Histology of lung cancer: experience from a tertiary care centre in South India

Background: Lung cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide and is increasing at an alarming rate in developing countries. Inspite of advances in treatment, prognosis of lung cancer is extremely poor. It is because of delayed presentation and difficulty in obtaining histological diagnosis. Histological confirmation is difficult in all cases due to the limited biopsy specimen obtained via bronchscopy / transthroacic biopsy. Primary objective was to study the histology of lung cancer at a tertiary care centre in South India. Secondary objective was to study association between smoking habit and histological type of lung cancerMethods: Cross sectional study conducted at Tertiary teaching hospital, South India in 100 patients with suspected lung cancer. Data on symptoms, smoking status, histological diagnosis were recorded using a structured questionnaire. Statistical analysis was done on the data collected. Chi square test was used to assess the statistical significance.Results: Total 100 lung cancer patients with histopathological diagnosis were included in the study. In the present study, histopathologically 90% of the patients had non-small cell lung cancer and 10% had small cell type of cancer. In male patients squamous cell carcinoma was the most common diagnosis, and majority were smokers. In female most common type was adenocarcinoma (40%).Conclusions: Adenocarcinoma (41.9%) was the commonest histological type in our study and this was the commonest histological type seen in females and nonsmokers

Relevance of Tea Shops and Cafes as Spaces for plot progression in Malayalam Cinema

Currently One of the most significant mass media for communication and storytelling is film. The film uses images, music, and sound effects to convey creative ideas, concepts, and emotions. Through its capability for visual portrayal, films engage, comprehend, and influence audiences. This paper entitled ‘Relevance of Teashops and Cafes as Spaces for Plot Progression in Malayalam Movies’ studies how films especially Malayalam films use the space of teashops and cafes in movies as a space of plot progression. Even though these locations are a necessary component in the production of Malayalam films, the role of teashops and cafes in the making of a film is a less-explored topic. The concept of space is crucial to the creation of films. A perfect setting is necessary for conveying all of the essence of the movie to the audience as well as the core idea of the movie.  The movie makes use of space for a variety of things, including setting up sets, filming scenes, and establishing distinct places. When Malayalam movies are taken into consideration the presence of a teashop or a cafe has always been an inevitable part. The locations of teashops and cafes were given a lot of attention in movie narratives, particularly in Malayalam films. In the atmosphere of these places, significant story developments and character growth take place. The teashop settings have been a major part of setting the overall tone and portraying the beauty of the film's setting in the majority of ancient Malayalam films. The cafes in the new Malayalam film function similarly by improving the mood of the film by creating lovely settings. The audience will be drawn to these locations as a result. The study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significance of teashop and cafe scenes in Malayalam films. The study focuses on the purpose of the teashop and café environments in the development of the story and other significant events in the film's narration. The study will use a qualitative methodology. Six major Malayalam films will be the subject of the analysis. For the study, a content analysis of six films from different periods that prominently featured cafe and teashop settings was chosen

A software framework for data dimensionality reduction: application to chemical crystallography

Materials science research has witnessed an increasing use of data mining techniques in establishing process‐structure‐property relationships. Significant advances in high‐throughput experiments and computational capability have resulted in the generation of huge amounts of data. Various statistical methods are currently employed to reduce the noise, redundancy, and the dimensionality of the data to make analysis more tractable. Popular methods for reduction (like principal component analysis) assume a linear relationship between the input and output variables. Recent developments in non‐linear reduction (neural networks, self‐organizing maps), though successful, have computational issues associated with convergence and scalability. Another significant barrier to use dimensionality reduction techniques in materials science is the lack of ease of use owing to their complex mathematical formulations. This paper reviews various spectral‐based techniques that efficiently unravel linear and non‐linear structures in the data which can subsequently be used to tractably investigate process‐structure‐property relationships. In addition, we describe techniques (based on graph‐theoretic analysis) to estimate the optimal dimensionality of the low‐dimensional parametric representation. We show how these techniques can be packaged into a modular, computationally scalable software framework with a graphical user interface ‐ Scalable Extensible Toolkit for Dimensionality Reduction (SETDiR). This interface helps to separate out the mathematics and computational aspects from the materials science applications, thus significantly enhancing utility to the materials science community. The applicability of this framework in constructing reduced order models of complicated materials dataset is illustrated with an example dataset of apatites described in structural descriptor space. Cluster analysis of the low‐dimensional plots yielded interesting insights into the correlation between several structural descriptors like ionic radius and covalence with characteristic properties like apatite stability. This information is crucial as it can promote the use of apatite materials as a potential host system for immobilizing toxic elements

Management of undernutrition and failure to thrive in children with congenital heart disease in low- and middle-income countries

Poor growth with underweight for age, decreased length/height for age, and underweight-for-height are all relatively common in children with CHD. The underlying causes of this failure to thrive may be multifactorial, including innate growth potential, severity of cardiac disease, increased energy requirements, decreased nutritional intake, malabsorption, and poor utilisation of absorbed nutrition. These factors are particularly common and severe in low- and middle-income countries. Although nutrition should be carefully assessed in all patients, failure of growth is not a contraindication to surgical repair, and patients should receive surgical repair where indicated as soon as possible. Close attention should be paid to nutritional support - primarily enteral feeding, with particular use of breast milk in infancy - in the perioperative period and in the paediatric ICU. This nutritional support requires specific attention and allocation of resources, including appropriately skilled personnel. Thereafter, it is essential to monitor growth and development and to identify causes for failure to catch-up or grow appropriately

Isolation and characterization of Newcastle disease virus from vaccinated commercial layer chicken

Aim: Newcastle disease (ND) is an infectious, highly contagious and destructive viral disease of poultry and controlled by vaccination. In spite of vaccination, incidence of ND was reported in commercial layers with gastrointestinal lesions. This study was undertaken to assess the prevalence and pathotypes of Newcastle disease virus (NDV) involved in gastrointestinal tract abnormalities of vaccinated commercial layer chicken of Namakkal region for a period of three years from 2008 and 2011. Materials and Methods: Pooled tissue (trachea, lung, spleen, proventriculus, intestine and caecal tonsils) samples collected from dead birds on postmortem examination from 100 layer flocks above 20 weeks of age with gastrointestinal lesions were subjected to isolation of NDV in embryonated specific pathogen free (SPF) chicken eggs. Mean death time (MDT) and intracerebral pathogenicity index of the isolates were characterized. Flock details were collected from NDV positive flocks to assess the prevalence and impact of NDV on vaccinated commercial layer chicken. Results: Among the 100 flocks examined Newcastle disease virus was detected in 14 flocks as a single infection and 10 flocks as combined infections with worm infestation, necrotic enteritis and coccidiosis. Chicken embryo mean death time (MDT) and intracerebral pathogenicity index (ICPI) values ranged from 50.4 to 96.0 hrs and from 0.650 to 1.675 respectively. Affected birds showed anorexia, diarrohea and drop in egg production. Macropathologically, matting of vent feathers, petechial haemorrhage on the tip of proventricular papilla, caecal tonsils and degeneration of ovarian follicles were noticed. The incidence of ND was most commonly noticed in 20-50 wk of age and between the months of September to November. Morbidity rate varied from 5% to 10% in the NDV alone affected flocks and 5 to 15% in NDV with other concurrent infections. Egg production drop from the expected level ranged between 3 to 7 % in ND and 5 to 10 % in concurrent infections. Average mortality in NDV and concurrently affected (NDV and Coccidiosis) flocks were 2.89% and 3.50 % respectively. Conclusion: The present study revealed 24 % of gastrointestinal tract abnormalities in commercial layer chicken were caused by various pathotypes of Newcastle disease virus. The virus caused the disease as single and concurrently with other diseases. Vaccination minimized the clinical manifestation and lesions even in velogenic virus affected flocks