Urinary Ascites following Mini Lap Tubectomy: A Rare Occurence

Iatrogenic bladder injury is a known complication of laparoscopic and gynecological surgeries with an incidence of 1.5 per 1000 cases. Urinary ascites is a result of undiagnosed iatrogenic bladder injury during pelvic surgeries. We report a rare case of urinary ascites following mini lap tubectomy on the eighth postoperative day. After the diagnosis was made, conservative management was done for the patient, to which she successfully responded

Effect of Treatment for HCV on the Development of HCC in a Predominately African American Medical Center Population

Introduction Direct Acting Antivirals (DAA) are effective in Hepatitis C (HCV) patients with cirrhosis, but viral elimination may occur in a setting where the HCC development pathway has already begun. Our objective was to determine whether achieving a sustained virologic response (SVR) prior to diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) improved outcomes in our predominately African American population. Methods We reviewed the medical records of 96 HCV patients diagnosed with HCC between 2015 and 2019 Primary outcomes were defined as either alive, death/hospice, or transplant. Tumor size was measured as non-small (\u3e 5cm or multiple tumors) or small (\u3c 5cm). The study was approved by the WSU IRB and data analysis performed using the SAS-JMP statistical software. Results Of the 96 patients with HCV who developed HCC, only 17 (18%) were treated for their HCV prior to diagnosis. There was no significant difference in the gender, race, and age of treated or non-treated patients. Hospice/death rates were found to be lower in the treated group when compared to those who were not treated prior to diagnosis (47% compared to 81% p = 0.0078). However, there was no significant difference in tumor size between these two groups (29% compared to 25%, p = 0.7297). Conclusions Most patients with HCC in this study did not receive treatment for their HCV prior to HCC diagnosis, which is likely due to the recent development timeline of the highly effective DAAs. Prior treatment of HCV leads to better outcomes than with no treatment, although this was not due to a smaller tumor size at diagnosis. Therefore, this could be due to some other unknown mechanism which may benefit from further subsequent investigation. Indeed, as many of the patients treated for HCV with DAA have not yet developed HCC or have yet to otherwise have final outcomes, we will need to continue to monitor our patient population into the future for further analysis

MtSNPscore: a combined evidence approach for assessing cumulative impact of mitochondrial variations in disease

Human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variations have been implicated in a broad spectrum of diseases. With over 3000 mtDNA variations reported across databases, establishing pathogenicity of variations in mtDNA is a major challenge. We have designed and developed a comprehensive weighted scoring system (MtSNPscore) for identification of mtDNA variations that can impact pathogenicity and would likely be associated with disease. The criteria for pathogenicity include information available in the literature, predictions made by various in silico tools and frequency of variation in normal and patient datasets. The scoring scheme also assigns scores to patients and normal individuals to estimate the cumulative impact of variations. The method has been implemented in an automated pipeline and has been tested on Indian ataxia dataset (92 individuals), sequenced in this study, and other publicly available mtSNP dataset comprising of 576 mitochondrial genomes of Japanese individuals from six different groups, namely, patients with Parkinson's disease, patients with Alzheimer's disease, young obese males, young non-obese males, and type-2 diabetes patients with or without severe vascular involvement. MtSNPscore, for analysis can extract information from variation data or from mitochondrial DNA sequences. It has a web-interface http://bioinformatics.ccmb.res.in/cgi-bin/snpscore/Mtsnpscore.pl webcite that provides flexibility to update/modify the parameters for estimating pathogenicity

Modeling the Office of Science Ten Year Facilities Plan: The PERI Architecture Tiger Team

The Performance Engineering Institute (PERI) originally proposed a tiger team activity as a mechanism to target significant effort optimizing key Office of Science applications, a model that was successfully realized with the assistance of two JOULE metric teams. However, the Office of Science requested a new focus beginning in 2008: assistance in forming its ten year facilities plan. To meet this request, PERI formed the Architecture Tiger Team, which is modeling the performance of key science applications on future architectures, with S3D, FLASH and GTC chosen as the first application targets. In this activity, we have measured the performance of these applications on current systems in order to understand their baseline performance and to ensure that our modeling activity focuses on the right versions and inputs of the applications. We have applied a variety of modeling techniques to anticipate the performance of these applications on a range of anticipated systems. While our initial findings predict that Office of Science applications will continue to perform well on future machines from major hardware vendors, we have also encountered several areas in which we must extend our modeling techniques in order to fulfill our mission accurately and completely. In addition, we anticipate that models of a wider range of applications will reveal critical differences between expected future systems, thus providing guidance for future Office of Science procurement decisions, and will enable DOE applications to exploit machines in future facilities fully

Programming Abstractions for Data Locality

The goal of the workshop and this report is to identify common themes and standardize concepts for locality-preserving abstractions for exascale programming models. Current software tools are built on the premise that computing is the most expensive component, we are rapidly moving to an era that computing is cheap and massively parallel while data movement dominates energy and performance costs. In order to respond to exascale systems (the next generation of high performance computing systems), the scientific computing community needs to refactor their applications to align with the emerging data-centric paradigm. Our applications must be evolved to express information about data locality. Unfortunately current programming environments offer few ways to do so. They ignore the incurred cost of communication and simply rely on the hardware cache coherency to virtualize data movement. With the increasing importance of task-level parallelism on future systems, task models have to support constructs that express data locality and affinity. At the system level, communication libraries implicitly assume all the processing elements are equidistant to each other. In order to take advantage of emerging technologies, application developers need a set of programming abstractions to describe data locality for the new computing ecosystem. The new programming paradigm should be more data centric and allow to describe how to decompose and how to layout data in the memory.Fortunately, there are many emerging concepts such as constructs for tiling, data layout, array views, task and thread affinity, and topology aware communication libraries for managing data locality. There is an opportunity to identify commonalities in strategy to enable us to combine the best of these concepts to develop a comprehensive approach to expressing and managing data locality on exascale programming systems. These programming model abstractions can expose crucial information about data locality to the compiler and runtime system to enable performance-portable code. The research question is to identify the right level of abstraction, which includes techniques that range from template libraries all the way to completely new languages to achieve this goal

<b>Dyeing silk with Jatropha flowers </b>

391-395In recent years research in the field of textiles is focused on the sources of natural dyes. The dye yielding potential of flowers of Jatropha integrimma Jacq. was evaluated and results are presented for the first time on this plant. The colour shades, mordant wise colour change and fastness to washing, rubbing and perspiration were studied. The results revealed that the dye extracted from these flowers give good shades with satisfactory fastness to light, washing, crocking and perspiration on silk

Effect of calcination temperature, pH and catalyst loading on photodegradation efficiency of urea derived graphitic carbon nitride towards methylene blue dye solution

In this study, the photodegradation of methylene blue (MB) dye was performed using urea based graphitic carbon nitride (g-C(3)N(4)). Interestingly, it has been observed that the calcination temperature for the synthesis of g-C(3)N(4) along with factors (pH and catalyst loading) influencing the photodegradation process, can make an impactful improvement in its photodegradation activity towards MB dye solution. The concept behind the comparatively improved photoactivity of g-C(3)N(4) prepared at 550 °C was explored using various characterisation techniques like XRD, FTIR, SEM, BET and DRS. The FTIR and XRD patterns demonstrated that synthesis of g-C(3)N(4) took place properly only when the calcination temperature was above 450 °C. The evolution of morphological and optical properties based on calcination temperature led to dramatically increased BET surface area and a decreased optical band gap value of g-C(3)N(4) prepared at 550 °C. The effects of pH conditions and catalyst concentration on the MB dye degradation rate using optimally synthesised g-C(3)N(4) are discussed. The value of the apparent rate constant was found to be 12 times more in the case of photodegradation of the MB dye using g-C(3)N(4) prepared at 550 °C at optimum pH and catalyst loading conditions when compared with g-C(3)N(4) prepared at 450 °C showing the lowest photoactivity potential. Further, high stability of the photocatalyst was observed for four cyclic runs of the photocatalytic reaction. Hence, g-C(3)N(4) can be considered as a potential candidate for methylene blue photodegradation