Synthesis and Significance of Carbon Quantum Dots (A Review)

CQDs were first discovered in 2004 accidently during the purification of single walled carbon nanotubes.[1]. Much progress has been achieved in the synthesis properties and application of CQDs.[2] As a new class of fluorescent Carbon nanomaterial CQDs processes. The properties of high solubility good. Conductivity, low toxicity, environmental friendliness, simple synthetic route are well as comparable optical properties to quantum dots.[3] Carbon quantum dots have been extensively investigated especially due to their strong and tunable fluorescence emission properties

Pattern of antimicrobial utilization in indoor ward of surgery department of a tertiary care teaching hospital of Southern Rajasthan, India

Background: Drug utilization studies are conducted to analyze prescription pattern, facilitate rational prescribing and improve the outcome. Antibiotics are frequently prescribed drugs in surgery department both by oral and parenteral route. Irrational prescribing of antibiotics is responsible for emergence of drug resistance in pathogens which is a global problem now a days.Methods: 225 patients admitted in surgical indoor were included in the study and data collected was evaluated as per WHO quality indicators.Results: Ceftriaxone was maximally utilized antimicrobial (%), average number of antimicrobial prescribed was 2.73±1.08. Average duration of hospitalization was 10.32 days. Costliest antimicrobial prescribed was meropenum and with minimum cost was Clarithromycin. Cost per patient was Rs.72.6. PDD/DDD ratio of Amoxicillin+Clavulanic acid was maximum. 24% of patients were receiving complementary and alternative medicines.Conclusions: The drugs were prescribed from the essential drug list with generic names in appropriate dose and duration. The need of Culture and sensitivity test for selecting antimicrobials was identified in the study. The study can be further expanded by including patients of vulnerable groups and private sector and evaluation of effect of self medication on outcome

Edible Mushroom For Medicinal Use

Medicinal mushroom has been used for their health benefits for thousands of years. Each mushroom has its own distinct health advantages. A lot of people heard about Medicinal mushroom or you can say Healing mushroom or Functional mushroom. But not all mushroom is like this on other side magic mushroom which are wildly cultivated that gives psychoactive effect. There are approx. 10,000 known species of mushroom, out of that 700 are edible.  Like there are numerous mushroom that have been utilized for their medicinal advantage for millennia. Some of them have specific biological effect like, Reishi for immunomodulatory, Lions mane for cognitive behavioral therapy, Chaga mushroom for body manage and regulate stress, Maitaki mushroom  for antibacterial. These mushroom are known for their extraordinary medicinal advantage for example safe health offering, creating cell reinforcement, helping a balance blood-sugar level, supporting brain health, supporting sensory system, expanding energy and low risk of depression. Mushroom contain polysaccharide that act as prebiotic. Also contain important minerals like copper, potassium, selenium, etc. Two epidemiological studies found that higher mushroom intake had protective effect on older elder brain and may prevent growth of amyloid protein that related to dementia. On other hand it protects the body from the physiological stress that cause visible sign of ageing.  So overall consumption of mushroom is not only having health benefits in diseases but they can be used to stop progression of disease. You can identify if this mushroom species is edible or poisonous by “Yellow stain test” – By scratching at the top of mushroom and if they show yellow color then it is poisonous mushroom

Multi-Task Meta Learning: learn how to adapt to unseen tasks

This work proposes Multi-task Meta Learning (MTML), integrating two learning paradigms Multi-Task Learning (MTL) and meta learning, to bring together the best of both worlds. In particular, it focuses simultaneous learning of multiple tasks, an element of MTL and promptly adapting to new tasks, a quality of meta learning. It is important to highlight that we focus on heterogeneous tasks, which are of distinct kind, in contrast to typically considered homogeneous tasks (e.g., if all tasks are classification or if all tasks are regression tasks). The fundamental idea is to train a multi-task model, such that when an unseen task is introduced, it can learn in fewer steps whilst offering a performance at least as good as conventional single task learning on the new task or inclusion within the MTL. By conducting various experiments, we demonstrate this paradigm on two datasets and four tasks: NYU-v2 and the taskonomy dataset for which we perform semantic segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and edge detection. MTML achieves state-of-the-art results for three out of four tasks for the NYU-v2 dataset and two out of four for the taskonomy dataset. In the taskonomy dataset, it was discovered that many pseudo-labeled segmentation masks lacked classes that were expected to be present in the ground truth; however, our MTML approach was found to be effective in detecting these missing classes, delivering good qualitative results. While, quantitatively its performance was affected due to the presence of incorrect ground truth labels. The the source code for reproducibility can be found at https://github.com/ricupa/MTML-learn-how-to-adapt-to-unseen-tasks

Frequency of color blindness in pre-employment screening in a tertiary health care center in Pakistan

Abstract OBJECTIVE: To describe the frequency of color vision deficiency among Pakistani adults presenting for pre-employment health screening in a tertiary care hospital. METHODS: The cross-sectional study was carried out at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and the data was collected for color vision deficiency, age, gender, and job applied for from pre-employment examination during 2013-2014. IBM SPSS 20 was used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Three thousand four hundred and thirty seven persons underwent pre-employment screening during 2013 and 2014; 1837 (53.44%) were males and 1600 (46.65%) females. The mean age was 29.01 (±6.53) years. A total of 0.9% (32/3437) persons had color vision deficiency with male being 1.4% and female 0.4%. CONCLUSION: Color vision deficiency was observed in 0.9% of candidates screened for pre-employment health check up in a tertiary care hospital. The color vision deficiency was predominantly present in male individuals

Indian Medicinal Plants with Antidiabetic Potential

Medicinal plants should be evaluated extensively to determine the active principles present in them that are responsible for the hypoglycemic activity of these plants. Herbal drugs have gained popularity among the general population due to their ability to treat ailments with minimum side effects. The multi-target approaches of medicinal plants make them least susceptible to failure during the treatment therapy. Medicinal plants showing prominent anti-diabetic activity during the initial studies should be further explored to identify the active principles present in them that can become the promising drug candidates for the disease treatment in the coming future. Keywords: Anti-diabetic, Diabetes Mellitus, Insulin, hypoglycemic, anti-hyperglycemic, anti-hyperlipidemic &nbsp

Ocular manifestation, complications and aetiological factors in Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis

Abstract OBJECTIVE: To describe the ocular manifestations of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome/Toxic Epidermal Necrosis among inpatients at a tertiary care hospital. METHODS: The retrospective observational descriptive study was carried out at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and comprised data on age, gender, aetiology and ocular findings related to patients diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome/ToxicEpidermal Necrosis between January 2000 and December 2011. SPSS 19 was used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: There were 87 patients; 48(55.2%) of them being males.The overall mean age was 33.2±22.2 years, ranging from 1 month to 84 years. The most common aetiology was idiopathic 20(23%) followed by non-steroidal inflammatory drugs and anti-epileptics 11(12.6%) each. Besides, 84(96.6%) patients had oral mucosal involvement whereas 45(51.7%) had ocular and 27(31.0%) had genital-mucosal involvement. Glassroding was performed in 16(18.4%) patients due to minor conjunctival adhesions. CONCLUSION: Ocular manifestations of varying severity were frequent, with drugs being the most common aetiolog