Clinical study of central serous chorioretinopathy presenting in a tertiary care centre

Background: Central Serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR) is one of the common causes of visual handicap affecting young people of highly intellectual professionals at the peak of their career which can lead to irrecoverable loss of vision.Methods: The present prospective observational population-based study was conducted in the Department of Ophthalmology, S.C.B. Medical College, Cuttack, Odisha from October 2013 to September 2015. The total number of patients attended the Outpatient Department (OPD) during the study period were 1,83,199. Amongst which 123 patients diagnosed to have CSCR were selected for the present study.Results: Incidence of CSCR during in this study period was 0.06%. The age group most commonly affected was 31 to 40 years. Males were affected 7 times more commonly than females. Increased incidence was noticed in bank employees (21.1 %) and IT professionals (17.8%).Conclusions: There was increased incidence of the disease in people under stressful life condition

A clinical study on retinopathy of prematurity in a tertiary care centre

Background: Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a multifactorial vasoproliferative retinal disorder that increases in incidence with decreasing gestational age. India shares 20% of the world childhood blindness. Besides congenital cataract, congenital glaucoma and ocular injuries, ROP is emerging as one of the important causes of childhood blindness in India.Methods: This hospital based prospective study was undertaken during October 2016 to September 2018 in the Department of Ophthalmology, SCB Medical College. Authors included (a) all preterm infants weighing less than 1750gm or gestational age less than 34 weeks at birth, (b) infants with birth weight between 1750gm to 2000gm and gestational age more than 34 weeks (late preterm and term infants) those were considered as high risk.Results: Among the 328 babies included in our study, the incidence of ROP was 29.57%. Bilateral ROP was found in 76.29% with nearly equal stages in both eyes and only 23 neonates showed unilateral involvement.Conclusions: Low birth weight, lower gestational age, blood transfusion, Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS), apnoea, supplemental oxygen therapy, maternal anaemia and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) were strongly associated with development of ROP

Kendrapada Sheep: An Insight Into Productivity and Genetic Potential of this Prolific Breed

Kendrapada sheep of Odisha is a prolific, medium stature meat type breed. The Kendrapada sheep is the second prolific sheep of India after Garrole of West Bengal, which carries FecB mutation, responsible for prolificacy. The reproductive traits of this sheep is the major attribute where the ewe of this sheep comes to heat at around 10–11 months and drops its first lamb at around 15–16 months of age. The average lambing interval in these sheep is 8 months with gestation period of 150 days. The reproductive performance of these sheep is the uniqueness of this sheep population with more than 70% multiple births; 62.8% twinning, 2.3% triplet and 1% quadruplets. Thus research should be undertaken to conserve the valuable germplasm of Kendrapada sheep to improve the other breeds of India which are good in context of weight gain but lack prolificacy. As sheep are well adapted to diverse climatic conditions they can easily thrive on wide variety of grasses and crop residues thus fits well in zero input free grazing system of rearing by rural poor. However the potentiality of this Kendrapada sheep in terms of meat quality and prolificacy and resistance to diseases has been the simulating force to take up base line survey along with variety of trials to conserve this breed. Keeping the above mentioned points in mind the present study was carried out to highlight the baseline details of this neglected breed as it is one of the first review articles on Kendrapada sheep

Multi-Modal Point-of-Care Diagnostics for COVID-19 Based on Acoustics and Symptoms

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to invent alternative respiratory health diagnosis methodologies which provide improvement with respect to time, cost, physical distancing and detection performance. In this context, identifying acoustic bio-markers of respiratory diseases has received renewed interest. Objective: In this paper, we aim to design COVID-19 diagnostics based on analyzing the acoustics and symptoms data. Towards this, the data is composed of cough, breathing, and speech signals, and health symptoms record, collected using a web-application over a period of twenty months. Methods: We investigate the use of time-frequency features for acoustic signals and binary features for encoding different health symptoms. We experiment with use of classifiers like logistic regression, support vector machines and long-short term memory (LSTM) network models on the acoustic data, while decision tree models are proposed for the symptoms data. Results: We show that a multi-modal integration of inference from different acoustic signal categories and symptoms achieves an area-under-curve (AUC) of 96.3&#x0025;, a statistically significant improvement when compared against any individual modality ( p < 0.05 ). Experimentation with different feature representations suggests that the mel-spectrogram acoustic features performs relatively better across the three kinds of acoustic signals. Further, a score analysis with data recorded from newer SARS-CoV-2 variants highlights the generalization ability of the proposed diagnostic approach for COVID-19 detection. Conclusion: The proposed method shows a promising direction for COVID-19 detection using a multi-modal dataset, while generalizing to new COVID variants

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Not AvailableThe chocolate mahseer (Neolissochilus hexagonolepis) is an important food and game fish of North Eastern India. To study the phylogenetic status we sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of N. hexagonolepis. The mitogenome is 16,563 bp in length and composed of 13 protein coding genes, 22 tRNAs, 2 rRNAs and one putative control region. The overall base compositionwas A 31.8%, T 25.0%, G 15.8%, C 27.4% and A+T content 56.9%, G+C content 43.1%. The phylogenetic analysis using the complete mitochondrial genome revealed that the chocolate mahseer belonged to same clade of mahseer group of fishes but different from genera Barbus and Acrossocheilus. The present study will be helpful for the evolution and conservation genetic studies of N. hexagonolepis.Not Availabl