Liposarcoma of the Spermatic Cord: A Rare Entity

Primary malignant tumours of spermatic cord are rare. The liposarcoma of spermatic cord is a rare entity and only a few cases have been reported in the literature. We report a case of forty five-year-old male with huge left inguinoscrotal swelling. Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) of swelling revealed the diagnosis of a liposarcoma. The patient was subjected to radical orchidectomy and wide excision. Histopathological examination (HPE) of the resected specimen reported a well-differentiated liposarcoma of the spermatic cord and confirmed the diagnosis

Isolated Cervical Rib Fracture: A Rare Etiology of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome

Isolated fracture of a cervical rib is a very rare entity and usually presents as a painless swelling or as thoracic outlet syndrome. We describe a case of a 45-year-old woman with history of fall two months back. She presented with symptoms of neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome for one month. Isolated left cervical rib fracture was documented on X-ray cervical spine. Her fractured cervical rib was resected through a supraclavicular approach, and symptoms resolved completely in the postoperative period

Prevalence and clinical correlates of psychiatric morbidity among caregivers of patients attending a psychiatric hospital in North India

Background: Consequent to the high prevalence of psychiatric disorders in present day world, their caregivers form an important group in the public health. Research on the physical and psychological well-being of caregivers is being carried worldwide with varied results. Psychological health of these caregivers is usually ignored both by these persons themselves and the health-care providers. The objective of the study was to screen for psychiatric morbidity among caregivers of patients attending a psychiatric hospital in North India, and to study the clinical correlates of the same.Methods: A total of 205 patients and their caregivers were consecutively recruited over a one month period. Sociodemographic and clinical information of patients was obtained either from the hospital records or from the caregiver. Scoring of the patient’s global assessment of functioning (GAF) was done by clinicians. The caregivers were administered a sociodemographic questionnaire, general health questionnaire (GHQ-12) and Zarit Burden interview. The presence of psychiatric morbidity was confirmed by a consultant psychiatrist.Results: Among the caregivers, 32.2% had GHQ scores of 3 and above. Majority of caregivers in this study were females (59.0%) while as majority of the patients were males (61.9%). Factors associated with psychiatric morbidity among caregivers include the high level of subjective burden of care, low level of functioning, and comorbid medical and psychiatric conditions.Conclusions: The study reveals a high level of psychiatric morbidity among the caregivers of patients with mental health problems

Entropy and information inequalities.

The concept of information theory originated when an attempt was made to create a theoretical model for the transmission of information theory of various kinds. Information theory is a branch of mathematical theory of probability and is applied in wide variety of fields: communication theory, thermodynamics, econometrics, operation research and psychology etc. The development presented here have represented a step towards generalizing various measures of information, their characterization, application in coding theory and inference.Digital copy of Thesis.University of Kashmir

A Multimodal Ensemble Machine Learning Approach to COVID-19 Misinformation Detection in Twitter

The emergence of social media platforms has unquestionably altered the manner in which people ingest information, with tweets now functioning as the primary source for news and other types of content. However, the proliferation of false news on these platforms has become a major concern, as it poses a severe threat to both individuals and society as a whole. Consequently, it is crucial to develop efficient methods for detecting false news in tweets. This study presents a novel hybrid approach that integrates the textual content of tweets with auxiliary features to detect false news. Our approach uses a pre-trained transformer-based language model, COVID-twitter-BERT to encode the text content of tweets into a dense representation that captures their meaning. The auxiliary features, such as sentiment score, credibility score, engagement score, average retweet count, average favourite count, and average followers of followers, are fed into a stacking classifier-based model to predict the trustworthiness score of the tweet. By combining the predictions of both models, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods, emphasising the significance of utilising both text content and auxiliary features for Twitter false news detection. Our research considerably advances the field of detecting false news by demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating transformer-based language models and machine learning models for this task. Our findings provide valuable insights for improving the detection of false news on social media

Giant Intrapulmonary Teratoma: A Rare Case

Teratomas are tumors composed of tissues derived from more than one germ cell line. Pulmonary teratomas are rare and commonly involve the upper lobe of the left lung. Criteria for pulmonary origin are the exclusion of a gonadal or other extragonadal primary site and origin entirely within the lung. We report a case of a giant pulmonary teratoma in a 2-year-old male child and review the relevant literature

A Study on Prevalence and Risk Factors for Varicose Veins in a population

Background: Varicose veins are a common chronic venous disorder affecting 20 to 60% of adults worldwide. The present study was conducted to assess prevalence and risk factors for Varicose Veins in a population. Material and methods: This cross sectional study was conducted to assess prevalence and risk factors for Varicose Veins in a population. For the purpose of this study, varicose veins were defined as enlarged, tortuous, sub- cutaneous veins, either visible or palpable clinically with the patient standing. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 21. Results: The prevalence of varicose veins was found to be high in the population (72.22%). In maximum patients aging was the main risk factor for varicose veins(30.76%) followed by prolonged standing (24.35%). Conclusion: The present study concluded that aging, prolonged standing were significant risk factors for the development of varicose veins

EFFECT OF MONOCROTOPHOS ON ELECTROLYTIC LEAKAGE, PROLINE CONTENT AND NITROGEN METABOLISM OF FLOATING PTERIDOPHYTE AZOLLA MICROPHYLLA

The green revolution increased productivity in its initial phase, but excessive application of modern intensive agriculture, e.g., use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides poses a serious threat to the environment and sustainable agriculture. The effects of the green revolution have shifted concern from increasing productivity to sustainability and resource conservation. The goal of this work is to investigate the effect of insecticide monocrotophos on electrolytic leakage, proline content and nitrogen metabolism of small-leaf floating aquatic pteridophyte Azolla microphylla, which lives in symbiosis with a nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria, Anabaena azollae. Mean root number and root length decreased under monocrotophos as compared to control. At higher concentrations, roots were dillateted, brown and inactive. Electrolytic leakage and proline content increased with increase of monocrotophos concentrations. The nitrogenase activity assayed in the present investigation increased at lower concentrations and decreased at higher concentrations. Exposure of the Azolla to different concentrations of monocrotophos decreased the glutamine synthetase activity at all concentrations compared to control. However it was interesting to observe that nitrate reductase activity increased as the concentration of insecticide increases