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Objectives Diabetic patients who undergo lower limb arterial bypass surgery are considered to have a worse clinical outcome compared to non-diabetics. The aim of the study was to test this hypothesis after applying propensity score matching analysis. Patients and methods A total of 113 consecutive lower limb bypass procedures (55 diabetic and 58 non-diabetic) were evaluated regarding their clinical outcome. Endpoints of the study included amputation-free survival, limb salvage, patency and patients’ survival up to 36 months post-procedure. After propensity score matching analysis, two new groups, diabetic and non-diabetic, of 31 limbs in each one were created, both equivalent regarding all baseline characteristics. Results Between the propensity score matching groups, the amputation-free survival was 68.8% in the non-diabetic and 37.7% in the diabetic group at 36 months ( p = 0.004). Similarly, the survival was 88.6% and 57.6%, respectively, in the two groups at the same time point ( p = 0.01). On the contrary, no difference was found in patency (58.3% vs. 56%) and in limb salvage rate (74.1% vs. 60.8%). Conclusions Lower limbs arterial bypass surgery has similar results regarding patency and limb salvage rate in diabetic and non-diabetic patients. On the contrary, mortality is worse in diabetic patients, this affecting negatively their amputation-free survival.

A 71-year-old male patient with severe left buttock and lower-extremity claudication due to iliac artery bifurcation stenoses was referred to our institution for endovascular treatment. A ‘kissing’ technique was used in order to dilate the proximal parts of both internal and external iliac arteries and avoid compromization of the internal iliac artery during proximal external iliac artery stenting. A balloon expandable stent was inserted via a left ipsilateral retrograde access to the narrowed origin of the left external iliacartery and a balloon catheter via a right contralateral access inside the origin of the left internal iliac artery. Simultaneous balloons inflation restored full patency of both vessels. Twelve months later the patient is doing well, free of buttock or lower-extremity claudication symptoms. For iliac artery bifurcation atherosclerotic disease, endovascular repair with the ‘kissing’ technique can achieve a complete bifurcation reconstruction offering significant clinical benefit in selected patients.

Network coding has shown a considerable improvement in terms of capacity and robustness compared to traditional store-and-forward transmission paradigm. However, since the intermediate nodes in network coding-enabled networks have the ability to change the packets en route, network coding-enabled networks are vulnerable to pollution attacks where a small number of polluted messages can corrupt bunches of legitimate messages. Recently, research effort has been put on schemes for protecting the transmitted messages against data pollution attacks. However, most of them cannot resist tag pollution attacks. This paper presents a new homomorphic MAC-based scheme, called Dual-Homomorphic MAC (Dual-HMAC), for network coding-enabled wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme makes use of two types of tags (i.e., MACs and D-MACs) to provide resistance against data pollution attacks and partially tag pollution attacks. Furthermore, our proposed scheme presents low communication overhead and low computational complexity compared to other existing schemes.