Database Management System for a Digitized Medical Image

Medical images are critical component of the healthcare system with great impact on the society’s welfare. Traditionally, medical images were stored on films in developing country, but the advances in modern imaging modalities made it possible to store them electronically. Thus, this paper gave and developed a novel framework for storing, retrieving and processing digitized medical images. Digital medical informatics and images are commonly used in hospitals today because  of the interrelatedness of the radiology department and other departments, especially the intensive care unit and emergency department, the transmission and sharing of medical images has become a critical issue. This work provides vivid solution to the problem encountered and the difficulties associated with the challenges of large memory utilization attributing to storing patient’s medical image information conveniently. Keyword: Database Management System, Digitized Medical images, Memory utilizatio

The relationship between intimate partner violence and postpartum depression in Osogbo, Nigeria

Background: Postpartum depression is the most prevalent postpartum mental health problem. Risk factors for postpartum depression include psychosocial stressors. One of these psychosocial stressors could be intimate partner violence. Co-occurrence of intimate partner violence and postpartum depression is considered deadly co morbidity because it can increase the risk of homicide and suicide. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between intimate partner violence and depression among postnatal women attending postnatal and infant welfare clinics of LAUTECH Teaching Hospital, Osogbo.Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 220 postpartum women who attended postnatal and infant welfare clinics of LAUTECH Teaching Hospital in Osogbo using Composite Abuse Scale (CAS), Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) and Socio-demographic questionnaire.  Respondents that were found to be EPDS positive as well as 10% of EPDS negative respondents were further assessed with Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) (depression subscale) to diagnose depression.Results: Respondents that experienced intimate partner violence were five times as likely to have postpartum depression compared to those that did not experience IPV. Logistic regression showed that intimate partner violence independently predicted postpartum depression in respondents (OR 4.799, CI 1.844-12.493).Conclusions: Postpartum depression was significantly higher among women that experienced intimate partner violence. This observation has implications for mental health of women, therefore, any woman with suspected postpartum depression should be asked about IPV as this could be a pointer to IPV

Sonographic soft tissue arthritic changes associated with post-stroke hemiplegic knee pain : utility of musculoskeletal ultrasound in a resource-limited setting

Purpose: Post-stroke arthritic changes that may compromise rehabilitation have been described in the upper and lower limbs. We aimed at evaluating the soft tissue arthritic changes associated with pain in hemiplegic knees of stroke patients in our environment. Material and methods: Hemiplegic and non-hemiplegic knees of 48 stroke patients as well as both knees of 26 apparently healthy controls were evaluated with a 7.5-12 MHz linear ultrasound probe. History of knee pain, and sociodemographic, laboratory, and clinical data were recorded for all study participants. Muscle tone and power as well as functional ambulatory category (FAC) were graded for the stroke patients. Data was analysed using SPSS version 20. Results: Pain was reported more often in hemiplegic than non-hemiplegic knees (n = 16 vs. n = 6, p = 0.021). The frequencies of soft tissue arthritic changes found, which included reduced lateral and medial femoral cartilage thickness, suprapatellar effusion, and irregular cartilage-bone margin, were similar between hemiplegic and non-hemiplegic knees (p > 0.05). Suprapatellar effusion and reduced lateral femoral cartilage thickness were more prevalent in the hemiplegic knees compared to the healthy control knees (p < 0.05). Stroke patients with pes anserinus tendinosis had greater risk of hemiplegic knee pain (HKP) when compared to stroke patients without this lesion (OR = 10; 95% CI: 1.7-61). FAC, muscle tone, and power showed no association with HKP. Conclusions: Soft tissue arthritic changes associated with knee pain are comparable between hemiplegic and non-hemiplegic knees of stroke patients. The risk of knee pain in stroke is higher in the presence of pes anserinus tendinosis

Does globalization and energy usage influence carbon emissions in South Asia? An empirical revisit of the debate

The 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 agenda hinges on attaining a sustainable environment with the need to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. Hence, this study empirically revisits the debate on the effect of nonrenewable energy and globalization on carbon emissions within the framework of the Kuznets hypothesis using an unbalanced panel data from seven South Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) covering 1980–2019. The variables of interest are carbon emissions measured in metric tons per capita, energy use measured as kg of oil equivalent per capita, and globalization index. To address five main objectives, we deploy four techniques: panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), quantile regression (QR), and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). For the most part, the findings reveal that the (1) inverted U-shaped energy-Kuznets curve holds; (2) U-shaped globalization-Kuznets curve is evident; (3) inverted U-shaped turning points for nonrenewable energy are 496.03 and 640.84, while for globalization are 38.83 and 39.04, respectively; (4) globalization-emission relationship indicates a U-shaped relationship at the median and 75th quantile; and (5) inverted U-shaped energy-Kuznets holds in Pakistan but a U-shaped nexus prevails in Nepal and Sri Lanka; inverted U-shaped globalization-Kuznets holds in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but U-shaped nexus is evident in Bhutan, Maldives, and Nepal. Deductively, our results show that South Asia countries (at early stage of development) are faced with the hazardous substance that deteriorates human health. Moreover, the non-linear square term of the nonrenewable energy-emissions relationship is negative, which validates the inverted U-shaped EKC theory. Overall, the effect of energy and globalization on carbon emissions is opposite while the consistency at the 75th quantile result indicates that countries with intense globalization are prone to environmental degradation

The role of decompressive craniectomy in limited resource environments

Decompressive craniectomy (DC) is a neurosurgical procedure useful to prevent and manage the impact of high intracranial pressure (ICP) that leads to brain herniation and brain’s tissue ischemia. In well-resourced environment this procedure has been proposed as a last tier therapy when ICP is not controlled by medical therapies in the management of different neurosurgical emergencies like traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke, infectious diseases, hydrocephalus, tumors, etc. The purpose of this narrative review is to discuss the role of DC in areas of low neurosurgical and neurocritical care resources. We performed a literature review with a specific search strategy in web repositories and some local and regional journals from Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The most common publications include case reports, case series and observational studies describing the benefits of the procedure on different pathologies but with several types of biases due to the absence of robust studies or clinical registries analysis in these kinds of environments

Performance Evaluation of Kernel-Based Feature Extraction Techniques for Face Recognition System

Face recognition is considered to be one of the most reliable biometrics where security issues are of concerned. Feature extraction which is a functional block of a face recognition system becomes a critical problem when there is need to obtain the best feature with minimum classification error and low running time. Most existing face recognition systems have adopted different non-linear feature extraction techniques for face recognition but identification of the most suitable non-linear kernel variants for these systems remain an open problem. Hence, this research work analyzed the performance of three kernel feature extraction technique (Kernel Principal Component Analysis, Kernel Linear Discriminant Analysis and Kernel Independent Component Analysis) for face recognition system. A database of 360 face images was created by obtaining facial images from LAUTECH Biometric Research Group consisting of six facial expressions of 60 persons. Images were preprocessed (gray scaling, cropping and histogram equalization) and the kernel variants were used to extract distinctive features and reduce the dimensionality of each of the images from 600x800 pixels to four smaller dimensions: 50x50, 100x100, 150x150 and 200x200 pixels. Euclidean Distance similarity measure was used for classification. The performance of the three kernel variants was evaluated for face recognition system using 180 images for training and 180 images for testing using the following metrics: Recognition Accuracy (RA) and Recognition Time (RT). Empirical result indicate that KLDA performs best for face recognition system with an average accuracy of 94.52%.  The larger image dimension also results in better recognition performance. We intend to experiment on other classifiers for face recognition system in our future work. Keywords— Biometrics, Face, Feature extraction, Kernel, KICA, KPCA, KLDA, Linear, Non-linear

The Role of Decompressive Craniectomy in Limited Resource Environments

Decompressive craniectomy (DC) is a neurosurgical procedure useful to prevent and manage the impact of high intracranial pressure (ICP) that leads to brain herniation and brain's tissue ischemia. In well-resourced environment this procedure has been proposed as a last tier therapy when ICP is not controlled by medical therapies in the management of different neurosurgical emergencies like traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke, infectious diseases, hydrocephalus, tumors, etc. The purpose of this narrative review is to discuss the role of DC in areas of low neurosurgical and neurocritical care resources. We performed a literature review with a specific search strategy in web repositories and some local and regional journals from Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The most common publications include case reports, case series and observational studies describing the benefits of the procedure on different pathologies but with several types of biases due to the absence of robust studies or clinical registries analysis in these kinds of environments

Effects of palm kernel cake supplement on fatty acid profile and milk composition of lactating wad goats fed grass silage

The scarcity of quality feed and cost-effective supplements necessitates verifiable concentrate as a supplement for goat milk production. Palm Kernel Cake (PKC), an oil palm by-product rich in protein and energy, gradually replaced Prepared Concentrate (PC) in this study. This replacement's impact on milk composition and fatty acid profile in lactating WAD goats fed grass silage basal diet was assessed. Five supplement concentrates with varying PC: PKC ratios (100:0, 75:25, 50:50, 25:75, 0:100) were fed to 25 lactating WAD goats in a randomized setting of 5 animals per group. The replacement significantly affected (p<0.05) milk fat, protein, specific gravity, ash, and fat-corrected milk. The highest milk fat (2.17%) came from 100% PKC supplementation, while the lowest (0.77%) came from 25% PKC. Total solid fat values were not significantly affected. Fat Corrected Milk results mirrored the milk fat trend. The 100% PKC group had the highest crude protein (8.22%), while 25% and 75%PKC were not different (p<0.05). Fatty acid profile, expressed as total Fatty Acid Methyl Esters (FAMEs) g/kg, showed increased medium and long-chain fatty acids as PC was replaced. In conclusion, 100% PKC supplementation enhanced milk fat, while 50% PC replacement increased long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in goat mil

Career Success Schemas and their Contextual Embeddedness: A Comparative Configurational Perspective

We introduce career success schemas as critical for understanding how people in different contexts perceive and understand career success. Using a comparative configurational approach, we show, in a study of 13 countries, that two structural characteristics of career success schemas\u2014complexity and convergence\u2014differ across country contexts and are embedded in specific configurations of institutional factors. Adopting complexity and convergence as primary dimensions, we propose a taxonomy of career success schemas at the country level. Based on this taxonomy, we contribute to the understanding of subjective career success across countries, discuss the importance of schemas for organisational career systems in multinational enterprises, and propose specific guidelines for future comparative careers research