EFFECT OF IMIDACLOPRID INSECTICIDE RESIDUE ON BIOCHEMICAL PARAMETERS IN POTATOES AND ITS ESTIMATION BY HPLC

Pesticides are known to interfere with the biochemical processes of plants, lowering their food quality. The effects of imidacloprid insecticide (a very commonly used pesticide on vegetables) on some biochemical quality control parameters and some enzyme systems (CAT, PPO and POD) were studied. Estimation of imidacloprid residues in potatoes was done by HPLC. It was observed that insecticide treated potatoes have considerable amount of imidacloprid 0.35 mg/kg at the time of harvesting. Washing potatoes with tap water and boiling for 20min. decreased residue up to 33% and 80% respectively. It was also found that the imidacloprid insecticide treatment decreased the reducing sugar, total phenols, ortho-dihydroxy phenols and ascorbic acid contents of potatoes but increased the total protein content and enzyme (catalase, peroxidase and polyphenol oxidase) activity. Keywords: Imidacloprid, potato, HPLC, biochemical parameters, enzyme activit

DeHiDe: Deep Learning-based Hybrid Model to Detect Fake News using Blockchain

The surge in the spread of misleading information, lies, propaganda, and false facts, frequently known as fake news, raised questions concerning social media's influence in today's fast-moving democratic society. The widespread and rapid dissemination of fake news cost us in many ways. For example, individual or societal costs by hampering elections integrity, significant economic losses by impacting stock markets, or increases the risk to national security. It is challenging to overcome the spreading of fake news problems in traditional centralized systems. However, Blockchain-- a distributed decentralized technology that ensures data provenance, authenticity, and traceability by providing a transparent, immutable, and verifiable transaction records can help in detecting and contending fake news. This paper proposes a novel hybrid model DeHiDe: Deep Learning-based Hybrid Model to Detect Fake News using Blockchain. The DeHiDe is a blockchain-based framework for legitimate news sharing by filtering out the fake news. It combines the benefit of blockchain with an intelligent deep learning model to reinforce robustness and accuracy in combating fake news's hurdle. It also compares the proposed method to existing state-of-the-art methods. The DeHiDe is expected to outperform state-of-the-art approaches in terms of services, features, and performance.Comment: 13 Pages, 5 figures, and 1 tabl

Changing trends in technique of hysterectomy in abnormal uterine bleeding: a comparison between non descent vaginal hysterectomy versus laparoscopic assisted vaginal hysterectomy

 Background: Hysterectomy is the commonest gynaecological surgery over the world. However, in India there is a huge lack in data regarding this surgery. The common indications are abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB), prolapse, pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and pelvic pain. This study focuses on pros and cons of different routes of hysterectomy to decide a better approach of management. Aims and objective of the study were to compare non descent vaginal hysterectomy (NDVH) to laparoscopic assisted vaginal hysterectomy (LAVH) to determine better route of hysterectomy.Methods: A randomized prospective observational study conducted in Hind Institute of Medical Science, Barabanki over a period of 2 years on perimenopausal women undergoing hysterectomy for AUB for benign pathology. 100 patients were selected for the study and randomly divided in 2 groups NDVH and LAVH. Preoperative investigations, intra-operative and postoperative complications were compared.Results: The mean duration of surgery was found to be significantly less in NDVH group 71.24 minutes as compared to LAVH group 103.1 minutes. (p value <0.001). Number of patients requiring Blood transfusion during or after surgery was higher in LAVH group (21) than in NDVH (15) (p value <0.05) suggesting more blood loss in LAVH. Patients undergoing NDVH were having significant less postoperative pain visual analogue score 3.8 as compared to 5.4 in LAVH group (p value <0.001) .5 patients in LAVH group were having postoperative abdomen discomfort as compared to only 1 in NDVH group (p value <0.05).Conclusions: NDVH supersedes LAVH being faster, less expensive, less blood loss and cosmetically scarless surgery. However, LAVH should be kept in mind if there is associated adnexal pathology

LINGO : Visually Debiasing Natural Language Instructions to Support Task Diversity

Cross-task generalization is a significant outcome that defines mastery in natural language understanding. Humans show a remarkable aptitude for this, and can solve many different types of tasks, given definitions in the form of textual instructions and a small set of examples. Recent work with pre-trained language models mimics this learning style: users can define and exemplify a task for the model to attempt as a series of natural language prompts or instructions. While prompting approaches have led to higher cross-task generalization compared to traditional supervised learning, analyzing 'bias' in the task instructions given to the model is a difficult problem, and has thus been relatively unexplored. For instance, are we truly modeling a task, or are we modeling a user's instructions? To help investigate this, we develop LINGO, a novel visual analytics interface that supports an effective, task-driven workflow to (1) help identify bias in natural language task instructions, (2) alter (or create) task instructions to reduce bias, and (3) evaluate pre-trained model performance on debiased task instructions. To robustly evaluate LINGO, we conduct a user study with both novice and expert instruction creators, over a dataset of 1,616 linguistic tasks and their natural language instructions, spanning 55 different languages. For both user groups, LINGO promotes the creation of more difficult tasks for pre-trained models, that contain higher linguistic diversity and lower instruction bias. We additionally discuss how the insights learned in developing and evaluating LINGO can aid in the design of future dashboards that aim to minimize the effort involved in prompt creation across multiple domains.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, Eurovis 202

Diagnostic Utility of TTF-1 and P40 Immunohistochemical Markers for Subtyping of Non-Small Cell Lung Carcinoma

Background : Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality over worldwide. Although the pathological diagnosis of lung carcinoma is limited as only small specimen available for diagnosis, the availability of targeted therapies has created a need for precise subtyping of non-small cell lung carcinoma. Several recent studies have demonstrated that the use of immunohistochemical markers can be helpful in differentiating squamous cell carcinoma from adenocarcinoma not only on surgically resected specimen but also on small biopsy samples. Material and Methods: A cross-sectional study of one year duration including 50 cases of lung carcinomas on guided biopsies were first reported on Haematoxylin and Eosin sections and later subjected for IHC using relevant markers TTF-1 and p40. Results: In our study IHC with TTF-1 and p40 aided in subtyping of 35 (92.1%) cases of non-small cell lung carcinoma and this diagnostic accuracy was found to be statistically significant with p value <0.001. On statistical analysis, p40 showed 100% sensitivity and 85.7% specificity for squamous differentiation whereas TTF-1 showed sensitivity of 85.7% and specificity of 100% for adenocarcinoma. Out of 50 cases, after IHC, 29 (58%) were diagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma, 18 (36%) as adenocarcinoma, 3 (6%) as non-small cell lung carcinoma. Conclusion: The minimalist IHC based model of p40 and TTF-1 on biopsy samples were effective to correctly subtype most cases of non-small cell lung carcinoma and contribute in sparing material for molecular testing. Keywords: Non-small cell lung carcinoma, immunohistochemistry, squamous cell carcinom

Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

18% of the world's population lives in India, and many states of India have populations similar to those of large countries. Action to effectively improve population health in India requires availability of reliable and comprehensive state-level estimates of disease burden and risk factors over time. Such comprehensive estimates have not been available so far for all major diseases and risk factors. Thus, we aimed to estimate the disease burden and risk factors in every state of India as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2016

Breast cancer management pathways during the COVID-19 pandemic: outcomes from the UK ‘Alert Level 4’ phase of the B-MaP-C study

Abstract: Background: The B-MaP-C study aimed to determine alterations to breast cancer (BC) management during the peak transmission period of the UK COVID-19 pandemic and the potential impact of these treatment decisions. Methods: This was a national cohort study of patients with early BC undergoing multidisciplinary team (MDT)-guided treatment recommendations during the pandemic, designated ‘standard’ or ‘COVID-altered’, in the preoperative, operative and post-operative setting. Findings: Of 3776 patients (from 64 UK units) in the study, 2246 (59%) had ‘COVID-altered’ management. ‘Bridging’ endocrine therapy was used (n = 951) where theatre capacity was reduced. There was increasing access to COVID-19 low-risk theatres during the study period (59%). In line with national guidance, immediate breast reconstruction was avoided (n = 299). Where adjuvant chemotherapy was omitted (n = 81), the median benefit was only 3% (IQR 2–9%) using ‘NHS Predict’. There was the rapid adoption of new evidence-based hypofractionated radiotherapy (n = 781, from 46 units). Only 14 patients (1%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during their treatment journey. Conclusions: The majority of ‘COVID-altered’ management decisions were largely in line with pre-COVID evidence-based guidelines, implying that breast cancer survival outcomes are unlikely to be negatively impacted by the pandemic. However, in this study, the potential impact of delays to BC presentation or diagnosis remains unknown