268 research outputs found

    Antimicrobial activity of skin secretions isolated from Indian toad, Bufo melanostictus Schneider 1799

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    Amphibians like toads have been known to secrete antimicrobial secretions outside their body into their environments, through skin pores and parotid glands. Toad skin-secretions contain four types of compounds namely, biogenic amines, bufadienolides, alkaloids & steroids and peptides & proteins. Bulk of research relating to amphibian antimicrobial secretions has been done on frogs. In toads, such research has only been done in South America, Europe and China. Antimicrobial secretions vary considerably from specie-to-specie and drastically across various biomes. This prompted us to examine and confirm presence of antimicrobial activity (if any) in Indian Common Toad (Bufo melanostictus Schneider 1799) skin secretions since; no such analysis had been previously done on this toad which is found all across the South-east Asia. The antibacterial potency of toad skin secretions was tested against the bacteria, Escherichia coli. After running preliminary antibacterial analysis assays, we found that these cutaneous secretions retrieved from Indian Common Toad possessed potential bactericidal activity. The results that we got confirmed that some unexplored bactericidal components were present in skin secretions of these toads. These conclusions call for further research into biochemistry and molecular characterization of these components

    Importance-Aware Fresh Delivery of Versions over Energy Harvesting MACs

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    We consider a scenario where multiple users, powered by energy harvesting, send version updates over a fading multiple access channel (MAC) to an access point (AP). Version updates having random importance weights arrive at a user according to an exogenous arrival process, and a new version renders all previous versions obsolete. As energy harvesting imposes a time-varying peak power constraint, it is not possible to deliver all the bits of a version instantaneously. Accordingly, the AP chooses the objective of minimizing a finite-horizon time average expectation of the product of importance weight and a convex increasing function of the number of remaining bits of a version to be transmitted at each time instant. The objective enables importance-aware delivery of as many bits, as soon as possible. In this setup, the AP optimizes the objective function subject to an achievable rate-region constraint of the MAC and energy constraints at the users, by deciding the transmit power and the number of bits to be transmitted by each user. We obtain a Markov Decision Process (MDP)-based optimal online policy to the problem and derive structural properties of the policy. We then develop a neural network (NN)-based online heuristic policy, for which we train an NN on the optimal offline policy derived for different sample paths of energy, version arrival and channel power gain processes. Via numerical simulations, we observe that the NN-based online policy performs competitively with respect to the MDP-based online policy

    Maternal mortality at Gulbarga district hospital, a tertiary care centre

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    Background: Pregnancy, although being considered a normal physiological state, carries serious risk of morbidity and at times maternal death. Maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is a very sensitive index that reflects the quality of health care provided by the country to the women population. It also reflects the educational and socioeconomic state of a country as well as public health consciousness. This study was carried out to determine the causes of maternal deaths at Gulbarga district hospital, a tertiary care hospital.Methods: This is a cohert of prospective and retrospective hospital based study of 2 years. IPD case records of maternal deaths were studied. A total of 25 maternal deaths were analyzed using percentage.Results: In the maternal deaths studied, the leading direct causes of death were haemorrhage (32%), followed by eclampsia (15%). Anaemia (8%) and cerebrovascular accidents (9%) were the common indirect causes of maternal death in our study. Most women (72%) died within 12 hours of admission suggesting majority patients reach the tertiary care hospital late.Conclusions: Most of the maternal deaths were preventable by optimal antenatal, intranatal and perinatal care. Most effective intervention to reduce pregnancy related mortality is education of family planning methods and safe abortion methods, increasing the number of skilled birth attendants, reducing home births and improving emergency obstetric care (EOC)

    An Encoder-Decoder Approach for Packing Circles

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    The problem of packing smaller objects within a larger object has been of interest since decades. In these problems, in addition to the requirement that the smaller objects must lie completely inside the larger objects, they are expected to not overlap or have minimum overlap with each other. Due to this, the problem of packing turns out to be a non-convex problem, obtaining whose optimal solution is challenging. As such, several heuristic approaches have been used for obtaining sub-optimal solutions in general, and provably optimal solutions for some special instances. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture consisting of an encoder block, a perturbation block and a decoder block, for packing identical circles within a larger circle. In our approach, the encoder takes the index of a circle to be packed as an input and outputs its center through a normalization layer, the perturbation layer adds controlled perturbations to the center, ensuring that it does not deviate beyond the radius of the smaller circle to be packed, and the decoder takes the perturbed center as input and estimates the index of the intended circle for packing. We parameterize the encoder and decoder by a neural network and optimize it to reduce an error between the decoder's estimated index and the actual index of the circle provided as input to the encoder. The proposed approach can be generalized to pack objects of higher dimensions and different shapes by carefully choosing normalization and perturbation layers. The approach gives a sub-optimal solution and is able to pack smaller objects within a larger object with competitive performance with respect to classical methods

    A study of urinary tract infection in pregnancy and its effect on maternal and perinatal outcome

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    Background: Urinary tract infection (UTI) during pregnancy is very common in developing countries like India. UTI is caused by the growth of micro-organisms in the urinary tract. This study aims to determine the incidence of UTI in whole pregnancy and its adverse effects on mother and fetus. Methods: This is a prospective study conducted in outpatient department of ESIC medical college for one year from January 2017 to December 2017. A total of 182 pregnant women attending OBG OPD for ANC check-up without any medical disorders or previous adverse pregnancy outcomes of 18-35 years of age were included in the study. Urine routine and urine culture sensitivity were done for all. Results: Out of 182 pregnant women tested for UTI, the incidence of UTI in pregnancy was found to be 19%. Asymptomatic UTI was noted in 65% patients with UTI. Primigravida were commonly affected (56%). Highest cases were in 18 to 25 years (63%) age group. 56% cases showed 6-10 pus cells/HPF. Prevalence of UTI was more common in winter seasons. Commonest causative organism was E. coli in 38% cases. Maternal complications like anaemia (26%) and puerperal pyrexia (23%) were observed. Adverse fetal outcomes like preterm birth (35%) and fetal growth restriction (15%) were observed. Conclusions: In this study, the prevalence rate of UTI during pregnancy is high (19%). The physiological changes of pregnancy predispose the women to UTI so does the other factors such as age, sexual activity, hygiene, multiparty, previous history of UTI and socio-economic conditions. All pregnant women should be screened for UTI with a urine routine and urine culture, treated with antibiotics if the culture is positive and then retested for cure. Awareness has to be created about good hygienic practices and adequate hydration among pregnant women

    Semantic Text Transmission via Prediction with Small Language Models: Cost-Similarity Trade-off

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    We consider the communication of natural language text from a source to a destination over noiseless and character-erasure channels. We exploit language's inherent correlations and predictability to constrain transmission costs by allowing the destination to predict or complete words with potential dissimilarity with the source text. Concretely, our objective is to obtain achievable (cˉ,sˉ)(\bar{c}, \bar{s}) pairs, where cˉ\bar{c} is the average transmission cost at the source and sˉ\bar{s} is the average semantic similarity measured via cosine similarity between vector embedding of words at the source and those predicted/completed at the destination. We obtain (cˉ,sˉ)(\bar{c}, \bar{s}) pairs for neural language and first-order Markov chain-based small language models (SLM) for prediction, using both a threshold policy that transmits a word if its cosine similarity with that predicted/completed at the destination is below a threshold, and a periodic policy, which transmits words after a specific interval and predicts/completes the words in between, at the destination. We adopt an SLM for word completion. We demonstrate that, when communication occurs over a noiseless channel, the threshold policy achieves a higher sˉ\bar{s} for a given cˉ\bar{c} than the periodic policy and that the sˉ\bar{s} achieved with the neural SLM is greater than or equal to that of the Markov chain-based algorithm for the same cˉ\bar{c}. The improved performance comes with a higher complexity in terms of time and computing requirements. However, when communication occurs over a character-erasure channel, all prediction algorithms and scheduling policies perform poorly. Furthermore, if character-level Huffman coding is used, the required cˉ\bar{c} to achieve a given sˉ\bar{s} is reduced, but the above observations still apply

    Bupropion for the treatment of fluoxetine non-responsive trichotillomania: a case report

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    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Trichotillomania, classified as an impulse control disorder in the <it>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders</it>, is characterized by the recurrent pulling out of one's hair, resulting in noticeable hair loss. The condition has a varied etiology. Specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors are considered the treatment of choice; however some patients fail to respond to this class of drugs. A few older reports suggest possible benefit from treatment with bupropion.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 23-year-old Asian woman with fluoxetine non- responsive trichotillomania was treated with sustained release bupropion (up to 450 mg/day) and cognitive behavior therapy. She demonstrated clinically significant improvement on the Clinical Global Impression - Improvement scale by week 13. The improvement persisted throughout the 12-month follow-up period.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The present case report may be of interest to psychiatrists and dermatologists. Apart from the serotonergic pathway, others, such as the mesolimbic pathway, also appear to be involved in the causation of trichotillomania. Bupropion may be considered as an alternative pharmacological treatment for patients who do not respond to specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors. However, this initial finding needs to be confirmed by well designed double-blind placebo controlled trials.</p

    A Cross-Sectional Study of People with Epilepsy and Neurocysticercosis in Tanzania: Clinical Characteristics and Diagnostic Approaches.

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    Neurocysticercosis (NCC) is a major cause of epilepsy in regions where pigs are free-ranging and hygiene is poor. Pork production is expected to increase in the next decade in sub-Saharan Africa, hence NCC will likely become more prevalent. In this study, people with epilepsy (PWE, n=212) were followed up 28.6 months after diagnosis of epilepsy. CT scans were performed, and serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of selected PWE were analysed. We compared the demographic data, clinical characteristics, and associated risk factors of PWE with and without NCC. PWE with NCC (n=35) were more likely to be older at first seizure (24.3 vs. 16.3 years, p=0.097), consumed more pork (97.1% vs. 73.6%, p=0.001), and were more often a member of the Iraqw tribe (94.3% vs. 67.8%, p=0.005) than PWE without NCC (n=177). PWE and NCC who were compliant with anti-epileptic medications had a significantly higher reduction of seizures (98.6% vs. 89.2%, p=0.046). Other characteristics such as gender, seizure frequency, compliance, past medical history, close contact with pigs, use of latrines and family history of seizures did not differ significantly between the two groups. The number of NCC lesions and active NCC lesions were significantly associated with a positive antibody result. The electroimmunotransfer blot, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was more sensitive than a commercial western blot, especially in PWE and cerebral calcifications. This is the first study to systematically compare the clinical characteristics of PWE due to NCC or other causes and to explore the utility of two different antibody tests for diagnosis of NCC in sub-Saharan Africa
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