Hybrid Spectrum Sensing Method for Cognitive Radio

With exponential rise in the internet applications and wireless communications, higher and efficient data transfer rates are required. Hence proper and effective spectrum is the need of the hour, As spectrum demand increases there are limited number of bands available to send and receive the data. Optimizing the use of these bands efficiently is one of the tedious tasks. Various techniques are used to send the data at same time, but for that we have to know which bands are free before sending the data. For this purpose various spectrum sensing approaches came with variety of solutions. In this paper the sensing problem is tackled with the use of hybrid spectrum sensing method, This new networking paradox uses the Centralized concept of spectrum sensing and creates one of the most trusted spectrums sensing mechanism. This proposed technique is simulated using MATLAB software.This paper also provides comparative study of various spectrum sensing methodologie

Awareness study of Pharmacovigilance among the health care professionals (nursing staff) at tertiary care hospital, Solapur, Maharashtra, India

Background: Early detection of adverse drug reaction is one step towards the prevention of ADRs. Foundation of Pharmacovigilance is spontaneous reporting which is minimal in India. Among the all health care professionals, nurses are caregivers at bedside. Improvement in knowledge and practice of adverse drug reaction reporting among nurses will definitely increases spontaneous reporting. In this study, knowledge, attitude and practice of nursing staff about pharmacovigilance was evaluated.Methods: It was prospective, cross-sectional, observational, questionnaire-based study among the nurses of the tertiary care hospital Solapur. A questionnaire evaluating knowledge, attitude and practice was distributed among nursing staff and filled questionnaire were collected back and analyzed by microsoft excel 2013.Results: Response rate of our study was 44.88%.  38.61% doctors were knowing meaning of pharmacovigilance while 61.38% participants knew that all drugs available in market are not safe. Taking proper medication history before prescribing drugs was considered important by 92.57% participants. 79.70% participants were aware about Pharmacovigilance program of India. 64.35% doctors answered correctly to elements which are mandatory to record. Only 24.75% participants were knowing the basis that pharmcovigilance provides for.Conclusions: Nursing staff of tertiary care hospital, Solapur had very appreciable and positive attitude towards pharmacovigilance but there is a need for improvement in knowledge and practice of ADR reporting

Evaluations of Thinning Algorithms for Preprocessing of Handwritten Characters

Thinning algorithms have played an important role in preprocessing phase which decides the success of recognition in the OCR system. This paper report on the performance of 11 thinning algorithms from the perspective of character recognition where different aspects of the performance of each algorithm like computing time, deviation from perfect 8-connectedness, and number of possible noise spurs present in the skeletons are considered

A pharmacovigilance study in patients of chronic non-infective respiratory diseases attending outpatient department of pulmonary medicine in a tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are the known dangers of any medicinal therapy. They are not only responsible for increasing the mortality and morbidity but also for multiplying the health care expenditure. It is important to monitor the adverse effects of the drugs in the patients on treatment for chronic non-infective respiratory diseases attending OPD of pulmonary medicine in a tertiary care teaching hospitalMethods: The study was single-centric, non-randomized and observational hospital-based study which was carried out for a period of 1 and a half years in JJ Hospital. The patients who were included in the study suffered from either of the 4 diseases-Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, bronchiectasis or interstitial lung diseases (ILD). Data were analyzed by using Microsoft excel sheet. Based on the outcome of modified Hartwig and Siegel severity assessment scale, ADRs were grouped into various severity categories.Results: One hundred and thirty-two number of ADRs were seen in 69 out of 352 patients (19.6 %) of the study population. The occurrence of ADR was found slightly higher in males i.e., 53.62% as compared to females i.e., 46.38%. The patients who were on treatment for ILD showed highest percentage of ADRs i.e., 57.89% which is followed by bronchiectasis (17.39%), COPD (16.17%) and lastly asthma (10.26%). The ADRs belonging to GIT system were highest in number i.e., 80. The most frequently occurring ADR in the study was palpitation which occurred in 14 cases i.e., 20.29%. Out of 132 ADRs observed, 96 i.e., 72.73% belonged to the mild category and 36 ADRs i.e., 27.27% belonged to the moderate category. Not a single severe ADR was found in the study.Conclusions: It was found that 19.6% of the patient population suffered from ADRs, which is a considerable number. It is essential that health care professionals should support ADR monitoring process for the safety of the medicinal product. Proper implementation of ADR monitoring will help to reduce the harmful effects by early detection of drug safety problems in patients, assessing the risk-benefit in an individual and the population, improving the selection, rational use of drugs through the provision of timely warning to healthcare professionals

Effect of maturity stages on the quality indices of wood apple (Feronia limonia) and modeling of its kinetics by applying machine learning approaches

In the present investigation, an inexpensive and non-destructive method was tested for the appropriate maturity classification of wood apple (Feronia limonia). The investigation was conducted to establish the pronounced effect of maturity stages on the growth kinetics, physico-chemical properties, and other quality indices of wood apple. A systematic trend was observed for all the properties namely sphericity, bulk density (g/cm3), true density (g/cm3), pH, total soluble solids TSS (°Brix), titratable acidity (%) and TSS/TA ratio, etc. of the fruit. In contrast, regular changes were also observed in the color properties at various maturity stages of the wood apple. The maturity kinetics was formulated by applying recurrent neural network (RNN) in compliance with K means cluster algorithm. RNN modeling was applied by considering color property (redness value) as input and six maturity indices as the output of the formulated structure. The RNN architecture, 1-6-6 showed the best results for forecasting the wood apple maturity based on color features. Further, based on the results of the K means cluster algorithm, the maturity stages were classified into three main categories, illustrated in the form of a simplified color chart. Hence, this investigation can be useful for proper control and identification of wood apple maturity during the processing

MOTION ANALYSIS IN VIDEO USING OPTICAL FLOW TECHNIQUES

ABSTRACT: This paper presents optical flow estimation technique to estimate the motion vectors in each frame of the video sequence. By thresholding and performing morphological closing on the motion vectors, we produces binary feature images. Using these binary features the cars are located. A bounding Box is drawn around the cars that pass beneath the white line. The algorithm used for this is lucas kanade. Use of the threshold to reduce the noise in small movements between frames is analyzed. Higher the threshold ,the less small movements impact the optical flow calculation. Experiments are done to find the value that best achieves our results

A workshop on ‘Dietary Sweetness—Is It an Issue?’

This report summarises a workshop convened by ILSI Europe on 3 and 4 April 2017 to discuss the issue of dietary sweetness. The objectives were to understand the roles of sweetness in the diet, establish whether exposure to sweetness affects diet quality and energy intake, and consider whether sweetness per se affects health. Although there may be evidence for tracking of intake of some sweet components of the diet through childhood, evidence for tracking of whole diet sweetness, or through other stages of maturity are lacking. The evidence to date does not support adverse effects of sweetness on diet quality or energy intake, except where sweet food choices increase intake of free sugars. There is some evidence for improvements in diet quality and reduced energy intake where sweetness without calories replaces sweetness with calories. There is a need to understand the physiological and metabolic relevance of sweet taste receptors on the tongue, in the gut and elsewhere in the body, as well as possible differentiation in the effects of sustained consumption of individual sweeteners. Despite a plethora of studies, there is no consistent evidence for an association of sweetness sensitivity/preference with obesity or type 2 diabetes. A multifaceted integrated approach, characterising nutritive and sensory aspects of the whole diet or dietary patterns, may be more valuable in providing contextual insight. The outcomes of the workshop could be used as a scientific basis to inform the expert community and create more useful dialogue among health care professionals

Deep phenotyping and genomic data from a nationally representative study on dementia in India

The Harmonized Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia for the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI-DAD) is a nationally representative in-depth study of cognitive aging and dementia. We present a publicly available dataset of harmonized cognitive measures of 4,096 adults 60 years of age and older in India, collected across 18 states and union territories. Blood samples were obtained to carry out whole blood and serum-based assays. Results are included in a venous blood specimen datafile that can be linked to the Harmonized LASI-DAD dataset. A global screening array of 960 LASI-DAD respondents is also publicly available for download, in addition to neuroimaging data on 137 LASI-DAD participants. Altogether, these datasets provide comprehensive information on older adults in India that allow researchers to further understand risk factors associated with cognitive impairment and dementia.Peer reviewe

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries