Epidemiology and Clinicopathological Profile of Renal Cell Carcinoma: A Review from Tertiary Care Referral Centre

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) accounts for 3% of all adult cancers and 85% of all kidney tumours. Incidence of RCC is lower in Asian region, particularly in India, probably due to lack of reporting. Most of the data about RCC are from Western countries; and data from India are scarce, especially regarding para-neoplastic syndromes. We sought to determine the epidemiology, clinicopathological profile and management of RCCin a tertiary care centre in Western India. This was a retrospective study that involved data analysis of records of RCC patients who presented to our institution from April 2016 to February 2020. Laboratory investigations, including tests for paraneoplastic syndrome (PNS), and relevant radiologic investigations were performed and treatment was offered according to the stage, patient factors and available modalities. A total 142 RCC patients were included in the study. The median age of presentation was 58 years. Most of the patients (67%) were symptomatic, and 33% of the patients were asymptomatic, and the RCC was diagnosed incidentally. A large number of patients (56.3%) had PNS. The most common histopathologic type of RCC was clear cell carcinoma (68.8%), followed by papillary (20%) and chromophobe (8%) carcinoma. 40% of carcinomas with sarcomatoid differentiation were seen in patients under 50 years of age. Two cases of multicystic RCC were both seen in patients less than 50 years of age. 65.5% of the patients presented at Stage 1 and 2. Most surgeries (71.2%) were done in a minimally invasive manner. A significant number of patients were asymptomatic, in which RCC was detected incidentally. The age of presentation was earlier, yet the patients had a higher tumour stage. More than half of the patients had PNSs. Despite growing trend towards Western data, the significantly higher number of patients with PNSs and early age of presentation suggest inherent differences in tumour biology, possibly related to differences in genetic and environmental factors

Engineering crops for tolerance against abiotic stress through gene manipulation

Plant genetic engineering took birth in the mid-eighties when, for the first time, plants were successfully engineered for improved virus, herbicide and insect resistance. This sphere has been ever-increasing since then. Abiotic stresses (such as high salt levels, low water availability leading to drought, excess water leading to flooding, high and low temperature regimes, etc.) adversely affect crop plants. The genetic responses of plants to these stresses are complex involving simultaneous expression of a number of genes. Till the early-nineties it was inconceivable that there would be any success in attaining the goal of improving resistance of crop plants to abiotic stresses. Continuing efforts of the stress biologists have resulted in engineering of plants resistant to low temperature, high temperature and excess salinity. A satisfactory progress has also been achieved in the area of generating plants resistant to water stress and flooding. While what has been achieved is impressive, it is still a challenging task to pyramid useful genes for high-level resistance to such stresses. The limiting factor in extension of biotechnology to abiotic stresses is the lack of information on what are the 'useful genes'-genes which would lead to better stress tolerance. We have reviewed how these genes are being searched to enable further development of strategies for stress management in crop plants. This is important because the strategics for coping with the abiotic stresses (and also for several other applications in plant biotechnology) have also come through the research work of scientists working on as diverse organisms as bacteria and fish

Traumatic injuries of teeth: A review

Dental trauma is a significant public health problem because of its frequency, impact on economic productivity and quality of life. It is not a disease and no individual is ever at zero risk of sustaining these potentially life-changing injuries. The aim of this article was to review the literature on the prevalence, incidence, a etiology, prognosis and outcomes of dental trauma. The importance of standardized reporting, oral health policy, adjunctive research methods, prevention and education will also be discussed. Approximately one-third of children and toddlers (primary teeth) and one-fifth of adolescents and adults (permanent teeth) sustained a traumatic dental injury. The majority involved the maxillary central incisors, mainly from falls in toddlers at home and contact sport in adolescents

Tooth wear: A review

Tooth wear is the result of four processes: abrasion (wear produced by interaction between teeth and other materials), attrition (wear through tooth-tooth contact), abfraction and erosion (dissolution of hard tissue by acidic substances). A further process (abfraction) might potentiate wear by abrasion and/or erosion. Knowledge of these tooth wear processes, and their interactions is reviewed. Both clinical and experimental observations show that individual wear mechanisms rarely act alone but interact with each other. The most important interaction is the potentiation of abrasion by erosive damage to the dental hard tissues. Saliva can modulate erosive/abrasive tooth wear, especially through formation of pellicle, but cannot prevent it

APPLICATION WHITELISTING: APPROACHES AND CHALLENGES

ABSTRAC

Challenges with reinforcement learning in prosthesis

Reinforcement Learning has work wonders in games like Atari and AlphaZero. Recent advancement in Deep Reinforcement Learning showcase it’s ability in the active Prosthesis as well. RL is being used widely to solve problems where Learning of the Agent in its own environment is as necessary as training the model beforehand. However, model developed, and successful in the gaming environment could still need to be tuned to be effective with Real Time devices such as Prosthetic Limb and other Real-World devices. In this article, main challenges are presented which we face while working on a Model Based and Model Free Reinforcement Learning in real world environment and suggesting an approach which would work uniformly on most of the Real Time scenarios. We observed the performance and noticed that there are couple of factors which needs to be taken care of in Real Time Applications which are not much though about in games and other online applications. We also compared the algorithms such as Policy Proximal Optimization (PPO) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) vs Model Based Policy search with Gaussian Processes and found out that a mix of Model-Based and Model-Free (MBMF) performed the best individually despite of all the challenges. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Tooth Wear: A Review

Tooth wear is the result of four processes: abrasion (wear produced by interaction between teeth and other materials), attrition (wear through tooth-tooth contact), abfraction and erosion (dissolution of hard tissue by acidic substances). A further process (abfraction) might potentiate wear by abrasion and/or erosion. Knowledge of these tooth wear processes, and their interactions is reviewed. Both clinical and experimental observations show that individual wear mechanisms rarely act alone but interact with each other. The most important interaction is the potentiation of abrasion by erosive damage to the dental hard tissues. Saliva can modulate erosive/abrasive tooth wear, especially through formation of pellicle, but cannot prevent it

Traumatic Injuries of Teeth: A Review

Dental trauma is a significant public health problem because of its frequency, impact on economic productivity and quality of life. It is not a disease and no individual is ever at zero risk of sustaining these potentially life-changing injuries. The aim of this article was to review the literature on the prevalence, incidence, a etiology, prognosis and outcomes of dental trauma. The importance of standardized reporting, oral health policy, adjunctive research methods, prevention and education will also be discussed. Approximately one-third of children and toddlers (primary teeth) and one-fifth of adolescents and adults (permanent teeth) sustained a traumatic dental injury. The majority involved the maxillary central incisors, mainly from falls in toddlers at home and contact sport in adolescents