Understanding of emergency contraception among nursing staff in a tertiary care hospital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India

Context: Emergency contraception (EC) offers women a last chance to prevent pregnancy after unprotected intercourse. Nursing personnel are both service providers and health educators to the community and their understanding can influence the contraceptive behaviour.Aim: To find out the understanding of emergency contraception among nursing personnel.Settings and design: Descriptive cross-sectional study.Material and methods: A predesigned questionnaire was used to collect the responses of nurses regarding their understanding of Emergency Contraception.Statistical analysis used: Mean & Percentages.Results: Eighty (80%) of the respondents had heard about EC. Majority (88.75%) responded in favour of Levonorgestrel. Most (76.25%) opined incorrectly that EC pills are abortifacient. All the participants showed positive attitude towards EC. However, only three participants came out to be EC users.Conclusion: Nurses with a complete knowledge and positive attitude towards EC can act as effective counsellors to the public to create awareness, improve their understanding and change their attitude towards EC.Keywords: Understanding; Nurses; Emergency contraception; Levonorgestre

Self-Supervised Few-Shot Learning on Point Clouds

The increased availability of massive point clouds coupled with their utility in a wide variety of applications such as robotics, shape synthesis, and self-driving cars has attracted increased attention from both industry and academia. Recently, deep neural networks operating on labeled point clouds have shown promising results on supervised learning tasks like classification and segmentation. However, supervised learning leads to the cumbersome task of annotating the point clouds. To combat this problem, we propose two novel self-supervised pre-training tasks that encode a hierarchical partitioning of the point clouds using a cover-tree, where point cloud subsets lie within balls of varying radii at each level of the cover-tree. Furthermore, our self-supervised learning network is restricted to pre-train on the support set (comprising of scarce training examples) used to train the downstream network in a few-shot learning (FSL) setting. Finally, the fully-trained self-supervised network's point embeddings are input to the downstream task's network. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of our method on both downstream classification and segmentation tasks and show that supervised methods pre-trained with our self-supervised learning method significantly improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our method also outperforms previous unsupervised methods in downstream classification tasks.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202

Real-Time Price-Based Optimal Energy Mix in Smart Distribution Network

With the increasing penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in Smart Distribution Networks (SDNs), balancing energy mix is a crucial task for distribution system operators. The aggregate consumption, generation, and power exchanged from the upstream network are essential for the energy management system. Appropriate allocation and scheduling of DERs and Energy Storage can minimize the total power drawn from the upstream network. This paper analyzes the Real-Time Price (RTP)-based approach for optimizing the scheduling of DERs and power transfer from the upstream network. The Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP)-based optimization approach is used to maximize the total profit made by maintaining optimal energy mix in SDNs by using the energy from DER and energy storage. When the upstream network’s tariff is higher, the energy balance is maintained by DERs and ESSs as far as possible. It is also observed that with the reduction in the energy price from DERs, power export from the SDN to the upstream network is increased

Optimal power flow based coordinated reactive and active power control to mitigate voltage violations in smart inverter enriched distribution network

Voltage violations are the main problem faced in distribution networks (DN) with a higher penetration of inverter-based generations (IBG). Active and reactive power control from smart inverters (SI) can mitigate such violations. Optimal power flow (OPF)-based control provides more accurate operating set points for the coordinated operation of SIs. Therefore, this paper presents a three-phase OPF-based control on SI-enriched unbalanced distribution networks. To consider this, first three-phase model using the current injection model (CIM) is developed. Later, the optimal active and reactive power set points for SIs are obtained by solving a quasi-dynamic optimization problem. The uniqueness of the proposed method is that it regulates the voltage at the affected nodes by obtaining the optimal set points for the smart inverter. The OPF is implemented with a mathematical CIM in Pyomo and solved using the Knitro solver. The proposed method is compared with the sensitivity-based Volt-Var Control (VVC), Volt-Watt Control (VWC), and combined VVC and VWC methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in a European low-voltage and CIGRE medium-voltage distribution network with 100% penetration. The analysis shows that the OPF-based control optimizes with less network loss and can maintain voltage violations with less reactive power support

Female sterilization failure, consequences and further contraception: a review of cases over ten years

Objective: To study the socio-demographic profile and etiological factors responsible for failure of tubal ligation. Their outcome and further adopted methods of contraception.Methods: This was a retrospective observational study done in a tertiary care centre from January 2009 to December 2018. All cases who came with sterilization failure were reviewed including their demographic patterns, previous methods used and the contraception choices adopted after procedural failure.Results: Over a period of ten years, out of a total of 157 cases of sterilization failure 43.33% (n=68) were laparoscopic interval ligation, 42.60% (n=67) were laparoscopic ligation with termination of pregnancy, 10.20% (n=16) were sterilization done along with lower segment cesarean section and 1.9% (n=3) were mini-laparotomy (minilap) done in postpartum period. Only 63.05% (n=99) got repeat sterilization procedure done despite previous failure. Out of 157 cases, in 50.9% (n=80) recanalization was found, tuboperitoneal fistula was responsible in 5.7% (n=9) women, slipped fallope ring was found in 5.7% (n=9) women, wrong application of fallope ring was seen in 1.9% (n=3) and 35.6% (n=56) did not opted for religation.Conclusion: Failures of sterilization procedures do exist especially in laparoscopic ligation. Counseling prior to adoption of this method, risk of failure and other noninvasive options of contraception must be discussed.

Sex cord stromal tumor of ovary masquerading as polycystic ovarian syndrome

Virilization is a portentous sign that suggests the possibility of an ovarian or adrenal neoplasm. Diagnosis may be delayed in some patients due to nonspecific symptoms and overlapping symptoms with that of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). However, it must be remembered that PCOS usually causes mild to moderate elevation of serum testosterone with hirsutism whereas serum testosterone levels are many times elevated in cases of androgen secreting tumors and virilization is a norm. So high testosterone level with new onset virilization rule out PCOS. Authors are reporting two cases of Sertoli Leydig cell tumor despite their similar histopathology and equivalent levels of serum testosterone had a varied clinical spectrum of virilization

Feedback and communication in active hydrogel spheres with pH fronts : facile approaches to grow soft hydrogel structures

Compartmentalized reaction networks regulating signal processing, communication and pattern formation are central to living systems. Towards achieving life-like materials, we compartmentalized urea-urease and more complex urea-urease/ester-esterase pH-feedback reaction networks into hydrogel spheres and investigate how fuel-driven pH fronts can be sent out from these spheres and regulated by internal reaction networks. Membrane characteristics are installed by covering urease spheres with responsive hydrogel shells. We then encapsulate the two networks (urea-urease and ester-esterase) separately into different hydrogel spheres to devise communication, pattern formation and attraction. Moreover, these pH fronts and patterns can be used for self-growing hydrogels, and for developing complex geometries from non-injectable hydrogels without 3D printing tools. This study opens possibilities for compartmentalized feedback reactions and their use in next generation materials fabrication

An insight into risk factors profile of oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancer patients attending two tertiary care hospitals in Jaipur, India

Background: Oral cancer is the second most prevalent cancers among males in Jaipur city. Assessment of risk factors profile of patients will help the policy makers in initiating new ways to curb the usage of tobacco among masses. The present study aims to find out the risk factors profile of oral and oropharyngeal cancer patients at two hospitals of Jaipur city.Methods: It was a prospective and observational study. The patients with histologically confirmed diagnosis of oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancers and fulfilling the inclusion criteria were recruited. Data on the demographic profile and clinical information were obtained from hospital and clinical records. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 14 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Chi-square test was performed to analyse the data.Results: Out of 400 oral cancer patients included in this study majority of the patients were in the age range of 40-60years and with a significant male preponderance in all the age groups (P <0.05). The most common habit among males and females was chewing. Buccal mucosa was the most commonly affected site followed by tongue. Both males and females were more likely to be diagnosed in stage 3 (p <0.05).Conclusions: There is a need to reduce the burden of this disease by educating the people about various risk factors which play role in oral cancer development