Sonographic Evaluation of Cholelithiasis and Its Correlation with Normal/Fatty Liver

Cholelithiasis and Fatty Liver disease are usually observed to coexist. Patients who have gallstones also have Fatty Liver as both of the conditions have same associated risk factors I.e., diabetes mellitus, gender, age, obesity, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance and high lipids level. Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is also an independent accountable risk factor for the formation of gallstones. We aimed to determine whether there is any correlation between cholelithiasis and fatty liver disease. The study was conducted in Lahore General Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan. The data was collected from March 24,2021 to May 24,2021. Informed consent was taken from all the participants. We did a cohort study comprising the data of 51 patients undergoing physical checkup. The data gathered included age, gender and whether they had normal or fatty liver. Cholelithiasis was diagnosed by confirming the presence of gallstones on abdominal ultrasonography after fasting for approximately 8hrs. it was an observational study for the assessment of correlation between cholelithiasis and fatty liver in the participants. A Total of 51 patients with cholelithiasis were included in our study. Most of the patients were 29 to 70 years of age. The average age of the patients was 42.3 ± 10.1 years. Out of 51 patients, there were 60.8% (P=31) females and 39.2%(P=20) males. Out of 51 cholelithiasis patients there were 31.4%(P=16) had Normal Liver and 68.6%(P=35) were positive with Fatty liver disease. Patients with stone size ranges from 1.90mm to 4.6mm hade Grade 1 Fatty liver as shown in table-5.4, Grade 2 Fatty liver was seen in patients with stone size ranges from 4.5mm to 5.8mm. Fatty liver Grade 3 was not observed in any included patient with cholelithiasis. Results of our study showed that both cholelithiasis and Fatty Liver disease are correlated with each other. Females are at higher risk to be affected by these with diseases. Early detection of Fatty liver in patients of cholelithiasis can help patients to prevent them further complications regarded to fatty liver and cholelithiasis and can play important role in health care of society. Keywords: Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, Cholelithiasis, Fatty liver, Ultrasonography. DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/91-07 Publication date:July 31st 202

Charmonium and e+e−e^+e^- pair photoproduction at mid-rapidity in ultra-peripheral Pb-Pb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV

The ALICE Collaboration at the LHC has measured the $J/\psi$ and $\psi$' photoproduction at mid-rapidity in ultra-peripheral Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV. The charmonium is identified via its leptonic decay for events where the hadronic activity is required to be minimal. The analysis is based on an event sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 23 ${\mu}b^{-1}$, The cross section for coherent and incoherent $J/\psi$ production in the rapidity interval -0.9 < y < 0.9, are $d\sigma_{J/\psi}^{coh}/dy = 2.38^{+0.34}_{-0.24}(sta+sys)$ mb and $d\sigma_{J/\psi}^{inc}/dy = 0.98^{+0.19}_{-0.17}(sta+sys)$ mb, respectively. The results are compared to theoretical models for $J/\psi$ production and the coherent cross section is found to be in good agreement with those models which include nuclear gluon shadowing consistent with EPS09 parametrization. In addition the cross section for the process $\gamma\gamma \to e^+e^-$ has been measured and found to be in agreement with the STARLIGHT Monte Carlo predictions.publishedVersio

Centrality dependence of the pseudorapidity density distribution for charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV

We present the first wide-range measurement of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density distribution, for different centralities (the 0-5%, 5-10%, 10-20%, and 20-30% most central events) in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV at the LHC. The measurement is performed using the full coverage of the ALICE detectors, -5.0 < $\eta$ < 5.5, and employing a special analysis technique based on collisions arising from LHC ' satellite' bunches. We present the pseudorapidity density as a function of the number of participating nucleons as well as an extrapolation to the total number of produced charged particles $N_{ch}$ = 17165 +/- 772 for the 0-5% most central collisions). From the measured d\)._{ch}\).d\).eta\) distribution we derive the rapidity density distribution, d\)._{ch}\).dy, under simple assumptions. The rapidity density distribution is found to be significantly wider than the predictions of the Landau model, which reproduce data well at RHIC energies. We assess the validity of longitudinal scaling by comparing to lower energy results from RHIC. Finally the mechanisms of the underlying particle production are discussed based on a comparison with various theoretical models.publishedVersio

Convalescent plasma in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised controlled, open-label, platform trial

SummaryBackground Azithromycin has been proposed as a treatment for COVID-19 on the basis of its immunomodulatoryactions. We aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of azithromycin in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19.Methods In this randomised, controlled, open-label, adaptive platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19Therapy [RECOVERY]), several possible treatments were compared with usual care in patients admitted to hospitalwith COVID-19 in the UK. The trial is underway at 176 hospitals in the UK. Eligible and consenting patients wererandomly allocated to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus azithromycin 500 mg once perday by mouth or intravenously for 10 days or until discharge (or allocation to one of the other RECOVERY treatmentgroups). Patients were assigned via web-based simple (unstratified) randomisation with allocation concealment andwere twice as likely to be randomly assigned to usual care than to any of the active treatment groups. Participants andlocal study staff were not masked to the allocated treatment, but all others involved in the trial were masked to theoutcome data during the trial. The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality, assessed in the intention-to-treatpopulation. The trial is registered with ISRCTN, 50189673, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04381936.Findings Between April 7 and Nov 27, 2020, of 16 442 patients enrolled in the RECOVERY trial, 9433 (57%) wereeligible and 7763 were included in the assessment of azithromycin. The mean age of these study participants was65·3 years (SD 15·7) and approximately a third were women (2944 [38%] of 7763). 2582 patients were randomlyallocated to receive azithromycin and 5181 patients were randomly allocated to usual care alone. Overall,561 (22%) patients allocated to azithromycin and 1162 (22%) patients allocated to usual care died within 28 days(rate ratio 0·97, 95% CI 0·87–1·07; p=0·50). No significant difference was seen in duration of hospital stay (median10 days [IQR 5 to >28] vs 11 days [5 to >28]) or the proportion of patients discharged from hospital alive within 28 days(rate ratio 1·04, 95% CI 0·98–1·10; p=0·19). Among those not on invasive mechanical ventilation at baseline, nosignificant difference was seen in the proportion meeting the composite endpoint of invasive mechanical ventilationor death (risk ratio 0·95, 95% CI 0·87–1·03; p=0·24).Interpretation In patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, azithromycin did not improve survival or otherprespecified clinical outcomes. Azithromycin use in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 should be restrictedto patients in whom there is a clear antimicrobial indication

Long-Term Variability of Atmospheric Visual Range (1980–2020) over Diverse Topography of Pakistan

A substantial drop in atmospheric visibility or visual range (VR) is documented in several parts of the world. We examined the long-term spatiotemporal variability in ground-based VR data for ten airports in Pakistan from 1980 to 2020. Average VR time series analysis was performed using nonparametric tests of Mann–Kendall (MK), Modified Mann–Kendall (MMK), Sen’s Slope (SS), and Sequential Mann–Kendall (SMK), followed by spatiotemporal mapping. Bad VR (<5 km) conditions prevailed over more than 60% of the study period. Noticeably, VR was better during 1991–2000 due to the high average annual rainfall (905 mm) during the 1990s. Plain areas such as Faisalabad experienced the greatest number of bad VR days with hourly (92.85%), daily (95.35%), monthly (90.97%), and seasonal (90.97%) measurements, followed by Sialkot and Multan. The VR of lowlands in central, southern, and eastern Punjab and northern, central, and eastern Sindh showed decreasing trends. In contrast, the VR in coastal areas of south and southwestern Sindh, in the western highlands, and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, have indicated positive trends. The results of this study will support policymakers in catering to the issue of declining VR in the region by supporting and developing strategies to limit the factor associated with VR

Privacy Preserving Time-Series Forecasting of User Health Data Streams

Privacy preservation plays a vital role in health care applications as the requirements for privacy preservation are very strict in this domain. With the rapid increase in the amount, quality and detail of health data being gathered with smart devices, new mechanisms are required that can cope with the challenges of large scale and real-time processing requirements. Federated learning (FL) is one of the conventional approaches that facilitate the training of AI models without access to the raw data. However, recent studies have shown that FL alone does not guarantee sufficient privacy. Differential privacy (DP) is a well-known approach for privacy guarantees, however, because of the noise addition, DP needs to make a trade-off between privacy and accuracy. In this work, we design and implement an end-to-end pipeline using DP and FL for the first time in the context of health data streams. We propose a clustering mechanism to leverage the similarities between users to improve the prediction accuracy as well as significantly reduce the model training time. Depending on the dataset and features, our predictions are no more than 0.025% far off the ground-truth value with respect to the range of value. Moreover, our clustering mechanism brings a significant reduction in the training time, with up to 49% reduction in prediction accuracy error in the best case, as compared to training a single model on the entire dataset. Our proposed privacy preserving mechanism at best introduces a decrease of ≈ 2% in the prediction accuracy of the trained models. Furthermore, our proposed clustering mechanism reduces the prediction error even in highly noisy settings by as much as 38% as compared to using a single federated private model

Exploring influential plant traits for enhancing upland cotton yield under salt stress

This research was conducted to explore genetic material that can yield better under salt stress conditions. The experiment was laid out using 27 upland cotton genotypes in a RCBD 2 factorial arrangement with two replications. Saline water (NaCl at 20 dS/m) was applied after satisfactory emergence was achieved. The crop was raised to maturity and data relating to yield, fiber quality and ionic traits were recorded. Analysis of variance showed significant variations in the germplasm. Plant height, bolls per plant, boll weight, GOT%, staple length, staple strength, K + and K + /Na + ratio under salinity stress showed a highly significant correlation with seed-cotton yield. The highest direct effect on seedcotton yield per plant was exhibited by bolls per plant and boll weight. The results from the correlation and path coefficient analyses revealed that although the K + /Na + ratio had a strong positively significant association with seedcotton yield, its direct effect on the seed-cotton yield was negative and thus selection on the basis of K + /Na + may not be fruitful. Hence, only indirect selection through bolls per plant and boll weight may be effective in increasing the seedcotton yield per plant under salinity stress

Genetic diversity of Newcastle disease virus in Pakistan:A countrywide perspective

Background: Newcastle disease (ND) is one of the most deadly diseases of poultry around the globe. The disease is endemic in Pakistan and recurrent outbreaks are being reported regularly in wild captive, rural and commercial poultry flocks. Though, efforts have been made to characterize the causative agent in some of parts of the country, the genetic nature of strains circulating throughout Pakistan is currently lacking. Material and methods. To ascertain the genetics of NDV, 452 blood samples were collected from 113 flocks, originating from all the provinces of Pakistan, showing high mortality (30-80%). The samples represented domesticated poultry (broiler, layer and rural) as well as wild captive birds (pigeons, turkeys, pheasants and peacock). Samples were screened with real-time PCR for both matrix and fusion genes (1792 bp), positive samples were subjected to amplification of full fusion gene and subsequent sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. Results: The deduced amino acid sequence of the fusion protein cleavage site indicated the presence of motif ( 112RK/RQRR↓F117) typical for velogenic strains of NDV. Phylogenetic analysis of hypervariable region of the fusion gene indicated that all the isolates belong to lineage 5 of NDV except isolates collected from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province. A higher resolution of the phylogenetic analysis of lineage 5 showed the distribution of Pakistani NDV strains to 5b. However, the isolates from KPK belonged to lineage 4c; the first report of such lineage from this province. Conclusions: Taken together, data indicated the prevalence of multiple lineages of NDV in different poultry population including wild captive birds. Such understanding is crucial to underpin the nature of circulating strains of NDV, their potential for interspecies transmission and disease diagnosis and control strategies