Treatment of osteonecrosis of femoral head in young patients by surface replacement of femoral head

Background: Osteonecrosis of hip is a pathological condition that affects usually young adults. Articular surface replacement (ASR) is considered to be a viable option in young patients. The study was done with the aim to analyse and to recommend the management of osteonecrosis of femoral head in young patients by surface replacement of femoral head as ideal procedure.Methods: The present study was conducted in 30 patients with osteonecrosis of the femoral head who attended to OPD at Santhiram Medical College and General Hospital, Nandyal, A.P during the period of April 2016 to September 2017. Articular surface replacement of the femoral head was the surgical procedure done in all the patients. The success of the treatment was analysed by Harris hip scoring.Results: Maximum number of patients (60%) was below 40 years of age. Male dominance (77%) was seen in the study. According to Ficat and Arlet classification 12 cases (40%) were under the category of stage II-B and 18 cases (60%) were of stage III. Postoperatively about 90% of patients had postoperative Harris hip score of >80 points. Surgery was succeeded in 10 hips of stage II-B and 15 hips in stage III. According to Harris hip scoring excellent results were obtained in 15 (50%), good in 12 (40%), fair in 2 (6.67%) and poor result 1 (3.3%) patient.Conclusion: The study concludes that the surface replacement is an anatomical hip arthroplasty with preservations of more than 70% of bone stock of femoral head and the ability of the patients to sit cross-legged and squat, which is the desire of the Indian population

LowDINO -- A Low Parameter Self Supervised Learning Model

This research aims to explore the possibility of designing a neural network architecture that allows for small networks to adopt the properties of huge networks, which have shown success in self-supervised learning (SSL), for all the downstream tasks like image classification, segmentation, etc. Previous studies have shown that using convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) can provide inherent inductive bias, which is crucial for learning representations in deep learning models. To reduce the number of parameters, attention mechanisms are utilized through the usage of MobileViT blocks, resulting in a model with less than 5 million parameters. The model is trained using self-distillation with momentum encoder and a student-teacher architecture is also employed, where the teacher weights use vision transformers (ViTs) from recent SOTA SSL models. The model is trained on the ImageNet1k dataset. This research provides an approach for designing smaller, more efficient neural network architectures that can perform SSL tasks comparable to heavy model

Fabrication and Evaluation of Low Density Glass-Epoxy Composites for Microwave Absorption Applications

In the present work, fabrication and evaluation of low density glass – epoxy (LDGE) composites suitable for absorbing minimum 80 per cent of incident microwave energy in 8 GHz to 12 GHz (X-band) is reported. LDGE composites having different densities were fabricated using a novel method of partially replacing conventional S-glass fabric with low density glass (LDG) layers as the reinforcement materials. Flexural strength, inter laminar shear strength and impact strength of the prepared LDGE composites were evaluated and compared with conventional High density glass-epoxy (HDGE) composites to understand the changes in these properties due to replacement of S-glass fabrics with LDG layers. To convert LDGE structures to radar absorbing structures controlled quantities of milled carbon fibers were impregnated as these conducting milled carbon fibers can act as dielectric lossy materials which could absorb the incident microwave energy by interfacial polarisation. Electromagnetic properties namely loss tangent and reflection loss of carbon fiber impregnated LDGE composites were evaluated in 8 GHz -12 GHz frequency region and compared with HDGE composites. It was observed that both LDGE and HDGE composites have shown loss tangent values more than 1.1 and minimum 80 per cent absorption of incident microwave energy. Thus the results indicates that, LDGE composites can show EM properties on par with HDGE composites. Furthermore these LDGE composite could successfully withstand the low velocity impacts (4.5 m/s) with 50 J incident energy. Due to their ability to show good mechanical properties and light weight, LDGE composites can be used as a replacement for conventional HDGE composites to realise radar absorbing structures

VISU: A 3D Printed Functional Robot for Human Pose Replication

563-569This paper presents VISU, a novel 3D printed functional robot. VISU is equipped with open-source technologies making it more modular in adapting Internet of Things (IoT) based services. VISU is able to detect and analyze the user’s activity and pose. In addition, a simple method to replicate the pose of a user is also proposed. VISU can also perform actions such as Face recognition, Object Recognition among other basic functionalities

VISU: A 3D Printed Functional Robot for Human Pose Replication

This paper presents VISU, a novel 3D printed functional robot. VISU is equipped with open-source technologies making it more modular in adapting Internet of Things (IoT) based services. VISU is able to detect and analyze the user’s activity and pose. In addition, a simple method to replicate the pose of a user is also proposed. VISU can also perform actions such as Face recognition, Object Recognition among other basic functionalities

Early human B cell response to Ebola virus in four U.S. survivors of infection

The human B cell response to natural filovirus infections early after recovery is poorly understood. Previous serologic studies suggest that some Ebola virus survivors exhibit delayed antibody responses with low magnitude and quality. Here, we sought to study the population of individual memory B cells induced early in convalescence. We isolated monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) from memory B cells from four survivors treated for Ebola virus disease (EVD) 1 or 3 months after discharge from the hospital. At the early time points postrecovery, the frequency of Ebola-specific B cells was low and dominated by clones that were cross-reactive with both Ebola glycoprotein (GP) and with the secreted GP (sGP) form. Of 25 MAbs isolated from four donors, only one exhibited neutralization activity. This neutralizing MAb, designated MAb EBOV237, recognizes an epitope in the glycan cap of the surface glycoprotein. In vivo murine lethal challenge studies showed that EBOV237 conferred protection when given prophylactically at a level similar to that of the ZMapp component MAb 13C6. The results suggest that the human B cell response to EVD 1 to 3 months postdischarge is characterized by a paucity of broad or potent neutralizing clones. However, the neutralizing epitope in the glycan cap recognized by EBOV237 may play a role in the early human antibody response to EVD and should be considered in rational design strategies for new Ebola virus vaccine candidates

Early human B cell response to Ebola virus in four U.S. survivors of infection

The human B cell response to natural filovirus infections early after recovery is poorly understood. Previous serologic studies suggest that some Ebola virus survivors exhibit delayed antibody responses with low magnitude and quality. Here, we sought to study the population of individual memory B cells induced early in convalescence. We isolated monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) from memory B cells from four survivors treated for Ebola virus disease (EVD) 1 or 3 months after discharge from the hospital. At the early time points postrecovery, the frequency of Ebola-specific B cells was low and dominated by clones that were cross-reactive with both Ebola glycoprotein (GP) and with the secreted GP (sGP) form. Of 25 MAbs isolated from four donors, only one exhibited neutralization activity. This neutralizing MAb, designated MAb EBOV237, recognizes an epitope in the glycan cap of the surface glycoprotein. In vivo murine lethal challenge studies showed that EBOV237 conferred protection when given prophylactically at a level similar to that of the ZMapp component MAb 13C6. The results suggest that the human B cell response to EVD 1 to 3 months postdischarge is characterized by a paucity of broad or potent neutralizing clones. However, the neutralizing epitope in the glycan cap recognized by EBOV237 may play a role in the early human antibody response to EVD and should be considered in rational design strategies for new Ebola virus vaccine candidates

Program monitoring in a mandatory-results model

In many real enforcement systems, a security-relevant action must return a result before the application program that invoked that action can continue to execute. However, current models of runtime mechanisms do not capture this requirement on results being returned to application programs; current models are limited to reasoning about policies and enforcement in terms of actions alone, without considering the results of those actions. This thesis presents a more general model of runtime policy enforcement in which all actions return (possibly void- or unit-type) results. This mandatory-results model more accurately reflects the capabilities and limitations of real enforcement mechanisms, particularly those mechanisms that operate by monitoring function/method invocations. We analyze the new model to show that result-returning runtime monitors enforce a strict superset of the safety policies, including some nontrivial liveness policies

Program monitoring in a mandatory-results model

In many real enforcement systems, a security-relevant action must return a result before the application program that invoked that action can continue to execute. However, current models of runtime mechanisms do not capture this requirement on results being returned to application programs; current models are limited to reasoning about policies and enforcement in terms of actions alone, without considering the results of those actions. This thesis presents a more general model of runtime policy enforcement in which all actions return (possibly void- or unit-type) results. This mandatory-results model more accurately reflects the capabilities and limitations of real enforcement mechanisms, particularly those mechanisms that operate by monitoring function/method invocations. We analyze the new model to show that result-returning runtime monitors enforce a strict superset of the safety policies, including some nontrivial liveness policies

Integrating User Experience (UX)Development with Agile SoftwareDevelopment Practices. : A Multiple Case Study Involving Organizations DevelopingInteractive Healthcare Technology (IHT) Applications

Context. User Experience has become key to product development in recent years, as manyorganizations have realized its role in maintaining high user acceptance ratings. User ExperienceDevelopment and Agile Software Development are two highly iterative processes and user-centricprocesses. While both methods stack up well theoretically, there are many challenges encountered whenthey are integrated together in real-world development scenarios. Similar to Agile development, UserExperience Development, has many phases: performing user research, gathering UCD (User-CenteredDesign) requirements, iterating design activities, and performing usability evaluation through user tests.Executing both processes in parallel and mapping their corresponding phases is a major issue andapplying these principles in development environment is even more challenging. This integration bearseven more significance in the field of healthcare technology, where user-centered requirements ofpatients and medical practitioners need to handled systematically, as there are a wide range ofspecifications that cater to unique individuals. Hence, a case study was conducted in two majororganizations involved in the development of Interactive Healthcare Technology (IHT) applications. Objectives. Through a case study, the author attempts to investigate the factors that influence theintegration between UX development and Agile methodologies. These factors include the contemporarytools, processes and methods (TPMs) that are being used integration and the challenges that persistwhen it is applied in industry. The study aims to analyze the Agile-UX development approaches of twodistinct organizations, involved in the same domain, to get an understanding of the mentioned factors. Methods. The multiple case study was conducted through interviews, surveys and direct observation.The qualitative data analysis of the surveys was done through thematic analysis. Quantitative dataanalysis was performed on the data gathered from the surveys. A literature review was conducted priorto the case study to gain knowledge on this issue, which also partially answers the research questions.The case study design was kept consistent across both organizations. Results. Through the results of the case study and a literature review, current UX development practicesin the industry have been identified. The challenges encountered at both case organizations have been studied. These results are further validated and contrasted with the results of the literature review.Following, a retrospection of the methods employed at the case environments, a set of recommendationsfor better integration was generated. A detailed comparative analysis of Agile-UX integration at twoorganizations has been documented. At the end a generic framework has been proposed based on theanalysis of results acquired. Conclusions. Numerous conclusions were drawn from the results and data analysis. Several challengeswere identified through the study, in addition to those suggested by relevant literature. Some of thesewere uniquely prevalent in the field of IHT development. It was found that dynamically changing usercenteredrequirements and late integration of usability and UX development with Agile practices werethe most profound challenges. Adoption of UCD techniques such as Design Studio played a positiverole in easing integration. Usability evaluation and user research are also major factors in the integrationprocess. Lack of time to iterate design and issues in scheduling and performing usability testing had abig impact. Involving users in the design and development process from an early stage is essential toensure high usability and good user experience of the product. The framework designed to counter thesechallenges, takes into account, all these aspects to provide a meticulous Agile-UX integrationframework. Some key conclusion drawn from this framework, are that the application of the “One SprintAhead” approach diminishes many challenges, while performing usability testing in parallel withsystem testing can support integration