Molecular detection and characterization of phytoplasma associated with China aster (Callistephus chinensis) phyllody in India

China aster (Callistephus chinensis L.) is one of the most popular annual flowering plant grown through-out the world. Phyllody disease of China aster is a phytoplasma associated disease that induces severe economic losses. Phytoplasmal disease in China aster was assessed for phytoplasma by direct polymerase chain reaction primed by using phytoplasma universal primer pairs PI/P7. A 1.8 Kb DNA fragments encoding the portion of phyto-plasma 16SrDNA amplified by PCR was cloned and sequenced. Sequencing of the PCR product and BLAST analy-sis indicated that China aster phyllody phytoplasma strain shared maximum sequence identity (99%) with strains of Peanut Witches’ broom (16SrII) phytoplasma group. Phylogenetic relationship of 16SrDNA sequence of China aster phyllody phytoplasma strain in the present study confirmed association of Peanut Witches’ broom (16SrII) group of phytoplasmas with China aster phyllody disease in India

Total dose infusion of fractionated iron dextran complex in management of anaemia in antenatal cases

Background: Iron deficiency anemia is common clinical manifestation in pregnancy. It can be easily prevented or corrected by early diagnosis and proper treatment successfully. This study was done to know the efficacy, effectiveness, rise in hemoglobin level and adverse effects of newly available low molecular weight iron dextran complex.Methods: A prospective clinical trial was conducted in randomly selected 50 antenatal women who attended the OPD of OBG department and were moderately anemic and fulfilled the inclusion criteria of the studyResults: All the 50 women were moderately anemic with hemoglobin level between 7-9 gm%. After total dose infusion of low molecular weight fractionated iron dextran complex, hemoglobin level was measured at 4 weeks and at term. The mean hemoglobin level rose to 9.5 gm/dl by 4 weeks after infusion and to 11.53 gm/dl at term, which was statistically significant (p<0.0001). Only one patient developed non-cardiac chest pain during the test dose and two patients developed urticaria during total dose infusion.Conclusion: The study showed a statistically significant increase in hemoglobin level after total dose infusion of low molecular weight iron dextran complex with a good safety profile and minimal hospital stay

Hybrid LSTM and Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Detection of Image Forgeries

With advanced image journaling tools, one can easily alter the semantic meaning of an image by exploiting certain manipulation techniques such as copy-clone, object splicing, and removal, which mislead the viewers. In contrast, the identification of these manipulations becomes a very challenging task as manipulated regions are not visually apparent. This paper proposes a high-confidence manipulation localization architecture which utilizes resampling features, Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) cells, and encoder-decoder network to segment out manipulated regions from non-manipulated ones. Resampling features are used to capture artifacts like JPEG quality loss, upsampling, downsampling, rotation, and shearing. The proposed network exploits larger receptive fields (spatial maps) and frequency domain correlation to analyze the discriminative characteristics between manipulated and non-manipulated regions by incorporating encoder and LSTM network. Finally, decoder network learns the mapping from low-resolution feature maps to pixel-wise predictions for image tamper localization. With predicted mask provided by final layer (softmax) of the proposed architecture, end-to-end training is performed to learn the network parameters through back-propagation using ground-truth masks. Furthermore, a large image splicing dataset is introduced to guide the training process. The proposed method is capable of localizing image manipulations at pixel level with high precision, which is demonstrated through rigorous experimentation on three diverse datasets

Encoder-Attention-Based Automatic Term Recognition (EA-ATR)

Automated Term Recognition (ATR) is the task of finding terminology from raw text. It involves designing and developing techniques for the mining of possible terms from the text and filtering these identified terms based on their scores calculated using scoring methodologies like frequency of occurrence and then ranking the terms. Current approaches often rely on statistics and regular expressions over part-of-speech tags to identify terms, but this is error-prone. We propose a deep learning technique to improve the process of identifying a possible sequence of terms. We improve the term recognition by using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based embeddings to identify which sequence of words is a term. This model is trained on Wikipedia titles. We assume all Wikipedia titles to be the positive set, and random n-grams generated from the raw text as a weak negative set. The positive and negative set will be trained using the Embed, Encode, Attend and Predict (EEAP) formulation using BERT as embeddings. The model will then be evaluated against different domain-specific corpora like GENIA - annotated biological terms and Krapivin - scientific papers from the computer science domain

Randomised comparison of oral and vaginal misoprostol when combined with mifepristone for termination of second trimester pregnancy

Background: Objective of the study was to compare the effectiveness of vaginal (200µg) and oral (400µg) misoprostol when combined with mifepristone (200 mg) in termination of second trimester pregnancy.Methods: 60 women who were pregnant between 13 and 20 weeks were included in the study. They were divided into two groups by random sampling method and they all received 200 mg of mifepristone orally on day 1. 36 hours later they received 200 µg of misoprostol vaginally or 400 µg of misoprostol orally every 3 hours as determined by the random sampling method. Main outcome measures were induction abortion interval, complete abortion rate and side effects.Results: There was a statistical difference in the amount of misoprostol required in the oral and the vaginal group, the total dose being higher in the oral group. The mean induction-abortion interval in the vaginal group was 6.2 hrs  and oral group was 11.6 hrs and this difference was statistically significant. There was no statistical difference in the complete abortion rate of the two groups. There was no difference in the side effects caused by both routes of misoprostol administration.Conclusion: 200 µg misoprostol inserted vaginally is better than 400 µg of oral misoprostol, 36 hours after administration of tab. Mifepristone 200 mg for termination of second trimester pregnancy

Ferrock: A Carbon Negative Sustainable Concrete

In this fast-growing world, people are focusing on the infrastructural development, where construction sector plays an important role. Cement is the most prominent material being used in construction that emits approximately 6-8% of the total carbon dioxide in the world during its production which is the major constituent of global warming. Thus, focusing on the carbon emission reduction and also utilization of the waste products for a better environment, a product named Ferrock was constituted. This paper is a review over a product that is stepping towards carbon negativity and waste management. It shows the best usage of iron ore waste powder obtained during the mining process that is just dumped away from the mines, causing air pollution, health hazards and also consuming larger area. The product indirectly reduces the carbon dioxide released by its unique strength gaining mechanism, which is in contrary with that of the cement and thus stands out among many other supplements of cement. Ferrock involves a curing process with carbonation and air curing in varied number of days for better strength in terms of compression, tensile strengths and achieving desirable properties. Ferrock is thus a more promising eco friendlier binding material in terms of its carbon negativity and in best usage of the waste

The age and mode of presentation of benign prostatic hyperplasia at Hubli in Karnataka

Background: The peculiarities of the prostate are that in old age when most of organ regresses in size it enlarges and causes trouble. By virtue of its position, it guards outlet of urinary bladder. It must be admitted that even today the extent nature of etiology, pathogenesis and diagnosis are all-debatable. Therefore, the present study was aimed at elucidating the age and mode of Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia among the patients in and around Hubli, Karnataka.Methods: The study was conducted after the institutional ethical committee approval and written informed consent from all the patients. 21 cases of BPH were included in the present study. The signs and symptoms of mode of presentation were recorded. The urine was examined for the presence of albumin, pus cells, epithelial cells and RBCs.  Results: The maximum incidence of the disease was in the age group of 60-69 years. Majority of the patients had difficulty in micturition followed by increased frequency of micturition both during day and night Patient with retention usually had distension of bladder. These patients complained of dull aching pain in the suprapubic area and in the groin region. Burning micturition (14.28%), dribbling of urine (4.76%), urgency (4.76%), and haematuria (4.76%) were present. Routine urine examination showed albumin (28.56%), pus cells (23.80%), epithelial cells (19.04%) and haematuria (4.76%).  Conclusion: Incidence of BPH at Hubli region of Karnataka is 0.3001% of total hospital admission. The maximum age incidence of BPH is in the age group of 60-69 years. Majority of the patients had difficulty in micturition increased frequency of micturition both during day and night a large number of cases show association with presence of urinary tract infection.

Standardization of Spacing and Soil Volume Wetting for Drip Irrigationin Papaya (Carica papaya L.)

Field experiments in two crops of papaya were conducted at ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research for four years during 2016-19 to standardise spacing with optimum soil volume wetting for drip irrigation. Narrowing the plant rows drastically reduced the plant height while leaf production affected significantly due to reduction in intra row spacing. The height at first fruiting was significantly lower with a spacing of 1.8 m x 1.5 m (56.4 cm) significantly differing from both 1.5 m x 1.5 m (60.9 cm) or 1.8 m x 1.8 m (66.8 cm). Significantly higher mean fruit yield (42.2 t/ha) was recorded with the spacing of 1.5 m x 1.5m as compared to either 1.8m x 1.5m (23.4 t/ha) or 1.8m x 1.8m (22.1 t/ha). Significantly higher water use efficiency (71.3 kg/ha.mm) was recorded in papaya by following closer spacing of 1.5 m x 1.5 m. Among the interactions, higher papaya yield (48.0 t/ha) was recorded with normal drip irrigation (80% soil volume wetting) under closer spacing (1.5 m. x 1.5 m). Further, higher water use efficiency (129 kg/ha. mm) could be obtained by scheduling the irrigation at 30% soil volume wetting especially by planting at 1.5 m. x 1.5 m. spacing suggesting its suitability for water scarcity areas

NN^k networks for Content-Based Image Retrieval

This paper describes a novel interaction technique to support content-based image search in large image collections. The idea is to represent each image as a vertex in a directed graph. Given a set of image features, an arc is established between two images if there exists at least one combination of features for which one image is retrieved as the nearest neighbour of the other. Each arc is weighted by the proportion of feature combinations for which the nearest neighbour relationship holds. By thus integrating the retrieval results over all possible feature combinations, the resulting network helps expose the semantic richness of images and thus provides an elegant solution to the problem of feature weighting in content-based image retrieval.We give details of the method used for network generation and describe the ways a user can interact with the structure. We also provide an analysis of the network’s topology and provide quantitative evidence for the usefulness of the technique