Delta bilirubin: a sensitive and predictive marker for acute rejection in liver transplant recipients

Background: This study was aimed to investigate the diagnostic utility of delta bilirubin for acute rejection in liver transplant recipients.Methods: The present study was conducted on 80 patients (56 men and 24 women) who were admitted for a major operation of liver transplantation at super-speciality hospital, Medanta-The Medicity, Gurgaon. The average age of the patients was 43±19 years. Data was analyzed as mean, standard deviation; student t test by using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were calculated in percentage.Results: The result from the present study indicates that delta bilirubin had highest sensitivities of 93% whereas conjugated bilirubin has 43% while AST, ALT, GGT and ALKP had sensitivities of 61%, 81%, 80% and 31% respectively. There was a significant difference of delta bilirubin between rejection and non rejection transplant recipients.Conclusions: Our findings supported that the serial measurement of delta bilirubin would be a reliable marker for recognizing early rejection in liver transplant recipients

Exploration of Corpus Augmentation Approach for English-Hindi Bidirectional Statistical Machine Translation System

Even though lot of Statistical Machine Translation(SMT) research work is happening for English-Hindi language pair, there is no effort done to standardize the dataset. Each of the research work uses different dataset, different parameters and different number of sentences during various phases of translation resulting in varied translation output. So comparing  these models, understand the result of these models, to get insight into corpus behavior for these models, regenerating the result of these research work  becomes tedious. This necessitates the need for standardization of dataset and to identify the common parameter for the development of model.  The main contribution of this paper is to discuss an approach to standardize the dataset and to identify the best parameter which in combination gives best performance. It also investigates a novel corpus augmentation approach to improve the translation quality of English-Hindi bidirectional statistical machine translation system. This model works well for the scarce resource without incorporating the external parallel data corpus of the underlying language.  This experiment is carried out using Open Source phrase-based toolkit Moses. Indian Languages Corpora Initiative (ILCI) Hindi-English tourism corpus is used.  With limited dataset, considerable improvement is achieved using the corpus augmentation approach for the English-Hindi bidirectional SMT system

A morphometric study of adult human atlas vertebrae in South Gujarat population, India

Background: The atlas (C1) has undergone many structural modification and located at critical point close to the vital centres of the medulla oblongata which can get compressed by a dislocation of the atlanto axial complex or instability of the atlanto axial joint. Knowing of various dimensions of atlas vertebrae are very important for the development of instrumentation related to atlas vertebrae.Methods: In this study, total 100 dried, unbroken atlas vertebrae of unknown age and sex were evaluated in department of anatomy of medical colleges of South Gujarat. All dimensions were measured in bilateral manner using Digital Vernier Callipers with 0.01mm resolution.Results: The mean width of atlas was 71.19 mm. The mean distance between lateral margins of both transverse foramina was 55.48 mm and the inner distance was 44.77 mm. The mean for anteroposterior diameter of vertebral canal of atlas was 28.16mm and transverse diameter was 26.63 mm. The height of anterior arch was 10.21 mm and posterior arch was 8.68mm. The mean for height of facet for dens was 8.96mm and width was 9.18 mm. The mean of anteroposterior diameter of right and left superior articular facet was 20.73 mm and 20.86 mm and transverse diameter was 11.34mm and 11.39mm. The mean of anteroposterior diameter of right and left inferior articular facet was 17.89mm and 17.77mm and transverse diameter was 14.97mm and 15 mm. The mean thickness of vertebral artery groove (VAG) for right and left side was 4.15mm and 3.99mm and width was 8.26 and 8.1 mm. The length of VAG-inner edge (D1) for right and left side was 10.34mm and 10.3mm and length for outer edge (D2) was 14.93mm and 15.1mm.Conclusions: The observations of present study helps in improving understanding of various bony dimensions which  could facilitate diagnosis and preoperative planning while operating close to important structures like nerve roots and the vertebral artery and will allow for more accurate modelling of South Gujarat, India

Love Experiences of Older African Americans: A Qualitative Study

The purpose of this study was to explore the romantic love experiences of African American older adults. Popular views on love among older African Americans remain highly subjective, open to the imaginations of other individuals and groups. This study attempts to challenge the popular descriptions of the nature of love among African American elderly by gathering narratives on various aspects of love as told by a sample of African-American elderly. A qualitative design is used to sample, gather and analyze data on love among African-American elderly. Our findings reveal that African American older adults value emotional intimacy. Cultural and historical factors appear to influence the choice of partners in later life. Implications for social intervention are discussed

A Technical Road Map from System Verilog to UVM

As the fabrication technology is advancing more logic is being placed on a silicon die which makes verification more challenging task than ever. More than 70% of the design cycle is used for verification. To improve the time to market we need a reusable verification environment that detects all functional errors and avoid re-spin. Universal verification methodology was introduced to fulfill these goals. UVM is well structured, reusable with little or no modifications, do not interfere with the device under test (DUT) and gives the speed of verification. UVM is supported by all major simulator vendors, which was not in earlier methodologies. This methodology provides a standard unified solution that compiles on all tools. This paper introduces the advantages of UVM over System Verilog, basic terminologies used in UVM and a simple functional verification environment construction using UVM DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15038

ASE@DPIL-FIRE2016: Hindi Paraphrase Detection using Natural Language Processing Techniques & Semantic Similarity Computations

ABSTRACT The paper reports the approaches utilized and results achieved for our system in the shared task (in FIRE-2016) for paraphrase identification in Indian languages (DPIL). Since Indian languages have a complex inherent nature, paraphrase identification in these languages becomes a challenging task. In the DPIL task, the challenge is to detect and identify whether a given sentence pairs paraphrased or not. In the proposed work, natural language processing with semantic concept extractions is explored for paraphrase detection in Hindi. Stop word removal, stemming and part of speech tagging are employed. Further similarity computations between the sentence pairs are done by extracting semantic concepts using WordNet lexical database. Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated over the given training sets using different machine learning classifiers. Then testing phase is used to predict the classes using the proposed features. The results are found to be promising, which shows the potency of natural language processing techniques and semantic concept extractions in detecting paraphrases. CCS Concepts Computing methodologies-Natural language processing Information systems -Document analysis and feature selection; Near-duplicate and paraphrase detectio

EVALUATION OF THE IMPACT OF VARIOUS EXTRACTS OF Swertia chirata ON ANTIMICROBIAL-RESISTANT STRAINS OF PATHOGENS

In several Asian nations, as well as other regions of the world, the plant Swertia chirata is commonly utilized as a herbal remedy. The current study aimed to assess Swertia chirata's impact on a range of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. To achieve this, the plant's leaves and stems were extracted using ethanol and methanol. Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli) and Gram-positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) were used as test organisms. The agar well diffusion method was utilized to determine the antibacterial activity and calculate the Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC). Using the broth dilution procedure, MIC was determined. Bacterial sp. demonstrated a significant zone of inhibition against all extracts out of all the strains. Methanol and ethanol were employed as controls. The results indicated that the ethanol extract of the stem and leaves was superior to the methanol extract in terms of its ability to the methanol extrac

EMAT Based Ultrasonic System for Determination of Thickness Variation in Metallic Samples

Thickness measurement is an important primary measurement parameter. It itself and from the various derived para-meters, provides valuable information in testing and process industries. Although numerous techniques are avail-able for thickness measurement which provide very good results for transparent material and when both sides are accessible, but these methods have limitations in case of opaque material and when only one side is accessible. A new EMAT based non contact technique is reported in this paper which is capable of measuring thickness variation even in opaque material and if only one side is accessible. Using EMAT it was possible to measure the thickness of a material in the order of a few nanometers. This was achi-evable by the facility developed at NPL, India to measure ultrasonic Time of Flight (TOF) to an accuracy of nano-seconds with deviation of 300 picoseconds. An experiment was done using EMAT to measure the variation in thickness due to stamped notch in an aluminium block having thick-ness of 25mm. EMAT system was able to measure considerable variation in the thickness due to notch. An experiment was also done on circular metallic pipe to determine the variation in inner diameter by measuring wall thickness. Excellent result was obtained with greater precision. This better precision is achieved because of Beam Width to Reflector ratio being close to unity. In case of flat plates this ratio is much greater than unity. To reduce this ratio to unity even in case of flat plates several samples were used in conjunction with EMAT and experiments were again performed on the above mentioned aluminium block to determine the variation in thickness due to notch