Spontaneous extrusion of gallstones after percutaneous drainage

There have been reports of late discharge of gallstones through operative wounds after spillage into the peritoneal cavity during laparoscopic cholecystectomy and after the development of spontaneous cholecystocutaneous fistulae. However, spontaneous discharge of gallstones from the tract of a percutaneous cholecystostomy or percutaneous drainage of a perforated gall bladder has not, to the best of our knowledge, been reported previously. We report a case in which a patient who had a percutaneous drain inserted for a perforated gall bladder discharged 34 gallstones from the tract after removal of the 7-F pigtail catheter

Teaching Compositionality to CNNs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in computer vision, approaching human-level performance when trained for specific tasks via application-specific loss functions. In this paper, we propose a method for augmenting and training CNNs so that their learned features are compositional. It encourages networks to form representations that disentangle objects from their surroundings and from each other, thereby promoting better generalization. Our method is agnostic to the specific details of the underlying CNN to which it is applied and can in principle be used with any CNN. As we show in our experiments, the learned representations lead to feature activations that are more localized and improve performance over non-compositional baselines in object recognition tasks.Comment: Preprint appearing in CVPR 201

Effect of Thermal Impact Failure on Aluminum Alloy Piston Crown

An analytical study of the thermal impact failure on a diesel engine piston has been performed in order to determine and analyze the possible causes of the failure. The piston is subjected to preliminary inspection, microstructure analysis and then hardness testing. Visual examination revealed the impact made by piston with valve head and the subsequent welding of the broken valve portion with the piston crown. It is observed to be caused by improper operating conditions. SEM and EDS analysis performed on the piston specimen revealed the presence of high alloy content and various intermetallics that precipitated in the Al-Si alloy material during combustion process. These particles are attributed for the high hardness and brittleness of the piston surface which thereby resulted in its fracture upon the impact. The weak boundaries between the intermetallics easily enable fatigue crack growth up to failure. Results from the microhardness test performed on the specimens validate the increase in hardness on the crown than on skirt. The analysis of obtained data and observations suggests that piston would have failed by fatigue even if the valve operated properly

Management of peri-implantitis lesions without the use of systemic antibiotics: a systematic review

Background: This systematic review aims to assess the current evidence on the efficacy of surgical and non-surgical debridement techniques in the treatment of peri-implantitis lesions without the use of any antimicrobials. Method: Five electronic databases (MEDLINE, Pubmed, Scopus, CINAHL and Cochrane) were used, alongside hand searches, to find relevant articles. Full-text articles that were randomised controlled trials, published in the English language from 2011 onwards without pre-operative, peri-operative and post-operative antibiotic usage were included. The study was conducted according to the latest Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)-P protocols, the latest Cochrane Risk of Bias tool and each investigated intervention was evaluated using the grading of recommendation, assessment, development and evaluation (GRADE) system. Results: The search yielded 2718 results. After initial screening, 38 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility. From these, 11 studies satisfied all inclusion criteria. These 11 articles described six non-surgical and five surgical debridement therapies. Most articles were classified as having either a high risk of bias or presenting with some concerns. Small sample sizes, in combination with this risk of bias, meant that all interventions were adjudged to be of either low or very low quality of evidence. Conclusion: While all investigated modalities displayed some sort of efficacy, this review suggests that a surgical approach may be best suited to treating peri-implantitis lesions in the absence of antibiotic therapy. Despite this weak indication, further research is required in this field

Dyon Spectrum in CHL Models

We propose a formula for the degeneracy of quarter BPS dyons in a class of CHL models. The formula uses a modular form of a subgroup of the genus two modular group Sp(2,Z). Our proposal is S-duality invariant and reproduces correctly the entropy of a dyonic black hole to first non-leading order for large values of the charges.Comment: LaTeX file, 38 pages, minor changes in section 3.3(v2), minor changes in introduction, appendix A and C(v3

Assisted Living: Domestic Power Monitoring utilising Home Automation Products and Cloud Storage

This paper describes the development of a system for taking measurements of electrical power consumption in a domestic situation and using a web service to store the measurements in a cloud hosted database. This is part of a larger project to evaluate the potential for using power monitoring as a proxy for wellness as part of the assisted living projects at Wintec

A minimally intrusive monitoring system that utilizes electricity consumption as a proxy for wellbeing

The purpose of this work was to test the hypothesis: `Off-the-shelf domestic electricity meters can be utilised to assist in monitoring the wellbeing of elderly people` Many studies have shown that it is, in theory, possible to use domestic electricity consumption to determine `activities of daily living` but the availability of systems for actual use is very limited. This work followed the Design Science Research Methodology to create a Java application running on the Google App Engine cloud service that interfaced with both electricity meters and voice and text services. The system was implemented and tested over a three month period with one older person and their carer. Results demonstrated that the technology readily succeeds in meeting the study`s initial objectives. The need for more sophisticated decision logic was apparent and a method to determine whether a home is currently occupied is likely to improve the ability to create more timely alerts

Off-the-shelf Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring Devices Utilised in a Low Activity Detection Service

There is a growing awareness for the need to provide low cost solutions for the care of the elderly and in particular to allow them to keep living independent lives. In parallel to this there has also been significant advances in a number of technical areas including 1) monitoring electricity consumption for the purpose of reducing power costs, 2) non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), 3) using sensors to determine activities of daily living and 4) cloud computing. The purpose of this work was to demonstrate that it is possible to use a readily available consumer off the shelf electricity monitor to provide a low intrusive activity monitor for older persons. This work uses the Design Science Research Methodology and builds on the results of our previous work that used raw electricity usage data. In this work we are trailing the use of a meter that uses NILM to identify individual appliances in the home. The information on appliance use was analysed by a cloud base program and alerts were sent to the carer when lower than expected activity was detected. Participants both in this work and those reported in the literature have mentioned the annoyance of having multiple sensors in a home, especially if they emit either constant or flashing light. In contrast NILM allows the use of multiple electrical appliances to be monitored without the need for a large number of sensors to be deployed – just one sensor at the meter or fuse board. The confluence of a number of technologies has enabled the creation of a low intrusive and low cost monitoring system to have become a reality. The initial trial of the system has been shown to be a mostly reliable alternative to a system built on multiple sensors. Based on previous work that involved the deployment of multiple sensors, the new system is expected to be more acceptable as it has the desired attribute of becoming invisible to the user

PHYTOCHEMICAL SCREENING AND EVALUATION OF IN-VITRO ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF DROSERA SPATULATA VAR BAKOENSIS- AN INDIGENOUS CARNIVOROUS PLANT AGAINST RESPIRATORY TRACT INFECTIOUS MICROBES.

Objective: In the present study, the phytochemical constituents of Drosera spatulata, have been evaluated and antimicrobial activity was screened against respiratory tract infectious microbes.Methods: The phytochemicals present in Drosera spatulata by qualitative phytochemical assays and the antimicrobial activity along with MIC, MBC and BIC were determined against S. aureus, Klebsiella pneumonia and S.Pneumonia the causative organisms of pulmonary infections, mainly effects the nasal pharynx, trachea, and lungs as well as Aspergillus niger.Results: Aqueous, ethanol, methanol extracts of thick roots, open flower and hair of Drosera spatulata var bakoensis against this pathogenic bacteria and fungi showed high zone of inhibition which estimated by disc-diffusion method as well as minimum inhibition concentration manifestation by the broth microdilution assay followed MBC and BIC. The values of MIC, MBC and BIC obtained were between 0.3-0.9, 0.36-2.25, 0.12 - 0.37 mg/mL. The results revealed that the plant extracts of Drosera spatulata var bakoensis have high potential even at low concentrations values against bacteria and fungi cultures and this results validated by the presence of high amounts of alkaloids, quinones, anthraquinones, flavonoids in the plant extracts. Conclusion: In the present study, the results showed the presence of high amounts of alkaloids, flavonoids, quninoes, anthraquinones, terpinoids in Drasera spatulata plant.  In the antibacterial and antifungal activity, the ethanol and methanol extracts significantly showed the activity against the tested respiratory disease causing bacteria and antifungal properties with zone of inhibition showed more than aqueous extracts at very low concentration