A Novel Software Solution to Diagnose the Hearing Disabilities In Human Beings

Ears are one of the most important sensory organs in human beings. They contribute equally to human beings in acquiring information from around the world. They also help in maintaining a sense of balance in addition to providing the human beings with the ability to hear. Majority of the population are over exposed to sound which significantly leads to hearing loss. A person is said to suffer from hearing loss if he loses the ability to perceive the sound within the normal audible range. In such a scenario, an affordable and reliable testing protocol is required to treat the human fraternity [1]. Therefore, the need of the day is to develop a low cost solution to assess the hearing disabilities in human beings by eliminating the requirement of sound proof environment used in traditional hearing test procedures like audiometry. The auditory function in human beings can be assessed using various parameters of sound such as pitch, intensity, frequency, etc. [2] The current work focuses on developing a simple and an affordable software system which is used to assess the threshold of hearing in human beings. MATLAB platform is used in designing the software system. The software has also been standardised by acquiring the threshold of hearing from 44 healthy individuals of both males and females with age group 20-30 years. The results prove that there is a slight improvement in the hearing perception of males when compared to females

Diagnostic accuracy in rotator cuff tears: clinical tests vs MRI

Background: Till date there is a lack of consensus regarding validity of clinical tests in identifying the rotator cuff injuries and also the predictive value of noninvasive investigations done to confirm such shoulder pathology.Methods: We included 48 patients with shoulder complaints in our study who underwent blinded clinical examination and MRI of shoulder, whose findings were compared with arthroscopic findings and were statistically analyzed.Results: In the study group mean age was 47 years and 71% were males. When compared with arthroscopy, clinical examination for supraspinatus had better sensitivity (90) but low specificity and negative predictive value (NPV) (37.5). MRI evaluation of supraspinatus had specificity of 85 and NPV of 60. Infraspinatus had almost similar statistical values. MRI was found to have better specificity (89.5) in comparison with clinical examination (52.6) in subscapularis evaluation along with higher positive (67 vs. 30) and negative predictive value (94 vs. 90).Conclusions: Clinical examination is good in identifying lesion or tear of supraspinatus and subscapularis but may also have false positives, where usage of noninvasive MRI will reduce these false positive in comparison with gold standard arthroscopy. Although clinical examination is very useful for diagnosis of rotator cuff injuries, MRI could be used to improve specificity and predictive values in patients who are planned for surgical management of rotator cuff injury

Night sky at the Indian Astronomical Observatory during 2000-2008

We present an analysis of the optical night sky brightness and extinction coefficient measurements in UBVRI at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO), Hanle, during the period 2003-2008. They are obtained from an analysis of CCD images acquired at the 2 m Himalayan Chandra Telescope at IAO. Night sky brightness was estimated using 210 HFOSC images obtained on 47 nights and covering the declining phase of solar activity cycle-23. The zenith corrected values of the moonless night sky brightness in mag/square arcsecs are 22.14(U), 22.42(B), 21.28(V), 20.54(R) and 18.86(I) band. This shows that IAO is a dark site for optical observations. No clear dependency of sky brightness with solar activity is found. Extinction values at IAO are derived from an analysis of 1325 images over 58 nights. They are found to be 0.36 in U-band, 0.21 in B-band, 0.12 in V-band, 0.09 in R-band and 0.05 in I-band. On average, extinction during the summer months is slightly larger than that during the winter months. No clear evidence for a correlation between extinction in all bands and the average night time wind speed is found. Also presented here is the low resolution moonless optical night sky spectrum for IAO covering the wavelength range 3000-9300 \AA. Hanle region thus has the required characteristics of a good astronomical site in terms of night sky brightness and extinction, and could be a natural candidate site for any future large aperture Indian optical-infrared telescope(s).Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, uses basi.cls, accepted for publication in Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of Indi

Soil fertility status of coconut and arecanut growing soils

The present study was undertaken to assess the soil fertility status of major coconut and arecanut growing soils in different agro-climatic conditions of Karnataka. Based on the agro-climate variability, thirty typical soil pedons representing five different agro-climatic zones (ACZs) of Karnataka, namely, eastern dry zone (EDZ), southern dry zone (SDZ), southern transitional zone (STZ), hilly zone (HZ), and coastal zone (CZ) were studied for their physicochemical properties. The study revealed that soils of semi-arid (EDZ and SDZ) and sub-humid (STZ) zones have near neutral to moderately alkaline reaction and humid region soils (coastal and hilly zones) have high acidity. The soils are non-saline with low cation exchange capacity. Greater soil organic carbon was recorded in arecanut soils than coconut under all ACZs except coastal zone. The major nutrients status of the soil samples indicated that the available nitrogen is low in all the pedons; the pooled data of available nitrogen content was higher in arecanut (166.3 kg ha-1) than coconut (152.6 kg ha-1), and hilly zone soils recorded higher available nitrogen. A wide range of available P2O5 was noticed in coconut and arecanut soils, ranging from 1.0 to 64.2 kg ha-1. The coconut soils (11.5 kg ha-1) recorded higher available P2O5 than arecanut soils (9.62 kg ha-1) when data were pooled. The soils were low to medium in available potassium, and a higher available K2O content was recorded in arecanut soils (151.7 kg ha-1) compared to coconut (110.1 kg ha-1). The available K2O ranged from 66.8 to 511.7 kg ha-1 in the surface and 37.6 to 461.2 kg ha-1 in sub-surface soils

Cocoa Care - An Android Application for Cocoa Disease Identification

India is an agricultural country. The correct and timely identification of diseases in crops is very much essential in agriculture. To obtain more valuable products, a product quality control is basically mandatory. Cocoa is an economically important crop that nowadays enlarges its production in southern India. To assist the farmers growing cocoa, we developed an android application Cocoa-Care. This application automatically identifies the diseases of cocoa crops, thereby helps the farmers who have little or no information about the disease. This application is developed by applying digital image processing techniques on the diseased cocoa images. Our approach replaces the manual disease inspection by the android application that identifies the cocoa disease from the captured image and suggests the possible remedies for the farmer. We used moment based texture features for the image representation and description. The matching is performed by nearest neighbor classifier. The results obtained are promising and this application can be used in the real time