Hierarchical Lossless Image Compression for Telemedicine Applications

AbstractThe main aim of hierarchical lossless image compression is to improve accuracy, reduce the bit rate and improve the compression efficiency for the storage and transmission of the medical images while maintain an acceptable image quality for diagnosis purpose. The cost and limitation in bandwidth of wireless channels has made compression is necessity in today's era. In medical images, the contextual region is an area which contains an important information and must be transmitted without distortion. In this paper the selected region of the image is encoded with Adaptive Multiwavelet Transform AMWT) using Multi Dimensional Layered Zero Coding (MLZC). Experimental results shows that Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Correlation Coefficient (CC), Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM) performance is high and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values are low, and moderate Compression Ratio (CR) at high Bits Per Pixel (BPP) when compared to the integer wavelet and multiwavelet transform

Drug utilization study in otorhinolaryngology outpatient department in a tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: Drug utilization research is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as marketing, distribution, prescription, and use of drugs in society, with special emphasis on the resulting medical, social, and economic consequences. Drug utilization study identifies the problems that arise from prescription and highlights the current approaches to the rational use of drugs. The main aim of the study is to assess the pattern of drug usage and the rationality of drug use in Otorhinolaryngology out-patient department (OPD).Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted in the OPD of Otorhinolaryngology at tertiary care hospital, Mandya, Karnataka, over a period of one year. Prescriptions of all OPD patients were collected, relevant information entered in a specially designed proforma and analysed using descriptive statistics.Results: A total of 21058 drugs were prescribed out of 8028 prescriptions. Majority of the patients were male (51%). Antimicrobials were the most commonly prescribed drugs (28%), followed by antihistamines (25%), antipyretics (20.5%).Most of the drugs 18576 (88.2%) were prescribed by oral route, followed by topical route. Majority of the drugs were prescribed by the generic names (86.5%). Most common type of infection was ear infection (3176), followed by throat infection (2848) and nose infection (2004).Conclusions: The present study showed that among antimicrobial agents, β lactams were commonly prescribed drugs in the department of Otorhinolaryngology. The maximum number of cases was diagnosed with ear infections and majority of the drugs were prescribed orally

A Review on Resource Provisioning Algorithms Optimization Techniques in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the provision of IT resources (IaaS) on-demand using a pay as you go model over the internet. It is a broad and deep platform that helps customers builds sophisticated, scalable applications. To get the full benefits, research on a wide range of topics is needed. While resource over provisioning can cost users more than necessary, resource under provisioning hurts the application performance. The cost effectiveness of cloud computing highly depends on how well the customer can optimize the cost of renting resources (VMs) from cloud providers. The issue of resource provisioning optimization from cloud-consumer potential is a complicated optimization issue, which includes much uncertainty parameters. There is a much research avenue available for solving this problem as it is in the real-world. Here, in this paper we provide details about various optimization techniques for resource provisioning

A Cadaveric Report on a Giant Ureteric Stone Led Right Hydro Ureter and Severe Hydronephrosis

BACKGROUND: The ureter shows natural constrictions in its course, and these are the potential site for the impaction of the renal calculus. Giant ureteral stones are associated with insidious growth and late presentation, often leading to renal failure.CASE PRESENTATION: In the present case, we observed a huge ureteric stone obstructing the right ureterovesical junction in a 58 year-old male cadaver. We also found hydroureter distal to the impaction of the calculus, renal damage and severe hydronephrosis on the right side. Histopathological analysis showed conditions of arterio-nephro-sclerosis and eroded ureter secondary to the calculus. Ureteric stones obstruction may result in hydroureter, hydronephrosis and progressive renal damage leading to irreversible renal function. The present case provides valuable information regarding the gross and histopathological alterations in ureteric calculi.CONCLUSION: It further enables clinicians to be armed with the knowledge of preventive approaches to educate patients with previous calculi, or those who may develop in the future.

HEPATOPROTECTIVE ACTIVITY OF AQUEOUS EXTRACT OF CAESALPENIA BONDUC AGAINST CCL4 INDUCED CHRONIC HEPATOTOXICITY

Objective: The leaves of Caesalpinia bonduc (CB) have been used against various disorders in folk medicine including the liver disorders. Earlier, we have shown the hepatoprotective effect of CB in acute hepatotoxicity model. The present study was designed to evaluate the anti-hepatotoxic and anti-fibrotic effect of the aqueous leaf extract of CB on CCl4 (carbon tetrachloride) induced chronic hepatotoxicity/fibrosis in Wistar rats.Methods: Animals were divided into three groups namely; preventive, curative and prophylactic, which was further subdivided into four groups each: Group I–untreated control, group II-CCl4 control, group III-CB+CCl4 and group IV–silymarin+CCl4. The aqueous extract of CB/silymarin was administered orally once, daily for eight weeks in the curative group and for four weeks in preventive and prophylactic groups respectively. The chronic liver damage/fibrosis was induced by intraperitoneal injection of CCl4 twice a week, for four weeks in preventive and prophylactic groups and for eight weeks in the curative group. Blood samples were collected for assaying serum biochemical parameters, and the livers were excised and processed for histology.Results: The data showed that supplementation of aqueous leaf extract of CB along with CCl4 significantly reduced the serum levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alkaline phosphatase(ALP), total bilirubin(TB) and prothrombin time(PT) thus further restoring the total protein(TP) and albumin(ALB) in preventive, curative and prophylactic groups when compared to CCl4 control. Significant improvement in the microscopic structure of the liver further confirmed the hepatoprotective effect of aqueous extract of CB over the liver injury and fibrosis induced by CCl4 in rats.Conclusion: The study, therefore, suggests that aqueous extract of CB might provide a novel and alternative approach for treating the chronic hepatotoxicity/liver fibrosis.Keywords: Caesalpenia bonduc, Liver, Chronic, CCl4, Fibrosis, Silymarin, Hepato-protectio

WEIGHT BASED DEDUPLICATION FOR MINIMIZING DATA REPLICATION IN PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE

The approach to minimize data replication in cloud storage is one of the challenging issues to process text data. The amount of digital data has been increasing exponentially. There is a need to reduce the amount of storage space by storing the data efficiently. In cloud storage environment, the data replication provides high availability with fault tolerance system. An effective approach of deduplication system using a weight based method is proposed at the target level in order to reduce the storage space in cloud. Storage space can be efficiently utilized by removing the unpopular files from the secondary servers. Target level consumes less processing power than Source level deduplication. Input text documents are stored into Dropbox cloud. The Term Frequency (TF) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) of the documents are found. The text features found are stored in database using MySQL. After storing features in database, fresh text documents are collected to find popular and unpopular files. TF and NER are found for the freshly collected text documents and duplicate features are removed to compare with the features stored in the database. On comparison, relevant text documents are listed. After listing text documents, document frequency, document weight and threshold factor are found. Depending on threshold factor, the popular and unpopular files are detected. The popular files are replicated in all the storage nodes to achieve availability. Before deduplication, the storage space occupied in the Dropbox cloud is 8.09MB. After deduplication, the unpopular files are removed from secondary storage nodes and the storage space occupied in the Dropbox cloud is 4.82MB. Finally, data replications are minimized and 45.6% of the cloud storage space is efficiently saved by applying weight based deduplication

Weight Based Deduplication for Minimizing Data Replication in Public Cloud Storage

260-269The approach to optimize the data replication in public cloud storage when targeting the multiple instances is one of the challenging issues to process the text data. The amount of digital data has been increasing exponentially. There is a need to reduce the amount of storage space by storing the data efficiently. In cloud storage environment, the data replication provides high availability with fault tolerance system. An effective approach of deduplication system using weight based method is proposed at the target level in order to reduce the unwanted storage spaces in cloud. Storage space can be efficiently utilized by removing the unpopular files from the secondary servers. Target level consumes less processing power than source level deduplication. Multiple input text documents are stored into dropbox cloud. The top text features are detected using the Term Frequency (TF) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) and they are stored in text database. After storing the top features in database, fresh text documents are collected to find the popular and unpopular files in order to optimize the existing text corpus of cloud storage. Top Text features of the freshly collected text documents are detected using TF and NER and these unique features after the removing the duplicate features cleaning are compared with the existing features stored in the database. On the comparison, relevant text documents are listed. After listing the text documents, document frequency, document weight and threshold factor are detected. Depending on average threshold value, the popular and unpopular files are detected. The popular files are retained in all the storage nodes to achieve the full availability of data and unpopular files are removed from all the secondary servers except primary server. Before deduplication, the storage space occupied in the dropbox cloud is 8.09 MB. After deduplication, the unpopular files are removed from secondary storage nodes and the storage space in the dropbox cloud is optimized to 4.82MB. Finally, data replications are minimized and 45.60% of the cloud storage space is efficiently saved by applying the weight based deduplication system

Analysis of Genetic Diversity among the five Species ofCalamusby RAPD Markers

Aims: the aim of the present study was to determine the genetic diversity among the five commercially important species of Calamus using Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers. Study Design: DNA extracted from mature leaves of selected species was used as template DNA for optimization of PCR amplification. Data was analysed with the help of software; numerical taxonomy and multivariate analysis version 2.02e (NTSYSpc) and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). Place and Duration of Study: The study was carried out at the Department of Botany, Bangalore University, Bangalore 560056, India during 2014. Methodology: Calamus huegelianus, C. nagabettai, C. prasinus, C. thwaitesii and C. vattayila, known for their good quality canes, are selected for the present study to characterize them through RAPD analysis. Fifteen decamer primers were used for amplification. However, only five primers have generated clear reproducible bands. Simple matching, similarity co-efficient, dendrogram and principal component analysis were composed by using NTSYSpc and UPGMA. Results: Clear and reproducible 108 bands were scored with 64 polymorphic bands indicating 59.25 percent of polymorphism among the species selected. Higher percent of 76.00 was noted in Calamus prasinus and least of 43.67 in C. huegelianus. Similarity co-efficient value of 0.45 to 0.66 indicates less genetic divergence among the taxa selected. The cluster analysis with the help of dendrogram and principal component analysis has revealed that C. vattayila is distinct from others since it has 6 veined leaflets. The other selected four taxa are having three veined leaflets. Hence, clustering pattern was compared with distinguished phenotypic characters. Conclusion: The previously mentioned data obtained through cluster, the principal component analysis clearly indicate that the taxa are clustered together based on sharing of common phenotypic characters. The present study is a step forward in understanding the genetic affinities among the selected taxa and their conservation strategies

An Unusual Right Popliteal Vein Aneurysm in an Adult: A Case Report

The incidence of venous aneurysm is less than arterial aneurysms. Most of them are incidental findings with no major clinical significance. However, popliteal vein aneurysms may be potentially life threatening as they can be a source of pulmonary embolism and potentially even death. We report a case of right popliteal vein aneurysm in a 67-year-old male cadaver. Information from this case study may contribute to an improved understanding of these phenomena, including early detection of these or similar thromboembolic events.

An unorthodox innervation of the gluteus maximus muscle and other associated variations: A case report

Knowledge of peripheral nerve morphology, location, and variation is important for facilitating appropriate diagnosis and intervention. We present a unique case of absence of the inferior gluteal nerve and high division of the sciatic nerve. In this instance, the common peroneal nerve was found piercing the piriformis muscle and emerging distally in the form of two trunks: thin medial and thick lateral. The medial trunk presented an interesting course, supplying the gluteus maximus muscle before joining the lateral trunk to form the common peroneal nerve. Additionally, the arteria nervi ischiadisci was also observed accompanying and supplying the tibial nerve passing inferior to the piriformis. These variations are important for clinicians and surgeons for some radiological diagnoses and surgical procedures in the lower limb