Comparison between paracervical and intracervical block before procedures on uterine cavity and cervical dilatation

Background: Procedures like dilatation and curettage and manual vacuum aspirations are one of the commonest procedures conducted in the outpatient Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Objective of present study was to find out whether intracervical block is as effective as paracervical block in patients undergoing cervical dilatation and procedures on uterine cavity.Methods: Patients undergoing dilatation and curettage or manual vacuum aspiration were given either paracevrical block or intracervical block. The pain during cervical dilatation and curettage or manual vacuum aspiration were assessed on a 10 cm visual analogue scale.Results: Mean visual analogue score during dilatation was comparable in both groups. Mean visual analogue score were comparable during dilatation in both groups before curettage or manual vacuum aspiration. Mean visual analogue scores during manual vacuum aspiration or curettage was also comparable with both groups. One patient had a serious side effect of convulsion during paracervical block.Conclusions: Intracervical block is preferable to paracervical block during procedures like cervical dilatation and on procedures on uterine cavity as intracervical block requires less technical precision than paracervical block

The Role of Interaction and Common Randomness in Two-User Secure Computation

This paper has been presented at : 2018 IEEE International Symposium On Information Theory (ISIT)We consider interactive computation of randomized functions between two users with the following privacy requirement: the interactive communication should not reveal to either user any extra information about the other user's input and output other than what can be inferred from the user's own input and output. We also consider the case where privacy is required against only one of the users. For both cases, we give single-letter expressions for feasibility and optimal rates of communication. Then we discuss the role of common randomness and interaction in both privacy settings.Gowtham R. Kurri was supported by a travel fellowship from the Sarojini Damodaran Foundation. This work was done while Jithin Ravi was at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He has received funding from ERC grant 714161

Interactive Secure Function Computation

We consider interactive computation of randomized functions between two users with the following privacy requirement: the interaction should not reveal to either user any extra information about the other user's input and output other than what can be inferred from the user's own input and output. We also consider the case where privacy is required against only one of the users. For both cases, we give single-letter expressions for feasibility and optimal rates of communication. Then we discuss the role of common randomness and interaction in both privacy settings. We also study perfectly secure non-interactive computation when only one of the users computes a randomized function based on a single transmission from the other user. We characterize randomized functions which can be perfectly securely computed in this model and obtain tight bounds on the optimal message lengths in all the privacy settings.Comment: 30 pages. Revised based on comments from the reviewer

Multiple Access Channel Simulation

We study the problem of simulating a two-user multiple access channel over a multiple access network of noiseless links. Two encoders observe independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) copies of a source random variable each, while a decoder observes i.i.d. copies of a side-information random variable. There are rate-limited noiseless communication links and independent pairwise shared randomness resources between each encoder and the decoder. The decoder has to output approximately i.i.d. copies of another random variable jointly distributed with the two sources and the side information. We are interested in the rate tuples which permit this simulation. This setting can be thought of as a multi-terminal generalization of the point-to-point channel simulation problem studied by Bennett et al. (2002) and Cuff (2013). General inner and outer bounds on the rate region are derived. For the specific case where the sources at the encoders are conditionally independent given the side-information at the decoder, we completely characterize the rate region. Our bounds recover the existing results on function computation over such multi-terminal networks. We then show through an example that an additional independent source of shared randomness between the encoders strictly improves the communication rate requirements, even if the additional randomness is not available to the decoder. Furthermore, we provide inner and outer bounds for this more general setting with independent pairwise shared randomness resources between all the three possible node pairs.Comment: 33 pages, 3 figure

Observing wind, aerosol particles, clouds and precipitation: Finland's new ground-based remote-sensing network

The Finnish Meteorological Institute, in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, has established a new ground-based remote-sensing network in Finland. The network consists of five topographically, ecologically and climatically different sites distributed from southern to northern Finland. The main goal of the network is to monitor air pollution and boundary layer properties in near real time, with a Doppler lidar and ceilometer at each site. In addition to these operational tasks, two sites are members of the Aerosols, Clouds and Trace gases Research InfraStructure Network (ACTRIS); a Ka band cloud radar at Sodankylä will provide cloud retrievals within CloudNet, and a multi-wavelength Raman lidar, PollyXT (POrtabLe Lidar sYstem eXTended), in Kuopio provides optical and microphysical aerosol properties through EARLINET (the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network). Three C-band weather radars are located in the Helsinki metropolitan area and are deployed for operational and research applications. We performed two inter-comparison campaigns to investigate the Doppler lidar performance, compare the backscatter signal and wind profiles, and to optimize the lidar sensitivity through adjusting the telescope focus length and data-integration time to ensure sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in low-aerosol-content environments. In terms of statistical characterization, the wind-profile comparison showed good agreement between different lidars. Initially, there was a discrepancy in the SNR and attenuated backscatter coefficient profiles which arose from an incorrectly reported telescope focus setting from one instrument, together with the need to calibrate. After diagnosing the true telescope focus length, calculating a new attenuated backscatter coefficient profile with the new telescope function and taking into account calibration, the resulting attenuated backscatter profiles all showed good agreement with each other. It was thought that harsh Finnish winters could pose problems, but, due to the built-in heating systems, low ambient temperatures had no, or only a minor, impact on the lidar operation – including scanning-head motion. However, accumulation of snow and ice on the lens has been observed, which can lead to the formation of a water/ice layer thus attenuating the signal inconsistently. Thus, care must be taken to ensure continuous snow removal