Florid genital tuberculosis co-existing with adenomyosis and evading diagnosis

When tuberculosis affects genital organs of young females, the disease often remains silent or may present with symptoms which are common to other Gynaecological conditions as well. The diagnosis of genital tuberculosis is challenging and the diagnosis can be missed even with extensive investigations including molecular studies. A case of florid tuberculosis affecting the uterus, cervix, ovaries and tubes, co-existing with adenomyosis of the uterus and the cold abscess masquerading as bilateral ovarian endometriomas is reported

Population structure and diversity of the periphyton community in the glacier-fed stream Balkhila at Siron from Garhwal Himalaya

The stream Balkhila is a glacier-fed and originates at higher altitudes from the Lal Mati glacier, flows through the famous Mandal valley of Garhwal Himalaya and finally merges with the Alaknanda River in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. The present study aimed to assess the population structure, density and diversity of the periphyton community along with some detrimental ecological parameters in the glacier fed stream Balkhila for a period of two years on a monthly basis from November 2018 to October 2020. The stream Balkhila was represented by 17 periphytic genera belonging to 3 classes, namely, Bacillariophyceae, Chlorohyceae and Cyanophyceae. The class Bacillariophyceae was represented by 10 periphytic genera (Cymbella, Navicula, Fragilaria, Nitzschia, Ampohora, Diatoma, Synedra, Tabellaria, Cocconeis and  Meridion), and Chlorophyceae (green algae) was represented by 6 algal genera (Chlorella, Ulothrix, Zygnema, Oedogomium, Spirogyra and Stigeoclonium). The class Myxophyceae was represented by a single genus (Phormidium). The maximum periphytic density (individuals/cm2) was found to be 316.7±7.1 x 103 in January, and the minimum density (12.5±3.5 x 103) was recorded in August. The SIMPLER test indicated 18.58% dissimilarity of periphytic communities between the two years of study. The Shannon–Wiener diversity index values were high (2.358 and 2.388) in December and January and minimum (0.2484 and 0.3534) in July and August during the first and second years of the study, respectively. Multivariate canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) suggested that most of the periphytic genera were closely associated with the winter season (December, January and February). The various ecological parameters of our study indicated that the Balkhila stream is a conducive habitat for periphyton communities

Investigating the benefits of molecular profiling of advanced non-small cell lung cancer tumors to guide treatments.

In this study we utilized data on patient responses to guided treatments, and we evaluated their benefit for a non-small cell lung cancer cohort. The recommended therapies used were predicted using tumor molecular profiles that involved a range of biomarkers but primarily used immunohistochemistry markers. A dataset describing 91 lung non-small cell lung cancer patients was retrospectively split into two. The first group's drugs were consistent with a treatment plan whereby all drugs received agreed with their tumor's molecular profile. The second group each received one or more drug that was expected to lack benefit. We found that there was no significant difference in overall survival or mortality between the two groups. Patients whose treatments were predicted to be of benefit survived for an average of 402 days, compared to 382 days for those that did not (P = 0.7934). In the matched treatment group, 48% of patients were deceased by the time monitoring had finished compared to 53% in the unmatched group (P = 0.6094). The immunohistochemistry biomarker for the ERCC1 receptor was found to be a marker that could be used to predict future survival; ERCC1 loss was found to be predictive of poor survival

Effect of baclofen on physiotherapy in the management of spastic cerebral palsy via gross motor function measure

Background: Cerebral palsy is the most common cause of physical disability in children. The gross motor function measure-66 (GMFM-66) is an observational clinical measure designed to evaluate gross motor function in children with cerebral palsy (CP). The aim of this study was to explore pediatric physiotherapists’ experiences with the gross motor capacity with CP by implementing a short-term intervention.Methods: This study was performed in the Department of Anatomy and Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Kiran Society, Varanasi. Patients aged between 2 years to 14 years of both sexes satisfying the inclusion and exclusion criteria were randomly enrolled into two groups; Group A included 60 patients who received only physiotherapy and Group B included 60 patients who received baclofen along with physiotherapy. Ethical clearance was obtained from the concerned authority. Data management and statistical analysis were performed using MS excel.Results: Percentage of spastic diplegia were 20.0% and 16.6% and percentage of spastic quadriplegia were 31.6% and 26.6% in group A and group B respectively. Before treatment mean score of GMFM for group A was increased to after 3 months of treatment and which further increased to after 6 months of treatment when compared to group B as their baseline mean score of GMFM  was after 3 months of treatment and it increased after 6 months of treatment.Conclusions: The findings suggest the GMFM to be a useful and reliable instrument for assessing motor function and treatment outcome in CP

Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model Under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

Forecasting influenza in a timely manner aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, effective influenza forecasting still remains a challenge despite increasing research interest. It is even more challenging amidst the COVID pandemic, when the influenza-like illness (ILI) counts are affected by various factors such as symptomatic similarities with COVID-19 and shift in healthcare seeking patterns of the general population. Under the current pandemic, historical influenza models carry valuable expertise about the disease dynamics but face difficulties adapting. Therefore, we propose CALI-Net, a neural transfer learning architecture which allows us to 'steer' a historical disease forecasting model to new scenarios where flu and COVID co-exist. Our framework enables this adaptation by automatically learning when it should emphasize learning from COVID-related signals and when it should learn from the historical model. Thus, we exploit representations learned from historical ILI data as well as the limited COVID-related signals. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is successful in adapting a historical forecasting model to the current pandemic. In addition, we show that success in our primary goal, adaptation, does not sacrifice overall performance as compared with state-of-the-art influenza forecasting approaches.Comment: Appears in AAAI-2

Reaction of Groundnut Advanced Breeding lines to Groundnut Bud Necrosis Disease

Forty advanced breeding lines were evaluated for reaction to Groundnut bud necrosis orthotospovirus (GBNV) in the field and greenhouse in Hyderabad, India during2013 rainy season. Results from natural infection showed eight resistant, 24 moderately resistant and eight moderately susceptible genotypes. There were no genotypes pertaining to highly resistant, susceptible and highly susceptible disease reaction grade. Greenhouse screening with mechanical sap inoculation showed all genotypes highly susceptible at 1:10 infected virus extract dilution, whereas at 1:100, two genotypes were moderately resistant, four moderately susceptible, ten susceptible and 24 highly susceptible. There were no genotypes pertaining to highly resistant and resistant disease reaction grade even at 1:100 infected virus extract dilution

An Attribute-Based Encryption Method Using Outsourced Decryption and Hierarchical Access Structure, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2022, nr 2

Cloud computing is being rapidly adopted by many organizations from different domains and large amounts of data is stored in the cloud. In order to ensure data security, the attribute-based access control mechanism has been emerging recently as a fine-grained access control model that grants access based on the data user’s attributes. In this model, the data owner builds the access policy using the attributes of the data users and access to the data is granted only if the requirements of such an access policy are satisfied. Ciphertext policy-based attribute-based encryption (CPABE) is one of the most widely used methods for providing encrypted access control. Complex, time consuming and costly paring operations are the major issue with the CPABE method. Hence, another efficient method is needed to reduce the data user’s overhead while decrypting data. This paper presents an efficient method consisting in outsourcing decryption operations to a third-party server, so that complex operations may be performed by that machine with only some simple calculations left on the data user’s side. The concept of a hierarchical access structure is also integrated with the traditional CPABE technique. The hierarchical approach enables the data owner to encrypt multiple data using a single common hierarchical access structure. This allows the user to decrypt only the relevant part of ciphertext, depending on which fragment of the hierarchical access structure is satisfied. The paper evaluates also the performance of the proposed model in terms of time and storage cost

High expression of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase in patients with sporadic Alzheimer’s disease

We have previously shown that the expression of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) is significantly increased in the brains of patients who have died of Parkinson’s disease (PD). In this study, we have compared the expression of NNMT in post-mortem medial temporal lobe, hippocampus and cerebellum of 10 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 9 non-disease control subjects using a combination of quantitative Western blotting, immunohistochemistry and dual-label confocal microscopy coupled with quantitative analysis of colocalisation. NNMT was detected as a single protein of 29 kDa in both AD and non-disease control brains, which was significantly increased in AD medial temporal lobe compared to non-disease controls (7.5-fold, P < 0.026). There was no significant difference in expression in the cerebellum (P = 0.91). NNMT expression in AD medial temporal lobe and hippocampus was present in cholinergic neurones with no glial localisation. Cell-type expression was identical in both non-disease control and AD tissues. These results are the first to show, in a proof-of-concept study using a small patient cohort, that NNMT protein expression is increased in the AD brain and is present in neurones which degenerate in AD. These results suggest that the elevation of NNMT may be a common feature of many neurodegenerative diseases. Confirmation of this overexpression using a larger AD patient cohort will drive the future development of NNMT-targetting therapeutics which may slow or stop the disease pathogenesis, in contrast to current therapies which solely address AD symptoms