The Christian Missionaries in Bengal 1793-1833.

The aim of the present study is to examine the missionary activities in Bengal during the period 1795-1835 and to assess the role of the missionaries in the social, educational and religious reforms that took place at that time. The first chapter attempts an analysis of the Eighteenth Century Socio-religious background of England and Bengal, against which it seeks to explain the growth of the missionary activities. It was the Methodist Revival Movement in England, the chapter shows, which gave rise to the outburst of missionary enthusiasm during the period. As far as Bengal is concerned the chapter brings into focus the contemporary socio-religious conditions in which the missionaries found themselves and analyses the policy of the East India Company towards the Indian religions, which, in its turn, determined its attitude towards the missionaries. Chapter two describes the various missionary organisations at work in Bengal during this period and their relationship towards each other, also the relationship between the missionaries and Europeans - government officials, merchants and professionals. Chapter three and four describe the missionaries at work - the methods they used to achieve their objects, namely Preaching, Translation and Education; and the reactions of the people. Chapter five, which is an elaborate discussion of the results of the missionary activities, offers an analysis hitherto unattempted, of the total number of converts, their social background, their behaviour after conversion, and people's reaction to the missionaries and their converts. Chapter six deals with the impact of the missionary activities on contemporary Society. The impact on the socio-religious reforms, growth of education and Bengali literature, is discussed fully. It is affirmed that the missionaries played a significant part in preparing the background for the Renaissance in Bengal. It is pointed out in conclusion, that the lasting contributions of the missionaries towards the social progress in Bengal came either directly or indirectly, from their non-evangelical and evangelical activities respectively

ViT-DAE: Transformer-driven Diffusion Autoencoder for Histopathology Image Analysis

Generative AI has received substantial attention in recent years due to its ability to synthesize data that closely resembles the original data source. While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have provided innovative approaches for histopathological image analysis, they suffer from limitations such as mode collapse and overfitting in discriminator. Recently, Denoising Diffusion models have demonstrated promising results in computer vision. These models exhibit superior stability during training, better distribution coverage, and produce high-quality diverse images. Additionally, they display a high degree of resilience to noise and perturbations, making them well-suited for use in digital pathology, where images commonly contain artifacts and exhibit significant variations in staining. In this paper, we present a novel approach, namely ViT-DAE, which integrates vision transformers (ViT) and diffusion autoencoders for high-quality histopathology image synthesis. This marks the first time that ViT has been introduced to diffusion autoencoders in computational pathology, allowing the model to better capture the complex and intricate details of histopathology images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ViT-DAE on three publicly available datasets. Our approach outperforms recent GAN-based and vanilla DAE methods in generating realistic images.Comment: Submitted to MICCAI 202

Association of dopaminergic pathway gene polymorphisms with chronic renal insufficiency among Asian Indians with type-2 diabetes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genetic markers conferring susceptibility to diabetes specific renal disease remains to be identified for early prediction and development of effective drugs and therapies. Inconsistent results obtained from analysis of genes from classical pathways generate need for examination of unconventional genetic markers having role in regulation of renal function. Experimental and clinical evidences suggest that dopamine is an important natriuretic hormone. Therefore, various genes involved in regulation of dopamine bioavailability could play a role in diabetic chronic renal insufficiency (CRI). We investigated the contribution of 12 polymorphisms from five Dopaminergic pathway genes to CRI among type-2 diabetic Asian Indian subjects.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Genetic association of 12 polymorphisms (SNPs) from five genes namely-dopamine receptor-1 (<it>DRD1</it>), <it>DRD2</it>, <it>DRD3</it>, <it>DRD4</it>, andcatechol-O-methyltransferase (<it>COMT</it>) with diabetic CRI was investigated using a case-control approach. Logistic regression analysis was carried out to correlate various clinical parameters with genotypes, and to study pair wise interactions between SNPs of different genes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>SNPs <it>-141 ins/del C and G>A </it>(1 kb upstream from exon 2) in DRD2 gene showed significant allelic and genotypic association. Allele <it>-141 insC </it>and genotype <it>-141 insC/insC </it>of <it>-141 ins/del C </it>polymorphism, and allele A of <it>G>A </it>SNP were found to be predisposing to CRI. Our result of allelic and genotypic association of -<it>141 insC/delC </it>SNP was also reflected in the haplotypic association. Heterozygous genotype of polymorphism <it>900 ins/del C in COMT </it>gene was predisposing towards CRI.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Some polymorphisms in <it>DRD2 </it>and <it>COMT </it>genes are significantly associated with susceptibility to CRI in the Asian Indian population which, if confirmed would be consistent with a suggested role of dopamine metabolism in disease occurrence.</p

Topology-Aware Uncertainty for Image Segmentation

Segmentation of curvilinear structures such as vasculature and road networks is challenging due to relatively weak signals and complex geometry/topology. To facilitate and accelerate large scale annotation, one has to adopt semi-automatic approaches such as proofreading by experts. In this work, we focus on uncertainty estimation for such tasks, so that highly uncertain, and thus error-prone structures can be identified for human annotators to verify. Unlike most existing works, which provide pixel-wise uncertainty maps, we stipulate it is crucial to estimate uncertainty in the units of topological structures, e.g., small pieces of connections and branches. To achieve this, we leverage tools from topological data analysis, specifically discrete Morse theory (DMT), to first capture the structures, and then reason about their uncertainties. To model the uncertainty, we (1) propose a joint prediction model that estimates the uncertainty of a structure while taking the neighboring structures into consideration (inter-structural uncertainty); (2) propose a novel Probabilistic DMT to model the inherent uncertainty within each structure (intra-structural uncertainty) by sampling its representations via a perturb-and-walk scheme. On various 2D and 3D datasets, our method produces better structure-wise uncertainty maps compared to existing works.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 5 table

Isolation, identification and antibiotic sensitivity pattern of Escherichia coli isolated from various clinical sample in a tertiary care hospital, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Background: Escherichia coli is one of the most frequent causes of many bacterial infections, including Urinary Tract Infections (UTI), blood stream infections, otitis media, pneumonia, meningitis, traveler’s diarrhoea, enteric infections and systemic infections. This study was done with the aim to surveying antibiotic sensitivity pattern of isolated Escherichia coli in both sex attended in NIMS Hospital, Jaipur under the taken time period.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 62 Escherichia coli were isolated from various clinical specimens of the patients attending both OPD and IPD. The strains were selected using the laboratory standard methods and culture-specific. The antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed using Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion method.Results: Out of total 62 isolates of Escherichia coli 26(41.93%) isolates were from male while 36(58.064%) from female patients. Maximum sensitivity were shown by Polymyxin B and Colistin i.c 100% followed by Nitrofuratonin 82.5% followed by Meropenem 79.03%, Aztreonam 72.58%, Piperacillin/ Tazobactam and Ciprofloxacin 61.30%, each Amikacin 56.45%, Imipenem 54.83%, Ofloxacin 45.16%, Cefepime 43.54%, Ceftazidime 38.71%, Gentamycin and Ceftriaxone 37.09% each, Cefotaxime 30.64%, Norfloxacin 27.5%. Maximum resistance shown against Norfloxacin 72.5%, followed by Gentamycin and Ceftriaxone 62.90%, Ceftazidime 61.30%.Conclusions: Escherichia coli infected more in urinary tract infection as compare to other sample in human, and it is common in female than male. Regular monitoring of antimicrobial susceptibility for E.coli is recommended to improve treatment. A changing trend in antibiotic sensitivity profile of the isolates need to be monitored as there is limited availability of newer drugs and the emergence of resistant bacteria far exceeds the rate of new drug development

Centrifugal Force and Ellipticity behaviour of a slowly rotating ultra compact object

Using the optical reference geometry approach, we have derived in the following, a general expression for the ellipticity of a slowly rotating fluid configuration using Newtonian force balance equation in the conformally projected absolute 3-space, in the realm of general relativity. Further with the help of Hartle-Thorne (H-T) metric for a slowly rotating compact object, we have evaluated the centrifugal force acting on a fluid element and also evaluated the ellipticity and found that the centrifugal reversal occurs at around $R/R_s \approx 1.45$, and the ellipticity maximum at around $R/R_s \approx 2.75$. The result has been compared with that of Chandrasekhar and Miller which was obtained in the full 4-spacetime formalism

Automated Assessment of Critical View of Safety in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) is one of the most common procedures in the US, with more than 1.2M procedures annually. Compared with classical open cholecystectomy, laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is associated with significantly shorter recovery period, and hence is the preferred method. However, LC is also associated with an increase in bile duct injuries (BDIs), resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. The primary cause of BDIs from LCs is misidentification of the cystic duct with the bile duct. Critical view of safety (CVS) is the most effective of safety protocols, which is said to be achieved during the surgery if certain criteria are met. However, due to suboptimal understanding and implementation of CVS, the BDI rates have remained stable over the last three decades. In this paper, we develop deep-learning techniques to automate the assessment of CVS in LCs. An innovative aspect of our research is on developing specialized learning techniques by incorporating domain knowledge to compensate for the limited training data available in practice. In particular, our CVS assessment process involves a fusion of two segmentation maps followed by an estimation of a certain region of interest based on anatomical structures close to the gallbladder, and then finally determination of each of the three CVS criteria via rule-based assessment of structural information. We achieved a gain of over 11.8% in mIoU on relevant classes with our two-stream semantic segmentation approach when compared to a single-model baseline, and 1.84% in mIoU with our proposed Sobel loss function when compared to a Transformer-based baseline model. For CVS criteria, we achieved up to 16% improvement and, for the overall CVS assessment, we achieved 5% improvement in balanced accuracy compared to DeepCVS under the same experiment settings

Plagiarism in non-anglophone countries: A cross-sectional survey of researchers and journal editors

Background: Plagiarism is one of the most common violation of publication ethics, and it still remains an area with several misconceptions and uncertainties.Methods: This online cross-sectional survey was conducted to analyze plagiarism perceptions among researchers and journal editors, particularly from non-Anglophone countries.Results: Among 211 respondents (mean age 40 years; M:F, 0.85:1), 26 were scholarly journal editors and 70 were reviewers with a large representation from India (50, 24%), Turkey (28, 13%), Kazakhstan (25, 12%) and Ukraine (24, 11%). Rigid and outdated pre- and post-graduate education was considered as the origin of plagiarism by 63% of respondents. Paraphragiarism was the most commonly encountered type of plagiarism (145, 69%). Students (150, 71%), non-Anglophone researchers with poor English writing skills (117, 55%), and agents of commercial editing agencies (126, 60%) were thought to be prone to plagiarize. There was a significant disagreement on the legitimacy of text copying in scholarly articles, permitted plagiarism limit, and plagiarized text in methods section. More than half (165, 78%) recommended specifically designed courses for plagiarism detection and prevention, and 94.7% (200) thought that social media platforms may be deployed to educate and notify about plagiarism.Conclusion: Great variation exists in the understanding of plagiarism, potentially contributing to unethical publications and even retractions. Bridging the knowledge gap by arranging topical education and widely employing advanced anti-plagiarism software address this unmet need