Post-residency fellowship training in maxillofacial prosthetics is needed in Pakistan

Objective: To determine the spectrum of maxillofacial prosthetics services in Pakistan, to explore the need of a relevant fellowship training programme in the country, and to determine whether they contribute to tumour board of head and neck oncology.Methods: The cross-sectional online survey was conducted from March to June 2020 and comprised all prosthodontists registered on the portal of the Pakistan Prosthodontics Association. Using Google Forms, the survey questionnaire was sent via email. The survey form was self-generated. Data was analysed using SPSS 23.Results: Of the 84 prosthodontists approached, 44(52.4%) responded. The overall median age was 39 years (range: 30-60 years), and 34(77.3%) subjects were males. Overall, 19(43.2%) subjects were from Punjab, 14(31.8%) Sindh, 6(13.6%) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 5(11.4%) Islamabad. None of the participants had received any formal accredited training in maxillofacial prosthetics. Although 37(84.1%) respondents reported providing maxillofacial prosthetics services to their patients as they had learnt it during their prosthodontics residency. Only 3(6.8%) respondents were contributing to head and neck tumour board. An overwhelming majority 42(95.5%) stressed the need of structured training programmes in maxillofacial prosthetics.Conclusions: There is no accredited maxillofacial prosthetics training centre and an obvious lack of prosthodontists with formal training in the professional area. The participation of prosthodontists in the head and neck tumour board was negligible

Maxillofacial prosthodontists are needed for the rehabilitation of patients with congenital and acquired craniofacial defects

Maxillofacial Prosthodontics (MFP) is a super-specialty of prosthodontics that involves around rehabilitation of patients presenting with congenital maxillofacial defects or craniofacial disabilities acquired due to disease such as cancer or trauma. (1) There are several types of prostheses that can be designed and fabricated by a maxillofacial prosthesis to improve the quality of life of patients. A simple classification is shown in figure 1. Continuous..

Impact of Leadership Incivility on Employee Leaving Intention and Job Insecurity: Mediating role of Workplace Ostracism

Purpose: Supervisors' Incivility is considered a key antecedent of workplace ostracism and it is one of the burning issues and has a direct relationship with Job Insecurity, similarly, Job Insecurity generates the intention to leave the organization among employees. Methodology: The targeted population was the employee of healthcare institutions working in Pakistan. The sample of 336 was collected using the purposive sampling technique and the quantitative approach was applied due to the explanatory nature of the study. A five-level Likert scale questionnaire was employed to collect the data from the employees of the healthcare institutions regardless of their role and designation. Data analysis was run in twos steps, first demographic & descriptive by using Statistical Package for social science (SPSS 25.0), and in the second stage we used structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used for convergent & discriminant validities the Partial least squares (PLS) approach was adopted by using the smart PLS software for the analysis of data. Findings: The results revealed that there is a direct positive relationship between leadership incivility and employee leaving intention and job security. The mediating role of workplace ostracism is not established among the dependent and independent variables however job insecurity ignites and mediates the employee leaving intentions. Conclusion: The study in Pakistan revealed that the workplace environment contributes 32% to job performance and 23% to Employee Leaving Intention. The study aims to evaluate leadership incivility and its effects on employee leaving intention and job insecurity, and also moderate the relationship between workplace ostracism with job insecurity and employee leaving intentions

Coincidence of dental midline with facial midline in a sample of Pakistani population

OBJECTIVE: To determine the frequency of coincidence of facial and dental midlines in a sample of Pakistani subjects. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY: Department of Prosthodontics, Fatima Jinnah Dental College and Hospital, Karachi, from October to December 2017. METHODOLOGY: Subjects of either gender (n=117) were selected from pool of otherwise healthy dental students. Facial portrait photographs using a DSLR camera were obtained while keeping the teeth in maximum inter-cuspation position. Auto-CAD software was used to analyse the coincidence of facial, maxillary and mandibular midlines. SPSS Version 23.0 was used for data analysis. The coincidence of the midlines were determined using Pearson correlation test. Level of significance was set at 0.05. RESULTS: The coincidence of maxilla-mandible midlines was 64.1% (75/117); whereas, coincidence of facial midline with maxillary and mandibular midlines were 47.9% (56/117) and 46.1% (54/117), respectively. Left sided deviations of dental midlines were more frequent than the right side. CONCLUSION: The coincidence of inter-maxillary midlines was seen in two-thirds of the participants only. The dental midlines were coincident with the facial midline in less than half of the sample

A bibliometric analysis of the studies on dental implant failure

Objective: To identify top 30 studies related to dental implant failures based on bibliometric analysis. Methods: The bibliometric study was conducted at Aga Khan University, Karachi from April 2021 to June 2021 and comprised database search on Google Scholar used key words dental implant failures for studies published between 1990 and 2020. The selected studies were reviewed based on citation count for which the cut-off date was June 1, 2021. Results: The top 30 papers on dental implant failures had median citation count of 153 (range: 41-1583. Most of the studies were retrospective 11(36.7%), followed by literature reviews 6(20%). The top three contributing journals were the \u27International Journal of Oral Maxillofacial Implants\u27 6(20%), the \u27Clinical Oral Implants Research\u27 5(16.7%) and \u27Clinical Implant Dentistry and Related Research\u27 3(10%). Goteborg University, Sweden, contributed the maximum number of most cited papers 8(26.7%). Conclusions: Most of the papers in the top-cited on dental implant failures were retrospective studies, and there was only one clinical trial

Isogenies and cryptography

This thesis explores the notion of isogenies and its applications to cryptography. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an efficient public cryptosystem with a short key size. For this reason it is suitable for implementing on memory-constraint devices such as smart cards, mobile devices, etc. However, these devices leak information about their private key through side channels (power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, timing etc) during cryptographic processing. In this thesis we have examined countermeasures against a specific side channel attack (power consumption) using isogeny, (a rational homomorphism between elliptic curves) and elliptic curve isomorphism. We found that these methods are an efficient way of securing cryptographic devices using ECC against power analysis attacks. We have also investigated the security and efficiency of implementation of a public key cryptosystem based on isogenies. We found that in order to implement the proposed cryptosystem one has to compute a root of the Hilbert polynomial H D ( X ) over F p . Since there is no known efficient way of achieving this calculation, the proposed cryptosystem cannot be used in practice