Indian psychiatric interview schedule (IPIS)

The paper discusses the advantages of the structured interview in psychiatric research and goes on to describe the details of development of a structured interview Schedule (IPIS) suitable for an Indian setting. The Schedule is described, as well as the results of interinvestigator reliability tests. Possible uses of the instrument and the necessary further developments are outlined

Indian psychiatric survey schedule (IPSS)

The paper describes the development of Indian Psychiatric Survey Schedule (IPSS) which is designed to inquire about the presence of 124 psychiatric symptoms and 10 items of historical information in the general population. The symptoms as well as the items of historical information are the same as those in IPIS (Kapur et al., 1974) but because of a multi-stage procedure adopted with IPSS, the inquiry takes much less time than that for IPIS. - A "preliminary interview schedule" which is meant for all members of the population can be used by a nonpsychiatrist after a short period of training. The other sections in IPSS, that is "detailed inquiry with the subject", "detailed inquiry with an informant" and "observations during interview" are completed when necessary by a trained psychiatrist who also gives a physical examination when somatic symptoms are reported. - The paper describes the reasons why a multi-stage procedure was designed, a pilot study which helped reach certain decisions regarding the construction of the schedule and the results of a study carried out to test the level of agreement obtained when three non-psychiatrists (after a short period of training) and a psychiatrist used the preliminary interview schedule with 40 hospital patients and 40 members of the general population

Characterization and expression analysis of Staphylococcus aureus pathogenicity island 3 - Implications for the evolution of staphylococcal pathogenicity islands

We describe the complete sequence of the 15.9-kb staphylococcal pathogenicity island 3 encoding staphylococcal enterotoxin serotypes B, K, and Q. The island, which meets the generally accepted definition of pathogenicity islands, contains 24 open reading frames potentially encoding proteins of more than 50 amino acids, including an apparently functional integrase. The element is bordered by two 17-bp direct repeats identical to those found flanking staphylococcal pathogenicity island 1. The island has extensive regions of homology to previously described pathogenicity islands, particularly staphylococcal pathogenicity islands 1 and bov. The expression of 22 of the 24 open reading frames contained on staphylococcal pathogenicity island 3 was detected either in vitro during growth in a laboratory medium or serum or in vivo in a rabbit model of toxic shock syndrome using DNA microarrays. The effect of oxygen tension on staphylococcal pathogenicity island 3 gene expression was also examined. By comparison with the known staphylococcal pathogenicity islands in the context of gene expression described here, we propose a model of pathogenicity island origin and evolution involving specialized transduction events and addition, deletion, or recombination of pathogenicity island "modules.

Novel duplex vapor electrochemical method for silicon solar cells

Progress in the development of low-cost solar arrays is reported. Topics covered include: (1) development of a simplified feed system for the Na used in the Na-SiF4 reactor; (2) production of high purity silicon through the reduction of sodium fluosilicate with sodium metal; (3) the leaching process for recovering silicon from the reaction products of the SiF4-Na reaction; and (4) silicon separation by the melting of the reaction product

The prognostic significance of ploidy analysis in operable breast cancer

The nuclear DNA content of 98 operable breast cancers was determined by flow cytometric analysis using paraffin-embedded tissue. All patients were on follow-up and failure of treatment or recurrences were identified. DNA ploidy data in the form of ploidy status and DNA index (DI) has been correlated with various clinical and histopathologic factors. The only significant correlation using univariate analysis exists between the histologic grade and DI (P < 0.025), recurrence of the disease and ploidy status (P < 0.005), and recurrence of the disease and DI (P < 0.005). The absence of correlation of ploidy status with other tumor derived factors indicates the independent nature of ploidy as a prognostic factor. Multivariate analysis showed that in the whole-group ploidy (P < 0.01), tumor margin (P < 0.01), and menopausal status (P < 0.01) were significant factors in the order mentioned. DI with a cut of at 1.29 is not found to be a significant factor in the multivariate analysis. The maximum prognostic value of ploidy status was observed in the postmenopausal group (P < 0.0005). In the node-negative group ploidy status (P < 0.05) is the only independent significant factor predicting for early relapse. It is concluded that ploidy status is an independent prognostic factor predicting for recurrence of the disease. In the node-negative subgroup this could be used to identify the subset of patients who may benefit from adjuvant treatment

HOPE: Help fOr People with money, employment, benefit or housing problems: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

Background: Self-harm and suicide increase in times of economic recession. Factors including job loss, austerity measures, financial difficulties and house repossession contribute to the risk. Vulnerable individuals commonly experience difficulties in navigating the benefits system and in accessing the available sources of welfare and debt advice, and this contributes to their distress. Our aim is to determine the feasibility and acceptability of a brief psychosocial intervention (the “HOPE” service) for people presenting to hospital emergency departments (ED) following self-harm or in acute distress because of financial, employment, or welfare (benefit) difficulties. Method: A pilot study including randomisation will be employed to determine whether it is possible to undertake a full-scale trial. Twenty people presenting to the ED who have self-harmed, have suicidal thoughts and depression and/or are in crisis and where financial, employment or benefit problems are cited as contributory factors will be asked to consent to random allocation to the intervention or control arm on a 2:1 basis. People who require secondary mental health follow-up will be excluded. Those randomised to the intervention arm will receive up to six sessions with a mental health worker who will provide practical help with financial and other problems. The mental health worker will use the motivational interviewing method in their interactions with participants. Control participants will receive one session signposting them to existing relevant support organisations. Participants will be followed up after 3 months. Participants and the mental health workers will take part in qualitative interviews to enable refinement of the intervention. The acceptability of outcome measures including the PHQ-9, GAD-7, repeat self-harm, EQ5D-5L and questions about debt, employment and welfare benefits will be explored. Discussion: This study will assess whether a full-scale randomised trial of this novel intervention to prevent self-harm among those distressed because of financial difficulties is feasible, including the acceptability of randomisation, potential rate of recruitment and the acceptability of outcome measures. Trial registration: ISRCTN5853124

Gall Bladder And Common Bile Duct Stones – When Is Direct Cholangiography Indicated?

The medical records of 277 consecutive patients who underwent cholecystectomy for benign gall stone disease, were reviewed to determine the incidence and cause of biliary tract obstructuion

Transfer Learning for Domain Adaptation in MRI: Application in Brain Lesion Segmentation

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used in routine clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, variations in MRI acquisition protocols result in different appearances of normal and diseased tissue in the images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have shown to be successful in many medical image analysis tasks, are typically sensitive to the variations in imaging protocols. Therefore, in many cases, networks trained on data acquired with one MRI protocol, do not perform satisfactorily on data acquired with different protocols. This limits the use of models trained with large annotated legacy datasets on a new dataset with a different domain which is often a recurring situation in clinical settings. In this study, we aim to answer the following central questions regarding domain adaptation in medical image analysis: Given a fitted legacy model, 1) How much data from the new domain is required for a decent adaptation of the original network?; and, 2) What portion of the pre-trained model parameters should be retrained given a certain number of the new domain training samples? To address these questions, we conducted extensive experiments in white matter hyperintensity segmentation task. We trained a CNN on legacy MR images of brain and evaluated the performance of the domain-adapted network on the same task with images from a different domain. We then compared the performance of the model to the surrogate scenarios where either the same trained network is used or a new network is trained from scratch on the new dataset.The domain-adapted network tuned only by two training examples achieved a Dice score of 0.63 substantially outperforming a similar network trained on the same set of examples from scratch.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure