Superior Vena Cava Syndrome: A Presenting Feature of Mediastinal Germ Cell Tumor

Superior vena cava syndrome (SVCS) is rare in children. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) is the most common cause of SVCS in children. This report an adolescent male who presented with SVCS due to mixed germ cell tumor (GCT) of the anterior mediastinum with predominant yolk cell component. Such etiology of SVCS is rarely reported

Improving Semantic Similarity with Cross-Lingual Resources: A Study in Bangla—A Low Resourced Language

Semantic similarity is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP). It is a topic of great interest as its understanding can provide a look into how human beings comprehend meaning and make associations between words. However, when this problem is looked at from the viewpoint of machine understanding, particularly for under resourced languages, it poses a different problem altogether. In this paper, semantic similarity is explored in Bangla, a less resourced language. For ameliorating the situation in such languages, the most rudimentary method (path-based) and the latest state-of-the-art method (Word2Vec) for semantic similarity calculation were augmented using cross-lingual resources in English and the results obtained are truly astonishing. In the presented paper, two semantic similarity approaches have been explored in Bangla, namely the path-based and distributional model and their cross-lingual counterparts were synthesized in light of the English WordNet and Corpora. The proposed methods were evaluated on a dataset comprising of 162 Bangla word pairs, which were annotated by five expert raters. The correlation scores obtained between the four metrics and human evaluation scores demonstrate a marked enhancement that the cross-lingual approach brings into the process of semantic similarity calculation for Bangla

Efficacy of stem cell in improvement of left ventricular function in acute myocardial infarction - MI3 Trial

Background and objectives: Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is characterized by irreparable and irreversible loss of cardiac myocytes. Despite major advances in the management of AMI, a large number of patients are left with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which is a major determinant of short and long term morbidity and mortality. A review of 33 randomized control trials has shown varying improvement in left ventricular (LV) function in patients receiving stem cells compared to standard medical therapy. Most trials had small sample size and were underpowered. This phase III prospective, open labelled, randomized multicenteric trial was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy in improving the LVEF over a period of six months, after injecting a predefined dose of 5-10 Χ 10 [8] autologous mononuclear cells (MNC) by intra-coronary route, in patients, one to three weeks post ST elevation AMI, in addition to the standard medical therapy. Methods: In this phase III prospective, multicentric trial 250 patients with AMI were included and randomized into stem cell therapy (SCT) and non SCT groups. All patients were followed up for six months. Patients with AMI having left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) of 20-50 per cent were included and were randomized to receive intracoronary stem cell infusion after successfully completing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Results: On intention-to-treat analysis the infusion of MNCs had no positive impact on LVEF improvement of ≥ 5 per cent. The improvement in LVEF after six months was 5.17 ± 8.90 per cent in non SCT group and 4.82 ± 10.32 per cent in SCT group. The adverse effects were comparable in both the groups. On post hoc analysis it was noted that the cell dose had a positive impact when infused in the dose of ≥ 5 X 10 [8] (n=71). This benefit was noted upto three weeks post AMI. There were 38 trial deviates in the SCT group which was a limitation of the study. Interpretation and conclusions:Infusion of stem cells was found to have no benefit in ST elevation AMI. However, the procedure was safe. A possible benefit was seen when the predefined cell dose was administered which was noted upto three weeks post AMI, but this was not significant and needs confirmation by larger trials