A spinal alignment correction system has a posted lumbar pedicle screw called a MAC Pin which has an elongated shaft and a rod coupler assembly and a cannulated tower. The electroless plating apparatus includes a pre-plating treatment module including a pre-plating treatment tank, a plating module, and an inter-module substrate transport device. An integrated system structured for continuously producing and supplying hydrogen to a micro fuel cell and for converting the continuously supplied hydrogen into electric energy. After trying each of the plurality of VQ codevectors, the codevector that minimizes the energy of the VQ error vector is selected as the output of the vector quantizer. The invention also relates to composite cooling elements manufactured by this method. The shell assembly includes a shell and a staple guide housing a plurality of staples.