Healthcare Event and Activity Logging.

The health of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can change frequently and inexplicably. Crucial events and activities responsible for these changes often go unnoticed. This paper introduces healthcare event and action logging (HEAL) which automatically and unobtrusively monitors and reports on events and activities that occur in a medical ICU room. HEAL uses a multimodal distributed camera network to monitor and identify ICU activities and estimate sanitation-event qualifiers. At the core is a novel approach to infer person roles based on semantic interactions, a critical requirement in many healthcare settings where individuals' identities must not be identified. The proposed approach for activity representation identifies contextual aspects basis and estimates aspect weights for proper action representation and reconstruction. The flexibility of the proposed algorithms enables the identification of people roles by associating them with inferred interactions and detected activities. A fully working prototype system is developed, tested in a mock ICU room and then deployed in two ICU rooms at a community hospital, thus offering unique capabilities for data gathering and analytics. The proposed method achieves a role identification accuracy of 84% and a backtracking role identification of 79% for obscured roles using interaction and appearance features on real ICU data. Detailed experimental results are provided in the context of four event-sanitation qualifiers: clean, transmission, contamination, and unclean

Clustering algorithm for local area network design in a CIM environment

Communication systems have come to be regarded as being one of the most important aspects in manufacturing enterprises in recent years. It continues to offer enormous potential for improving the efficiency of manufacturing enterprises through Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). It is true however that this potential cannot be realized by developments on the communications front alone. Strategic and economic considerations in installing a communications system in a manufacturing environment is of vital significance. This thesis, at the outset attempts to bring out some of the issues in the area of communications (research), specifically in relation to CIM. A perception of prior research to some of these issues has been provided. The main focus of this thesis is placed on developing a methodology for designing an optimal flow local area network (LAN) for a CIM communications system using analytical models for resource allocation. A new representation of information flow load among the various nodes in a network is conceived which helps to determine an optimal communication traffic matrix. A decision logic to generate a system architecture based on the above information flow is designed. The various factors and variables involved in a communication network are identified. For the purpose of this study however, the most critical variables /factors of these are considered. Definitions of the various terminologies associated with these factors are provided. Experimentations are performed using the simulation approach. The main objective of this study is to help LAN designers to suggest effective configurations of the nodes to be networked so that the installation costs and propagation delays are reduced

Eye-CU: Sleep Pose Classification for Healthcare using Multimodal Multiview Data

Manual analysis of body poses of bed-ridden patients requires staff to continuously track and record patient poses. Two limitations in the dissemination of pose-related therapies are scarce human resources and unreliable automated systems. This work addresses these issues by introducing a new method and a new system for robust automated classification of sleep poses in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment. The new method, coupled-constrained Least-Squares (cc-LS), uses multimodal and multiview (MM) data and finds the set of modality trust values that minimizes the difference between expected and estimated labels. The new system, Eye-CU, is an affordable multi-sensor modular system for unobtrusive data collection and analysis in healthcare. Experimental results indicate that the performance of cc-LS matches the performance of existing methods in ideal scenarios. This method outperforms the latest techniques in challenging scenarios by 13% for those with poor illumination and by 70% for those with both poor illumination and occlusions. Results also show that a reduced Eye-CU configuration can classify poses without pressure information with only a slight drop in its performance.Comment: Ten-page manuscript including references and ten figure

Utility of prophylactic cervical cerclage in intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection twins: a prospective study

Background: Several interventions have been used to reduce the rate of preterm birth and prolonging gestation in a twin pregnancy and routine usage of cervical cerclage in twin pregnancy conceived after intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure has found to be beneficial.Methods: Prospective case series studies, series of expectant mothers with twin pregnancy conceived by ICSI were studied under tertiary care hospital setting. A total of 108 cases with twin pregnancy were included during a period of 2016 to 2019. Obstetric profile of all the cases was taken; cervical cerclage procedure was done at 14-16 weeks of gestation (McDonald method) after a normal nuchal translucency scan and a double marker test. Pregnancy outcome parameters like abortion, preterm labour/delivery, premature rupture of membranes (PROM), and mode of delivery, gestational age at delivery, birth weight and neonatal complications were assessed.Results: Mean age of the mothers was 30.61±4.45 years, rates of the pregnancy outcome parameters were abortion 0%, preterm labour 11.1%, premature rupture of membranes (PROM) 9.3%, mean gestational age at delivery was at 34.56±1.71 weeks. Neonatal outcome parameters were mean birth weight was at 2279±470 grams, 77.8% of the neonates had normal APGAR scores. The rates of NICU admission was 28%, RDS– 24.1%, 3.7% had sepsis and 92.6% of neonates survived and 7.4% died.Conclusions: In ICSI twin pregnancies with normal cervical measurements, prophylactic cervical cerclage is effective in prolonging pregnancy and preventing preterm delivery and thereby minimizing neonatal morbidity and mortality

Total dose infusion of fractionated iron dextran complex in management of anaemia in antenatal cases

Background: Iron deficiency anemia is common clinical manifestation in pregnancy. It can be easily prevented or corrected by early diagnosis and proper treatment successfully. This study was done to know the efficacy, effectiveness, rise in hemoglobin level and adverse effects of newly available low molecular weight iron dextran complex.Methods: A prospective clinical trial was conducted in randomly selected 50 antenatal women who attended the OPD of OBG department and were moderately anemic and fulfilled the inclusion criteria of the studyResults: All the 50 women were moderately anemic with hemoglobin level between 7-9 gm%. After total dose infusion of low molecular weight fractionated iron dextran complex, hemoglobin level was measured at 4 weeks and at term. The mean hemoglobin level rose to 9.5 gm/dl by 4 weeks after infusion and to 11.53 gm/dl at term, which was statistically significant (p<0.0001). Only one patient developed non-cardiac chest pain during the test dose and two patients developed urticaria during total dose infusion.Conclusion: The study showed a statistically significant increase in hemoglobin level after total dose infusion of low molecular weight iron dextran complex with a good safety profile and minimal hospital stay

Modeling Kinetic Glomerular Filtration Rate in Adults with Stable and Unstable Kidney Function: Vancomycin as the Motivating Example

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162720/2/phar2442_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162720/1/phar2442.pd

A possible case of etoricoxib induced fixed drug eruption

Fixed drug eruption (FDE) is a most commonly with adverse drug reaction seen with use of Non-steroidalanti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in particular nimesulide followed by antibiotics and anticonvulsants. Etoricoxib is a selective cyclo-oxygenase isoenzyme-2 inhibitor which is superior to conventional NSAIDs and causes less side effects. Authors present a case of fixed drug eruption due to etoricoxib in a male patient. A 50-year-old patient presented to Outpatient Department (OPD) of Dermatology of a Tertiary Care Hospital with complains of skin rashes over lips, oral cavity, trunk, both the upper and lower limbs, palm, soles, scrotum and glans penis since a week. The detailed history of the patient revealed the use of etoricoxib a week back, prescribed for low back pain. It was suspected that the cutaneous drug reaction was due to the use of etoricoxib. The suspected drug etoricoxib was stopped, patient was admitted and managed symptomatically. The above reaction was assessed to be “possible” as per WHO-UMC and Naranjo causality scale, “moderate” on Hartwig’s scale and “Probably preventable” according to Schumock and Thornton criteria. This case reporting was done to sensitize the prescribers regarding rare side effects of the above drug and the need to confirm past history of drug reaction before prescription