CAN SHOE SIZE CORRECTLY PREDICT THE SIZE OF COMPONENTS OF TOTAL KNEE REPLACEMENT PRE-OPERATIVELY

Objective: To ascertain the correlation between shoe size and sizes of femoral and tibial components of total knee replacement preoperatively in patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty. Study design: Prospective cohort study Study settings and duration: This study was conducted at department of orthopedic surgery, Shifa International Hospital, Islamabad from July 2020 – December 2020. Material and methods: Sample size was calculated using WHO calculator and it was 43 patients in total. Patients were approached through non-probability consecutive sampling. Shoe size of patients was measured using a Brannock device. During surgery, Implant model and sizes of the femoral and tibial components implanted during knee replacement were noted. Data was analyzed with the help of SPSS version 24. We applied Pearson’s correlation cofficeint. P value ≤ 0.05 was considered significant. Results: Out of 43, there were 9(20.9%) male and female 34(79.1%). Mean age of patients was 51.7±6.8 (SD). We found good positive correlation between shoe size and tibial component (p=<0.001). Positive co relation was found between femoral component and shoe size (p=0.001). Shoe size predict 72% of Tibial component and 65% femoral component. Conclusion: Shoe size is effective and safe predictors of total knee replacement components pre-operatively. This procedure is more accurate and less labor intensive. Accurate templating result in less surgical duration and provide several benefits to patients and health care providers.  

A reliable energy-balancing multi-group (REM) routing protocol for firefighter communication networks

In a fire rescue operation, a fast, reliable, and robust communication system is needed to quickly take control of the emergent situation. One of the most important issues in firefighter communication networks (FCNs) is the design of a specialized routing protocol that caters to the specific needs of the fire rescue application. This paper proposes a reliable, energy-balancing, multi-group (REM) routing protocol for an FCN. Since firefighters work in groups, a cluster-based hierarchical approach was adopted. REM is intended to achieve reliability and energy balancing in data communication by incorporating metric-based cluster head (CH) selection, CH rotation among cluster members, and a routing algorithm. Within a cluster, the node with highest metric value based on residual energy and number of connections is chosen as the CH. The CH's responsibilities are rotated periodically among the cluster members. REM chooses nodes with a higher metric based on residual energy, number of connections, and number of hopsto the base station (BS) as the next hop for forwarding data to the BS. This helps to achieve reliability, less delay, and energy balancing when compared with other routing schemes, as evident from the simulation results.Peer reviewe