Performance analysis of turbo coded OFDM in wireless application

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular modulation method in high speed wireless communications. By partitioning a wideband fading channel into flat narrowband channels, OFDM is able to mitigate the detrimental effects of multi path fading using a simple one- tap equalizer. There is a growing need to quickly transmit information wirelessly and accurately.Engineers have already combine techniques such as OFDM suitable for high data rate transmission with forward error correction (FEC) methods over wireless channels. In this thesis, we enhance the system throughput of a working OFDM system by adding turbo coding. The smart use of coding and power allocation in OFDM will be useful to the desired performance at higher data rates.Error control codes have become a vital part of modern digital wireless systems,enabling reliable transmission to be achieved over noisy channels. Over the past decade,turbo codes have been widely considered to be the most powerful error control code of practical importance. In the same time-scale, mixed voice/data networks have advanced further and the concept of global wireless networks and terrestrial links has emerged. Such networks present the challenge of optimizing error control codes for different channel types,and for the different qualities of service demanded by voice and data

How many people living with HIV will be additionally eligible for antiretroviral treatment in Karnataka State, India as per the World Health Organization 2013 guidelines?

BACKGROUND: The National AIDS control programme (NACP) in India is currently following the World Health Organization (WHO) 2010 antiretroviral therapy (ART) guidelines. In 2013, the WHO revised its recommendations for initiating ART among people living with HIV (PLHIV) by increasing the threshold for ART initiation to a CD4 count ≤500 cells/uL. For certain patient groups, ART is recommended irrespective of CD4 count (PLHIV with active tuberculosis, hepatitis B virus infection, pregnant and breast feeding women, children aged under five years and those living in a sero-discordant relationship). In this operational research, we assess the effect of applying this recommendation on the number of PLHIV additionally eligible for ART. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional analysis of routinely collected programme data from all PLHIV registered in Karnataka State (population 60 million), India in 2012. RESULTS: Of 37,044 PLHIV, 27,074 (73%) were eligible for initiating ART as per WHO-2010 criteria. As per the WHO-2013 criteria (CD4 count ≤500 and all pregnant women and under-five children irrespective of CD4 count), an additional 5104 (14%) HIV-infected people would be eligible for initiating ART. There were no data to inform the additional patient load due to sero-discordance. CONCLUSION: Adopting the WHO-2013 guidelines for India has important resource implications. However, given the significant patient and programmatic benefits of adopting the new guidelines, this has been considered favourably by the NACP in India and steps are being planned to integrate ART care into the general health system to cope with the increased numbers of patients

StressNet: a spatial-spectral-temporal deformable attention-based framework for water stress classification in maize

In recent years, monitoring the health of crops has been greatly aided by deploying highthroughput crop monitoring techniques that integrate remotely captured imagery and deep learning techniques. Most methods rely mainly on the visible spectrum for analyzing the abiotic stress, such as water deficiency in crops. In this study, we carry out experiments on maize crop in a controlled environment of different water treatments. We make use of a multispectral camera mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for collecting the data from the tillering stage to the heading stage of the crop. A pre-processing pipeline, followed by the extraction of the Region of Interest from orthomosaic is explained. We propose a model based on a Convolution Neural Network, added with a deformable convolutional layer in order to learn and extract rich spatial and spectral features. These features are further fed to a weighted Attention-based Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory network to process the sequential dependency between temporal features. Finally, the water stress category is predicted using the aggregated Spatial-Spectral-Temporal Characteristics. The addition of multispectral, multi-temporal imagery significantly improved accuracy when compared with mono-temporal classification. By incorporating a deformable convolutional layer and Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory network with weighted attention, our proposed model achieved best accuracy of 91.30% with a precision of 0.8888 and a recall of 0.8857. The results indicate that multispectral, multi-temporal imagery is a valuable tool for extracting and aggregating discriminative spatial-spectral-temporal characteristics for water stress classification

Severity of Psoriasis Associates With Aortic Vascular Inflammation Detected by FDG PET/CT and Neutrophil Activation in a Prospective Observational Study.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Heart Association via http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/ATVBAHA.115.306460OBJECTIVE: To understand whether directly measured psoriasis severity is associated with vascular inflammation assessed by (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography computed tomography. APPROACH: In-depth cardiovascular and metabolic phenotyping was performed in adult psoriasis patients (n=60) and controls (n=20). Psoriasis severity was measured using psoriasis area severity index. Vascular inflammation was measured using average aortic target-to-background ratio using (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography computed tomography. RESULTS: Both the psoriasis patients (28 men and 32 women, mean age 47 years) and controls (13 men and 7 women, mean age 41 years) were young with low cardiovascular risk. Psoriasis area severity index scores (median 5.4; interquartile range 2.8-8.3) were consistent with mild-to-moderate skin disease severity. Increasing psoriasis area severity index score was associated with an increase in aortic target-to-background ratio (β=0.41, P=0.001), an association that changed little after adjustment for age, sex, and Framingham risk score. We observed evidence of increased neutrophil frequency (mean psoriasis, 3.7±1.2 versus 2.9±1.2; P=0.02) and activation by lower neutrophil surface CD16 and CD62L in blood. Serum levels of S100A8/A9 (745.1±53.3 versus 195.4±157.8 ng/mL; P<0.01) and neutrophil elastase-1 (43.0±2.4 versus 30.8±6.7 ng/mL; P<0.001) were elevated in psoriasis. Finally, S100A8/A9 protein was related to both psoriasis skin disease severity (β=0.53; P=0.02) and vascular inflammation (β=0.48; P=0.02). CONCLUSIONS: Psoriasis severity is associated with vascular inflammation beyond cardiovascular risk factors. Psoriasis increased neutrophil activation and neutrophil markers, and S100A8/A9 was related to both skin disease severity and vascular inflammation.JMT is supported by a Wellcome Trust research training fellowship (104492/Z/14/Z) and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre. JHFR is part-supported by the HEFCE, the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the British Heart Foundation, and the Wellcome Trus

Global patient outcomes after elective surgery: prospective cohort study in 27 low-, middle- and high-income countries.

BACKGROUND: As global initiatives increase patient access to surgical treatments, there remains a need to understand the adverse effects of surgery and define appropriate levels of perioperative care. METHODS: We designed a prospective international 7-day cohort study of outcomes following elective adult inpatient surgery in 27 countries. The primary outcome was in-hospital complications. Secondary outcomes were death following a complication (failure to rescue) and death in hospital. Process measures were admission to critical care immediately after surgery or to treat a complication and duration of hospital stay. A single definition of critical care was used for all countries. RESULTS: A total of 474 hospitals in 19 high-, 7 middle- and 1 low-income country were included in the primary analysis. Data included 44 814 patients with a median hospital stay of 4 (range 2-7) days. A total of 7508 patients (16.8%) developed one or more postoperative complication and 207 died (0.5%). The overall mortality among patients who developed complications was 2.8%. Mortality following complications ranged from 2.4% for pulmonary embolism to 43.9% for cardiac arrest. A total of 4360 (9.7%) patients were admitted to a critical care unit as routine immediately after surgery, of whom 2198 (50.4%) developed a complication, with 105 (2.4%) deaths. A total of 1233 patients (16.4%) were admitted to a critical care unit to treat complications, with 119 (9.7%) deaths. Despite lower baseline risk, outcomes were similar in low- and middle-income compared with high-income countries. CONCLUSIONS: Poor patient outcomes are common after inpatient surgery. Global initiatives to increase access to surgical treatments should also address the need for safe perioperative care. STUDY REGISTRATION: ISRCTN5181700

Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for death and disability, but its overall association with health remains complex given the possible protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption on some conditions. With our comprehensive approach to health accounting within the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016, we generated improved estimates of alcohol use and alcohol-attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 195 locations from 1990 to 2016, for both sexes and for 5-year age groups between the ages of 15 years and 95 years and older. Methods Using 694 data sources of individual and population-level alcohol consumption, along with 592 prospective and retrospective studies on the risk of alcohol use, we produced estimates of the prevalence of current drinking, abstention, the distribution of alcohol consumption among current drinkers in standard drinks daily (defined as 10 g of pure ethyl alcohol), and alcohol-attributable deaths and DALYs. We made several methodological improvements compared with previous estimates: first, we adjusted alcohol sales estimates to take into account tourist and unrecorded consumption; second, we did a new meta-analysis of relative risks for 23 health outcomes associated with alcohol use; and third, we developed a new method to quantify the level of alcohol consumption that minimises the overall risk to individual health. Findings Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016, accounting for 2.2% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1.5-3.0) of age-standardised female deaths and 6.8% (5.8-8.0) of age-standardised male deaths. Among the population aged 15-49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally in 2016, with 3.8% (95% UI 3.2-4-3) of female deaths and 12.2% (10.8-13-6) of male deaths attributable to alcohol use. For the population aged 15-49 years, female attributable DALYs were 2.3% (95% UI 2.0-2.6) and male attributable DALYs were 8.9% (7.8-9.9). The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1.4% [95% UI 1. 0-1. 7] of total deaths), road injuries (1.2% [0.7-1.9]), and self-harm (1.1% [0.6-1.5]). For populations aged 50 years and older, cancers accounted for a large proportion of total alcohol-attributable deaths in 2016, constituting 27.1% (95% UI 21.2-33.3) of total alcohol-attributable female deaths and 18.9% (15.3-22.6) of male deaths. The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0.0-0.8) standard drinks per week. Interpretation Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.Peer reviewe

Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for death and disability, but its overall association with health remains complex given the possible protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption on some conditions. With our comprehensive approach to health accounting within the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016, we generated improved estimates of alcohol use and alcohol-attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 195 locations from 1990 to 2016, for both sexes and for 5-year age groups between the ages of 15 years and 95 years and older. METHODS: Using 694 data sources of individual and population-level alcohol consumption, along with 592 prospective and retrospective studies on the risk of alcohol use, we produced estimates of the prevalence of current drinking, abstention, the distribution of alcohol consumption among current drinkers in standard drinks daily (defined as 10 g of pure ethyl alcohol), and alcohol-attributable deaths and DALYs. We made several methodological improvements compared with previous estimates: first, we adjusted alcohol sales estimates to take into account tourist and unrecorded consumption; second, we did a new meta-analysis of relative risks for 23 health outcomes associated with alcohol use; and third, we developed a new method to quantify the level of alcohol consumption that minimises the overall risk to individual health. FINDINGS: Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016, accounting for 2·2% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1·5–3·0) of age-standardised female deaths and 6·8% (5·8–8·0) of age-standardised male deaths. Among the population aged 15–49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally in 2016, with 3·8% (95% UI 3·2–4·3) of female deaths and 12·2% (10·8–13·6) of male deaths attributable to alcohol use. For the population aged 15–49 years, female attributable DALYs were 2·3% (95% UI 2·0–2·6) and male attributable DALYs were 8·9% (7·8–9·9). The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1·4% [95% UI 1·0–1·7] of total deaths), road injuries (1·2% [0·7–1·9]), and self-harm (1·1% [0·6–1·5]). For populations aged 50 years and older, cancers accounted for a large proportion of total alcohol-attributable deaths in 2016, constituting 27·1% (95% UI 21·2–33·3) of total alcohol-attributable female deaths and 18·9% (15·3–22·6) of male deaths. The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0·0–0·8) standard drinks per week. INTERPRETATION: Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Classification of eye diseases using optic cup segmentation and optic disc ratio and its implementation using VHDL

The proposed work consists reprocessing using morphological operations and then segmentation of optic disc and optic cup by using the morphological operations. These operations are minimizing errors detection limit of the optic disc due to blood vessels cross. Then, the cup to disc ratio (CDR) is calculated using these operations. The cup to disc ratio is more than 0.3 then patients are glaucoma otherwise normal. Spatially Weighted Fuzzy C Mean (SWFCM) clustering method is used to segment the optic disc and Superpixel algorithm is used to segment the optic cup. The segmented optic disc and cup are then used to compute the CDR for glaucoma screening. Optic disc and cup segmentation of fundus image are considered for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection and Glaucoma detection. In this paper, we are considering one simple image and its part will be implemented by using VHDL family Altra Quartus II, which is a programmable logic device design software produced by Altera. Quartus II enables analysis and synthesis of HDL designs, which enables the developer to compile their designs, perform timing analysis, examine RTL diagrams, simulate a design's reaction to different stimuli, and configure the target device with the programmer. Quartus includes an implementation of VHDL and Verilog for hardware description, visual editing of logic circuits, and vector waveform simulation. The implemented results using MATLAB shows accurate results obtained both for diabetic retinopathy as well as glaucoma

Optimum Sowing Window and Suitable Varieties for Cultivation Soybean (Glycine max L.) During Off-Season in Northern Telangana Zone

Aims: To identify the optimum sowing time and suitable varieties of soybean for profitable cultivation during the off-season in the Northern Telangana Agroclimatic zone of Telangana state in India. Study Design:&nbsp; Strip plot design with three replications. Place and Duration of Study: The Regional Sugarcane and Rice Research Station, Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU), Rudrur, Nizamabad District, Telangana state, India, between October 2022 and June 2023. Methodology: The field experiment was conducted in medium clay loam soil under irrigated condition. The experiment was laid out in strip plot design with three varieties viz., JS 335 (V1), ASB 22 (V2) and KDS 726 (V3) as horizontal strips and nine dates of sowings viz., 3 Oct (D1), 19 Oct (D2), 3 Nov (D3), 19 Nov (D4), 3 Dec (D5) 19 Dec (D6), 3 Jan (D7), 19 Jan (D8) and 3 Feb (D9) as vertical strips, replicated thrice. The seeds were sown by dibbling at 5 cm apart within the row and rows were space at 45 cm apart. Standard recommended package of practice of kharif season suggested by PJTSAU was followed. The data on growth yield attributes was recorded on selected 5 plant, averaged/ plant and grain yield was recorded from net plot, converted to one hectare and analyzed statistically using OP Stat. Results: The results of the experiment revealed that, the cv. KDS 726 recorded the maximum plant height (35.2 cm) and biomass accumulation (8.93 g plant-1) which was significantly more over the cv. JS 335 and cv. ASB 22 in 3 Nov and 19 Oct sowings, respectively. The cultivars the cv. JS 335 (V1) recorded more number of pods over cv. ASB 22 (V2) and cv. KDS 726 (V3) in 19 Oct (D2), 3 Nov (D3), 19 Nov (D4), 3 Dec (D5) and 3 Jan (D7) sowings. The cv. KDS 726 (V3) was found superior in terms of seeds pod -1 (3.0) which was comparable to cv. JS 335 (V1) and significantly more over cv. ASB 22 (V2) when it was sown on 19 Oct (D2). The cv. KDS 726 (V3) recorded significantly more test weight (g) over cv. JS 335 (V1) and cv. ASB 22 (V2) from 19 Oct (D2) to 3 Jan (D7) sowings. The cv. ASB 22 sown on 3 Oct produced significantly more seed yield (753 kg ha-1) and haulm yield (1599 kg ha-1) over cv. JS 335 and cv. (KDS 726).&nbsp; Conclusion: The soybean cv. ASB 22 with sowing first week of Oct was found to be suitable for cultivation during the off season