Maternal history and second trimester uterine artery Doppler in the assessment of risk for development of early and late onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction

Background: To evaluate the value of one step uterine artery Doppler and maternal history in the prediction of early onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction in a random populationMethods: This study was conducted from 2012 to 2014 Lalla Ded hospital which is a tertiary care hospital associated with GMC Srinagar. This was a prospective study conducted on 200 pregnant women in the second trimester between 19-22 weeks of gestation. Singleton pregnant women were recruited from those attending antenatal care clinics at this hospital over a period of two years. Obstetric and medical history was taken. Transabdominal ultrasound was done and then patients were subjected to Doppler examination of uterine arteries.Results: Mean age of study population was 26.3 years with maximum number of patients in 25-29 year age group. Total numbers of primigravida were 59.5%. Maternal history revealed that 9.5% had previous history of hypertensive pregnancy, 3.5% had history of IUGR. Early onset pre-eclampsia (32 weeks) was present in 57.1% cases. Doppler abnormalities were present in 7.5%. In the patients who developed pre-eclampsia 57.1% had uterine artery Doppler abnormalities.Conclusions: Maternal history and uterine artery Doppler at 19-22 weeks gestation is a single step test for the prediction of early onset(<32 weeks) and late onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction

Contribution of BRCA1 germline mutation in patients with sporadic breast cancer

Hereditary artifacts in BRCA1 gene have a significant contributory role in familial cases of breast cancer. However, its germline mutational penetrance in sporadic breast cancer cases with respect to Pakistani population has not yet been very well defined. This study was designed to assess the contributory role of germline mutations of this gene in sporadic cases of breast cancer. 150 cases of unilateral breast cancer patients, with no prior family history of breast cancer and no other disorders or diseases in general with age range 35–75 yrs, were included in this study

A Novel Stacked CNN for Malarial Parasite Detection in Thin Blood Smear Images

Malaria refers to a contagious mosquito-borne disease caused by parasite genus plasmodium transmitted by mosquito female Anopheles. As infected mosquito bites a person, the parasite multiplies in the host's liver and start destroying the red-cells. The disease is examined visually under the microscope for infected red-cells. This diagnosis depends upon the expertise and experience of pathologists and reports may vary in different laboratories doing a manual examination. Another way around, many machine learning techniques have been applied for spontaneous detection of blood smears. However, feature engineering is a challenging task that requires expertise to adjust positional and morphological features. Therefore, this study proposes a novel Stacked Convolutional Neural Network architecture that improves the automatic detection of malaria without considering the hand-crafted features. The 5-fold cross-validation process on 27, 558 cell images with equal instances of parasitized and uninfected cells on a publicly available dataset from the National Institute of health, the accuracy of our proposed model is 99.98%. Furthermore, the statistical results revealed that the proposed model is superior to the state-of-the-art models with 100% precision, 99.9% recall, and 99% f1-measure

RFCNN: Traffic Accident Severity Prediction Based on Decision Level Fusion of Machine and Deep Learning Model

Traffic accidents on highways are a leading cause of death despite the development of traffic safety measures. The burden of casualties and damage caused by road accidents is very high for developing countries. Many factors are associated with traffic accidents, some of which are more significant than others in determining the severity of accidents. Data mining techniques can help in predicting influential factors related to crash severity. In this study, significant factors that are strongly correlated with the accident severity on highways are identified by Random Forest. Top features affecting accidental severity include distance, temperature, wind_Chill, humidity, visibility, and wind direction. This study presents an ensemble of machine learning and deep learning models by combining Random Forest and Convolutional Neural Network called RFCNN for the prediction of road accident severity. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with several base learner classifiers. The data used in the analysis include accident records of the USA from February 2016 to June 2020. Obtained results demonstrate that the RFCNN enhanced the decision-making process and outperformed other models with 0.991 accuracy, 0.974 precision, 0.986 recall, and 0.980 F-score using the 20 most significant features in predicting the severity of accidents

Effect of early tranexamic acid administration on mortality, hysterectomy, and other morbidities in women with post-partum haemorrhage (WOMAN): an international, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal death worldwide. Early administration of tranexamic acid reduces deaths due to bleeding in trauma patients. We aimed to assess the effects of early administration of tranexamic acid on death, hysterectomy, and other relevant outcomes in women with post-partum haemorrhage. Methods In this randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, we recruited women aged 16 years and older with a clinical diagnosis of post-partum haemorrhage after a vaginal birth or caesarean section from 193 hospitals in 21 countries. We randomly assigned women to receive either 1 g intravenous tranexamic acid or matching placebo in addition to usual care. If bleeding continued after 30 min, or stopped and restarted within 24 h of the first dose, a second dose of 1 g of tranexamic acid or placebo could be given. Patients were assigned by selection of a numbered treatment pack from a box containing eight numbered packs that were identical apart from the pack number. Participants, care givers, and those assessing outcomes were masked to allocation. We originally planned to enrol 15 000 women with a composite primary endpoint of death from all-causes or hysterectomy within 42 days of giving birth. However, during the trial it became apparent that the decision to conduct a hysterectomy was often made at the same time as randomisation. Although tranexamic acid could influence the risk of death in these cases, it could not affect the risk of hysterectomy. We therefore increased the sample size from 15 000 to 20 000 women in order to estimate the effect of tranexamic acid on the risk of death from post-partum haemorrhage. All analyses were done on an intention-to-treat basis. This trial is registered with ISRCTN76912190 (Dec 8, 2008); ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00872469; and PACTR201007000192283. Findings Between March, 2010, and April, 2016, 20 060 women were enrolled and randomly assigned to receive tranexamic acid (n=10 051) or placebo (n=10 009), of whom 10 036 and 9985, respectively, were included in the analysis. Death due to bleeding was significantly reduced in women given tranexamic acid (155 [1·5%] of 10 036 patients vs 191 [1·9%] of 9985 in the placebo group, risk ratio [RR] 0·81, 95% CI 0·65–1·00; p=0·045), especially in women given treatment within 3 h of giving birth (89 [1·2%] in the tranexamic acid group vs 127 [1·7%] in the placebo group, RR 0·69, 95% CI 0·52–0·91; p=0·008). All other causes of death did not differ significantly by group. Hysterectomy was not reduced with tranexamic acid (358 [3·6%] patients in the tranexamic acid group vs 351 [3·5%] in the placebo group, RR 1·02, 95% CI 0·88–1·07; p=0·84). The composite primary endpoint of death from all causes or hysterectomy was not reduced with tranexamic acid (534 [5·3%] deaths or hysterectomies in the tranexamic acid group vs 546 [5·5%] in the placebo group, RR 0·97, 95% CI 0·87-1·09; p=0·65). Adverse events (including thromboembolic events) did not differ significantly in the tranexamic acid versus placebo group. Interpretation Tranexamic acid reduces death due to bleeding in women with post-partum haemorrhage with no adverse effects. When used as a treatment for postpartum haemorrhage, tranexamic acid should be given as soon as possible after bleeding onset. Funding London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Pfizer, UK Department of Health, Wellcome Trust, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Convalescent plasma in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised controlled, open-label, platform trial

SummaryBackground Azithromycin has been proposed as a treatment for COVID-19 on the basis of its immunomodulatoryactions. We aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of azithromycin in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19.Methods In this randomised, controlled, open-label, adaptive platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19Therapy [RECOVERY]), several possible treatments were compared with usual care in patients admitted to hospitalwith COVID-19 in the UK. The trial is underway at 176 hospitals in the UK. Eligible and consenting patients wererandomly allocated to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus azithromycin 500 mg once perday by mouth or intravenously for 10 days or until discharge (or allocation to one of the other RECOVERY treatmentgroups). Patients were assigned via web-based simple (unstratified) randomisation with allocation concealment andwere twice as likely to be randomly assigned to usual care than to any of the active treatment groups. Participants andlocal study staff were not masked to the allocated treatment, but all others involved in the trial were masked to theoutcome data during the trial. The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality, assessed in the intention-to-treatpopulation. The trial is registered with ISRCTN, 50189673, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04381936.Findings Between April 7 and Nov 27, 2020, of 16 442 patients enrolled in the RECOVERY trial, 9433 (57%) wereeligible and 7763 were included in the assessment of azithromycin. The mean age of these study participants was65·3 years (SD 15·7) and approximately a third were women (2944 [38%] of 7763). 2582 patients were randomlyallocated to receive azithromycin and 5181 patients were randomly allocated to usual care alone. Overall,561 (22%) patients allocated to azithromycin and 1162 (22%) patients allocated to usual care died within 28 days(rate ratio 0·97, 95% CI 0·87–1·07; p=0·50). No significant difference was seen in duration of hospital stay (median10 days [IQR 5 to >28] vs 11 days [5 to >28]) or the proportion of patients discharged from hospital alive within 28 days(rate ratio 1·04, 95% CI 0·98–1·10; p=0·19). Among those not on invasive mechanical ventilation at baseline, nosignificant difference was seen in the proportion meeting the composite endpoint of invasive mechanical ventilationor death (risk ratio 0·95, 95% CI 0·87–1·03; p=0·24).Interpretation In patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, azithromycin did not improve survival or otherprespecified clinical outcomes. Azithromycin use in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 should be restrictedto patients in whom there is a clear antimicrobial indication

Deepfake Detection on Social Media: Leveraging Deep Learning and FastText Embeddings for Identifying Machine-Generated Tweets

Recent advancements in natural language production provide an additional tool to manipulate public opinion on social media. Furthermore, advancements in language modelling have significantly strengthened the generative capabilities of deep neural models, empowering them with enhanced skills for content generation. Consequently, text-generative models have become increasingly powerful allowing the adversaries to use these remarkable abilities to boost social bots, allowing them to generate realistic deepfake posts and influence the discourse among the general public. To address this problem, the development of reliable and accurate deepfake social media message-detecting methods is important. Under this consideration, current research addresses the identification of machine-generated text on social networks like Twitter. In this study, a simple deep learning model in combination with word embeddings is employed for the classification of tweets as human-generated or bot-generated using a publicly available Tweepfake dataset. A conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture is devised, leveraging FastText word embeddings, to undertake the task of identifying deepfake tweets. To showcase the superior performance of the proposed method, this study employed several machine learning models as baseline methods for comparison. These baseline methods utilized various features, including Term Frequency, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, FastText, and FastText subword embeddings. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is also compared against other deep learning models such as Long short-term memory (LSTM) and CNN-LSTM displaying the effectiveness and highlighting its advantages in accurately addressing the task at hand. Experimental results indicate that the design of the CNN architecture coupled with the utilization of FastText embeddings is suitable for efficient and effective classification of the tweet data with a superior 93&#x0025; accuracy

Maternal history and second trimester uterine artery Doppler in the assessment of risk for development of early and late onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction

Background: To evaluate the value of one step uterine artery Doppler and maternal history in the prediction of early onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction in a random populationMethods: This study was conducted from 2012 to 2014 Lalla Ded hospital which is a tertiary care hospital associated with GMC Srinagar. This was a prospective study conducted on 200 pregnant women in the second trimester between 19-22 weeks of gestation. Singleton pregnant women were recruited from those attending antenatal care clinics at this hospital over a period of two years. Obstetric and medical history was taken. Transabdominal ultrasound was done and then patients were subjected to Doppler examination of uterine arteries.Results: Mean age of study population was 26.3 years with maximum number of patients in 25-29 year age group. Total numbers of primigravida were 59.5%. Maternal history revealed that 9.5% had previous history of hypertensive pregnancy, 3.5% had history of IUGR. Early onset pre-eclampsia (&lt;32 weeks) was present in 42.9% and late onset pre-eclampsia (&gt;32 weeks) was present in 57.1% cases. Doppler abnormalities were present in 7.5%. In the patients who developed pre-eclampsia 57.1% had uterine artery Doppler abnormalities.Conclusions: Maternal history and uterine artery Doppler at 19-22 weeks gestation is a single step test for the prediction of early onset(&lt;32 weeks) and late onset pre-eclampsia and intra uterine growth restriction

Probing the Catalytic Activity of Tin-Platinum Decorated Graphene; Liquid Phase Oxidation of Cyclohexane

Pt-Sn supported on reduced graphene oxide (Pt-Sn/rGO) was synthesized and characterized by SEM, EDX, and XRD. The catalytic activity of Pt-Sn/rGO was tested for the solvent free liquid phase oxidation of cyclohexane to a mixture of cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone, also called KA oil, under mild reaction conditions. The products were analyzed gravimetrically, by UV spectrophotometer, and GC equipped with FID. The catalyst was found to be fairly active as well as selective for the desired products. The experimental data was analyzed by Freundlich, Temkin, and Langmuir adsorption isotherms. The L-H model was found to give a better fit of the data. The catalyst was fully recyclable and truly heterogeneous