Hematological Parameters in HIV Patients: Association with CD4 Count

Background: Around 2.1 million people are currently living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in India. Hematological parameters have been proposed as alternative markers of HIV infection in areas with limited resources. This study aimed to describe hematological parameters in patients with HIV infection and to determine their association with CD4 cell counts. Methods: This cross-sectional study assessed 100 HIV patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART). Their blood samples were collected to measure complete blood count (CBC) and CD4 count. Patients with known hematological disorders, critically ill patients, and those not willing to give informed consent were excluded. The Chi-square test was used to find the association between hematological parameters and CD4 counts. Results: Most patients with HIV infection had anemia (85%), followed by thrombocytopenia (42%) and neutropenia (36%). There was a statistically significant association between the number of patients having anemia and CD4 cell counts. Conclusion: Hematological changes are common in HIV patients. Hematological parameters should be routinely monitored and managed to reduce morbidity. Also, patients with unexplained low blood counts should be screened for underlying HIV infection

SemEval 2023 Task 6: LegalEval -- Understanding Legal Texts

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.Comment: 13 Pages (9 Pages + References), Accepted at SemEval 202

Abstracts of National Conference on Biological, Biochemical, Biomedical, Bioenergy, and Environmental Biotechnology

This book contains the abstracts of the papers presented at the National Conference on Biological, Biochemical, Biomedical, Bioenergy, and Environmental Biotechnology (NCB4EBT-2021) Organized by the Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology Warangal, India held on 29–30 January 2021. This conference is the first of its kind organized by NIT-W which covered an array of interesting topics in biotechnology. This makes it a bit special as it brings together researchers from different disciplines of biotechnology, which in turn will also open new research and cooperation fields for them. Conference Title: National Conference on Biological, Biochemical, Biomedical, Bioenergy, and Environmental BiotechnologyConference Acronym: NCB4EBT-2021Conference Date: 29–30 January 2021Conference Location: Online (Virtual Mode)Conference Organizer: Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology Warangal, Indi