Neural Network Approaches to Medical Toponym Recognition

Toponym identification, or place name recognition, within epidemiology articles is a crucial task for phylogeographers, as it allows them to analyze the development, spread, and migration of viruses. Although, public databases, such as GenBank (Benson et al., November 2012), contain the geographical information, this information is typically restricted to country and state levels. In order to identify more fine-grained localization information, epidemiologists need to read relevant scientific articles and manually extract place name mentions. In this thesis, we investigate the use of various neural network architectures and language representations to automatically segment and label toponyms within biomedical texts. We demonstrate how our language model based toponym recognizer relying on transformer architecture can achieve state-of-the-art performance. This model uses pre-trained BERT as the backbone and fine tunes on two domains of datasets (general articles and medical articles) in order to measure the generalizability of the approach and cross-domain transfer learning. Using BERT as the backbone of the model, resulted in a large highly parameterized model (340M parameters). In order to obtain a light model architecture we experimented with parameter pruning techniques, specifically we experimented with Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (Frankle and Carbin, May 2019) (LTH), however as indicated by Frankle and Carbin (May 2019), their pruning technique does not scale well to highly parametrized models and loses stability. We proposed a novel technique to augment LTH in order to increase the scalability and stability of this technique to highly parametrized models such as BERT and tested our technique on toponym identification task. The evaluation of the model was performed using a collection of 105 epidemiology articles from PubMed Central (Weissenbacher et al., June 2015). Our proposed model significantly improves the state-of-the-art model by achieving an F-measure of 90.85% compared to 89.13%

Residual influence of organic materials, crop residues, and biofertilizers on performance of succeeding mung bean in an organic rice-based cropping system

The present investigation was undertaken to assess the residual influence of organic materials and biofertilizers applied to rice and wheat on yield, nutrient status, and economics of succeeding mung bean in an organic cropping system. The field experiments were carried out on the research farm of IARI, New Delhi during crop cycles of 2006 to 2007 and 2007 to 2008 to study the effects of residual organic manures, crop residues, and biofertilizers applied to rice and wheat on the performance of succeeding mung bean. The experiment was laid out in a randomized block design with three replications. Treatments consisted of six combinations of different residual organic materials, and biofertilizers included residual farmyard manure (FYM) and vermicompost (VC) applied on nitrogen basis at 60 kg ha-1 to each rice and wheat crops, FYM + wheat and rice residues at 6 t ha-1 and mung bean residue at 3 t ha-1 in succeeding crops (CR), VC + CR, FYM + CR + biofertilizers (B), VC + CR + B, and control (no fertilizer applied). For biofertilizers, cellulolytic culture, phosphate-solubilizing bacteria and Rhizobium applied in mung bean. Results Incorporation of crop residue significantly increased the grain yield of mung bean over residual of FYM and VC by 25.5% and 26.5%, respectively. The combinations of FYM + CR + B and VC + RR + B resulted in the highest increase growth and yield attributing characters of mung bean and increased grain yield of mung bean over the control by 47% and net return by 27%. Conclusions The present study thus indicate that a combination of FYM + CR + B and VC + CR + B were economical for the nutrient need of mung bean in organic farming of rice-based cropping system

THE EFFECT OF COMBINATIONS OF ORGANIC MATERIALS AND BIOFERTILISERS ON PRODUCTIVITY, GRAIN QUALITY, NUTRIENT UPTAKE AND ECONOMICS IN ORGANIC FARMING OF WHEAT

Organic farming often has to deal with a scarcity of readily available nutrients, and this is in contrast to chemical farming which relies on soluble fertilisers. The present study was conducted to ascertain the effect of different combinations of organic manures, rice residues and biofertilisers in organic farming of wheat. The field experiments were carried out on the research farm of Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi in 2006-07 and 2007-08. Treatments consisted of a control (no fertiliser) and six fertiliser treatments, namely, farmyard manure (FYM), vermicompost (VC), FYM + rice residue (RR), VC + RR, FYM + RR + biofertilisers (B), and VC + RR + B. FYM and VC were applied on nitrogen basis (60 kg ha-1), whereas RR was applied at 6 t ha-1. For biofertilisers, Azotobacter, cellulolytic culture (CC) and phosphate solubilising bacteria (PSB) were used. The combinations of FYM + RR + B and VC + RR + B resulted in the highest increased growth and yield attributing characters of wheat and increased grain yield of wheat over the control by 81% and 89% (Year 1 & Year 2), and net return by 82% and 73%. These combinations were significantly superior to all other combinations for all the growth and yield parameters, yield, net profit and grain quality of wheat. The results of this study show that VC + RR + B was the most productive treatment, while FYM + RR + B was the most economical treatment with respect to increasing net profit. This was because of the higher price of vermicompost compared with FYM. Both of these combinations resulted in improved grain quality and nutrient uptake by grain. The present study thus indicates that a combination of FYM + RR + biofertilisers or VC + RR + biofertilisers hold promise for organic wheat farming

Organic Agriculture and Nanotechnology

Organic agriculture is a holistic production management system which promotes and enhances agro-ecosystem health, including biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. On the other hand, nanotechnology is a rapidly developing domain of research and practice, the terminology is in a state of flux and usage is evolving. Nano-applications are being applied across the entire agriculture and food sectors. In agriculture, for example, nano-pesticides and nano-sensors are changing the nature of agricultural production. In regard to use of nanotechnologies in organic production currently, there are no national or international regulation, definitions, licensing or declaration requirements. We are still a long way off from conclusively assessing nanotechnologies or individual substances with nanoparticles, since we do not yet have the toxiclogical and ecological bases to do this. In our view, all of nanotechnology applications should be evaluated case by case. Positive or negative lists seem to be a good tool to regulate the use of nanotechnology in organic agriculture

Effects of Systemic to Pulmonary Shunt on the pulmonary Artery Indices in Children with Pulmonary Atresia and Ventricular Septal Defect

Systemic to pulmonary artery shunt is one of the important treatments in pulmonary atresia–ventricular septal defect (PA-VSD). There are controversial views about the effects of shunt on the growth of pulmonary artery tree. The aim of this study was to assess the early and late effects of systemic to pulmonary shunt by angiography on the increase of pulmonary artery indices (Nakata and Mc Goon), and development of complications in patients with PA-VSD. We retrospectively reviewed the results of 19 PA-VSD patients having systemic to pulmonary shunt and had pre and post operation angiography (inclusion criteria). None of them had large collateral or PDA (exclusion criteria). The mean age of the patients was 5 ± 3.6 years. Ten patients had left shunts, 8 cases had right shunts and one case had a central shunt. After shunt the mean increase in Nakata index was 40.8 mm2/m2 (P=0.08) and in McGoon index was 0.11 (P=0.23). A major stenosis was observed in 1 case. The increase of McGoon index was higher in right shunts and in early years after the operation. We can conclude that systemic to pulmonary shunt can be performed with low risk, providing good palliation and is associated with relative increase of pulmonary artery indices (not significant), and low incidence of major stenosis, especially when the shunt was performed in more than two years old patients

Frequency of Patient Complaints Before and After Legal Medicine Consultation in Orthopedic Ward

Background: Patient who complain of the health community are unpleasant and may endanger the honor of the medical community. However, patients’ complaints can improve the quality of medical services, increase the accuracy of the medical staff, and reduce diagnostic and treatment costs. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of patients’ complaints before and after legal medicine consultation in the orthopedic ward of Taleghani hospital in Tehran, Iran.Methods: This retrospective cross-sectional study investigated the frequency of the complaints of 460 patients before and after legal medicine consultation from spring 2011 to winter 2017. Data were analyzed by excel.Results: The results of this study showed that the frequency of complaints was lowest in spring and highest in fall. The number of complaints and frequencies also decreased over time compared with the previous year. The lowest number of complaints was in 2011 and the highest in 2013.Conclusion: In this study, performing legal medicine consultation in Taleghani hospital in Tehran, Iran reduced the number of registered complaints

ToxBuster: In-game Chat Toxicity Buster with BERT

Detecting toxicity in online spaces is challenging and an ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media and gaming consumption. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model trained on a relatively large dataset of 194k lines of game chat from Rainbow Six Siege and For Honor, carefully annotated for different kinds of toxicity. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art, ToxBuster achieves 82.95% (+7) in precision and 83.56% (+57) in recall. This improvement is obtained by leveraging past chat history and metadata. We also study the implication towards real-time and post-game moderation as well as the model transferability from one game to another.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Cost-effectiveness analysis of cetuximab in treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer in Iranian pharmaceutical market

Background: Cetuximab is a monoclonal antibody which acts against the epidermal growth-factor receptor. Randomized controlled trials show that the addition of cetuximab to folinic acid, 5-flourouracil, irinotecan (FOLFIRI), folinic acid, 5-flourouracil, oxaliplatin (FOLFOX) and capecitabin + oxaliplatin (CAPOX) regimens, as the first-line treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC), increases the overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) compared to FOLFIRI, FOLFOX and CAPOX regimens alone. The aim of this study was to analyze the cost-effectiveness of different treatment programs for managing metastatic CRC with and without cetuximab in the first-line treatment of unresectable metastatic CRC in Iran. Methods: A systematic search of the literature was performed in PubMed, Centre for Reviews and Dissemination Databases and Cochrane Library to assess the effectiveness of the drug in the context of PFS, OS and the adverse events. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of each treatment program was calculated. An extensive sensitivity analysis was conducted on the results regarding the effectiveness. Results: The addition of cetuximab to FOLFIRI, FOLFOX and CAPOX programs increased PFS by 0.1, 0.042 and 0.042 years, respectively. Similarly, the addition of cetuximab to FOLFIRI, FOLFOX and CAPOX increased OS by 0.325, 0.442 and 0.442 years and also cost $212825,$202484 and $204198 individually. Whereas, based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggested threshold for cost-effectiveness analysis, even FOLFOX + cetuximab was very higher than the threshold in Iran (37.4 times higher). Conclusions: The FOLFOX regimen + cetuximab provides lower costs per additional life years gained (more cost-effective) compared with its alternatives in the treatment of patients with unresectable metastatic CRC. However, according to the WHO indicator, none of the cetuximab regimens could be considered as cost effective for the Iranian health care market

Innovation of a new silicone prosthesis for inguinal hernioplasty : new method for silicone prosthesis production, a preliminary study

Purpose: The main strategy in inguinal hernia repair is mesh hernioplasty (specially prolene mesh): Pain in anterior femoral, inguinal and scrotal-areas, Mainly due to sensory-nerve-injury in the very regions and was deferen injury are the-main complications reported following repairing inguinal hernia. In:this study we decided to use semiliquid silicone in order to form it in an in-vivo prosthesis production method to perform hernioplasty. Methods: In this technique, silicone Was produced through Room Temperature Vulcanization (RTV) technique, which is feasible in the; room temperature. The produced semiliquid polymer was shaped in the inguinal canal in six cadavers. Result : While the prostheses adequately covered all the anatomic area Of the canal with an acceptable thickness in all of the cases, a Satisfactory shape was developed in four cases. While 15-20 cc of silicone was-needed to cover all anatomic areas properly the hardness equal to 15 was achieved after curing process. Conclusion: New silicone prosthesis forms satisfyingly in the, inguinal canal and can protect it by encapsulation mechanism. It is soft with no risk of damage to the nerves or vat. It is inert and has no toxicity to the adjacent tissue. This technique of silicone remodeling can also be used in other fields of surgery such as plastic or vascular surgery