Scalable multimodal convolutional networks for brain tumour segmentation

Brain tumour segmentation plays a key role in computer-assisted surgery. Deep neural networks have increased the accuracy of automatic segmentation significantly, however these models tend to generalise poorly to different imaging modalities than those for which they have been designed, thereby limiting their applications. For example, a network architecture initially designed for brain parcellation of monomodal T1 MRI can not be easily translated into an efficient tumour segmentation network that jointly utilises T1, T1c, Flair and T2 MRI. To tackle this, we propose a novel scalable multimodal deep learning architecture using new nested structures that explicitly leverage deep features within or across modalities. This aims at making the early layers of the architecture structured and sparse so that the final architecture becomes scalable to the number of modalities. We evaluate the scalable architecture for brain tumour segmentation and give evidence of its regularisation effect compared to the conventional concatenation approach.Comment: Paper accepted at MICCAI 201

Green Inhibitors for Prevention of Metal and Alloys Corrosion: An Overview

Corrosion control of metal is of technical, economical, environmental and aesthetical importance. The use of inhibitor is the best way to prevent metal and alloys from corrosion. There is an intensive effort underway to develop new plant origin corrosion inhibitors for metal subjected to various environmental conditions. These efforts are motivated by the desire to replace toxic organic corrosion inhibitors used for mitigation of corrosion of various metals and alloys in solutions. Plants represent a class of interesting source of compounds currently being explored for use in metal corrosion protection in most systems, as possible replacement of toxic synthetic inhibitors. The green corrosion inhibitors are bio degradable, non-toxic, environmentally benign, and low cost, are obtained from renewable resources with minimal health and safety concerns. Investigations of corrosion inhibiting abilities of tannins, alkaloids, organic amino acids and organic dyes of plant origin are of interest. Development of computational modeling backed by wet results would help in understanding the mechanism of inhibition action, their adsorption patterns, inhibitor-metal surface interface and help in the development of designer inhibitor with an understanding of the time required for the release of self-healing inhibitors. The present paper restricts itself mainly to the plant materials as “Green Corrosion Inhibitor”. Keywords: Green Corrosion Inhibitor, Corrosion Inhibition, Plant Extracts

Demo Alleviate: Demonstrating Artificial Intelligence Enabled Virtual Assistance for Telehealth: The Mental Health Case

After the pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) powered support for mental health care has become increasingly important. The breadth and complexity of significant challenges required to provide adequate care involve: (a) Personalized patient understanding, (b) Safety-constrained and medically validated chatbot patient interactions, and (c) Support for continued feedback-based refinements in design using chatbot-patient interactions. We propose Alleviate, a chatbot designed to assist patients suffering from mental health challenges with personalized care and assist clinicians with understanding their patients better. Alleviate draws from an array of publicly available clinically valid mental-health texts and databases, allowing Alleviate to make medically sound and informed decisions. In addition, Alleviate\u27s modular design and explainable decision-making lends itself to robust and continued feedback-based refinements to its design. In this paper, we explain the different modules of Alleviate and submit a short video demonstrating Alleviate\u27s capabilities to help patients and clinicians understand each other better to facilitate optimal care strategies

Pyomyositis: A Complicated and Curious Case Report

Introduction: In the elderly (over the age of 50), the risk of urinary tract infections is estimated at 8% per year in men. Anatomic abnormalities such as prostatic hypertrophy, leading to urinary retention is considered as the main reason. Pyomyositis is an uncommon condition of optical urethrotomy, especially in patients who have received local radiation therapy in the past. Till date no cases of pectineus muscle abscess and only two cases of obturator externus muscle abscess have been reported in the literature, with only one developing as a result of genitourinary intervention such as urethrotomy. Case presentation: Here we are presenting a case of a very unusual and serious complication in an elderly man presenting with urosepsis several months after undergoing urethrotomy. Conclusion: Elderly men have an increased risk of sepsis, higher than that in women with UTI

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF STABILITY-INDICATING HPTLC METHOD FOR SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF ENALAPRIL MALEATE, HYDROCHLOROTHIAZIDE AND PARACETAMOL IN COMBINED TABLET DOSAGE FORM

A stability-indicating high-performance thin-layer chromatographic (HPTLC)  method has been developed for the determination of simultaneous determination of Enalapril maleate (ENAL), Hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) and Paracetamol (PARA)  in tablet dosage forms, The separation was achieved on TLC aluminum plates precoated with silica gel 60F-254 using chloroform: methanol: toluene : ethyl acetate (20:10:40:30 % v/v/v/v)  as the mobile phase. The densitometric analysis was carried out at 230 nm. Compact bands appeared at Rf 0.21 ± 0.01, 0.50 ± 0.02 and 0.73 ± 0.01 respectively, for ENAL, HCTZ and PARA. Linear regression analysis revealed linearity in the range of 1000 – 6550 ng/spot for ENAL, 100-3600 ng/spot for HCTZ and 500 – 3400 ng/spot for PARA. Drugs were subjected to acid and alkali hydrolyses, forced oxidation, thermal and photo degradation treatments. The degraded products were well separated from the pure drugs. Statistical analysis proved that the method is precise, accurate, selective and economical and may be used for routine analysis of ENAL, HCTZ and PARA in tablet dosage forms

A spectroscopy approach to the study of virus infection in the endophytic fungus Epichloë festucae

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In this work we propose a rapid method based on visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) spectroscopy to determine the occurrence of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) viruses in <it>Epichloë festucae </it>strains isolated from <it>Festuca rubra </it>plants. In addition, we examined the incidence of infections by <it>E. festucae </it>in populations of <it>F. rubra </it>collected in natural grasslands of Western Spain.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Vis-NIR spectra (400-2498 nm) from 124 virus-infected and virus-free <it>E. festucae </it>isolates were recorded directly from ground and freeze-dried mycelium. To estimate how well the spectra for uninfected and infected fungal samples could be differentiated, we used partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS1-DA) and several data pre-treatments to develop calibration models.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Applying the best regression model, obtained with two sampling years and using standard normal variate (SNV) combined with first derivative transformation to a new validating data set (42 samples), we obtained a correct classification for 75% of the uninfected isolates and up to 86% of the infected isolates.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results obtained suggest that Vis-NIR spectroscopy is a promising technology for detection of viral infections in fungal samples when an alternative faster approach is desirable. It provides a tool adequately exact and more time- and cost-saving than the conventional reference analysis.</p

Essentials of Aquaphotomics and Its Chemometrics Approaches

Aquaphotomics is a novel scientific discipline involving the study of water and aqueous systems. Using light-water interaction, it aims to extract information about the structure of water, composed of many different water molecular conformations using their absorbance bands. In aquaphotomics analysis, specific water structures (presented as water absorbance patterns) are related to their resulting functions in the aqueous systems studied, thereby building an aquaphotome-a database of water absorbance bands and patterns correlating specific water structures to their specific functions. Light-water interaction spectroscopic methods produce complex multidimensional spectral data, which require data processing and analysis to extract hidden information about the structure of water presented by its absorbance bands. The process of extracting information from water spectra in aquaphotomics requires a field-specific approach. It starts with an appropriate experimental design and execution to ensure high-quality spectral signals, followed by a multitude of spectral analysis, preprocessing and chemometrics methods to remove unwanted influences and extract water absorbance spectral pattern related to the perturbation of interest through the identification of activated water absorbance bands found among the common, consistently repeating and highly influential variables in all analytical models. The objective of this paper is to introduce the field of aquaphotomics and describe aquaphotomics multivariate analysis methodology developed during the last decade. Through a worked-out example of analysis of potassium chloride solutions supported by similar approaches from the existing aquaphotomics literature, the provided instruction should give enough information about aquaphotomics analysis i.e. to design and perform the experiment and data analysis as well as to represent water absorbance spectral pattern using various forms of aquagrams-specifically designed aquaphotomics graphs. The explained methodology is derived from analysis of near infrared spectral data of aqueous systems and will offer a useful and new tool for extracting data from informationally rich water spectra in any region. It is the hope of the authors that with this new tool at the disposal of scientists and chemometricians, pharmaceutical and biomedical spectroscopy will substantially progress beyond its state-of-the-art applications

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

10. DARPA—Enabling Technical Innovation

The Role of DARPA DARPA is a unique institution that is consistently evolving. Every program manager you ask will give you a different view of DARPA. Everyone has a different opinion, whether it be a DARPA program manager, a performer on a DARPA project, a small business, the academic community, other government organizations, or the public. This is important to understand and is a result of how DARPA is structured, and how DARPA works with so many different technical communities on ground br..