Thoracoscopic Drainage of Para-Vertebral Abscess - Report of Two Cases

Tuberculosis of the spine is common in tropical countries like Bangladesh and it is the most common site of skeletaltuberculosis as a whole. In addition to the anti-tubercular chemotherapy, paravertebral abscess often require surgicaldecompression. Surgical intervention for the thoracic region needs formal thoracotomy which involves a very longincision over the chest. In this regards, thoracoscopic drainage would have been a good option. Two patients (one 53years old female and other 20 years old male) with para- vertebral abscess with compression and collapse of vertebralbodies resulting cord compression presented with neurological symptoms underwent video assisted thoracoscopicdrainage with biopsy from the abscess wall using a standard laparoscope (as thoracoscope) at the BangabandhuSheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU), and a private hospital in Dhaka. The patients were fed on 1st post operativeday and antituberculer chemotheraphy was continued. Post-operative period was uneventful and the patients weredischarged on 8th post operative day with antituberculer chemotheraphy. There was a gradual improvement of neurologicalsymptoms of lower limbs. Till date the 1st and 2nd patient were followed-up for a period of 18 and 12 months respectively.The condition of both patients improved gradually with no neurological deficit. To the best of our knowledge, there wasno previous report of thoracoscopic drainage of para-vertebral abscess from Bangladesh. So this is the 1st report in ourcountry. Thoracoscopic drainage of para-vertebral abscess appears to be a technically feasible, patient friendly modalityof treatment for the spinal tuberculosis in experienced hand with excellent cosmetic out come.Key words: Thoracoscopic drainage; paravertebral abscessDOI: 10.3329/bsmmuj.v3i1.5513BSMMU J 2010; 3(1): 35-3

J MEDICINE 2010; 11: 83-85 IMAGING NEGATIVE PARATHYROID ADENOMA

Primary hyperparathyroidism typically presents with skeletal and renal manifestations. In most (80–85%) cases, the cause is a single parathyroid adenoma. We present a case of 36-year-old lady of primary hyperparathyroidism presented with multiple fractures, nephrolithiasis, and nephrocalcinosis. All of the imaging techniques to localize the cause were negative. She underwent surgical neck exploration with detection of left parathyroid adenoma. Her post-operative period was uneventful with significant clinical and biochemical improvement

Tackling Fake News in Bengali: Unraveling the Impact of Summarization vs. Augmentation on Pre-trained Language Models

With the rise of social media and online news sources, fake news has become a significant issue globally. However, the detection of fake news in low resource languages like Bengali has received limited attention in research. In this paper, we propose a methodology consisting of four distinct approaches to classify fake news articles in Bengali using summarization and augmentation techniques with five pre-trained language models. Our approach includes translating English news articles and using augmentation techniques to curb the deficit of fake news articles. Our research also focused on summarizing the news to tackle the token length limitation of BERT based models. Through extensive experimentation and rigorous evaluation, we show the effectiveness of summarization and augmentation in the case of Bengali fake news detection. We evaluated our models using three separate test datasets. The BanglaBERT Base model, when combined with augmentation techniques, achieved an impressive accuracy of 96% on the first test dataset. On the second test dataset, the BanglaBERT model, trained with summarized augmented news articles achieved 97% accuracy. Lastly, the mBERT Base model achieved an accuracy of 86% on the third test dataset which was reserved for generalization performance evaluation. The datasets and implementations are available at https://github.com/arman-sakif/Bengali-Fake-News-DetectionComment: Under Revie