Study of outcome of displaced calcaneal fractures by closed reduction and percutaneous internal fixation with multiple k wires and screws

Background: Calcaneum is the largest of the tarsal bones and the largest bone of the foot. Calcaneum fracture account for 2% of all fracture of the body and 60% of all tarsal fractures. Many calcaneal fractures are work related as they result from a fall from height, especially in male age 35-45 years. In our study we treated the displaced calcaneal fracture with closed reduction and percutaneous fixation using multiple percutaneous K-wires and screw to evaluate their functional outcome. Methods: The study was conducted as a prospective study at the department of Orthopaedics, Dr. Shankarrao chavan Government Medical College, Nanded, India during the period January 2019 to June 2020. Thirty patients of 20 to 60 years, who underwent surgical fixation for displaced calcaneal fracture using multiple K wires and screws were followed up. Functional outcomes at six month follow up were assessed. Results: In this study we selected 30 patients with displaced calcaneal fracture admitting in our institute. All patients underwent operative procedure in the form of multiple k wire and cc .screws by percutaneous approach Out of all 30 patients treated with this method had shown excellent results with minimal postoperative complications. Conclusions: The study with percutaneous K wires and screws for displaced calcaneal fractures showed very good functional outcome. Although it was not free of complications, our study has shown very good results. Technique involve in our study is less invasive, with minimum blood loss, less operative time without soft tissue stripping

Cassini's floating potential in Titan's ionosphere: 3-D Particle-In-Cell Simulations

Accurate determination of Cassini's spacecraft potential in Titan's ionosphere is important for interpreting measurements by its low energy plasma instruments. Estimates of the floating potential varied significantly, however, between the various different plasma instruments. In this study we utilize 3-D particle-in-cell simulations to understand the key features of Cassini's plasma interaction in Titan's ionosphere. The spacecraft is observed to charge to negative potentials for all scenarios considered, and close agreement is found between the current onto the simulated Langmuir Probe and that observed in Titan's ionosphere. These simulations are therefore shown to provide a viable technique for modeling spacecraft interacting with Titan's dusty ionosphere.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication at URSI General Assembly and Scientific Symposium 2023, Sapporo, Japa

Spacecraft Charging of the Moraz\'an MRZ-SAT Satellite in Low Earth Orbit: Initial Results on the Influence of Energetic Electron Anisotropy on Differential Charging

The advent of the modular CubeSat satellite architecture has heralded a revolution in satellite missions, drastically lowering the technical and financial barriers to space. Surface charging resulting from energetic electron poses a direct risk to satellites in space, causing electric arcing and breakdowns. This risk is exacerbated for small technology demonstration CubeSats that are less resilient than larger satellites. An upcoming CubeSat launch is the first CubeSat project originating from Honduras, the Moraz\'an satellite (MRZ-SAT), due to launch in 2024. This will carry earth observational payloads to detect natural disasters. This study conducts simulations using the Electro-Magnetic Spacecraft Environment Simulator code to study absolute and differential charging of the MRZ-SAT cube-sat in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The MRZ-SAT hosts four antennas, an architecture which lends itself well to studying and understanding differential charging in LEO. The MRZ-SAT was first simulated in a typical benign ionospheric plasma environment. Here the antenna located in the ambient plasma wake displayed the maximum charging up to --0.9 V, 0.24 V biased to the main cube. An energetic electron population was then included and the wake antenna subsequently charged to greater values of --2.73 V, now 1.56 V biased to the main cube. The anisotropy of the energetic electrons was then varied, and this differential charging trend appeared exacerbated with anisotropies of 0.5 to 0.05 inducing absolute wake antenna voltages up to --4.5 V and differential voltage biases 50 and 100 \% greater than when an isotropic population was considered. This study highlights the importance of electron anisotropy in LEO to surface charging and identifies this property in the energetic electron distribution functions as inducing potentially greater risks to satellites of electrical arcing and breakdown.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables, pre-print of the conference paper presented at the 2023 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC23), Baku, Azerbaijan, 2-6 October 202

Biologically Inspired Energy Efficient Routing Protocol in Disaster Situation

Wireless sensor network (WSN) plays a crucial role in many industrial, commercial, and social applications. However, increasing the number of nodes in a WSN increases network complexity, making it harder to acquire all relevant data in a timely way. By assuming the end node as a base station, we devised an Artificial Ant Routing (AAR) method that overcomes such network difficulties and finds an ideal routing that gives an easy way to reach the destination node in our situation. The goal of our research is to establish WSN parameters that are based on the biologically inspired Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) method. The proposed AAR provides the alternating path in case of congestion and high traffic requirement. In the event of node failures in a wireless network, the same algorithm enhances the efficiency of the routing path and acts as a multipath data transmission approach. We simulated network factors including Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Throughput, and Energy Consumption to achieve this. The major objective is to extend the network lifespan while data is being transferred by avoiding crowded areas and conserving energy by using a small number of nodes. The result shows that AAR is having improved performance parameters as compared to LEACH, LEACH-C, and FCM-DS-ACO

Image Classification on NXP i.MX RT1060 using Ultra-thin MobileNet DNN

Deep Neural Networks play a very significant role in computer vision applications like image classification, object recognition and detection. They have achieved great success in this field but the main obstacles for deploying a DNN model into an Autonomous Driver Assisted System (ADAS) platform are limited memory, constrained resources, and limited power. MobileNet is a very efficient and light DNN model which was developed mainly for embedded and computer vision applications, but researchers still faced many constraints and challenges to deploy the model into resource-constrained microprocessor units. Design Space Exploration of such CNN models can make them more memory efficient and less computationally intensive. We have used the Design Space Exploration technique to modify the baseline MobileNet V1 model and develop an improved version of it. This paper proposes seven modifications on the existing baseline architecture to develop a new and more efficient model. We use Separable Convolution layers, the width multiplier hyperparamater, alter the channel depth and eliminate the layers with the same output shape to reduce the size of the model. We achieve a good overall accuracy by using the Swish activation function, Random Erasing technique and a choosing good optimizer. We call the new model as Ultra-thin MobileNet which has a much smaller size, lesser number of parameters, less average computation time per epoch and negligible overfitting, with a little higher accuracy as compared to the baseline MobileNet V1. Generally, when an attempt is made to make an existing model more compact, the accuracy decreases. But here, there is no trade off between the accuracy and the model size. The proposed model is developed with the intent to make it deployable in a realtime autonomous development platform with limited memory and power and, keeping the size of the model within 5 MB. It could be successfully deployed into NXP i.MX RT1060 ADAS platform due to its small model size of 3.9 MB. It classifies images of different classes in real-time, with an accuracy of more than 90% when it is run on the above-mentioned ADAS platform. We have trained and tested the proposed architecture from scratch on the CIFAR-10 dataset

Primary Malignant Melanoma of Female Urethra: A Case Report and Review of Literature

We report a very rare case report of female diagnosed with primary malignant melanoma. A 65 years old diabetic elderly postmenopausal femalepresented with a history of intermittent blood spots on undergarments forfew days. Genital examination revealed a single, tan colored, soft chestnut size and polypoidal non ulcerated mass lesion protruding through theurethral meatus. Mass biopsy revealed poorly differentiated epithelial malignancy and immuno-histological analysis revealed positive with HMB45 and protein S-100 suggestive of melanoma. Metastatic work up for themalignancy was negative. Complete urethrectomy with Mitrofanoff procedure with inguinal lymph node dissection was performed. Histopathological examination was suggestive of malignant melanoma of urethra.Here we discuss the clinicopathological features and management optionpossible in this scenario

Enhanced optical limiting and nonlinear absorption properties of azoarene-appended phosphorus (V) tetratolylporphyrins

Optical limiting performance, third-order nonlinearity X(3), and nonlinear absorption properties have been investigated in a new class of azoarene phosphorus (V) porphyrins with charge transfer (CT) states. The introduction of axial azoarene groups into the phosphorus porphyrin structure is found to reduce the limiting threshold by a factor of 2 and lead to a rise in the second hyperpolarizability by 1 order of magnitude in the picosecond time regime and by 2 orders of magnitude in the nanosecond regime. The experimental data show reverse saturation of absorption in the nanosecond time regime and a saturation of the nonlinear absorption above a fluence of 0.5 J/cm2 in the picosecond regime. The presence of the CT state reduces saturation of excited-state absorption (ESA) in the S1 → Sn transition through the S1 → CT transition. Faster CT → T1 transition increases the ESA from T1 → Tn states in the nanosecond regime. A self-consistent theoretical analysis based on rate equations is used to estimate the high-lying excited-state lifetimes and absorption cross sections from the experimental results

Laparoscopic Management of Adrenal Lesions Larger Than 5 cm in Diameter

Introduction: Laparoscopic adrenalectomy remains a controversial procedure for large tumors. The incidence of adrenocortical carcinoma increases and technical difficulty of adrenalectomy increases as the size increases. We examined the outcome and complications of laparoscopic adrenalectomy for such lesions. Materials and Methods: Twenty-nine patients underwent laparoscopic adrenalectomy, of whom 19 had tumors larger than 5 cm in diameter, having a median tumor size of 7.0 cm. They were compared with patients whose adrenal tumors were smaller than 5 cm. Results: Patients with small tumors (< 5 cm) had a significantly shorter median operative time of 90 minutes as compared to 145 minutes in those with large tumors (> 5 cm). There was no significant difference in the median hemoglobin drop (1.05 g/dL versus 1.30 g/dL), time for starting oral intake (24 hours in both groups) or hospital stay (3.5 days versus 4.0 days) between patients with small and large tumors, respectively. There were no intra-operative complications except for 1 incidence of supraventricular tachycardia in a patient with a large pheochromocytoma. There were no major complications seen in any of the patients and no open conversions. Histopathology of large tumors revealed 16 benign tumors (8 pheochromocytomas, 4 adenomas, 2 ganglioneuromas, 1 pseudocyst, and 1 myelolipoma) and 3 malignancies, of which 1 was primary adrenocortical carcinoma and 2 were metastatic renal cell carcinoma. Conclusion: In experienced hands, laparoscopic adrenalectomy is safe and feasible for large functioning adrenal tumors. Large adrenal tumors suspicious of harboring malignancy with no peri-adrenal involvement can be tackled laparoscopically