Single tertiary care centre experience of ovarian granulosa cell tumour in Chennai, India: a retrospective analysis

Background: Granulosa cell tumours of ovary are rare sex-cord stromal tumours characterized by long natural history and favourable prognosis. The present study was done to evaluate the clinical presentation, treatment, outcome, and prognostic factors for patients diagnosed as granulosa cell tumours.Methods: A Retrospective study of Granulosa cell tumour of the ovary was done for a period of five years from January 2011 to December 2015 at a tertiary care centre, Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Madras Medical College, Chennai. The clinical data and the treatment details were retrieved from the records of medical oncology department and the data were analysed.Results: Twenty five patients were diagnosed as granulose cell tumours of ovary during the study period. The median patient age was 48 years. The most common clinical presentation at diagnosis was vaginal bleeding (76%) followed by abdominal pain (40%). Mean tumor size was 9.6cm. The majority of patients were diagnosed in FIGO stage Ia (84%, n = 21). Thirteen patients (52%) underwent complete staging laparotomy. Twenty three patients (92%) had Adult Granulosa cell tumour. Two patients (8%)had juvenile Granulosa cell tumour. After surgery, all patients were put on observation except two patients who received adjuvant chemotherapy (EP: Etoposide, Cisplatin). The median followup period was 48 months. Five patients (20%) had recurrence; The average time to relapse was 29.6 months. Patients who had tumour size more than 9.7cm had more recurrence events (Hazard Ratio(HR):1.058), but their association is not significant (P value-0.839). The association between menopausal status, torsion of tumour mass, tumour stage with recurrence rate were not significant. The estimated mean overall survival was 84.8 months. Following univariate Cox regression modeling, survival appeared to be independent of age range, post operative residual tumour and the FIGO stage.Conclusions: Granulosa cell tumours of ovary are rare, often diagnosed in early stage. Patients who had tumour size of more than 9.7cm had more recurrence events. A prolonged post therapeutic follow-up is necessary to pick up the late relapses

Building a Winning Team: Selecting Source Model Ensembles using a Submodular Transferability Estimation Approach

Estimating the transferability of publicly available pretrained models to a target task has assumed an important place for transfer learning tasks in recent years. Existing efforts propose metrics that allow a user to choose one model from a pool of pre-trained models without having to fine-tune each model individually and identify one explicitly. With the growth in the number of available pre-trained models and the popularity of model ensembles, it also becomes essential to study the transferability of multiple-source models for a given target task. The few existing efforts study transferability in such multi-source ensemble settings using just the outputs of the classification layer and neglect possible domain or task mismatch. Moreover, they overlook the most important factor while selecting the source models, viz., the cohesiveness factor between them, which can impact the performance and confidence in the prediction of the ensemble. To address these gaps, we propose a novel Optimal tranSport-based suBmOdular tRaNsferability metric (OSBORN) to estimate the transferability of an ensemble of models to a downstream task. OSBORN collectively accounts for image domain difference, task difference, and cohesiveness of models in the ensemble to provide reliable estimates of transferability. We gauge the performance of OSBORN on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Our setup includes 28 source datasets, 11 target datasets, 5 model architectures, and 2 pre-training methods. We benchmark our method against current state-of-the-art metrics MS-LEEP and E-LEEP, and outperform them consistently using the proposed approach.Comment: To appear at ICCV 202

Potentially toxic element (PTEs) related health risk assessment from air conditioner filter dust in and around Chennai metropolitan

1078-1088We report the health risk assessment of air conditioner filter dust collected from different parts of Chennai city, Southern India, using geochemistry and magnetic properties as proxy. The particle size analysis indicates dust particles range from 0.5 μm to 955 μm and the dust grains falling in the range between 30 to 40 μm. The XRD results indicate that the dust samples contain magnetite, hematite, goethite, and trace elements. The hazard index (HI) of trace elements for child and adult determined in our study shows the probable risk for elements as: Cr > Pb > Ni > Cu > Zn. The daily exposure for inhalation [carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic LDDinh] and cancer risk for inhalation (CRinh) were showing high risk and health impact for Cr followed by Ni. It is suggested from the study that higher ventilation rate assisted by means of a mechanical system and use of air conditioners with regular cleaning can improve the living conditions in the Metropolitan areas

Undescended testis: 513 patients’ characteristics, age at orchidopexy and patterns of referral

10.1136/archdischild-2013-305225Archives of Disease in Childhood995401-40

Tamil expertise and Service to Tamil by Sri Vaishnava Acharyaas

Sri Vaishnava Tradition has been considering both Sanskrit and Tamil as its two eyes and hence the scholars were refered as “Ubhaya vedantins” (Knowledgeable in both Tamil and Sanskrit). It is popular belief that Acharyas are very fluent in Vedas, Upanishads and the rest while not so much accustomed to Tamil literature. On the contrary the early Acharyas have excelled in their knowledge of Tamil literature and have used their Tamil vocabulary to enrich their commentaries for Divyaprabandams.  From Acharya Ramanuja to present day heads of Vaishnava tradition have maintained that Divyaprabandams have to be revered as “Veda samyam” and often referred to them as “Tamil Marai” (Vedas in Tamil). This essay presents glimpses in to the commentary literature and the life style of Acharyas to throw light into the knowledge and service rendered by Acharyas for the Tamil languag

A four-channel communications arbiter for multiprocessor arrays

The paper indicates the role of arbitration in multiprocessor arrays and points out the limitations of conventional arbiters for this application. A novel arbitration scheme, called time-out arbitration, which is much more suitable for multiprocessor arrays, is then presented. The design and hardware implementation of a time-out arbiter are then described

A simulator construction methodology for the Shiva multiprocessor system

This paper describes a simulator for the Shiva multiprocessor system and the simulator construction methodology (SCM) used in its creation. The SCM, based on the active functional unit (AFU) construct, is a modern SCM which is flexible, accurate, fast, easy to use, capable of dynamic reconfigurability at run-time, and most of all simple and capable of quick simulator construction. The AFU SCM is capable of all these things through the use of object-oriented software techniques. The Shiva simulator constructed using the AFU SCM is program-driven and capable of micro and macro architectural simulation

Design and evaluation of a dual-microcomputer shared memory system with a shared I/O bus

The design, implementation and evaluation are described of a dual-microcomputer system based on the concept of shared memory. Shared memory is useful for passing large blocks of data and it also provides a means to hold and work with shared data. In addition to the shared memory, a separate bus between the I/O ports of the microcomputers is provided. This bus is utilized for interprocessor synchronization. Software routines helpful in applying the dual-microcomputer system to realistic problems are presented. Performance evaluation of the system is carried out using benchmarks

MAP-Index Coded Media-Based Modulation

Mirror activation pattern (MAP) in media-based modulation (MBM) refers to the ON/OFF status of radio-frequency mirrors, which create different near field geometries for different ON/OFF combinations. In this letter, we introduce a novel coding scheme for MBM in which indices are assigned to MAPs, such that these indices are used as labels for the elements in a Galois field. The MAP indices are then coded across time, and the block transmission is carried out. The resulting signal set has good distance distribution, which leads to good bit error performance. Structured sparse matrix sketching-based signal detection algorithms for the proposed scheme are presented