IS-19 Biosecurity Matters! Protect Your Research

Genetically modified mammals are an essential tool in today’s biomedical research resulting in a global trade where biosecurity is critical at the national, sub-national, and perhaps most importantly at an institutional level. The global research animal exchange entails many risks to the microbial status of research animals and animal colonies. Though research animal vendors have well-established procedures to minimise biosecurity concerns, the typical researcher may need guidance in addressing biosecurity concerns when importing animals from a vendor or colleague or when shipping animals to a colleague. A biosecurity risk mitigation process typically involves careful evaluation of animal source risk, transportation risks and destination institution capability and researcher’s requirements. This presentation will focus on important considerations when developing a plan, meeting a given institution’s biosecurity needs when receiving animals from across town or around the world while facilitating the animal related researcher’s needs

Learning to Adapt the Parameters of Behavior Trees and Motion Generators (BTMGs) to Task Variations

The ability to learn new tasks and quickly adapt to different variations or dimensions is an important attribute in agile robotics. In our previous work, we have explored Behavior Trees and Motion Generators (BTMGs) as a robot arm policy representation to facilitate the learning and execution of assembly tasks. The current implementation of the BTMGs for a specific task may not be robust to the changes in the environment and may not generalize well to different variations of tasks. We propose to extend the BTMG policy representation with a module that predicts BTMG parameters for a new task variation. To achieve this, we propose a model that combines a Gaussian process and a weighted support vector machine classifier. This model predicts the performance measure and the feasibility of the predicted policy with BTMG parameters and task variations as inputs. Using the outputs of the model, we then construct a surrogate reward function that is utilized within an optimizer to maximize the performance of a task over BTMG parameters for a fixed task variation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conducted experimental evaluations on push and obstacle avoidance tasks in simulation and with a real KUKA iiwa robot. Furthermore, we compared the performance of our approach with four baseline methods

A hybrid planning approach to robot construction problems

We study robot construction problems where multiple autonomous robots rearrange prefabricated components to build stable structures. Robot construction problems can play a vital role in construction industries where the tasks such as designing a desired structure, planning for the necessary actions, and constructing structures from available components can be performed by the robots. Robotic construction may especially be useful in places, such as disaster zones or the space, where it is not safe or feasible for humans to visit. In these unsafe or hard-to-reach places, robots can build necessary buildings, bridges or shelters using the surrounding materials. We view robot construction problems as planning problems: find a plan (i.e., a sequence of actions) to obtain a final stable configuration of prefabricated objects satisfying some goal conditions, from a given initial configuration. These problems are challenging from the perspective of task planning ii since they may need incorporation of preexisting structure into the final design, pre-assembly of movable substructures, and use of extra blocks as temporary supports or counterweights during construction. These problems are challenging from the perspective of geometric reasoning as well, since they need feasibility checks to ensure reachability of a block, to avoid collisions of blocks, and to ensure stability of complex structures. We propose a formal hybrid planning framework to address these challenges using Answer Set Programming, and state-of-the-art feasibility checkers. This framework not only decides for a stable final configuration of the structure, but also computes the order of manipulation tasks for multiple autonomous robots to build the structure from an initial configuration, while simultaneously ensuring the stability, supportedness and other desired properties of the partial construction at each step of the plan. We show the usefulness of our approach on a wide variety of robot construction tasks, including bridge building and overhang construction scenarios, and using different types of objects, including cylindrical ones. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through dynamic simulations and physical implementations with a bi-manual Baxter robot

PREVALENCE OF HEPATITIS-C ANTIBODIES AMONGST NURSING STAFF WORKING IN A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL

Objective; To determine the prevalence of HCV infection amongst nursing staff working in a tertiary care hospital. Study Design; Descriptive Cross-sectional Study. Setting; Nursing staff of Nishtar Hospital Multan. Subjects and methods; One hundred fifty two senior nursing staff working  in all wards of Nishtar Hospital Multan.. Diagnosis of HCV infection was made by detection of antibodies to HCV in serum (ACON Hepatitis C Virus Rapid Test Strip, Serum). Those nurses whose test was positive by the above technique, underwent second generation Elisa testing for Hepatitis C to confirm the diagnosis (Cobas Core Anti-HCV EIA). Results; Study was conducted upon 152 nursing staffs working in different wards of Nishtar Hospital Multan, which is a tertiary care hospital. These 152 staff nurses were checked for anti-HCV and only 3 cases were positive (1.97%) and 149 negative (98.03%). Conclusion; Study shows that the prevalence of HCV infection among nursing staff is 1.97%, which is low as compared to other studies but higher in comparison to the general population of Multan (0.27%). It is recommended that emphasis should be placed on prevention & a health care worker safety unit should be started in both private and public health care systems to increase the awareness. The health care workers should strictly follow appropriate preventive measures. Key Words: Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, Blood Transfusion, Health care worker

Learning of Parameters in Behavior Trees for Movement Skills

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful mathematical framework that allows robots to learn complex skills by trial-and-error. Despite numerous successes in many applications, RL algorithms still require thousands of trials to converge to high-performing policies, can produce dangerous behaviors while learning, and the optimized policies (usually modeled as neural networks) give almost zero explanation when they fail to perform the task. For these reasons, the adoption of RL in industrial settings is not common. Behavior Trees (BTs), on the other hand, can provide a policy representation that a) supports modular and composable skills, b) allows for easy interpretation of the robot actions, and c) provides an advantageous low-dimensional parameter space. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that can learn the parameters of a BT policy in simulation and then generalize to the physical robot without any additional training. We leverage a physical simulator with a digital twin of our workstation, and optimize the relevant parameters with a black-box optimizer. We showcase the efficacy of our method with a 7-DOF KUKA-iiwa manipulator in a task that includes obstacle avoidance and a contact-rich insertion (peg-in-hole), in which our method outperforms the baselines.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted at 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

FREQUENCY OF MICROALBUMINURIA IN PATIENTS WITH DIABETIC RETINOPATHY

Background; The magnitude of damage caused by these microvascular complications of diabetes stresses the need for sensitive markers of screening for retinopathy and nephropathy. This study was done to determine the frequency of microalbuminuria in patients with diabetic retinopathy. Material and methods; A total of 300 patients’ type 2 diabetic patients with diabetic retinopathy presenting in Diabetes OPD of Nishtar Hospital, Multan were selected. After taking informed written consent, all patients underwent retinal imaging using Non Mydriatic Fundus Camera (NIDEK® Model # AFC-330). Urine sample of each patient was sent to the institute pathology laboratory for measuring albumin / creatinine ratio. Grades of retinopathy and microalbuminuria. Collected Data was entered into SPSS version 17.0 and was analyzed through its statistical package. Results; Of these 300 study cases, 179 (59.7%) were male patients while 121 (40.3%) were female patients. Mean age of our study cases was 52.10 ± 5.65 years (with minimum age was 42 years while maximum age was 60 years).                 Most of our study cases were from poor socioeconomic background i.e. 170 (56.7%) while only 13.3 % belonged to the higher socio-economic status. Majority of our study cases were having low educational level such as illiterate i.e. 60 (20%), primary education in 71 (23.7%) while only 3 % had bachelors degree or above. Mean duration of diabetes was 14.18 ± 2.73 years (with minimum duration of disease was 10 years while 19 years was maximum duration of the disease). Among these patients Grade III diabetic retinopathy was more prevalent i.e. 149 (49.7%) followed by grade IV retinopathy i.e. 100 (33.3%). Diabetes was controlled in only 81 (27%) of our study cases and obesity was present in 101 (33.7%) of our study cases. Microalbuminuria was present in 121 (40.3%) of our study cases. Conclusion; Very high frequencies of microalbuminuria were noted in patients with diabetic retinopathy in our study. Microalbuminuria was significantly associated with female gender, increasing age, socio-economic status, low educational level, disease severity, disease duration and obesity. Microalbuminuria was not associated with control of diabetes. Keywords; Microalbuminuria, Diabetic Retinopathy, Frequency

Al-Zakat: Taxation Model in Public Finance

Al-zakat is a Quranic term, which is considered as a religious financial worship. From traditional point of view a fixed percentage i.e. 2.5% is imposed as a religion tax on the Muslims which have a certain quantity of gold, silver and some animals. The heads on which this amount may be spent and the rate is considered as fixed. But the actual fact is that, Quran has used this term for the taxation system of an Islamic state. Different reasons from Quran can be given to prove this claim, e.g. Quran has separated al-zakat from al-sadaqat and expenditure in the way of Allah and do not consider it as a donation, imposition of al-zakat is associated with getting of power, Quran did not appeal to pay it but the order is given for the same, the heads and rate of al-zakat are not given in Quran. Keywords: Quran; Verse; al-zakat; Donation; Sadaqa

Correlation of Musculoskeletal Dysfunctions with Enhanced Computer Usage and Prescription of Management Strategies, In Computer Users of Afro Asian Institute, Lahore (Pakistan)

OBJECTIVE: To nail down the frequency of musculoskeletal problem’s in computer users and Recommend treatment/management options to the papulation with MSK problems. STUDY DESIGN: It is a cross-sectional descriptive study. PLACE AND DURATION: This study was performed from April 2019 to November 2019 at Afro Asian institute. Lahore (Pakistan). METHODOLOGY: One hundred subjects (54 males and 46 females) who were using computers were studied from Afro Asian institute Lahore. We used a questionnaire for collecting data about MSK status of individuals, data was statistically analyzed using SPSS. We used Chi-square test for evaluation of data. Moreover, Physiotherapy Management (Postural education, stretching of tightened structures, strengthening of weakened structures, heating modalities and periodic AROM exercises) and medical management (NSAIDS, muscle relaxant, analgesics) was prescribed for improvements, according to the severity and grading of MSK problems. RESULTS: The frequency of MSK dysfunctions was 52.60% in those who had been using computers for less than or equal to 2 hrs, 68.15% for 2-4 hrs computer users,81.45% for subjects with computer using of 4-6 hrs, and 93.72% in subjects who were using computer for more than 6 hours, respectively. The frequency of MSK problems (cervicalgia, LBP, shoulder pain, and elbow pain and pain in carpels) was classified according to a scale of pain ranging from grade I to grade V. Keywords: Musculoskeletal Problems, Management Strategies, Postural Education DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/71-08 Publication date: February 29th 202