67 research outputs found

    A Review on Grid Integration Challenges of Wind Energy Systems

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    In recent decades, the strengthening of electric energy security and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions acquired great traction. The integration of large-scale intermittent renewable energy resources (RER) such as wind energy into existing electrical systems has risen dramatically in recent years. In the last few years, however, this integration creates several operational and control issues that impede the process. Grid functioning must be reliable and stable. This article will look at the problems that have been documented as a result of the recommended solutions techniques and the integration of wind energy Among the many difficulties, Generation uncertainty, power quality difficulties, angular and voltage stability, and reactive power support are all factors to consider. The ability to ride through faults is examined and explored. Aside from that, there are financial, environmental, and political factors to consider

    Sudden Generalized Weakness and Giddiness after administration of Lekhana Basti – An Unintended Drug Reaction (ADR)

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    It is common belief in Indians that herbal drugs or Ayurveda medicines are always 100% safe and doesn’t produce any of the adverse effects but which is not always true, well this is shown by our case report where the adverse effect were seen in the form of generalized weakness and giddiness. A South Indian Male patient of age 45 years who was resident of Belgaum for 10 years. Patient consulted us for the complaints of sudden weight gain with the associated complaints like heaviness of body, laziness etc. Giddiness and generalized weakness disappeared when dose of Lekhanabasti was reduced. Direct relation (score 6) were the causality according to Naranjo's Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale. This report highlights the importance of Preassessment and awareness towards the careful use of Ayurveda medicines like that of contemporary medications

    IONTOPHORETIC DRUG DELIVERY: A NOVEL APPROACH THROUGH TRANSDERMAL ROUTE

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    ABSTRACT The goal of delivery system is to get optimal therapeutic management. But, it still remains a challenge in the field of pharmaceuticals for delivery of ionic species and some non ionic. Several transdermal approaches have been used and recently the Iontophoretic technique has been widely used. This technique of facilitated movement of ion across a membrane under the influence of an externally applied potential difference is one of the most promising physical penetrations enhancing method. The rationale behind using this technique is the capability of this method to increase the systemic delivery of high molecular weight compounds with controlled input kinetics. Also improved systemic bioavailability, ensuring from bypassing the first pass metabolism. This article presents a review of literature relating to iontophoresis. This review briefly describes the history of iontophoresis and discussion of factors which affect Iontophoretic drug delivery. Present review also provides its applications for various clinical conditions

    Early and extended erythropoietin monotherapy after hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy:a multicentre double-blind pilot randomised controlled trial

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    Objective: To examine the feasibility of early and extended erythropoietin monotherapy after hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE). Design: Double-blind pilot randomised controlled trial.Setting: Eight neonatal units in South Asia. Patients: Neonates (≥36 weeks) with moderate or severe HIE admitted between 31 December 2022 and 3 May 2023. Interventions: Erythropoietin (500 U/kg daily) or to the placebo (sham injections using a screen) within 6 hours of birth and continued for 9 days. MRI at 2 weeks of age. Main outcomes and measures: Feasibility of randomisation, drug administration and assessment of brain injury using MRI. Results: Of the 154 neonates screened, 56 were eligible; 6 declined consent and 50 were recruited; 43 (86%) were inborn. Mean (SD) age at first dose was 4.4 (1.2) hours in erythropoietin and 4.1 (1.0) hours in placebo. Overall mortality at hospital discharge occurred in 5 (19%) vs 11 (46%) (p=0.06), and 3 (13%) vs 9 (40.9%) (p=0.04) among those with moderate encephalopathy in the erythropoietin and placebo groups. Moderate or severe injury to basal ganglia, white matter and cortex occurred in 5 (25%) vs 5 (38.5%); 14 (70%) vs 11 (85%); and 6 (30%) vs 2 (15.4%) in the erythropoietin and placebo group, respectively. Sinus venous thrombosis was seen in two (10%) neonates in the erythropoietin group and none in the control group. Conclusions: Brain injury and mortality after moderate or severe HIE are high in South Asia. Evaluation of erythropoietin monotherapy using MRI to examine treatment effects is feasible in these settings. Trial registration number: NCT05395195

    Albiglutide and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (Harmony Outcomes): a double-blind, randomised placebo-controlled trial

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    Background: Glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists differ in chemical structure, duration of action, and in their effects on clinical outcomes. The cardiovascular effects of once-weekly albiglutide in type 2 diabetes are unknown. We aimed to determine the safety and efficacy of albiglutide in preventing cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke. Methods: We did a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 610 sites across 28 countries. We randomly assigned patients aged 40 years and older with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (at a 1:1 ratio) to groups that either received a subcutaneous injection of albiglutide (30–50 mg, based on glycaemic response and tolerability) or of a matched volume of placebo once a week, in addition to their standard care. Investigators used an interactive voice or web response system to obtain treatment assignment, and patients and all study investigators were masked to their treatment allocation. We hypothesised that albiglutide would be non-inferior to placebo for the primary outcome of the first occurrence of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke, which was assessed in the intention-to-treat population. If non-inferiority was confirmed by an upper limit of the 95% CI for a hazard ratio of less than 1·30, closed testing for superiority was prespecified. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02465515. Findings: Patients were screened between July 1, 2015, and Nov 24, 2016. 10 793 patients were screened and 9463 participants were enrolled and randomly assigned to groups: 4731 patients were assigned to receive albiglutide and 4732 patients to receive placebo. On Nov 8, 2017, it was determined that 611 primary endpoints and a median follow-up of at least 1·5 years had accrued, and participants returned for a final visit and discontinuation from study treatment; the last patient visit was on March 12, 2018. These 9463 patients, the intention-to-treat population, were evaluated for a median duration of 1·6 years and were assessed for the primary outcome. The primary composite outcome occurred in 338 (7%) of 4731 patients at an incidence rate of 4·6 events per 100 person-years in the albiglutide group and in 428 (9%) of 4732 patients at an incidence rate of 5·9 events per 100 person-years in the placebo group (hazard ratio 0·78, 95% CI 0·68–0·90), which indicated that albiglutide was superior to placebo (p<0·0001 for non-inferiority; p=0·0006 for superiority). The incidence of acute pancreatitis (ten patients in the albiglutide group and seven patients in the placebo group), pancreatic cancer (six patients in the albiglutide group and five patients in the placebo group), medullary thyroid carcinoma (zero patients in both groups), and other serious adverse events did not differ between the two groups. There were three (<1%) deaths in the placebo group that were assessed by investigators, who were masked to study drug assignment, to be treatment-related and two (<1%) deaths in the albiglutide group. Interpretation: In patients with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, albiglutide was superior to placebo with respect to major adverse cardiovascular events. Evidence-based glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists should therefore be considered as part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in patients with type 2 diabetes. Funding: GlaxoSmithKline

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

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    Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

    31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

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    Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

    Effect of salivary contamination on shear bond strength of two adhesives: An in vitro study

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    Introduction: Composite material used with bonding system are technique sensitive and contamination of an etched surface by saliva or blood plays a key role in bonding efficacy. Achieving good moisture control is a common problem encountered and is of importance while treating a pediatric age group since rubber dam in dental office is commonly applied in fewer than 10% of restorative treatment. Despite the advantage of rubber dam application, usage of rubber dam depends on child′s behavior and its level of co-operation for which pediatric dentists compromise with its usage. This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of salivary contamination of enamel and dentin on bond strength of two adhesives. Materials and Methods: An in vitro study comprised of test group of 112 central incisors divided into 4 groups for testing on enamel and dentin separately. These are Group I: Control group without salivary contamination; Group II: Contaminated with saliva and air-dried; Group III: Contaminated with saliva, rinsed and air-dried; Group IV: Coated with adhesive, light cured and then contaminated. Shear bond strength was calculated using universal testing machine. Results: For testing on enamel and dentin, significantly decreased bond strength was seen with Group II (P < 0.05) and Group IV (P < 0.01) showed decreased bond strength, whereas bond strength of group III was not significant (P > 0.05), when compared with control Group I. Conclusion: The decontamination method used in this study by rinsing the contaminated cured adhesive layer that did not reverse the harmful effect of salivary contamination. As most of the children are active and restless with swinging mood, it is important not to negotiate with the procedural steps during treatment

    Android-Based Resource Tracking and Management

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    Abstract Today&apos;s mail couriers have rushed onto real time tracking in postal services. The Post Office is rolling stone for tracking of mail couriers. Even in an growing environment, the postal service remains part of the social economy, serving its people and businesses. Before replacing in more robust form, &quot;This program is an interim step for replacement of current scanners with a single device based on Smartphone technology using GPS &amp; GPRS&quot;. This system aims to provide low cost means of monitoring resources of courier company like manpower, time and money. Customer gets the facility to request material just in one click without wasting time in going to courier office and request for material. This application helps administrator to assign tasks to the employees according to the destination to manage resources. Our application reduces the errors caused due to manual entries. Customer gets full assurance of material delivery within stipulated time. Our application is beneficial for courier boy in terms of saving his time to prepare his daily services reports and send it to the admin through applicatio
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