Evaluation of cervical erosion in symptomatic women

Background: The objective of this study was evaluation of symptomatic women with cervical erosion.Methods: Prospective clinical study done in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, VIMS, Ballari for one-year period from June 2016 to May 2017. All patients with symptoms of white discharge, post coital bleeding and menstrual irregularities were examined by per speculum examination and all those who had cervical erosion (112 Patients) were included in the study. Pap smear and colposcopy were done in all subjects. Colposcopic guided biopsy was done in women with abnormal findings on colposcopy. Histological prediction of colposcopic findings was done according to the Reid’s modified colposcopic index. The result of the biopsy was correlated with the predicted histology of the Reid’s modified colposcopic index and statistical analysis done to calculate diagnostic efficacy of colposcopy in the evaluation of symptomatic women with cervical erosion.Results: Out of the 112 patients, 5.35% (6/112) had abnormal Pap smear. All patients underwent colposcopy and colposcopic guided biopsy, 11.6% (13/112) had abnormal colposcopic findings. Histopathology confirmed CIN I in 6.25% (7/112) and CIN II in 1.78% (2/112) patients. The sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV and accuracy of PAP smear was found to be 22.22%, 96.11%, 33.33%, 93.39% and 90.17%. The above values for colposcopy were found to be 88.89%, 95.15%, 61.54%, 98.99% and 94.64%.Conclusions: Colposcopy should be done in all symptomatic patients with cervical erosion as it is a good diagnostic tool for premalignant conditions of the cervix and correlates well with histopathological findings

Utilization of canola seed fractions in ruminant feeds

Canola fibre-protein and can-sugar are the two by-products arising from a process for separating high quality protein fractions from canola meal. In the first trial chemical characteristics of fibre-protein and can-sugar were examined in comparison with commercial canola and soy meal. In the second trial in situ rumen degradability and kinetics of test feed was studied. Based on the findings of those two trials, available energy values were estimated based on NRC (2001) while protein contents potentially absorbable at small intestine were predicted using both NRC (2001) and DVE/OEB models. Subsequently a mixture of fibre-protein and can-sugar was used as an additive to dehydrated alfalfa pellet and two dairy cow trials were conducted to determine the palatability and examine effect on lactation performances of blended alfalfa pellet feeding in comparison with standard alfalfa pellet. Palatability difference was evaluated by “Paterson -two choice alternating access method” through a 7 day experimental period using 6 lactating Holstein cows. In the lactating performance trial, 6 cows were randomly assigned into two groups and two treatments were allocated over three experimental periods in a switchback design. Can-sugar consisted of water soluble components (CP 15.6 %DM; SCP 96.2 %CP; NFC 99.9 %CHO) with non-protein nitrogen as the main CP fraction (NPN 96.2 %CP). Fibre-protein was a highly fibrous material (NDF: 55.6%; ADF: 46.3%; ADL: 24.1%) comparing to canola meal (NDF: 25.4%, ADF: 21.2%, ADL: 9.0%) due to presence of higher level of seed hulls in fibre-protein. Comparing to canola meal, fibre-protein contained 9% less CP and 1/4 of that consisted of undegradable ADIP. Rumen degradability of can-sugar was assumed as immediate and total as it was water soluble. Most of the ruminally undegradable nutrient components present in canola meal appeared to be concentrated into fibre protein during the manufacturing process and as a result fibre-protein has shown a consistently lower effective degradability of DM, OM, CP NDF and ADF comparing to both canola and soy meal. Available energy content in can-sugar was marginally higher than that of canola meal while fibre-protein contained only 2/3 that of canola meal. The predicted absorbable protein content at small intestine was about 1/2 that of canola meal. These results indicate that fibre-protein can be considered as a secondary source of protein in ruminant feed and a mixture of fibre-protein and can-sugar would nutritionally complement each other to formulate into a cheaper ingredient in ruminant ration. In the palatability study, there was no significant difference (P>0.05) in intake preference or finish time between the blended and standard alfalfa pellets. The results from the lactation study showed that there was no significant difference (P>0.05) in milk yield, dairy efficiency or milk composition between the blended and standard alfalfa pellets. The results from the two studies indicated that fibre-protein and can-sugar fractions could be used as an additive to alfalfa dehydrated pellet at 15% inclusion rate without compromising its palatability or the performance of dairy cows. For future studies it is proposed to conduct feeding trials with varying levels of inclusions to alfalfa pellet to know the nutritional effect of fibre-protein and can-sugar while ascertain optimum inclusion rate

Measuring ‘Brand Love’ : Understanding the Attitude of Millennials towards Select Brands

The dynamic environment of markets has forced the market researchers to study customer orientation towards a product and his associations with the brand.  Millennial are opinion leaders across all business domains in the society; this emphasizes the importance of this particular segment and their impact on brand equity.  Indian business is very dynamic and is continuously being affected by the various changes due to the entry of new foreign players, high technological up gradations and changing consumer needs. Hence it has become very important for the marketers of the brands to make their brands more attractive to gain more loyalists. This study intends to propose the importance of the various factors that are responsible for creating ―brand love‖ in the mind of the consumer and thus make the business of the brand profitable for a long time. The validation of the scales for measurement has been proven through this study and top loved brands have been got from the respondents. Brand Love scales on the various brands in the Indian context have proven that love towards the brand generate a high amount of loyalty and have significant effects through  a positive ‗word of mouth‘ comment

An Experimental Study into Behaviour of Circular Footing on Reinforced Soil

The experimental investigations are reported on the study of load-deformation behavior of a model circular footing on reinforced soil in respect of two-layered system comprising clay as sub-grade and mine waste as backfill material. The footing was subjected to axial load. Two different types of reinforcing materials such as Kolon Geo-grid (KGR-40) and rubber grids derived out of waste tyres were used in the study. The study revealed appreciable increase in ultimate bearing pressure and decrease in settlement with the provision of a single layer reinforcement. Further, rubber grid performed better than the Geo-grid in respect to BCR and SRF. The study indicates significance of solid waste materials such as mine wastes and discarded tyres as effective civil engineering construction materials

LRH-Net: A Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation Approach for Low-Resource Heart Network

An electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors the electrical activity generated by the heart and is used to detect fatal cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Conventionally, to capture the precise electrical activity, clinical experts use multiple-lead ECGs (typically 12 leads). But in recent times, large-size deep learning models have been used to detect these diseases. However, such models require heavy compute resources like huge memory and long inference time. To alleviate these shortcomings, we propose a low-parameter model, named Low Resource Heart-Network (LRH-Net), which uses fewer leads to detect ECG anomalies in a resource-constrained environment. A multi-level knowledge distillation process is used on top of that to get better generalization performance on our proposed model. The multi-level knowledge distillation process distills the knowledge to LRH-Net trained on a reduced number of leads from higher parameter (teacher) models trained on multiple leads to reduce the performance gap. The proposed model is evaluated on the PhysioNet-2020 challenge dataset with constrained input. The parameters of the LRH-Net are 106x less than our teacher model for detecting CVDs. The performance of the LRH-Net was scaled up to 3.2% and the inference time scaled down by 75% compared to the teacher model. In contrast to the compute- and parameter-intensive deep learning techniques, the proposed methodology uses a subset of ECG leads using the low resource LRH-Net, making it eminently suitable for deployment on edge devices

Recent Developments in Quality Management in the Era of Digital Transformation – A Review

The purpose of the current exploratory research is to trace the growth and evolution of the Quality Management as a critical function in organizations and as a discipline of study in academia and research. The methodology adapted is to review some of the classical works and research in the area of Quality Management, which indicates direction of growth and evolution. There are several pioneers who have contributed richly for building and shaping the Quality Management principles, practices and methodologies over several decades. The current study involved the task of summarizing significant trends of Quality Management starting from the crafts man era and going up to the current trend of managing Quality as part of digital transformation. In the digital era there is an increased emphasis on automation of all the activities related to product and process quality management. The use of IoT based automation starting from data capturing, archiving and the point of self-diagnostic and autonomous way of managing quality issues is common place in today’s industries Quality 4.0 era. There are several challenges along the way for which quality professionals must be equipped in terms of knowledge, skills and attitude necessary for quality problem solving using modern techniques. This aspect is also researched in this study. Familiarity with technology platforms such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, image processing, sensors and actuators and such other emerging technologies must form the arsenal for analyzing data and data patterns in the face of data deluge. This requires several inter and multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange forums for grooming future quality professional. This article aims at tracing the metamorphosis of quality management with focus on people development and continuous process improvements in the manufacturing and allied sectors

First record of Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith, 1943 (Squamata: Colubridae) from India

Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith, 1943 was previously considered to be endemic to the dry and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka. However, an adult specimen of C. taprobanica was collected from Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve of Andhra Pradesh, India, being the first record of this snake species from India, significantly extending the known range of distribution of the species. The dry zones of peninsular India were connected with Sri Lanka as recently as ca. 17,000 years ago, which probably allowed movement of species between these two regions

A VLSI Approach for Cache Compression in Microprocessor

Speed is one of the important issues that generally customers consider for selecting any electronic component in the market. Speed of a microprocessor based system mainly depends on the speed of the microprocessor which in turn depends on the memory access time. Accessing on chip memory takes more time than accessing off-chip memory. Because of these, designers of memory system may find cache compression as an advantageous method to increase speed of a microprocessor based system, as it increases cache capacity and off-chip bandwidth. The However, most past work, and all work on cache compression, has made unsubstantiated assumptions about the performance, power consumption, and area overheads of the proposed compression algorithms and hardware. It is not possible to determine whether compression at levels of the memory hierarchy closest to the processor is beneficial without understanding its costs. Proposed hardware compression algorithms fall into the dictionary-based category, which depend on building a dictionary and using its entries to encode repeated data values. Proposed algorithm has number of novel features like including combining pairs of compressed lines into one cache line and allowing parallel compression of multiple words while using a single dictionary and without degradation in compression ratio

Henoch-Schonlein Purpura—A Case Report and Review of the Literature

We describe a case of an adolescent male with Henoch-Schonlein purpura (HSP), presenting with cutaneous and gastrointestinal manifestations. Endoscopy revealed diffuse ulcerations in the stomach, duodenum, and right colon. Biopsies revealed a leukocytoclastic vasculitis in the skin and gastrointestinal tract. Steroid therapy led to complete resolution of the symptoms. HSP is the most common childhood vasculitis, and is characterized by the classic tetrad of nonthrombocytopenic palpable purpura, arthritis or arthralgias, gastrointestinal and renal involvement. It is a systemic disease where antigen-antibody (IgA) complexes activate the alternate complement pathway, resulting in inflammation and small vessel vasculitis. Mild disease resolves spontaneously, and symptomatic treatment alone is sufficient. Systemic steroids are recommended for moderate to severe HSP. The prognosis depends upon the extent of renal involvement, which requires close followup. Early recognition of multiorgan involvement, especially outside of the typical age group, as in our adolescent patient, and appropriate intervention can mitigate the disease and limit organ damage