Factors associated with community-acquired urinary tract infections among adults attending assessment centre, Mulago Hospital Uganda.

Background: Urinary tract infections (UTI) are a common medical problem affecting the general population and thus commonly encountered in medical practice, with the global burden of UTIs at about 150 million people. Because uropathogens largely originate from colonic flora, they are easy to predict, and this is the rationale for empirical treatment in Community Acquired- UTI (CA-UTIs). With the increasing prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria among adults with CA-UTI in Uganda, it is no longer adequate to manage CA-UTIs on empiric regimen without revising the susceptibility patterns of common CA-UTI causative agents. Thus in this study we set out to identify: The factors associated with CA-UTIs, the common uropathogens and the drug sensitivity patterns of the common uropathogens cultured. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional study that was conducted in adults who presented with symptoms of a UTI at Mulago Hospital, assessment center. There were 139 patients who consented to the study and were recruited, an interviewer administered questionnaire was used to collect information from the study participants as regards demographic, social and clinical characteristics and Mid Stream Urine (MSU) samples were collected for urinalysis, culture and antibiotic susceptibility testing using the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion technique was applied to the isolates.Numeric data were summarized using measures of central tendency while the categorical data was summarized using proportions and percentages. Results: Age, female sex and marital status were factors that were significantly associated with CA-UTIs. Fifty four (54) cultures were positive for UTI with 26 giving pure growths. The commonest uropathogen isolated was Escherichia coli at 50%, this was followed by Staphylococcus aureus at 15.4%. The sensitivity of Escherichia coli to Ampicillin and Nitrofurantoin were78.6%, 64.3% respectively, and the sensitivity of Staphylococcus aureus to ciprofloxacin, Nitrofurantoin and gentamycin were 100%, 66.7% and 66.7% respectively. Conclusion: There are known factors associated with CA-UTIs such as age, female sex. There was generally high sensitivity to nitrofurantoin and gentamycin by most of the uropathogens isolated, and high resistance to the common antibiotics such as nalidixic acid and erythromycin thus a need for a bigger study that can be used to effect the change of the current recommendations in the Uganda Clinical Guidelines as regards empirical management of CA-UTIs

Identifying optimal generic processors for biomedical implants

The extremely limited resource budget available to medical implants makes it imperative that they are designed in the most optimal way possible. The limited resources include - but are not limited to - battery life, expected responsiveness of the system and chip area. We have already detailed the design of a design-space exploration (DSE) tool specifically geared towards finding the Pareto-optimal design front. In this paper, we choose processor configurations from the Paretooptimal processor set found by the DSE using real implants as case studies. We find that even under the extremely biased constraints that we use, our processor(s) perform better than many of the real implants. This provides strong hints towards designing an implant processor that is generic enough to cover most, if not all, implant applications

Vehicle classification using the convolution neural network approach

We present vehicle detection classification using the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) of the deep learning approach. The automatic vehicle classification for traffic surveillance video systems is challenging for the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to build a smart city. In this article, three different vehicles: bike, car and truck classification are considered for around 3,000 bikes, 6,000 cars, and 2,000 images of trucks. CNN can automatically absorb and extract different vehicle dataset’s different features without a manual selection of features. The accuracy of CNN is measured in terms of the confidence values of the detected object. The highest confidence value is about 0.99 in the case of the bike category vehicle classification. The automatic vehicle classification supports building an electronic toll collection system and identifying emergency vehicles in the traffic

ImpEDE: A multidimensional design-space exploration framework for biomedical-implant processors

The demand for biomedical implants keeps increasing. However, most of the current implant design methodologies involve custom-ASIC design. The SiMS project aims to change this process and make implant design more modular, flexible, faster and extensible. The most recent work within the SiMS context provides ImpEDE, a framework based on a multiobjective genetic algorithm, for automatic exploration of the design space of implant processors. The framework provides the processor designer with a Pareto front through which informed decisions can be made about specific implant families after analyzing their particular tradeoffs and requirements. A highly efficient, parallelized version of the genetic algorithm is also used to evolve the front and has as its objectives the optimization of power, performance and area. In addition, we illustrate the extensibility of our framework by modifying it to include a case study of a synthetic implant application with hard realtime deadlines

CANNY EDGE DETECTION BASED REAL-TIME INTELLIGENT PARKING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Real-time traffic monitoring and parking are very important aspects for a better social and economic system. Python-based Intelligent Parking Management System (IPMS) module using a USB camera and a canny edge detection method was developed. The current situation of real-time parking slot was simultaneously checked, both online and via a mobile application, with a message of Parking “Available” or “Not available” for 10 parking slots. In addition, at the time entering in parking module, gate open and at the time of exit parking module, the gate closes automatically using servomotor and sensors. Results are displayed in figures with the proposed method flow chart

ImpBench revisited: An extended characterization of implant-processor benchmarks

Implants are nowadays transforming rapidly from rigid, custom-based devices with very narrow applications to highly constrained albeit multifunctional embedded systems. These systems contain cores able to execute software programs so as to allow for increased application versatility. In response to this trend, a new collection of benchmark programs for guiding the design of implant processors, ImpBench, has already been proposed and characterized. The current paper expands on this characterization study by employing a geneticalgorithm- based, design-space exploration framework. Through this framework, ImpBench components are evaluated in terms of their implications on implant-processor design. The benchmark suite is also expanded by introducing one new benchmark and two new stressmarks based on existing ImpBench benchmarks. The stressmarks are proposed for achieving further speedups in simulation times without polluting the processor-exploration process. Profiling results reveal that processor configurations generated by the stressmarks follow with good fidelity - except for some marked exceptions - ones generated by the aggregated ImpBench suite. Careful use of the stressmarks can seriously reduce simulation times up to x30, which is an impressive speedup and a good tradeoff between DSE speed and accuracy

Abstracts of International Conference on Scholarly Communication, Open-Access Publishing and Ethics

Academic education, research, and development intensify the nation socially and fiscally competitive. Institutions have a greater role to enhance their intellectual infrastructure facilitations to help in the process of building an institutional academic and research culture through means of scholarly communication and publication. This book covers Abstracts of various peer-reviewed papers presented in the International Conference on Scholarly Communication, Open-access Publishing and Ethics (SCOPE-2018) held at SPA Vijayawada during 25 -26 October 2018. Indeed, these papers are divided into four important subject areas viz. academic research and development; scholarly communication; open access publishing, copyright and ethics; and academic library, preservation facilitations