Dysphagia and dyspnea by lingual thyroid mass: An appropriate approach

Lingual thyroid is a rare embryological anomaly originated from the thyroid gland failure that descends from the foramen cecum to its normal eutopic pre-laryngeal site. The case in this study was a 39. year old female, presenting with the sensation of a foreign body, progressive dysphagia and dyspnea. Indirect laryngoscopy revealed a large well-defined mass in the tongue base. Imaging studies confirmed the diagnosis of large ectopic lingual thyroid. The surgery was performed via an external cervical approach due to the mass size. The decision on the best treatment looks into the mass position, size, symptoms, airway emergency and medical facilities. © 2014

In vitro inhibition of growth in Saprolegnia sp. isolated from the eggs of Persian sturgeon Acipenser persicus (Pisces: Acipenseriformes) by Pseudomonas aeroginosa (PTCC:1430)

Saprolegnia is one of the most important agents decreasing the eggs survival rate in sturgeon hatcheries.There are some chemical substances for controlling the fungal infection of eggs. In this study, an attempt was made to introduce a germ negative bacterium, Pseudomonas aeroginosa (PTCC1430)(Persian Type Culture Collection) as a biocontrolling agent of water mold. Saprolegnia was isolated from the eggs of some infected Persian sturgeon, Acipenser persicus in a sturgeon hatchery and then was purified. P.aeroginosa was cultured in Potato dextrose Agar (PDB) media and then was prepared in 5 concentrations (103,104,105,106and107cfu.ml-1) while challenging with fungi in petri dishes under laboratory conditions.The results showed that by increasing the concentration of the bacteria in plates, hyphal growth of the fungi was reduced. The highest concentration of P. aeroginosa concentration (107) roughly stopped the -fungi growth and the Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) was 104cfu.m-l. Results in this study implied the potential of P. aeroginosa (PTCC1430) as a biological agent in controlling saprolegniosis

Association of Serum Uric Acid Level with the Severity of Brain Injury and Patient's Outcome in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Introduction: The prognostic value of serum Uric Acid (UA) levels in Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is unclear. Aim: To investigate the relationship between serum UA levels and prognosis of patients with TBI when in hospital and at six months after discharge. Materials and Methods: All patients attended our emergency department during July 2014 and December 2015 and were consecutively entered into the study and among 890 evaluated candidates based on inclusion criteria we finally investigated the serum UA levels of 725 TBI patients. Computed Tomography (CT) images of the brain were obtained within the first 24 hours of hospitalization. Outcome was assessed using the Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) score at discharge and at six months after discharge. Results: Data of 725 patients (42.89 men; mean age: 54.69+/-12.37 years) were analyzed. Mean+/-Standard Deviation (SD) of Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores was 4.65+/-1.76. Serum levels of UA, when in hospital and at six months after discharge, among those who died were lower than those who survived (in hospital: 0.126+/-0.026 vs. 0.243+/-0.942 mmol/l, p = 0.000; 6 months post-discharge: 0.130+/-0.044 vs. 0.286+/-0.069 mmol/l, p<0.001). The mean UA plasma was significantly different between deceased and alive patients according to GOS scores (p<0.001 and p=0.030, respectively). The UA levels showed a significant relationship with GCS scores and severity of brain injury assessed using the Marshall Classification Score (p=0.005). Conclusion: Our results showed a strong relationship between UA levels and patients' outcomes either in hospital or at six months after discharge. Serum UA level could be considered as a valuable marker for evaluating the severity of brain injury and outcomes of TBI

A stability-indicating high performance liquid chromatographic assay for the determination of orlistat in capsules

A stability-indicating HPLC method was developed and validated for the quantitative determination of orlistat in capsule dosage forms. An isocratic separation was achieved using a Perfectsil® target ODS-3, 250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d., 5 µm particle size column with a flow rate of 0.7 ml/min and using a UV detector to monitor the eluate at 210 nm. The mobile phase consisted of methanol:acetonitrile:trifluoroacetic acid (82.5:17.5:0.01, v/v/v). The drug was subjected oxidation, hydrolysis, photolysis and heat to apply stress conditions. Complete separation was achieved for the parent compound and all degradation products in an overall analytical run time of approximately 15 min with the parent compound orlistat eluting at approximately 9 min. The method was linear over the concentration range of 0.02–0.75 mg/ml (r = 0.9998) with a limit of detection and quantitation 0.006 and 0.02 mg/ml, respectively. The method has the requisite accuracy, selectivity, sensitivity and precision to assay orlistat in capsules. Degradation products resulting from the stress studies did not interfere with the detection of orlistat and the assay is thus stability-indicating

Towards Multi-class Object Detection in Unconstrained Remote Sensing Imagery

Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale, orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-based region proposal and region of interest networks to produce object detections. Finally, rotational non-maximum suppression is applied to remove redundant detections. During training, we minimize joint horizontal and oriented bounding box loss functions, as well as a novel loss that enforces oriented boxes to be rectangular. Our method achieves 68.16% mAP on horizontal and 72.45% mAP on oriented bounding box detection tasks on the challenging DOTA dataset, outperforming all published methods by a large margin (+6% and +12% absolute improvement, respectively). Furthermore, it generalizes to two other datasets, NWPU VHR-10 and UCAS-AOD, and achieves competitive results with the baselines even when trained on DOTA. Our method can be deployed in multi-class object detection applications, regardless of the image and object scales and orientations, making it a great choice for unconstrained aerial and satellite imagery.Comment: ACCV 201

The role of effective information in decision making by managers at Shahid Beheshti of teaching hospitals of Shahid Beheshti university of medical sciences

Today, one of the most fundamental factors in the field of management is providing managers with effective information in order to improve the quality of their decision-making. In this paper, we studied the role of effective information in decision making by managers and directors in 2006- 2007(From March 20, 2006 to march 19, 2007)

Energy usage and drying capacity of flat-bed and inclined-bed dryers for rough rice drying

The evaluation of a dryer performance in terms of energy consumption, drying capacity and quality of final product is the main concern of rice milling industry at any time. A study was implemented to investigate on the benefits of common drying practices by studying the drying performances of flat-bed and inclined-bed dryers which are popular in rice industry in Malaysia and neighbouring countries. For this purpose, flat-bed dryer (FBD) and inclined-bed dryer (IBD) were designed, fabricated and operated in the laboratory based on actual industrial drying conditions. The results revealed that inclined-bed drying significantly increased drying capacity (ton m-2 h-1) of up to 25 % at drying temperature of 42-43°C and almost 29 % at 38-39°C drying air temperature compared to flat-bed drying. Furthermore, overall drying energy consumption in IBD was found to vary between 78.6 to 91.97 kW.h ton-1, while for FBD the energy consumption was more than 200 kW.h ton-1 for both levels of drying air temperatures. Both dryers were found to produce rice with desired/ acceptable commercial quality index, even though the head rice yields of FBD were higher than that of IBDs

Evaluation of physiological aspects and molecular identification of Saprolegnia isolates from rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and Caspian trout (Salmo trutta caspius) eggs based on RAPD–PCR

The genus of saprolegnia is one of the most important pathogenic aquatic fungi in farmed and wild fish. In the present study, fungal infected egss were collected from rainbow trout (Oncorhyncus mykiss) and Caspian trout (Salmo trutta caspius). After purification, 16 isolates were obtained (8 isolates from rainbow trout and 8 isolates from Caspian salmon, respectively). The isolates were then coded as R2 – R9 (rainbow trout) and S2 – S9 (Caspian trout).The registered DNA for S. parasitica (ACTT # 200048) and S. diclina (ACTT # 4206) were used and coded as R1 and S1, respectively. Based on the RAPD profile obtained all samples were divided to 3 groups and members of each group had more than 90% similarity among themselves. According to matrix of similarity and reference strains, the isolates were classified as three groups. Therefore, all of isolates in group 1 and 3 were S. parasitica and S. diclina, respectively, and the members of group 2 were known as Saprolegnia sp. The results of thermal resistance assessment showed that the isolates of rainbow trout and Caspian salmon eggs had slow growth in the temperature between 18 – 20 °C. Thus, R2 and S8 isolates had the lowest radial growth compared to other isolates. The isolates categorized in S. parasitica (group 1) created secoundry zoospores but not observed in two other groups. Thus, catenulated gamme was found in 78% and 55.55% isolates of rainbow trout and Caspian trout eggs, respectively. This study indicated that molecular methods were the best methods for identification of Saprolegnia spp. and it could be applied as a supplementary confirming method