Study of the relationship between initial autonomic functions and subsequent motor and sensory recovery, in traumatic cervical spinal cord injury patients

INTRODUCTION: Spinal cord injury (SCI) results in multisystem dysfunction. It is a devastating event which often leads to permanent neurological deficits. Recovery of the SCI quadriplegic patient depends to a large extent on the amount of tract fibres that are intact. Currently the SCI patients are classified based on the extent of preserved motor and sensory functions into American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale (AIS) grade A,B,C,D and E (in the order of least to most preserved motor and sensory functions. This classification does not take into account the intactness of the autonomic fibres. Some of the patients show functional improvement by the end of the rehabilitation programme and shift to higher AIS grades. As of now it is not possible to predict accurately which patients will improve. When a cervical SCI patient is admitted for rehabilitation, the clinicians are faced with the dilemma of predicting the recovery in them. The patients themselves and their relatives would like to know the extent to which the patient will recover functionally after rehabilitation. OBJECTIVES: To study whether autonomic pathway integrity assessed through the sympathetic skin response and short-term heart rate variability indices, is useful for prognostication in traumatic cervical spinal cord injury quadriplegic patients. METHODS: Short-term heart rate variability (HRV) indices computed in 24 cervical spinal cord injury AIS grade A/B patients, at the time of admission, were correlated with the change in motor and sensory scores at the end of the rehabilitation programme, using Spearman’s correlation coefficient. Fisher’s exact test was used to study the association between the presence/absence of sympathetic skin response (SSR) at the time of admission and the change in AIS grade at the end of the rehabilitation programme. RESULTS: There was no statistically significant correlation between the HRV indices and the change in motor and sensory scores. Neither was there any statistically significant association between the presence or absence of SSR at the time of admission and the subsequent improvement in AIS grade. The findings of the present study indicate that HRV indices and SSR are not useful parameters to prognosticate recovery in traumatic cervical spinal cord injury quadriplegic patients

Anti (Q, L)-Fuzzy Subhemirings of a Hemiring

In this paper, an attempt has been made to study the algebraic nature of an anti (Q, L)-fuzzy subhemirings of a hemi ring

Complex free energy landscapes in biaxial nematics and role of repulsive interactions : A Wang - Landau study

General quadratic Hamiltonian models, describing interaction between crystal molecules (typically with $D_{2h}$ symmetry) take into account couplings between their uniaxial and biaxial tensors. While the attractive contributions arising from interactions between similar tensors of the participating molecules provide for eventual condensation of the respective orders at suitably low temperatures, the role of cross-coupling between unlike tensors is not fully appreciated. Our recent study with an advanced Monte Carlo technique (entropic sampling) showed clearly the increasing relevance of this cross term in determining the phase diagram, contravening in some regions of model parameter space, the predictions of mean field theory and standard Monte Carlo simulation results. In this context, we investigated the phase diagrams and the nature of the phases therein, on two trajectories in the parameter space: one is a line in the interior region of biaxial stability believed to be representative of the real systems, and the second is the extensively investigated parabolic path resulting from the London dispersion approximation. In both the cases, we find the destabilizing effect of increased cross-coupling interactions, which invariably result in the formation of local biaxial organizations inhomogeneously distributed. This manifests as a small, but unmistakable, contribution of biaxial order in the uniaxial phase.The free energy profiles computed in the present study as a function of the two dominant order parameters indicate complex landscapes, reflecting the difficulties in the ready realization of the biaxial phase in the laboratory.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

Water quality studies of Hoskerehalli lake of Bangalore, Karnataka

The aim of the current study was to evaluate the status of the Hoskerehalli lake water with respect to different physicochemical parameters [pH, temperature, total dissolved solids (TDS), turbidity, electrical conductivity (EC), total hardness (TH), alkalinity, dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), phosphate, sulphate, nitrate and potassium] during the year 2005. These parameters were compared with water quality standards to indicate probable pollution. However, the overall water quality of the lake remained within the safe limits throughout the study period. Correlation coefficient matrix between each parameter were estimated to throw light on relationship between different physicochemical parameters under investigation, few parameters like pH - temperature (r = 0.712), TDS - turbidity (r = 0.800), TDS - conductivity (r = 0.988), turbidity - conductivity (r = 0.781), temperature - alkalinity (r = 0.822), sulphate - potassium (r = 0.724) showed good positive correlation. The lake water quality is good and fit for irrigation and fish culture purpose

Evaluation of Bacteriological Water Quality, Bangalore-In View of Public health.

From a public health perspective, access to sufficient amounts of clean and safe drinking water is a crucial issue. The provision of good quality household drinking water is often regarded as an important means of improving health. The study was undertaken to analyze the bacterial water quality in Bangalore district, Karnataka. The bacteriological analysis was carried out using the multiple tube technique (MPN- Most Probable Number) for detection of faecal coliform and subsequently organisms present in the sample of water were identified following standard methods. The identified organisms include E. coli, Staphylococcus species, Citrobacter species, Enterobacter, Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteus species, Pseudomonas, Serratia species. 60% of the isolated organism being of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The total heterotrophic plate count (THPC) gave a range of 1.5*104 to 2.2*104 CFU/ml while the total coliform plate count (TCPC) gave a range of 2*103 to 8.3*103 CFU/ml. The presumptive faecal coliform ranged between 0-180 coliform per 100 ml. E. coli / fecal coliform were detected in 60 % of the water sample

Evaluation of the Microbial Pollution of Water in Ramasandra Lake, Bangalore, Karnataka and Assessment of Multiple Antibiotic Resistance among Escherichia Coli

An experiment was designed to examine microbiology of water samples of Ramasandra Lake and further assess the occurance of the multiple antibiotic resistance of E coli. Analysis of the water samples obtained from the lake indicates high microbial and fecal contamination with microbial load in order of 105 and MPN >1800/100ml. Collected water samples from four stations were screened for the E coli to assess their resistance to 10 different antibiotics. Of the 14 E coli isolates 0% were susceptible to all antibiotics used. The isolates were found resistance to penicillin and tetracycline (100%). Among the 10 antibiotics tested, four pattern of antibiotics resistance were obtained and all of them were multiple antibiotic resistance with the number of antibiotics ranging from 2 to 7. The result indicates the developing antibiotic resistant E coli may be a serious threat on public health, aquatic organisms and environment

Memory and I/O optimized rectilinear steiner minimum tree routing for VLSI

As the size of devices are scaling down at rapid pace, the interconnect delay play a major part in performance of IC chips. Therefore minimizing delay and wire length is the most desired objective. FLUTE (Fast Look-Up table) presented a fast and accurate RSMT (Rectilinear Steiner Minimum Tree) construction for both smaller and higher degree net. FLUTE presented an optimization technique that reduces time complexity for RSMT construction for both smaller and larger degree nets. However for larger degree net this technique induces memory overhead, as it does not consider the memory requirement in constructing RSMT. Since availability of memory is very less and is expensive, it is desired to utilize memory more efficiently which in turn results in reducing I/O time (i.e. reduce the number of I/O disk access). The proposed work presents a Memory Optimized RSMT (MORSMT) construction in order to address the memory overhead for larger degree net. The depth-first search and divide and conquer approach is adopted to build a Memory optimized tree. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed approach over existing model for varied benchmarks in terms of computation time, memory overhead and wire length. The experimental results show that the proposed model is scalable and efficient