Navigating the Promises and Hurdles of Blockchain Technology: A Journey through Opportunities and Challenges

Everyone has come across the buzz word of the industry “Blockchain”. Today, Blockchain and the crypto-currencies have become parallel platforms where people have started performing their monetary/non-monetary transactions. It is a very popular technology that rules almost every sector in foreign country, but not approved fully by Indian government. Blockchain is the collection of blocks connected in a linear list fashion [1]. Each block encloses its own data, also holds the hash of the previous block which ties a new block to the previous one unlike linked list. If one of the blocks is removed from the blockchain, the entire chain will collapse because of loss of connectivity. Cryptography in hands with computer science ensures that nobody can change the data in blockchain network. Once information is added to the blockchain, it is impossible to remove or edit. The immutable nature makes the blockchain to serve as a trustworthy database of information. Once validated by the network’s consensus algorithm(s), these blocks are added to an existing sequential chain of cryptographic hash-linked blocks, to ensure the integrity of the data in blockchain [2]. Hence this paper brings about the structure of blockchain, the creation of blocks, the data structure-Merkle tree to store the transactions, the distributed consensus algorithms to achieve agreement among the nodes, the popular use-cases and applications of blockchain

Injection ranitidine induced death

Ranitidine is a histamine-2-receptor antagonist. It was a commonly used drug. It holds excellent safety record. Anaphylactic reactions to ranitidine is uncommonly encountered. Death due to ranitidine is extremely a rare event and very few cases are reported world-wide. Clinical history, Lab investigations and histological data of a 43-Years old woman with negative history of allergic events, who died suddenly after the intra-venous administration of 50mg of intravenous ranitidine which was prescribed as a routine pre medication prior hysterectomy is presented below. Though the incidence of anaphylactic reactions is less with ranitidine, precautions to be taken prior administration of the drug and when such an event is encountered it should be promptly managed

A Study on Analysis of the Surgical Outcomes in Congenital Glaucoma following Combined Trabeculotomy and Trabeculectomy

BACKGROUND: Congenital glaucoma is due to the isolated trabeculodysgenesis. The intraocular pressure is raised in early childhood due to developmental defect in the trabecular meshwork causing decreased facility of aqueous outflow. Therefore management is mainly surgical and aimed at improving the facility of outflow by cleaving the abnormal trabecular meshwork. Combined trabeculotomy with trabeculectomy has replaced goniotomy as the preferred surgical treatment. The technique is less dependant on corneal clarity therefore applicable to all primary surgery in congenital glaucoma. AIM OF THE STUDY: To analyse the surgical outcomes in congenital glaucoma following combined trabeculotomy and trabeculectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Evaluation done are presenting IOP, anterior segment corneal clarity and corneal diameter. All were re examined in the postoperative period following combined trabeculotomy and trabeculectomy surgery for intraocular pressure measurement. RESULTS: Following Combined Trabeculotomy and Trabeculectomy, there was a statistically significant reduction in IOP in the post operative visits when compared with Pre Operative IOP. There was also an associated reduction in corneal haze and improvement in vision. There was Complete Success in 53.33% and Qualified success in 46.67% at final follow-up visit with no failures. This was because long term follow up is needed to determine and manage the failure rates and complications. CONCLUSION: Medical therapy is often ineffective and surgery is the ultimate management. Combined Trabeculotomy and Trabeculectomy is a safer and effective primary surgery for Primary Congenital Glaucoma with good success rate and better IOP control

Evaluating Performance of Web Applications in (Cloud) Virtualized Environments

Web applications usually involve a number of different software libraries and tools (usually referred to as frameworks) each carrying out specific task/s and generating the corresponding overhead. In this paper, we show how to evaluate and even find out several configuration performance characteristics by using virtualized environments which are now used in data centers and cloud environments. We use specific and simple web software architectures as proof of concept, and explain several experiments that show performance issues not always expected from a conceptual point of view. We also explain that adding software libraries and tools also generate performance analysis complexities. We also shown that as an application is shown to scale, the problems to identify performance details and bottlenecks also scale, and the performance analysis also requires deeper levels of details.Instituto de Investigación en Informátic

Performance of a megawatt-scale grid-connected solar photovoltaic power plant in Kolar District in Karnataka

A megawatt scale grid-connected photovoltaic power plant was commissioned on 27 December 2009 in Yalesandra in Kolar district in Karnataka. The Yalesandra plant is one among more than 20 such Megawatt size solar power plants in India during the past few years. The performance of this plant during its first year of operation has been discussed. The total electrical energy generated by the Yelasandra plant during 2010 was 3.34 million kWh. Although the performance of photovoltaic modules was good, there were problems associated with the inverters which led to reduction in energy generation. The impact of temperature variation of modules on their performance has been highlighted

Manpower Governance in Health Services in India by Developing Information Technology Infrastructure in Health

ABSTRACT Management of Knowledge workers in healthcare is KEYWORDS Attrition, Knowledge workforce, e-health, retention strategies ABBREVIATIONS Healthcare Information Technology (HIT ), Electronic Medical Record (EMR ), Health Information System (HIS) , Electronic Data Capture (EDC), Continuing Medical Education ( CME), Hospital Management Information Systems ( HMIS) Unique Health Identification Number (UHID) DESCRIPTION This manuscript describes the work done by the Healthcare Attrition Tracking Survey (HATS) conducted to evaluate the rate of attrition among Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics and healthcare administrators. About 2000 healthcare professionals were approached for the survey. Out of this, after elimination based on certain eligibility criteria, questionnaire was filled by 807 respondents. 40 hospitals including both private and public sectors in the rural and urban areas were included for this survey. Additionally, Focused Group Discussions (FGD) were also carried out to find out factors contributing to attrition. Next, plausible retention strategies were analyzed for knowledge workforce in healthcare. Data was analysed by means of Factor Analysis on Rotated Factor Matrix using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) in SPSS 16.0 package to determine the relationships between factors influencing attrition. Six factors of attrition namely Compensation and perks, Work Life Balance, Sense of Accomplishment, Work load leading to exhaustion,Need for automation and technology improvement, Break Monotony of Work have been identified with a data reliability of 0.809%. Simplification of processes using Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) tools is a suggested as a significant strategy to reduce stress at work, time spent on administrative work and focus on core competence by knowledge workers in healthcare thereby reducing rate of attrition. INTRODUCTION Health care industry relies a lot on advanced medical technology, but it is also a labor-intensive industry. Health care providers play a vital role in the health care system. As the Indian healthcare industry experiences phenomenal growth, hospitals are moving forward towards excellence rather than survival and gearing up to fulfill the gaps in three key areas of people, process and technology. In this paper, the terms "health care providers", "health care professionals", "health care knowledge workers " and "human resources for health" are used interchangeably, although "human resources for health" may comprise people other than those who have been trained in health-related field, such as health policy analysts, health planners, medical statisticians or ambulance drivers. Previous studies in the area of attrition have been carried out amongst physicians, nurses and pharmacists [1], 4. METHODOLOGY 4.1. DATA SOURCE Data for this study came from the second round of the Healthcare Attrition Tracking Survey (HATS). HATS is a part of the multi-level study of the ongoing research program conducted to address these issues regarding attrition among healthcare professionals and to determine if implementation of Health Information Technology in hospitals and healthcare centers can work as an effective retention strategy in India. HATS was conducted among skilled healthcare professionals such as doctors, paramedics, administrative and managerial staff in public as well as private hospitals covering rural and urban regions of Northern India. informatics ( IAMI) in Hyderabad, India (Nov. 2009). This was followed by a pre-test study conducted on 30 respondents in a leading 100 bedded Private Hospital in New Delhi, India. The second round of data collection led to the present paper using a complex sampling design of 40 Hospitals randomly selected to yield a non-biased representative sample of healthcare workforce both in rural and urban areas. Out of about over 2000 respondents surveyed, 807 finally respondents filled the questionnaire. The questionnaire tool was developed by the authors, reviewed by the experts in the field and then utilized for the HATS. The major challenge faced was to take permission from the HR authorities to conduct the survey due to issues of transparency of the system and its HR policies. STUDY DESIGN RESULTS An overall response rate of 40% was achieved in this study with a total of 1000 questionnaires distributed and 807 responses. The following illustrates the descriptive statistics of the various parameters considered for the HATS. Table III Comparison of the six factors of attrition DISCUSSION Results show a significant difference in attitudes towards factors affecting attrition. These attitudes together with nature of work and income are associated with an increased propensity for migration to another job. These findings support earlier such findings, that a broader set of both push and pull factors should be taken into consideration while considering attrition in healthcare [5]. The factors that have been identified through statistical analyses provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between forces that influence attrition rate. The results also provide evidence to demonstrate that economic motivation as a factor for changing jobs is not an independent, stand-alone factor in itself, but rather a component of broader factors that takes into consideration the yearning to improvise both developments in both professional and personal front. This finding is a departure from previous studies that indicate the intention of healthcare professionals to frequently change jobs and migration to foreign countries are mainly dependent on remuneration. This may be partly because those studies did not take into account the deeper analysis of relationships between factors [24]

An Effective Strategy for the Synthesis of Biocompatible Gold Nanoparticles Using Cinnamon Phytochemicals for Phantom CT Imaging and Photoacoustic Detection of Cancerous Cells

This is a post-print version of the Pharmaceutical Research Article. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. DOI 10.1007/s11095-010-0276-6Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to explore the utilization of cinnamon coated gold nanoparticles (Cin-AuNPs) as CT/optical contrast enhancement agent for detection of cancer cells. Methods: Cin-AuNPs were synthesized by a “Green” procedure and the detailed characterization has been performed by physic-chemical analysis. Cytotoxicity and cellualar uptake studies were carried out in normal human fibroblast and cancerous (PC-3 and MCF-7) cells respectively. The efficacy of detecting cancerous cells was monitored using photoacoustic technique. In vivo biodistribution was studied after IV injection of Cin-AuNPs in mice and a CT phantom model was generated. Results: Biocompatible Cin-AuNPs were synthesized with high purity. Significant uptake of these gold nanoparticles was observed in PC-3 and MCF-7 cells. Cin-AuNPs internalized in cancerous cells facilitate detectable photoacoustic signals. In vivo biodistribution in normal mouse shows steady accumulation of gold nanoparticles in lungs and rapid clearance from blood. Quantitative analysis of CT values in phantom model reveals that the cinnamon phytochemicals coated AuNPs has reasonable attenuation efficiency. Conclusions: The results indicate that these non-toxic Cin-AuNPs can serve as excellent CT/ photoacoustic contrast enhancement agents and may provide a novel approach toward the tumor detection through nanopharmaceuticals.This work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute under the Cancer Nanotechnology Platform program (grant number: 5R01CA119412-01), NIH - 1R21CA128460-01; NIH-SBIR-Contract no. 241, and University of Missouri-Research Board - Program C8761 RB 06-030

Impact of blockchain technology adoption in farms of FPO members

BCT adoption remains to be a promising way to achieve food security and safety in many developing countries. This paper explores the impact of blockchain technology adoption on household farm income. Based on a simple random sampling method, a cross sectional survey was conducted in the year 2023 to collect data from 240 sample farmers including 120 BCT adopters and 120 non-adopters in Erode district of Tamil Nadu. The information regarding socio-economic profiles like age, gender, educational status, farming experience, farm size, extension agency contact, training programmes attended, access to technological information were collected from sample farmers through personal interviews. The present research used a treatment effect analysis with propensity score matching approach to assess the impact of blockchain technology adoption on household’s farm income. Results showed a significant increase in farm income as a result of blockchain technology adoption among sample farmers. PSM approach estimated that the blockchain technology adopters earned higher farm income of ₹25829.16 as compared to non-adopters. Hence the findings provide empirical evidence that blockchain technology adoption in agriculture can contribute to improve quality food production and enhance farm income

The Influence Of Maternal Infections On Congenital Heart Defect

ABSTRACT Congenital heart defects (CHDs) contribute significantly to heightened infant mortality rates. This review explores the intricate link between maternal infections and CHDs, emphasizing diverse factors influencing fetal development, such as bacterial, fungal, protozoan and viral agents. These infections pose reproductive health risks, potentially leading to complications like prematurity, stillbirth and heart defect to the fetus. The TORCH acronym (Toxoplasma, Other infections, Rubella, Cytomegalovirus, Herpes simplex) identifies infectious teratogens related to congenital issues, emphasizing vertical transmission through the placenta or ascending from the vagina. Rubella and Cytomegalovirus play a significant role in heart defects, particularly when maternal infections amplify CHD risk during pregnancy. Specific scrutiny is placed on Rubella and Cytomegalovirus for their impact on pregnancy outcomes and potential links to congenital heart defects, with preventive strategies discussed, including vaccination and antiviral therapy. The timing and severity of these infections are pivotal in determining their impact on fetal heart development. Environmental exposures and maternal nutrition are critical factors influencing fetal development. Maternal undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries associates with adverse pregnancy outcomes, including congenital heart defects. Emphasizing the importance of maintaining a nutritious maternal diet, rich in essential nutrients, is crucial for improved fetal health and successful pregnancy outcomes. This review offers insights into preventive measures and underscores the need for continued research to enhance prenatal care strategies