“Time is brain”- management of the patient with iatrogenic intracerebral hemorrhage

The brain is a critical organ of our body, which depends on a continuous supply of oxygen and glucose for normal functioning. An inadequate supply of oxygen and glucose can trigger a characteristic pathophysiological cascade leading to neuronal death. Multiple neuroprotective strategies have been developed blocking one or more steps along this cascade. Here, we report the case of an intracerebral hemorrhage during neurointerventional procedure in a catheterization laboratory. Accurate decision and timely intervention of neuroprotective strategies resulted in the complete neurological recovery of the patient

Comparison on efficiency of various techniques in treatment of waste and sewage water – A comprehensive review

AbstractIn the present scenario, environmental laws have become stringent towards health, economy and reduction of pollution. The pollution is a result of discharge of various organic and inorganic substances into the environment. The sources of pollution include domestic agricultural and industrial water. Conventional techniques such as chemical precipitation, carbon adsorption, ion exchange, evaporations and membrane processes are found to be effective in treatment of waste and sewage water. Recently, biological treatments have gained popularity to remove toxic and other harmful substances. The objective of the paper is to make comprehensive review including the performance of each technique in treatment of waste and sewage water. The research directions are also suggested based on the review

Endovascular aspiration of clot in a 3-year-old child with embolic infarct of right middle cerebral artery

Stroke in children is common and is associated with long-term morbidity. The incidence of stroke is 13/100,000 in children above 1 month, with higher incidences in neonates and premature infants. It has to be differentiated from other diseases which have a similar presentation. We present a case of a 3-year-old female child with embolic stroke of right middle cerebral artery managed with endovascular clot retrieval done under general anesthesia

Discriminating Free Hand Movements Using Support Vector Machine and Recurrent Neural Network Algorithms

Decoding natural hand movements is of interest for human-computer interaction and may constitute a helpful tool in the diagnosis of motor diseases and rehabilitation monitoring. However, the accurate measurement of complex hand movements and the decoding of dynamic movement data remains challenging. Here, we introduce two algorithms, one based on support vector machine (SVM) classification combined with dynamic time warping, and the other based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, which were designed to discriminate small differences in defined sequences of hand movements. We recorded hand movement data from 17 younger and 17 older adults using an exoskeletal data glove while they were performing six different movement tasks. Accuracy rates in decoding the different movement types were similarly high for SVM and LSTM in across-subject classification, but, for within-subject classification, SVM outperformed LSTM. The SVM-based approach, therefore, appears particularly promising for the development of movement decoding tools, in particular if the goal is to generalize across age groups, for example for detecting specific motor disorders or tracking their progress over time

Reduced dimension stimulus decoding and column-based modeling reveal architectural differences of primary somatosensory finger maps between younger and older adults

The primary somatosensory cortex (SI) contains fine-grained tactile representations of the body, arranged in an orderly fashion. The use of ultra-high resolution fMRI data to detect group differences, for example between younger and older adults’ SI maps, is challenging, because group alignment often does not preserve the high spatial detail of the data. Here, we use robust-shared response modeling (rSRM) that allows group analyses by mapping individual stimulus-driven responses to a lower dimensional shared feature space, to detect age-related differences in tactile representations between younger and older adults using 7T-fMRI data. Using this method, we show that finger representations are more precise in Brodmann-Area (BA) 3b and BA1 compared to BA2 and motor areas, and that this hierarchical processing is preserved across age groups. By combining rSRM with column-based decoding (C-SRM), we further show that the number of columns that optimally describes finger maps in SI is higher in younger compared to older adults in BA1, indicating a greater columnar size in older adults’ SI. Taken together, we conclude that rSRM is suitable for finding fine-grained group differences in ultra-high resolution fMRI data, and we provide first evidence that the columnar architecture in SI changes with increasing age

Documenting the fauna of a small temporary pond from Pune, Maharashtra, India

Most of the limnological studies in India have focussed on a few taxa of large, permanent water bodies, and pond ecosystems, and related temporary water bodies are neglected.  We present here a faunal inventory, with representative photographs, for a single, small temporary pond, reporting over 125 species of strictly aquatic fauna and 25 species of associated fauna, even though we did not identify some groups such as Protozoa, Diptera and nymphs of Odonata, etc.  The identified species belong to seven taxa of vertebrates and invertebrates together. Arthropoda and Rotifera were the most species rich groups, observed with 83 and 45 representatives, respectively. Coleoptera were the most numerous in terms of species number.  Such a small water body holds some endemics as well as otherwise very rare animals and so deserves better attention.  We also highlight the potential and importance of such habitats for research and conservation.   </div

Production of Site-Specific Antibody–Drug Conjugates Using Optimized Non-Natural Amino Acids in a Cell-Free Expression System

Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are a targeted chemotherapeutic currently at the cutting edge of oncology medicine. These hybrid molecules consist of a tumor antigen-specific antibody coupled to a chemotherapeutic small molecule. Through targeted delivery of potent cytotoxins, ADCs exhibit improved therapeutic index and enhanced efficacy relative to traditional chemotherapies and monoclonal antibody therapies. The currently FDA-approved ADCs, Kadcyla (Immunogen/Roche) and Adcetris (Seattle Genetics), are produced by conjugation to surface-exposed lysines, or partial disulfide reduction and conjugation to free cysteines, respectively. These stochastic modes of conjugation lead to heterogeneous drug products with varied numbers of drugs conjugated across several possible sites. As a consequence, the field has limited understanding of the relationships between the site and extent of drug loading and ADC attributes such as efficacy, safety, pharmacokinetics, and immunogenicity. A robust platform for rapid production of ADCs with defined and uniform sites of drug conjugation would enable such studies. We have established a cell-free protein expression system for production of antibody drug conjugates through site-specific incorporation of the optimized non-natural amino acid, para-azidomethyl-l-phenylalanine (pAMF). By using our cell-free protein synthesis platform to directly screen a library of aaRS variants, we have discovered a novel variant of the Methanococcus jannaschii tyrosyl tRNA synthetase (TyrRS), with a high activity and specificity toward pAMF. We demonstrate that site-specific incorporation of pAMF facilitates near complete conjugation of a DBCO-PEG-monomethyl auristatin (DBCO-PEG-MMAF) drug to the tumor-specific, Her2-binding IgG Trastuzumab using strain-promoted azide–alkyne cycloaddition (SPAAC) copper-free click chemistry. The resultant ADCs proved highly potent in <i>in vitro</i> cell cytotoxicity assays