Traumatic lumbar visceral herniation in a young woman

INTRODUCTIONLumbar herniation is uncommon, with traumatic etiology being rare. Traumatic lumbar hernias are usually caused by seatbelt injury in motor vehicle accidents. It is exceedingly uncommon to see lumbar hernias in an unrestrained passenger of a motor vehicle accident.PRESENTATION OF CASEWe present a case of a traumatic inferior lumbar hernia in a young woman who was an unrestrained driver of a vehicle involved in a high-speed collision, with multiple rollover and ejection. CT scans of the abdomen and pelvis suggested soft tissue injury involving muscles in the left lower posterior flank with traumatic herniation of the colon and small bowel. Emergent midline abdominal laparotomy confirmed herniation in the left lower quadrant. After abdominal closure, in the prone position, an extensive laceration over the left flank also confirmed herniation. Due to its dirty nature, the wound was irrigated, lavaged and covered with wound vacuum-assisted closure placement. The decision was made in favor of delayed elective hernia repair.DISCUSSIONLumbar hernias are usually caused by sudden force to the abdomen, leading to increased intra-abdominal pressure. This pressure combined with areas of weakness in the superior and/or inferior triangle lead to herniation. Uncommonly, the contents of lumbar hernias can strangulate or incarcerate leading to bowel obstruction. This can often be prevented by detection with CT and laparotomy.CONCLUSIONLumbar herniation of traumatic etiology is rare. Early detection with CT and/or exploratory laparotomy is important to avoid increases in size of the defect and bowel strangulation and incarceration.     

A novel audio forensic data-set for digital multimedia forensics

Today, digital multimedia (audio, video, images) is a common evidential source in litigation and criminal justice proceedings, and, not surprisingly, multimedia forensics is an active research area. One particular challenge faced by multimedia forensic researchers is the lack of a comprehensive and publicly available data-set for evaluating existing and new algorithms. This paper presents a digital audio forensic data-set, designed to facilitate evaluation of audio forensic algorithms (e.g. microphone identification, acoustic environment identification and splice detection). This paper also briefly describes the data-collection settings, microphones, speakers, languages and notations used. Existing tamper-detection techniques rely on artefacts due to recording devices, codec and/or the acoustic environment in the audio in question. Experimental results show that the selected approaches achieved promising results.     

An incomplete vascular ring causing respiratory distress

Kommerell’s diverticulum is a rare saccular aneurysmal dilation of the descending aorta. We report a case of a 3.5-year-old boy with the extremely rare combination of Kommerell’s diverticulum with a right descending aorta and proximal patent ductus arteriosus aneurysm forming an incomplete vascular ring. To our knowledge, this rare case has not been reported to date.