Besides the scheduled closures of the procedure rooms including nine public holidays and seven training days, occasional closures – due to illness, holidays and conference attendance of physicians – occurred frequently.
The use of HA, only when solicited, reduces costs and risks, effectively reducing pain, which allows closure of the procedure.
As is often the case, such idealistic ambition is relatively easily put down on paper when applying for research funding, but proves to be quite a challenge in practice, where even the ambition itself will become the subject of intense debate, even after the closure of the procedure.
There is no consensus on the surgical treatment of anal fistulas at present. 25 Management of complex anal fistulas remains a tremendous challenge because of the high level of recurrence and complications, depending of the type of fistula and choice of closure procedure.
We also recorded region of lumbar surgery, type of procedure, operative time from skin incision to closure, estimated blood loss, and whether or not prophylactic antibiotics were administered.
We also compared the performance of the basic and modified algorithms (their running times and the average number of calls to the closure computation procedure) on a particular set of 100 instances of the binary polymer model with n=12, t=2, and p x, r)=0.00001609 (with this value of p x, r), there is about a 50% chance that an instance of the model contains an RAF set).
The modified RAF algorithm, based on the notion of pseudo-RAFs, clearly improves on the number of calls to the closure computation procedure, which is computationally the most expensive part of the algorithm.
As expected, the average number of calls to the closure computation procedure is reduced; indeed, by a factor of 1.78.
In short, the above results show that the modified algorithm can be expected to be not worse than the basic one in terms of running time, and better in terms of the number of calls to the closure computation procedure.
