To study the Prevalence, Sociodemographic, Clinico-Radiological Profile and also Correlation of COPD Assessment Test (CAT) and Degree of Airflow Obstruction in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in Females attending Tertiary Care Hospital

INTRODUCTION: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a common preventable and treatable disease, is characterized by persistent airflow limitation that is usually progressive and associated with an enhanced chronic inflammatory response in the airways and the lung to noxious particles or gases. Exacerbations and comorbidities contribute to the overall severity in individual patients.AIM OF THE STUDY: 1. To study the prevalence of severity of airway obstruction, sociodemographic, clinico-radiological profile in female Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. 2. To assess the correlation of COPD assessment test (CAT) and degree of airflow obstruction in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in females. 3. To also assess the correlation between sociodemographic and clinicoradiological factors affecting the severity of airflow obstruction. MATERIALS & METHODS: 91 female patients more than 40 years of age with clinical history and symptoms suggestive of COPD with spirometric diagnosis of COPD according to GOLD guidelines 2016 with post bronchodilator FEV1/FVC under 0.70 and who satisfied the inclusion and exclusion criteria were enrolled in the study and the following were assessed Severity of symptoms, Socioeconomic status, Risk factor assessment, Nutritional status, Presence and severity of depression, Degree of airflow obstruction and reversibility, Exercise capacity, Radiological presentation. RESULTS: In our female COPD patients 71% were below the age of 60 years with 74% having high and very high CAT score and 59.2% having dyspnea of grade 3 and 4 of mMRC scale. In this study group 63.7% belonged to moderate degree of airflow limitation based on GOLD criteria, less than 10% were underweight based on BMI. Most of the patients belonged to the more symptomatic group (Group B 38% and Group D 54%) in GOLD Combined Assessment stratification of patients. In the study population 71% had exposure to solid biomass fuel with 54% having a biomass exposure index above 60. Only 3.2% were smokers. Occupational exposure to dust and chemicals present as they were construction workers (18.6%), agricultural workers (18.6%), sweepers (5.4%), cooks (5.4%) and flour handlers (5.4%). The CT Phenotypes present in our patient were Airway Predominant (45%), Mixed Phenotype (27.4%) and Emphysematous Predominant Phenotype in 16.4%. The common comorbidities were diabetes (30.8%), systemic Hypertension (35.8%), moderate depression (40.7%) and Ischemic heart disease in 9.8%. CONCLUSION: Majority of the COPD patients were below 60 years, more symptomatic with normal BMI and had moderate degree of airflow limitation. Most of them had exposure to biomass smoke even from childhood. CAT scoring had a strong correlation with severity of airflow limitation. Airway Predominant Phenotype was the commonest Phenotype. Depression was the most common comorbidity. Age, BMI, Biomass exposure, mMRC and CT Phenotype had significant association with severity of airflow limitation

A Modified Frame Difference Method Using Correlation Coefficient for Background Subtraction

AbstractBackground subtraction is one of the most important step in video surveillance which is used in a number of real life applications such as surveillance, human machine interaction, optical motion capture and intelligent visual observation of animals, insects. Background subtraction is one of the preliminary stages which are used to differentiate the foreground objects from the relatively stationary background. Normally a pixel is considered as foreground if its value is greater than its value in the reference image. Hence, every pixel has to be compared to find the foreground and background pixel. This paper presents a technique which improves the frame difference method by first classifying the blocks in the frame as background and others using correlation coefficient. Further refinement is performed by performing pixel-level classification on blocks which are not considered as background. Experiments are conducted on standard data-sets and the performance measures shows good results in some critical conditions

Combinatorial efficacy of Trichoderma spp. and Pseudomonas fluorescens to enhance suppression of cell wall degrading enzymes produced by Fusarium wilt of Arachis hypogaea.L

Fusarium oxysporum, the soil borne pathogen causes vascular wilt, on majority of crop plants. It has been demonstrated that two different species of Trichoderma and Pseudomonas fluorescens suppress disease by different mechanisms. Therefore, application of a mixture of these biocontrol agents, and thus of several suppressive mechanisms, may represent a viable control strategy. A necessity for biocontrol by combinations of biocontrol agents can be the compatibility of the co-inoculated micro-organisms. Hence, compatibility between Trichoderma spp. and Pseudomonas fluorescens that have the ability to suppress Fusarium oxysporum in vitro on the activity of pectinolytic enzymes of Fusarium oxysporum. The activity of pectinolytic enzymes, i.e. pectin methyl esterase, endo and exo polymethylgalacturonases and exo and endo pectin trans eliminases produced by Fusarium oxysporum (Control) was higher. Maximum inhibition of pectin methylesterase, exo and endo polymethylgalacturonase and exo and endopectin trans eliminase was shown by culture filtrate of Trichoderma viride + Pseudomonas fluorescens (Tv+Pf) (1+2%), followed by Trichoderma harzianum + Pseudomonas fluorescens, (Th +Pf) (1.5+2%) and Trichoderma viride + Trichoderma harzianum (Tv+Th) (1+1.5%). However, pathogenecity suppression of Fusarium oxysporum, a causative of Arachis hypogaea. L by the compatible combination of Trichodema viride + Pseudomonas fluorescens (1+2%) was significantly better as compared to the single bio-agent. This indicates that specific interactions between biocontrol agents influence suppression of pathogenicity factors directly by combinations of these compatible bio-agents.Int. J. Agril. Res. Innov. & Tech. 7 (2): 36-42, December, 201

Signal Integrity Analysis of Modified Coplanar Waveguide Structure Using ADI-FDTD Method

Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technology shrinks to Deep Sub Micron (DSM) geometries, interconnect is becoming a limiting factor in determining circuit performance. High speed interconnect suffers from signal integrity effects like crosstalk, and propagation delay thereby degrading the entire system operation. In order to reduce the adverse signal integrity effects, if is necessary for the interconnect to have accurate physical dimensions. The interconnection and packaging related issues are main factors that determine the number of circuits that can be integrated in a chip as well as the chip performance. In this paper, it is proposed to simulate high speed interconnect structures using Alternate Direction Implicit Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (ADI-FDTD) method. The electrical parameters such as mutual inductance and mutual capacitance were calculated from E and H fields for Coplanar waveguide (CPW) and Stacked Grounded Coplanar waveguide (SGCPW). Keywords: Interconnects, ADI-FDTD Method, Coplanar Waveguide, Crosstalk and Signal Integrit

In Vitro Effects of Antagonistic Microorganisms on Fusarium oxysporum [Schlecht. Emend. Synd & Hans] Infecting Arachis hypogaea L.

In  an  attempt  to develop  biocontrol  system  for  management  of Fusarium wilt in groundnut, Trichoderma viride, Trichoderma harzianum, and Pseudomonas fluorescens were evaluated for their antagonistic  activity against  Fusarium  oxysporum in vitro .The conidia of Fusarium oxysporum  were found  to  be inhibited by all the  three  antagonistic microorganisms. Among  them,  highest percent  inhibition of  conidial  germination was brought out  by Trichoderma viride [89.4%] followed by Trichoderma harzianum [85.7%] and Pseudomonas fluorescens [83.15%]and inhibition of radial mycelial growth were 86.6%, 84.0%,  60.0% respectively.This inhibition is due to the volatile and non volatile metabolites and cell wall degrading enzymes produced by Trichoderma spp . Antagonistic  activity of Pseudomonas  spp.against Fusarium oxysporum is mainly due to the antibiotics, Fe-chelating siderophores and hydrogen cyanide

Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Source code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not realistic in the present scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is one of the possible solutions for this problem. A novel watermarking technique is employed so that it can be easily and reliably detected by special techniques. In this paper, verification methods are presented to detect software plagiarism in the embedded application software without the implemented source code. All the approaches use side-channel information obtained during the execution of the suspicious code. The primary method is passive, i.e. no previous modification of the original code is required. It determines that the Hamming weights of the executed instructions of the suspicious device are used and uses string matching algorithms for comparisons with a reference implementation. The other method inserts additional code fragments as a watermark that can be identified in the power consumption of the executed source code. Proposed approaches are robust against code-transformation attacks

CHARACTERIZATION OF MANGANESE DOPED SODIUM BORATE GLASSES USING SPECTROSCOPIC METHODS

Glass samples belonging to the general chemical formula 60B2O3–(40-x)Na2O–xMnO2 with x=5, 10,15, 20, and 25 mol % are prepared by melt quench method. Characterization of the system was carried out using XRD, SEM and FTIR. The structural changes with composition of the glasses have been studied by FT-IR spectroscopy. FT-IR spectra analysis indicates that MnO2 is preferentially incorporated into the borate network. Amorphous nature of the system was confirmed by XRD and SEM is used to study the morphology of the glass samples

Energy Efficient unauthorized Intrusion Detection in mobile Ad-Hoc Neworks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configuring, infrastructure-less, dynamic wireless networks in which the nodes are resource constrained. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are used in MANETs to monitor activities so as to detect any intrusion in the network. The proposed system present efficient scheme for analyzing and optimizing the time duration for which the intrusion detection systems need to remain active in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network. A probabilistic model is proposed that makes use of cooperation between IDSs among neighborhood nodes to reduce their individual active time. Usually, an IDS has to run all the time on every node to oversee the network behavior. This can turn out to be a costly overhead for a battery-powered mobile device in terms of power and computational resources. Hence, this project aim is to reduce the duration of active time of the IDSs without compromising on their effectiveness. To validate this proposed approach, it models the interactions between IDSs as a multi-player cooperative game in which the players have partially cooperative and partially conflicting goals

Combination of Trichoderma viride and Pseudomonas fluorescens for the enhanced control of Fusarium wilt disease caused by Fusarium oxysporum infecting Arachis hypogaea L.

Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum is a devastating disease of peanut. The fungus causes severe yield loss in groundnut. Combinations of biocontrol agents that are compatible with each other is a viable approach to control the plant disease. The study was conducted to determine the beneficiary aspects of  combining different species of Trichoderma and Pseudomonasfluorescens i.e Trichoderma viride+Pseudomonas fluorescens (Tv+Pf), Trichoderma harzianum+Pseudomonas fluorescens (Th+Pf) and Trichoderma viride +Trichoderma harzianum (Tv+Th) to control the Fusarium wilt  in  biochemicalparameters such as DNA, RNA, Amino nitrogen, phenols, dihydroxy and   proline  contents of Arachis hypogaea.L. Among the three combinations tested, Trichoderma viride + Pseudomonas fluorescens (1+2%) sprayed leaves provided greater suppression of Fusariumoxysporum by increasing the levels of DNA,RNA,Amino nitrogen contents resulting  in the suppression of  Fusarium wilt  disease of Arachis hypogaea L.Maximum  reduction of  DNA, RNA, Amino nitrogen was observed in the infected Fusariumoxysporumleaves Phenol, Dihydroxy phenols and proline contents increase sharply in the treated plants treated with (Tv+Pf) as compared to the control plants. At the same time the other two combinations resulted in  enhanced control  in  comparison with  individual ones. This present study indicates that specific combination of Trichoderma viride and Pseudomonas fluorescens could have the greater efficacy in the inhibition of pathogen  in the biocontrol of Fusarium wilt  disease  as   compared   with   individual strains