A STABILITY-INDICATING AND VALIDATED REVERSE-PHASE HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID CHROMATOGRAPHIC METHOD FOR THE SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF PHENYLEPHRINE AND FEXOFENADINE IN BULK AND TABLET DOSAGE FORMS

ABSTRACTObjective: A simple and accurate stability indicating reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography method was developed and validatedfor the simultaneous estimation of phenylephrine and fexofenadine in pharmaceutical dosage forms.Methods: Chromatography was carried out on an ODS C-18 column (4.6 mm×250 mm, 5 µ particle size) with a isocratic mobile phase composed oforthophosphoric acid buffer, acetonitrile, (75:25% v/v) at a flow rate of 1 mL/minutes. The column temperature was maintained at 30°C and thedetection was carried out using a photodiode array detector at 210 nm.Results: The retention times for phenylephrine and fexofenadine were 2.096 minutes and 4.241 minutes, respectively. The percentage recoveriesof phenylephrine and fexofenadine were 100.63% and 99.84%, respectively. The relative standard deviation for assay of tablets was found to be<2%. The detection and quantification limits were found to be 0.10 and 0.31 µg/mL for phenylephrine and 0.01 and 0.03 µg/mL for fexofenadine,respectively.Conclusion: Thus, the method was fast, accurate, precise, and sensitive; hence, it can be employed for routine quality control of tablets containingboth drugs in quality control laboratories and pharmaceutical industries.Keywords: Phenylephrine, Fexofenadine, Stability indicating method, Validation method, Reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography

Heterosis and combining ability for yield and its related traits in ridge gourd [Luffa acutangula (L.)Roxb.]

Line × Tester analysis involving three lines and four testers was carried out in ridge gourd [Luffa acutangula (Roxb.) L.]. Significant variation was noticed in the mean performance of the parents and hybrids for all the characters studied except for vine length and fruit girth. The results from GCA and SCA variance indicated the predominance of non-additive gene action for all the traits except fruit girth. Significant heterosis of 177.78% over standard check, Arka Sumeet for fruit weight per plant was expressed by the cross GARG-1 × CO-1. The best general combiners were GARG-1 and Pusa Nutan among the lines, and Jaipur long and CO-1 among testers. Best specific combining ability effects for fruit length and yield (t/ ha) were recorded by the crosses Pusa Nasdar × Arka Sumeet and GARG-1 × CO-1

Voice Conversion by Prosody and Vocal Tract Modification

In this paper we proposed some exible methods, which are useful in the process of voice conversion. The pro-posed methods modify the shape of the vocal tract system and the characteristics of the prosody according to the de-sired requirement. The shape of the vocal tract system is modied by shifting the major resonant frequencies (for-mants) of the short term spectrum, and altering their band-widths accordingly. In the case of prosody modication, the required durational and intonational characteristics are im-posed on the given speech signal. In the proposed method, the prosodic characteristics are manipulated using instants of signicant excitation. The instants of signicant excita-tion correspond to the instants of glottal closure (epochs) in the case of voiced speech, and to some random excita-tions like onset of burst in the case of nonvoiced speech. Instants of signicant excitation are computed from the Lin-ear Prediction (LP) residual of the speech signals by using the property of average group delay of minimum phase sig-nals. The manipulations of durational characteristics and pitch contour (intonation pattern) are achieved by manipu-lating the LP residual with the help of the knowledge of the instants of signicant excitation. The modied LP residual is used to excite the time varying lter. The lter parameters are updated according to the desired vocal tract characteris-tics. The proposed methods are evaluated using listening tests. 1

Intonation modeling for Indian languages

Abstract In this paper we propose models for predicting the intonation for the sequence of syllables present in the utterance. The term intonation refers to the temporal changes of the fundamental frequency ðF 0 Þ. Neural networks are used to capture the implicit intonation knowledge in the sequence of syllables of an utterance. We focus on the development of intonation models for predicting the sequence of fundamental frequency values for a given sequence of syllables. Labeled broadcast news data in the languages Hindi, Telugu and Tamil is used to develop neural network models in order to predict the F 0 of syllables in these languages. The input to the neural network consists of a feature vector representing the positional, contextual and phonological constraints. The interaction between duration and intonation constraints can be exploited for improving the accuracy further. From the studies we find that 88% of the F 0 values (pitch) of the syllables could be predicted from the models within 15% of the actual F 0 . The performance of the intonation models is evaluated using objective measures such as average prediction error ðlÞ, standard deviation ðrÞ and correlation coefficient ðcÞ. The prediction accuracy of the intonation models is further evaluated using listening tests. The prediction performance of the proposed intonation models using neural networks is compared with Classification and Regression Tree (CART) models

A study on the clinical manifestations and the incidence of benign and malignant tumors in a solitary thyroid nodule

Tumors are either benign or malignant. The thyroid nodule, which is usually a clinical manifestation of most of the thyroid disorders, is one among them which has been the subject of controversies with divergent opinions and views. Clinical presentation of thyroid nodules varies widely ranging from solitary nodules to benign and malignant tumors. Thyroid nodules accounts up to 8% of the adult population having palpable nodules. However studies on its incidence in the population residing near seacoast are limited. Hence, the present study is carried in an aim to evaluate the clinico-pathological correlation of solitary thyroid nodule and the incidence of malignancy in the population residing at sea coast. The study is conducted in the Narayana Medical College & Hospital (NMCH), which is situated within 10-15 km radius of the seacoast in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, India. In this study, 73 subjects were selected who presented with thyroid swelling which was clinically confirmed as solitary thyroid nodule. Out of 73 cases, 12 cases (16.5%) were found to have malignant lesions with remaining 61 cases (83.5%) being benign lesions. The incidence of malignancy among solitary thyroid nodule subjects is up to 16.5% in the population residing near seacoast. Thus the present study warrants people to consult surgeons for early diagnosis and adequate treatment without being passive as most of these swellings are asymptomatic for long duration

Role of Alvarado score in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis

Acute appendicitis is a surgical emergency, which is associated with morbidity and mortality occasionally. If failed to diagnose early the situation may become more complicated. In acute appendicitis it is not possible to have definitive diagnosis by histopathology preoperatively, we would like a simple test like Alvarado scoring system which depends on the presence and absence of certain variable, which provides an accurate guide to whether or not the patient has the condition. Hence, accurate diagnosis and timely intervention is needed. Therefore, the present study was conducted to evaluate the Alvarado scoring system in diagnosing acute appendicitis and its co relation with histopathology. This prospective study was conducted in 100 consecutive patients admitted in the department of general surgery of Narayana Medical College, Nellore with the clinical diagnosis of acute appendicitis. The findings based on the Alvarado score indicate that 68% of the subjects had a score of more than 7 and 22% of the subjects had a score between 5 and 7. Only 10% of the subjects had a score between 1 and 4. Out of 83 eligible subjects 75 were found to have acute appendicitis by histopathological examination. Negative appendicectomy was very low representing up to 9.6% whereas the percentage of positive predictive value was high representing up to 90.4%. Although the diagnosis of acute appendicitis remains mainly clinical evaluation, the scoring system is easy, simple and cheap complementary aid for supporting the diagnosis of acute appendicitis

Object Sub-Categorization and Common Framework Method using Iterative AdaBoost for Rapid Detection of Multiple Objects

Object detection and tracking in real time has numerous applications and benefits in various fields like survey, crime detection etc. The idea of gaining useful information from real time scenes on the roads is called as Traffic Scene Perception (TSP). TSP actually consists of three subtasks namely, detecting things of interest, recognizing the discovered objects and tracking of the moving objects. Normally the results obtained could be of value in object recognition and tracking, however the detection of a particular object of interest is of higher value in any real time scenario. The prevalent systems focus on developing unique detectors for each of the above-mentioned subtasks and they work upon utilizing different features. This obviously is time consuming and involves multiple redundant operations. Hence in this paper a common framework using the enhanced AdaBoost algorithm is proposed which will examine all dense characteristics only once thereby increasing the detection speed substantially. An object sub-categorization strategy is proposed to capture the intra-class variance of objects in order to boost generalisation performance even more. We use three detection applications to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework: traffic sign detection, car detection, and bike detection. On numerous benchmark data sets, the proposed framework delivers competitive performance using state-of-the-art techniques

Gesture Recognition for Enhancing Human Computer Interaction

Gesture recognition is critical in human-computer communication. As observed, a plethora of current technological developments are in the works, including biometric authentication, which we see all the time in our smartphones. Hand gesture focus, a frequent human-computer interface in which we manage our devices by presenting our hands in front of a webcam, can benefit people of different backgrounds. Some of the efforts in human-computer interface include voice assistance and virtual mouse implementation with voice commands, fingertip recognition and hand motion tracking based on an image in a live video. Human Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly vision-based gesture and object recognition, is becoming increasingly important. Hence, we focused to design and develop a system for monitoring fingers using extreme learning-based hand gesture recognition techniques. Extreme learning helps in quickly interpreting the hand gestures with improved accuracy which would be a highly useful in the domains like healthcare, financial transactions and global busines

Antifungal attributes of Lactobacillus plantarum MYS6 against fumonisin producing Fusarium proliferatum associated with poultry feeds

Fumonisins, being common in occurrence in maize-based feeds, pose a great threat to animal and human health. The present study is aimed at determining the antifungal activity of Lactobacillus plantarum MYS6 against a fumonisin producing fungus, Fusarium proliferatum MYS9. The isolate was subjected to standard tests for determining its probiotic attributes and antifungal properties. L. plantarum MYS6 thrived well at pH 3.0 and 6.0, and exhibited strong resistance up to 3% bile. The isolate showed a high degree of cell surface hydrophobicity corresponding to its strong adhesion to chicken crop epithelial cells. Coinoculation with the fungus on modified de Man Rogosa Sharpe medium revealed the inhibitory effect of L. plantarum MYS6 on fungal growth and biomass. Observation using scanning electron microscopy showed distortion of hyphal structures, swollen tips and disrupted conidia. Conidia germination inhibition assay restrained germination and showed deformed hyphae. The bioprotective feature of the isolate was evident by the inhibition of fungal development in maize-kernel treated with the cell free supernatant of L. plantarum MYS6. Both the isolate and its extracellular metabolites lowered fumonisin content in feed model up to 0.505 mg/Kg of feed and 0.3125 mg/Kg of feed respectively when compared to the level of 0.870 mg/Kg of feed in control. The major antifungal compounds produced by the isolate were 10-Octadecenoic acid, methyl ester; palmitic acid, methyl ester; heptadecanoic acid, 16-methyl ester; stearic acid and lauric acid. L. plantarum MYS6 reduced 61.7% of fumonisin possibly by a binding mechanism. These findings suggest the application of L. plantarum MYS6 as an efficient probiotic additive and biocontrol agent in feed used in poultry industry. Additionally, the antifungal metabolites pose a conspicuous inhibition of Fusarium growth and fumonisin production