sensor network to identify an object or a person using radio frequency transmission. A typical RFID system includes transponders (tags) and interrogators (readers): tags are attached to objects/persons, and readers communicate with the tags in their transmission ranges via radio signals. RFID systems have been gaining more and more popularity in areas such as supply chain management, automated identification systems, and any place requiring identifications of products or people. RFID technology is better than barcode in many ways, and may totally replace barcode in the future if certain technologies can be achieved such as low cost and protection of personal privacy. This paper provides a technology survey of RFID systems and various RFID applications. We also discuss five critical research issues: cost control, energy efficiency, privacy issue, multiple readers’ interference, and security issue. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discrete-time signal processing (2nd ed.) <=SEP=> 

A Multiband Dual-Polarized Omnidirectional Antenna for 2G/3G/LTE Applications <=SEP=> A multiband dual-polarized omnidirectional antenna for 2G/3G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communications is proposed in this letter, which consists of horizontal polarization (HP) and vertical polarization (VP) element with separate feeds. The VP element consists of three polygonal radiation patches with three equally spaced legs shorted to the ground plane. The HP element consists of three wideband slot loop structures, which is nested on the top of the VP element. Three slot loop structures provide a 360° coverage for HP and enhance its bandwidth. Both the simulated and measured results indicate that the frequency bands of 1650–2900 MHz for HP and 780–2700 MHz for VP can be achieved. The reflection of VP improves the gain of the HP element at least 1 dBi after nesting. The gain of HP element is more than 3 dBi for LTE, and the gain of VP element is more than 5 dBi in the LTE band and 1.5 dBi in the 2G band. Port isolation larger than 30 dB and low-gain variation levels are also obtained. The proposed antenna can be applied in mobile communications.

Automatic Detection and Quantification of WBCs and RBCs Using Iterative Structured Circle Detection Algorithm <=SEP=> Segmentation and counting of blood cells are considered as an important step that helps to extract features to diagnose some specific diseases like malaria or leukemia. The manual counting of white blood cells (WBCs) and red blood cells (RBCs) in microscopic images is an extremely tedious, time consuming, and inaccurate process. Automatic analysis will allow hematologist experts to perform faster and more accurately. The proposed method uses an iterative structured circle detection algorithm for the segmentation and counting of WBCs and RBCs. The separation of WBCs from RBCs was achieved by thresholding, and specific preprocessing steps were developed for each cell type. Counting was performed for each image using the proposed method based on modified circle detection, which automatically counted the cells. Several modifications were made to the basic (RCD) algorithm to solve the initialization problem, detecting irregular circles (cells), selecting the optimal circle from the candidate circles, determining the number of iterations in a fully dynamic way to enhance algorithm detection, and running time. The validation method used to determine segmentation accuracy was a quantitative analysis that included Precision, Recall, and F-measurement tests. The average accuracy of the proposed method was 95.3% for RBCs and 98.4% for WBCs.

Cognitive behavioural therapy for major psychiatric disorder: does it really work? A meta-analytical review of well-controlled trials. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Although cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is claimed to be effective in schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder, there have been negative findings in well-conducted studies and meta-analyses have not fully considered the potential influence of blindness or the use of control interventions.


METHOD
We pooled data from published trials of CBT in schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder that used controls for non-specific effects of intervention. Trials of effectiveness against relapse were also pooled, including those that compared CBT to treatment as usual (TAU). Blinding was examined as a moderating factor.


RESULTS
CBT was not effective in reducing symptoms in schizophrenia or in preventing relapse. CBT was effective in reducing symptoms in major depression, although the effect size was small, and in reducing relapse. CBT was ineffective in reducing relapse in bipolar disorder.


CONCLUSIONS
CBT is no better than non-specific control interventions in the treatment of schizophrenia and does not reduce relapse rates. It is effective in major depression but the size of the effect is small in treatment studies. On present evidence CBT is not an effective treatment strategy for prevention of relapse in bipolar disorder.

A Space Vector Modulation Scheme of the Quasi-Z-Source Three-Level T-Type Inverter for Common-Mode Voltage Reduction <=SEP=> The conventional three-level inverter suffers the limitation of voltage buck operation. In order to give both voltage buck and boost operation capability, the quasi-Z-source three-level T-type inverter (3LT<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^2$</tex-math></inline-formula>I) has been proposed. This paper further proposes a space vector modulation (SVM) scheme for the quasi-Z-source 3LT<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^2$</tex-math> </inline-formula>I to reduce the magnitude and slew rate of common-mode voltage (CMV). By properly selecting the shoot-through phase, the shoot-through states are inserted within zero vector in order not to affect the active states and output voltage. Doing so, the CMV generated by the quasi-Z-source 3LT<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $^2$</tex-math></inline-formula>I is restricted within one-sixth of dc-link voltage, and voltage boosting and CMV reduction can be simultaneously realized. In addition, high dc-link voltage utilization can be maintained. The proposed scheme has been verified in both simulations and experiments. Comparisons are conducted with the conventional SVM method and the phase-shifted sinusoidal PWM method.

Social Honeypots: Making Friends With A Spammer Near You <=SEP=> Social networking communities have become an important communications platform, but the popularity of these communities has also made them targets for a new breed of social spammers. Unfortunately, little is known about these social spammers, their level of sophistication, or their strategies and tactics. Thus, in this paper, we provide the first characterization of social spammers and their behaviors. Concretely, we make two contributions: (1) we introduce social honeypots for tracking and monitoring social spam, and (2) we report the results of an analysis performed on spam data that was harvested by our social honeypots. Based on our analysis, we find that the behaviors of social spammers exhibit recognizable temporal and geographic patterns and that social spam content contains various distinguishing characteristics. These results are quite promising and suggest that our analysis techniques may be used to automatically identify social spam.

Monolithic DC-DC boost converter with current-mode hysteretic control <=SEP=> A monolithic DC-DC boost converter with current-mode hysteretic control is designed and simulated in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The system is simple, robust, and has a fast response to external changes. It does not require an external clock, and the output is regulated by voltage feedback in addition to limiting the inductor current by sensing it. A non-overlapping clock is internally generated to drive the power switches using buffers designed to minimize power dissipation. For conversion specifications of 1.8 V to 3.3 V at 150 mA, overall efficiency of 94.5% is achieved. Line regulation is 17.5 mV/V, load regulation is 0.33% for a 100 mA current step, while the output voltage ripple is below 30 mV for nominal conditions.

Least-Squares Fitting of Circles and Ellipses ∗ <=SEP=> Fitting circles and ellipses to given points in the plane is a problem that arises in many application areas, e.g. computer graphics [1], coordinate metrology [2], petroleum engineering [11], statistics [7]. In the past, algorithms have been given which fit circles and ellipses in some least squares sense without minimizing the geometric distance to the given points [1], [6]. In this paper we present several algorithms which compute the ellipse for which the sum of the squares of the distances to the given points is minimal. These algorithms are compared with classical simple and iterative methods. Circles and ellipses may be represented algebraically i.e. by an equation of the form F (x) = 0. If a point is on the curve then its coordinates x are a zero of the function F . Alternatively, curves may be represented in parametric form, which is well suited for minimizing the sum of the squares of the distances. 1 Preliminaries and Introduction Ellipses, for which the sum of the squares of the distances to the given points is minimal will be referred to as “best fit” or “geometric fit”, and the algorithms will be called “geometric”. Determining the parameters of the algebraic equation F (x) = 0 in the least squares sense will be denoted by “algebraic fit” and the algorithms will be called “algebraic”. We will use the well known Gauss-Newton method to solve the nonlinear least squares problem (cf. [15]). Let u = (u1, . . . , un) T be a vector of unknowns and consider the nonlinear system of m equations f(u) = 0. If m > n, then we want to minimize

Measures of retaining digital evidence to prosecute computer-based cyber-crimes <=SEP=> With the rapid growth of computer and network systems in recent years, there has also been a corresponding increase in cyber-crime. Cybercrime takes many forms and has garnered much attention in the media, making information security a more urgent and important priority. In order to fight cyber-crime, criminal evidence must be gathered from these computer-based systems. This is quite different from the collection of conventional criminal evidence and can confuse investigators attempting to deal with the forensics of cyber-crime, highlighting the importance of computer forensics. In this paper, we offer solutions to guard against cyber-crime through the implementation of software toolkits for computerbased systems. In this way, those who engage in criminal acts in cyber-space can be more easily apprehended. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Obesity, fat distribution, and weight gain as risk factors for clinical diabetes in men. <=SEP=> OBJECTIVE
To investigate the relation between obesity, fat distribution, and weight gain through adulthood and the risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM).


RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
We analyzed data from a cohort of 51,529 U.S. male health professionals, 40-75 years of age in 1986, who completed biennial questionnaires sent out in 1986, 1988, 1990, and 1992. During 5 years of follow-up (1987-1992), 272 cases of NIDDM were diagnosed among men without a history of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in 1986 and who provided complete health information. Relative risks (RRs) associated with different anthropometric measures were calculated controlling for age, and multivariate RRs were calculated controlling for smoking, family history of diabetes, and age.


RESULTS
We found a strong positive association between overall obesity as measured by body mass index (BMI) and risk of diabetes. Men with a BMI of > or = 35 kg/m2 had a multivariate RR of 42.1 (95% confidence interval [CI] 22.0-80.6) compared with men with a BMI < 23.0 kg/m2. BMI at age 21 and absolute weight gain throughout adulthood were also significant independent risk factors for diabetes. Fat distribution, measured by waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), was a good predictor of diabetes only among the top 5%, while waist circumference was positively associated with the risk of diabetes among the top 20% of the cohort.


CONCLUSIONS
These data suggest that waist circumference may be a better indicator than WHR of the relationship between abdominal adiposity and risk of diabetes. Although early obesity, absolute weight gain throughout adulthood, and waist circumference were good predictors of diabetes, attained BMI was the dominant risk factor for NIDDM; even men of average relative weight had significantly elevated RRs.

A Highly Linear Two-Stage Amplifier Integrated Circuit Using InGaP/GaAs HBT <=SEP=> This paper presents a linearized two-stage amplifier integrated circuit (IC), having an output power level of about 1 Watt, used for general purpose applications. A predistortion method, based on alignment of the nonlinear characteristics between the first- and the second-stage amplifiers, has been proposed and analyzed in order to enhance the linearization aspects. The resistors in the active bias circuits of both the stages are optimized to achieve the best cancellation conditions for the third-order intermodulation components. The two-stage amplifier IC, which is based on an InGaP/GaAs hetero-junction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology, has been designed and implemented for the 900 MHz band. An output 1 dB compression point (P1dB) of 29.6 dBm, a maximum third-order output intercept point (OIP3) of as high as 48.7 dBm at a two-tone average output power of 21 dBm have been obtained while having a quiescent current of 375 mA and a single bias supply of 5.5 V. The implemented amplifier is able to maintain its IMD3 performance below -60 dBc up to an output power of 21 dBm.

REAL TIME HAND GESTURE RECOGNITION USING SIFT <=SEP=> The objective of the gesture recognition is to identify and distinguish the human gestures and utilizes these identified gestures for applications in specific domain. In this paper we propose a new approach to build a real time system to identify the standard gesture given by American Sign Language, or ASL, the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico. We propose a new method of improvised scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and use the same to extract the features. The objective of the paper is to decode a gesture video into the appropriate alphabets.

Improved Training of Generative Adversarial Networks Using Representative Features <=SEP=> Despite the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image generation, the trade-off between visual quality and image diversity remains a significant issue. This paper achieves both aims simultaneously by improving the stability of training GANs. The key idea of the proposed approach is to implicitly regularize the discriminator using representative features. Focusing on the fact that standard GAN minimizes reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, we transfer the representative feature, which is extracted from the data distribution using a pre-trained autoencoder (AE), to the discriminator of standard GANs. Because the AE learns to minimize forward KL divergence, our GAN training with representative features is influenced by both reverse and forward KL divergence. Consequently, the proposed approach is verified to improve visual quality and diversity of state of the art GANs using extensive evaluations.

Functional inactivation of the amygdala before but not after auditory fear conditioning prevents memory formation. <=SEP=> Two competing theories predict different effects on memory consolidation when the amygdala is inactivated after fear conditioning. One theory, based on studies using inhibitory avoidance training, proposes that the amygdala modulates the strength of fear learning, and post-training amygdala manipulations interfere with memory consolidation. The other, based on studies using Pavlovian fear conditioning, hypothesizes that fear learning occurs in the amygdala, and post-training manipulations after acquisition will not affect memory consolidation. We infused the GABAA agonist muscimol (4.4 nmol/side) or vehicle into lateral and basal amygdala (LBA) of rats either before or immediately after tone-foot shock Pavlovian fear conditioning. Pre-training infusions eliminated acquisition, whereas post-training infusions had no effect. These findings indicate that synaptic activity in LBA is necessary during learning, but that amygdala inactivation directly after training does not affect memory consolidation. Results suggest that essential aspects of plasticity underlying auditory fear conditioning take place within LBA during learning.

BitDeposit: Deterring Attacks and Abuses of Cloud Computing Services through Economic Measures <=SEP=> Dependability in cloud computing applications can be negatively affected by various attacks or service abuses. To come ahead of this threat, we propose an economic measure to deter attacks and various service abuses in cloud computing applications. Our proposed defense is based on requiring a service user to pay a small deposit, using digital currency, before invoking the service. Once they are done using the service, and there has been no detected abuse or attack, the deposit is paid back by the service provider to the service user. If an attack or an abuse is detected, the service user is not paid back and the service provider gets to keep the deposit. We propose the use of micro payments with a decentralized nature and small transaction fees, such as the Bit coin digital currency. Moreover, thanks to the existence of money exchanges which convert the Bit coin currency to real world currency, service providers can recoup loses when they exchange the confiscated deposits for real world currency.

Multi-channel ECG classification using forests of randomized shapelet trees <=SEP=> Data series of multiple channels occur at high rates and in massive quantities in several application domains, such as healthcare. In this paper, we study the problem of multi-channel ECG classification. We map this problem to multivariate data series classification and propose five methods for solving it, using a split-and-combine approach. The proposed framework is evaluated using three base-classifiers on real-world data for detecting Myocardial Infarction. Extensive experiments are performed on real ECG data extracted from the Physiobank data repository. Our findings emphasize the importance of selecting an appropriate base-classifier for multivariate data series classification, while demonstrating the superiority of the Random Shapelet Forest (0.825 accuracy) against competitor methods (0.664 accuracy for 1-NN under cDTW).

Penile septoplasty for congenital ventral penile curvature: results in 51 patients. <=SEP=> PURPOSE
The technique most widely used to correct congenital ventral penile curvature is still corporoplasty as originally described by Nesbit. We present results in patients treated with a variation of Nesbit corporoplasty used specifically for congenital ventral penile curvature.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
From June 2000 to June 2007 we treated 51 patients with congenital ventral penile curvature using modified corporoplasty (septoplasty), consisting of accessing the bed of the penile dorsal vein and excising 1 or more diamonds of tunica albuginea from it, extending in wedge-like formation 4 to 5 mm deep into the septum, until the penis is completely straightened. Patient history, clinical findings, self-photography results and the International Index of Erectile Function score were assessed. Curvature grade is expressed using the equation, 180 degrees - X, where X represents the deviation in degrees from the penis axis. Mean preoperative ventral curvature was 131.4 degrees (median 135, range 145 to 110). Of the patients 13 also had erectile dysfunction.


RESULTS
At followup postoperative mean ventral curvature was 178.3 degrees (median 179.1, range 180 to 175). A total of 49 stated that they were completely satisfied. Penile shortening was 5 to 15 mm. Compared to preoperative values there were marked improvements in the International Index of Erectile Function score in the various groups. No major postoperative complications developed. In 4 patients wound healing occurred by secondary intent.


CONCLUSIONS
This technique provides excellent straightening of the curved penis. By avoiding isolation of the whole dorsal neurovascular bundle there is no risk of neurovascular lesions. Suture perception is minimized.