Awareness On the Use of Fluoridated Toothpaste for Children Among General Population

Introduction: Fluoridated toothpaste contains fluoride (F), which can control caries by reducing demineralization of enamel, promoting the re-mineralization of enamel and inhibiting the metabolism of bacteria. Although fluoridated toothpaste has certain anti-caries effects, excessive intake may cause some adverse effects such as skeletal fluorosis and dental fluorosis. In addition, studies have found that the accidental swallowing of fluoridated toothpaste in children may be 2–3 times the safe limit, suggesting that use of fluoridated toothpaste may be a risk factor for dental fluorosis. Aim: The aim of this study is to assess the knowledge and awareness on the usage of fluoridated toothpaste among the general population, especially parents of minor children. Materials and method: A questionnaire based survey was conducted through an online survey from February to April 2021 the parents of children below 18. Data was analysed with the SPSS software version 22. Descriptive statistics as percent were calculated to summarise qualitative data. Chi square test was used to analyze. Result: Most of the respondents (41%) were the parents of children at the age of 0-5 years. About 77% of the respondents are aware of the mineral fluoride. An early 78% of the respondents were aware that our teeth need fluoride to prevent dental caries and the remaining 22% were not aware. Conclusion: The present survey within the limitations concludes that there is adequate knowledge and awareness regarding the benefits of fluoridated toothpaste usage among the overall survey population

Assessing the Effectiveness of Automated Emotion Recognition in Adults and Children for Clinical Investigation

Recent success stories in automated object or face recognition, partly fuelled by deep learning artificial neural network (ANN) architectures, has led to the advancement of biometric research platforms and, to some extent, the resurrection of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In line with this general trend, inter-disciplinary approaches have taken place to automate the recognition of emotions in adults or children for the benefit of various applications such as identification of children emotions prior to a clinical investigation. Within this context, it turns out that automating emotion recognition is far from being straight forward with several challenges arising for both science(e.g., methodology underpinned by psychology) and technology (e.g., iMotions biometric research platform). In this paper, we present a methodology, experiment and interesting findings, which raise the following research questions for the recognition of emotions and attention in humans: a) adequacy of well-established techniques such as the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), b) adequacy of state-of-the-art biometric research platforms, c) the extent to which emotional responses may be different among children or adults. Our findings and first attempts to answer some of these research questions, are all based on a mixed sample of adults and children, who took part in the experiment resulting into a statistical analysis of numerous variables. These are related with, both automatically and interactively, captured responses of participants to a sample of IAPS pictures

Training feedforward neural network using genetic algorithm to diagnose left ventricular hypertrophy

In this research work, a new technique was proposed for the diagnosis of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) from the ECG signal. The advanced imaging techniques can be used to diagnose left ventricular hypertrophy, but it leads to time-consuming and more expensive. This proposed technique overcomes thesef issues and may serve as an efficient tool to diagnose the LVH disease. The LVH causes changes in the patterns of ECG signal which includes R wave, QRS and T wave. This proposed approach identifies the changes in the pattern and extracts the temporal, spatial and statistical features of the ECG signal using windowed filtering technique. These features were applied to the conventional classifier and also to the neural network classifier with the modified weights using a genetic algorithm. The weights were modified by combining the crossover operators such as crossover arithmetic and crossover two-point operator. The results were compared with the various classifiers and the performance of the neural network with the modified weights using a genetic algorithm is outperformed. The accuracy of the weights modified feedforward neural network is 97.5%

Knowledge and perception towards pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reactions reporting among medical students at a teaching hospital in South India

Background: Pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reactions monitoring has become an integral part to ensure patient safety. Targeting the younger doctors for sensitization towards pharmacovigilance is the key to ensure practice of ADR reporting in clinical practice. The objective of the study is to understand and assess the knowledge and perception of students towards pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reactions reporting.Methods: The study included undergraduate medical students of second, pre-final and final years of Mysore Medical College. A validated and standardized KAP based questionnaire was distributed to all students. Willingness to answer and complete the questionnaire was considered as consent.Results: The questions were statistically analysed individually and compared. Q1-Q10 compared knowledge towards pharmacovigilance, Q11-Q20 on the attitude and Q21-Q23 on the practice of ADR reporting. 325 questionnaires were distributed of which only 280 consented (second year - 114, pre-final - 98, final - 68). 112(49.1%), 137(69.9%) and 79(58.1%) of the three groups respectively knew what pharmacovigilance and ADR is. 79.8%, 76.5% and 75% knew who can report ADRs while 18.4%, 32.7% and 33.8% did not know what ADRs to report. 73(64.1%); 93(81.6%), 18(18.4%); 69(70.4%), 13(19.1%); 37(54.4%) knew the existence of AMC in the institute and the PvPI respectively. More than 92% agreed that ADR reporting is necessary. Majority (>90%) agreed that PV and ADR reporting should be taught to all health care students while 28%, 30% and 54% said that it was not well covered in their curriculum.73(64%), 51(52%) and 63(93%) were not familiar with the ADR reporting form.Conclusions: Pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting needs to be made compulsory, have better, interesting ways to learn and understand it, so that the students can practice it with confidence in their clinical practice

Comparison of impact of undergraduate teaching program to assess the knowledge and attitude towards pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reporting among undergraduate medical students at a teaching medical institute in South India

Background: Pharmacovigilance has become an important tool to ensure the safety of patient in recent years. To ensure right practice of pharmacovigilance, proper understanding is very essential and the medical colleges with the undergraduate teaching program become a vital platform to educate and train the medical students towards pharmacovigilance. This study compares the impact of teaching program of the undergraduate curriculum in assessing the knowledge and attitude of the undergraduate medical students towards pharmacovigilance.Methods: The study includes 158 undergraduate medical students of second year being trained in pharmacology at Mysore Medical College. A validated and standardized questionnaire was distributed to all the students twice, once during their 3rd term (pre-sensitization) and the second time during their 5th term (post sensitization). Willingness to answer and complete the questionnaire was considered as consent.Results: The pre and post sensitization questionnaires were analyzed individually. A decrease from 114 to 90 students (15.19 % decrease) willing to complete the questionnaire was seen. The mean total knowledge score was 6.37±1.90 during the pre-test as compared to 6.35±1.78 in the post test analysis. An overall increase was seen with the knowledge of ADRs and pharmacovigilance. Only 18.4% knew of the presence of an ADR monitoring center in the institute pre-test which increased to 64.4% post sensitization. 81.6% answered rightly the type of ADRs that needs to be reported as compared to the 67.3% pre-sensitization. The overall attitude towards ADR reporting was seen to be in the right direction, with 71% saying that pharmacovigilance covered adequately in the curriculum. Voluntary reporting attitude increased from 74.6% to 88%. 70% of the students feel ADR reporting as a professional obligation, while only 54% felt so pre-sensitization.Conclusions: Pharmacovigilance should be included in the curriculum with more hours dedicated to teaching. Various interesting methods should be implemented to train and made aware of its importance to ensure patient safety on a global scale

Iris Image Recognition using Optimized Kohonen Self Organizing Neural Network

The pursuit to develop an effective people management system has widened over the years to manage the enormous increase in population. Any management system includes identification, verification and recognition stages. Iris recognition has become notable biometrics to support the management system due to its versatility and non-invasive approach. These systems help to identify the individual with the texture information distributed around the iris region. Many classification algorithms are available to help in iris recognition. But those are very sophisticated and require heavy computation. In this paper, an improved Kohonen self-organizing neural network (KSONN) is used to boost the performance of existing KSONN. This improvement is brought by the introduction of optimization technique into the learning phase of the KSONN. The proposed method shows improved accuracy of the recognition. Moreover, it also reduces the iterations required to train the network. From the experimental results, it is observed that the proposed method achieves a maximum accuracy of 98% in 85 iterations

An End-to-End Automated License Plate Recognition System Using YOLO Based Vehicle and License Plate Detection with Vehicle Classification

An accurate and robust Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) method proves surprising versatility in an Intelligent Transportation and Surveillance (ITS) system. However, most of the existing approaches often use prior knowledge or fixed pre-and-post processing rules and are thus limited by poor generalization in complex real-life conditions. In this paper, we leverage a YOLO-based end-to-end generic ALPR pipeline for vehicle detection (VD), license plate (LP) detection and recognition without exploiting prior knowledge or additional steps in inference. We assess the whole ALPR pipeline, starting from vehicle detection to the LP recognition stage, including a vehicle classifier for emergency vehicles and heavy trucks. We used YOLO v2 in the initial stage of the pipeline and remaining stages are based on the state-of-the-art YOLO v4 detector with various data augmentation and generation techniques to obtain LP recognition accuracy on par with current proposed methods. To evaluate our approach, we used five public datasets from different regions, and we achieved an average recognition accuracy of 90.3% while maintaining an acceptable frames per second (FPS) on a low-end GPU

The alternate GNB3 splice variant, Gβ3s, exhibits an altered signalling response to EGF stimulation, which leads to enhanced cell migration

It has recently been reported that the duplication of the GNB3 gene has been shown to be directly linked to an obesity phenotype, both in humans and also in a humanised mouse model. Moreover, the common human GNB3 c.825C>T polymorphism (rs5443) causes this ubiquitously expressed gene to be aberrantly spliced approximately 50% of the time leading to the production of both a normal Gβ3 protein and a truncated, possibly less stable subunit, known as Gβ3s. The presence of the GNB3 825T allele has previously been shown to be associated with predisposition to hypertension, obesity, various cancers, Alzheimers, age related cognitive function, erectile dysfunction as well as a marker for pharmacogenetic drug action. Great controversy, however, currently exists as to whether these phenotypes associated with the 825T allele are a) mainly due to the presence of the smaller, possibly more active, Gβ3s subunit or b) merely down to the haploinsufficiency of the normal GNB3 transcript, due to its frequent aberrant splicing. In order to try and address these two conflicting hypothesis, we report on the identification and characterisation of signalling alterations unique to the presence of Gβ3s protein subunit. Moreover we also show the physiological consequences associated with altered signalling, directly induced by the Gβ3s subunit. For this, we used both an EBV transformed lymphoblast cell line homozygote for GNB3 825T/825T (TT) and a stable Gβ3s expressing recombinant COS-7 clone. In both of these cell lines that express the Gβ3s subunit, we found enhanced cytosolic calcium influx upon stimulation with EGF, TGFα and VEGF ligands, as compared to “normal” GNB3 controls with the 825C/825C (CC) genotype. This aberrant calcium influx also led to an increase in ERK, but not AKT1, phosphorylation. Despite the lack of AKT1 activation, we paradoxically observed a significant increase in phosphorylation of its downstream substrates, namely mTOR and p70S6k (KS6B2). Moreover we observed a decrease in phospho FoxO3a only in Gβ3s expressing cells, but not in the “normal” GNB3 (CC) control cell line. The presence of the Gβ3s subunit also appeared to alter the distinct localisation patterns of both Foxo3a and AKT1, while also increasing the colocalisation of mTOR and p70S6K. Subsequent growth factor stimulation studies revealed that EGF treatment, of Gβ3s expressing cells, appeared to cause a significant decrease in cAMP levels, which, in turn resulted in both enhanced caveolin-1a phosphorylation, and an increase in actin stress fibre formation. The identification of these distinct Gβ3s specific signalling alterations were indicative of a more aggressive migratory phenotype. This led us to further investigate and confirm that the presence of the Gβ3s subunit also appears to cause significantly enhanced migration and robust scratch wound healing kinetics, as compared to cells harbouring only the normal copy of the gene. These data therefore present convincing evidence that the Gβ3s subunit is stable, functional and its presence can significantly alter signalling pathways, in different cell types