Penetrating cardiac trauma: A retrospective case series from Karachi.

Penetrating cardiac trauma is a medical emergency that commonly affects young men throughout the world. A retrospective review of the records of all patients presenting with cardiac injury was done from January 2000 to December 2015 at our institute. There were 10 cases of such trauma, all of whom were males, 17 to 48 years of age. The most common mechanism of injury was gunshot wounds followed by stab wounds. The Mean Revised Trauma Score was 7.23±0.855. Only 2 out of the total 10 patients died (20% mortality). The Right Ventricle followed by the Left Ventricle was the most common site of injury. Median Sternotomy was the surgical procedure of choice in managing these patients. Pericardial tamponade and Haemothorax were common intra-operative findings. Patients having penetrating cardiac injury presenting with detectable signs of life on arrival to the hospital can be rescued by early surgical interventio

Neurosymbolic visual reasoning with scene graph enrichment

Visual reasoning is a critical component of artificial intelligence that aims to understand, interpret, and reason about complex visual content. It has an interdisciplinary nature incorporating visual feature extraction and image generation from computer vision, linguistic feature extraction and language generation from natural language processing, and graph-based representation and semantic enrichment from knowledge representation and reasoning. Data-centric visual reasoning techniques often face limitations in intuitively interpreting visual content due to the limited expressiveness and generalisability of scene representations. We propose a knowledge-enhanced neurosymbolic visual reasoning framework based on scene graph enrichment. This framework employs deep learning techniques for object detection and relationship prediction in visual content to generate scene graph representations, which are then refined and semantically enriched using common sense knowledge extracted from a heterogeneous knowledge graph. The enriched scene graphs are used in downstream visual reasoning tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering and image generation. A comprehensive experimental analysis on the standard datasets and evaluation benchmarks demonstrates considerable improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of relationship recall rate, image captioning quality, question answering accuracy and image generation realism. The encouraging results validate the effectiveness of leveraging heterogeneous common sense knowledge for enhanced scene understanding and visual reasoning.2025-02-2

iVision HHID: Handwritten hyperspectral images dataset for benchmarking hyperspectral imaging-based document forensic analysis

This article presents a dataset of hyperspectral images of handwriting samples collected from 54 individuals. The purpose of the presented dataset is to further explore the use of hyperspectral imaging in document image analysis and to benchmark the performance of forensic analysis methods for hyperspectral document images. Each hyperspectral cube in the dataset has a spatial resolution of 512 × 650 pixels and contains 149 spectral channels in the spectral range of 478–901 nm. All the individuals have different personalities and have their writing patterns. The information of age and gender of each individual is collected. Each subject has written twenty-eight sentences using 12 different varieties of pens from different brands in blue color, each approximately 9 words or 33 characters long, all English alphabets in capital and small cases, digits from 0 to 9. The previous methods use synthetic mixed samples created by joining different parts of the images from the UWA WIHSI dataset.Each document consists of real mixed samples written withdifferent pens and by different writers with a variety of mixing ratios of inks and writers for forensic analysis.The standard A4 pages, each weighing 70 gs and manufactured by “AA” company, are used for data collection. The handwritten notes written by each subject with different pens are annotated in rectangular boxes. This dataset can be used for several tasks related to hyperspectral document image analysis and document forensic analysis including, handwritten optical character recognition, ink mismatch detection, writer identification at sentence, word, and character-level, handwriting-based gender classification, handwriting-based age prediction, handwritten word segmentation, and word generation. This dataset was designed and collected by the research team at the Artificial intelligence and Computer Vision Lab (iVision), Institute of Space Technology, Pakistan, and the hyperspectral images were acquired through imaging spectroscopy in the visible wavelength range at Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands

Robust and computationally efficient online image stabilisation framework based on adaptive dual motion vector integration

Image stabilisation aims to compensate and smoothen the effects of undesired trembling motion of cameras mounted on non‐static platforms. It becomes quite a challenging task in the case of moving platforms, such as ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and handheld devices. Many satisfactory solutions to the image stabilisation problem are proposed in the recent literature, but most of these methods are not adaptable for handling a wide range of intentional motions with minimum lag, especially in real‐time scenarios. In this study, the authors propose an online two‐dimensional image stabilisation technique based on dual motion vector integration, which is a novel adaptive motion smoothing technique that employs an average length of motion vectors to estimate the intentional motion. The overall computational cost of the proposed system is significantly reduced by employing frame‐shaking judgment that only allows processing of jittering frames. Promising experimental results have been obtained on challenging videos obtained from hand‐held and vehicle‐mounted cameras which demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed technique against feature point mismatching and presence of moving objects within the scene at a frame rate of 30 frames per second

Overview of the mutational landscape in primary myelofibrosis and advances in novel therapeutics

Primary Myelofibrosis is a BCR-ABL negative myeloproliferative neoplasm with a variety of hematological presentations, including thrombosis, bleeding diathesis and marrow fibrosis. It is estimated to have an incidence of 1.5 per 100,000 people each year. Although JAK2 or MPL mutations are seen in PMF, several other mutations have recently been documented, including mutations in CALR, epigenetic regulators like TET, ASXL1, and 13q deletions. The identification of these mutations has improved the ability to develop novel treatment options. These include JAK inhibitors like ruxolitinib, heat shock protein-90 inhibitors like ganetespib, histone deacetylase inhibitors including panobinostat, pracinostat, vorinostat and givinostat, hypomethylating agents like decitabine, hedgehog inhibitors like glasdegib, PI3K, AKT and mTOR inhibitors like everolimus as well as telomerase inhibitors like imtelstat. Research on novel therapeutic options is being actively pursued in order to expand treatment options for primary myelofibrosis however currently, there is no curative therapy other than allogenic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (ASCT) which is possible in select patients

Conducting the Pakistan brain tumour epidemiology study - report on the methodology

Objective: To combat the lack of brain tumour registries, the Pakistan Brain Tumour Epidemiology Study (PBTES) was conducted without any funding from an external source. Methods: A retrospective analysis of patient data, including patients of all age groups diagnosed with all histopathological types of brain tumours from all over Pakistan, was performed. For this, Pakistan Brain Tumour Consortium (PBTC) was established, including 32 neurosurgical centres from around the country. Data was collected online through a proforma that included variables such as patient demographics, clinical characteristics, operative details, postoperative complications, survival indices, and current functional status. The data collection and analysis team included principal investigators, core leads, regional leads, regional associates, and student facilitators. Despite logistical concerns and lack of resources, the PBTES was conducted successfully, and a formal brain tumour surveillance database was formed without any external funding, which remains unheard of. Conclusion: The methods applied in this study are reproducible and can be employed not just to develop more robust brain tumour and other cancer registries but also to study the epidemiology of communicable and non-communicable diseases in resource-limited settings, both locally and globally.  Keywords: brain neoplasms, retrospective study, epidemiology, noncommunicable diseases. Continue..

A national overview of paediatric and adolescent and young adult surgical neuro-oncology in Pakistan

Objective: To build a comprehensive brain tumour database that will allow us to analyse in detail the prevalence, demographics, and outcomes of the disease in paediatric, adolescent, and young adult age groups. Method: A national cross-sectional study was conducted at 32 centres, and data regarding patient demographics and brain tumours were collected. This data was then stratified based on age groups, healthcare sectors, socioeconomic status, tumour types, and surgical outcomes. Result: Most of the patients who were diagnosed with brain tumours belonged to a lower socioeconomic background and went to public sector hospitals. More males were diagnosed with and treated for brain tumours in the paediatric, adolescent, and young adult populations. The most common tumour in the paediatric population was medulloblastoma (23.7%) and the most common tumour in the adolescent (27.8%) and young adult population (34.7%) was glioma. Significant improvement in KPS scores were seen for: craniopharyngioma (p = 0.001), meningioma (p < 0.0005) and pituitary adenoma (p < 0.0005) Conclusion: This study shows that in all three age groups, there was a greater prevalence in males. Most of the patients belonged to a lower-middle-income class background and most patients presented to public sector hospitals. Greater knowledge of these parameters unique to each age group is the key to understanding and alleviating the burden of disease. Cancer registries, specifically brain tumour registries that keep up-to-date records of these patients, are essential to identify and keep track of these unique parameters to advance medical research and treatment strategies, ultimately lowering the disease burden. Keywords:  Pediatric, Neuro-oncology, Adolescent and young adult, AYA, Medulloblastoma, Craniopharyngioma, Epidemiology