Community based trial of home blood pressure monitoring with nurse-led telephone support in patients with stroke or transient ischaemic attack recently discharged from hospital.

BACKGROUND: High blood pressure in patients with stroke increases the risk of recurrence but management in the community is often inadequate. Home blood pressure monitoring may increase patients' involvement in their care, increase compliance, and reduce the need for patients to attend their General Practitioner if blood pressure is adequately controlled. However the value of home monitoring to improve blood pressure control is unclear. In particular its use has not been evaluated in stroke patients in whom neurological and cognitive ability may present unique challenges. DESIGN: Community based randomised trial with follow up after 12 months. PARTICIPANTS: 360 patients admitted to three South London Stroke units with stroke or transient ischaemic attack within the past 9 months will be recruited from the wards or outpatients and randomly allocated into two groups. All patients will be visited by the specialist nurse at home at baseline when she will measure their blood pressure and administer a questionnaire. These procedures will be repeated at 12 months follow up by another researcher blind as to whether the patient is in intervention or control group. INTERVENTION: INTERVENTION patients will be given a validated home blood pressure monitor and support from the specialist nurse. Control patients will continue with usual care (blood pressure monitoring by their practice). Main outcome measures in both groups after 12 months: 1. Change in systolic blood pressure.2. Cost effectiveness: Incremental cost of the intervention to the National Health Service and incremental cost per quality adjusted life year gained

Automatic detection and classification of nasopharyngeal carcinoma on PET/CT with support vector machine

Purpose: Positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) has established values for imaging of head and neck cancers, including the nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), utilizing both morphologic and functional information. In this paper, we introduce a computerized system for automatic detection of NPC, targeting both the primary tumor and regional nodal metastasis, on PET/CT. Methods: Candidate lesions were extracted based on the features from both PET and CT images and a priori knowledge of anatomical features and subsequently classified by a support vector machine algorithm. The system was validated with 25 PET/CT examinations from 10 patients suffering from NPC. Lesions manually contoured by experienced radiologists were used as the gold standard. Results: Results showed that the system successfully identified all 53 hypermetabolic lesions larger than 1 cm in size and excluded normal physiological uptake in brown fat, muscles, bone marrow, brain, and salivary glands. Conclusion: The system combined both imaging features and a priori clinical knowledge for classification between pathological and physiological uptake. Preliminary results showed that the system was highly accurate and promising for adoption in clinical use. © The Author(s) 2011.published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 25 May 201

Technical efficiency of resource conserving technologies in rice wheat system: case of Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India

Poster prepared for presentation at the conferenceThis study aimed to evaluate the technical efficiency of farmers engaged in rice-wheat cropping systems in India using Resource Conserving Technologies (RCTs) such as zero-tillage and direct seeding, under the intervention of the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) project primarily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal of the project is to alleviate hunger and malnutrition as well as increase income and food security for poor farmers living in South Asia. The Resource Conserving Technologies (RCTs) are being promoted as part of conservation agriculture supported by the project. These technologies are designed to reduce the strain agricultural production has on two critical natural resources: water and soil. The RCT technologies are being promoted by the CSISA project in several locations in India, and the main ones are direct seeded rice, reduced-tillage, and zero-tillage. The farmers participating in the study are part of the CSISA project and are located in Eastern Uttar-Pradesh and Bihar in Northeastern India. The data used in this study was derived from a socio-economic survey conducted in these two regions during the Kharif season of 2009 and Rabi season of 2010. A Stochastic frontier Analysis, using the Cobb-Douglas or Translog function form, was performed to investigate and compare the determinants of technical efficiency among farmers receiving intervention and those who are not. Farmers receiving intervention from the CSISA project tend to be more technically efficient than those without intervention.Tien Dung Khong, Valerien O. Pede, Zenaida M. Sumalde, Justin D. McKinley, Samarendu Mohant

Genetic algorithm supported by graphical processing unit improves the exploration of effective connectivity in functional brain imaging

published_or_final_versio

Technical Efficiency of Resource-Conserving Technologies in Rice -Wheat Systems: The Case of Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India

This study has evaluated the technical efficiency of farmers engaged in rice-wheat cropping systems in North-eastern India, who are using Resource-Conserving Technologies (RCTs) such as Zero Tillage (ZT) and Direct Seeded Rice (DSR). These technology promotions are being carried out under the intervention of the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) project, primarily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The resource-conserving technologies are being promoted as part of conservation agriculture supported by the project. The data used in this study have been derived from the socioeconomic surveys conducted in Eastern Uttar-Pradesh and Bihar in North-eastern India during the kharif season of 2009 and rabi season of 2010. A stochastic frontier analysis was carried out to investigate and compare the determinants of technical efficiency among the farmers receiving intervention and those who are not. The study has revealed that farmers receiving CSISA intervention have realized higher levels of technical efficiency. Additionally, farmers who are receiving subsidies and farmers who are planting more diversified crops have higher levels of technical efficiency.Conservation agriculture, Direct seeded rice, India, Resource-conserving technology, Technical efficiency, Stochastic frontier, Zero tillage, Agricultural and Food Policy, O30, Q18, O22,

Genetic algorithm supported by graphical processing unit improves the exploration of effective connectivity in functional brain imaging

published_or_final_versio

TUNet: A Block-online Bandwidth Extension Model based on Transformers and Self-supervised Pretraining

We introduce a block-online variant of the temporal feature-wise linear modulation (TFiLM) model to achieve bandwidth extension. The proposed architecture simplifies the UNet backbone of the TFiLM to reduce inference time and employs an efficient transformer at the bottleneck to alleviate performance degradation. We also utilize self-supervised pretraining and data augmentation to enhance the quality of bandwidth extended signals and reduce the sensitivity with respect to downsampling methods. Experiment results on the VCTK dataset show that the proposed method outperforms several recent baselines in both intrusive and non-intrusive metrics. Pretraining and filter augmentation also help stabilize and enhance the overall performance.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICASSP 2022, 5 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

Mitf-Mdel, a novel melanocyte/melanoma-specific isoform of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor-M, as a candidate biomarker for melanoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Melanoma incidence is on the rise and advanced melanoma carries an extremely poor prognosis. Treatment options, including chemotherapy and immunotherapy, are limited and offer low response rates and transient efficacy. Thus, identification of new melanocyte/melanoma antigens that serve as potential novel candidate biomarkers in melanoma is an important area for investigation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Full length MITF-M and its splice variant cDNA were cloned from human melanoma cell line 624 mel by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Expression was investigated using regular and quantitative RT-PCR in three normal melanocytes (NHEM), 31 melanoma cell lines, 21 frozen melanoma tissue samples, 18 blood samples (pheripheral blood mononuclear cell; PBMC) from healthy donors and 12 non-melanoma cancer cell lines, including three breast, five glioma, one sarcoma, two kidney and one ovarian cancer cell lines.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A novel splice variant of MITF-M, which we named MITF-Mdel, was identified. The predicted MITF-Mdel protein contains two in frame deletions, 56- and 6- amino acid deletions in exon 2 (from V32 to E87) and exon 6 (from A187 to T192), respectively. MITF-Mdel was widely expressed in melanocytes, melanoma cell lines and tissues, but almost undetectable in non-melanoma cell lines or PBMC from healthy donors. Both isoforms were expressed significantly higher in melanoma tissues than in cell lines. Two of 31 melanoma cell lines expressed only one isoform or the other.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>MITF-Mdel, a novel melanocyte/melanoma-specific isoform of MITF-M, may serve as a potential candidate biomarker for diagnostic and follow-up purposes in melanoma.</p