5 IVAN also compared discontinuous (as-needed) treatment against continuous monthly injections.
Of the strategies for the treatment of nAMD evaluated in this trial, we found discontinuous (as-needed) bevacizumab to be the least costly and most cost-effective.
In the IVAN study, 610 patients were assigned randomly to ranibizumab or bevacizumab, given either every month (continuous) or as needed (discontinuous), with three consecutive injection series and monthly review.
The key components of this procedure include direct undermining only in the paramedian area, discontinuous undermining to costal margins and flanks as needed, lateral placement of the highest-tension wound-closure suture, superficial fascial system repair with permanent sutures along the entire incision, and liberal adjunctive liposuction in the upper abdomen and lateral and posterior trunk.
A 1-h pre-treatment with 1 μM BA caused a temporary malformation of the emerging cell plate, which thus appeared to be discontinuous (as described further below; Fig. 3C, 2 min), and also increased the time needed for the expanding cell plate to complete its fusion with the parental cell wall independently of cell size (Fig. 3D).
VA gain was nearly the same in patients receiving discontinuous as in those receiving monthly injections (discontinuous − continuous = −0.35 letters).
The finished sequence map was discontinuous, as expected from the physical map.
Thanks to only first oder PDEs involved in the LBE, no special techniques, such as hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method (HDG), local discontinuous Galerkin method (LDG) and so on, are needed to discrete diffusion term, and thus, it simplifies the algorithm and implementation of the high order spectral difference method for simulating viscous flows.
Discontinuous treatment reduced the number of injections required, but increased the number of monitoring consultations needed to assess disease status against retreatment criteria, as we assumed that OCT would only be performed when it would inform treatment decisions.
Upwinding needed for convection of σ is made by a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) FE method.
Since these functions are, in general, discontinuous across subdomain interfaces, we need to impose the continuity conditions separately.
