Aspergillus fumigatus cerebral abscess following hemodialysis: A case report

Background and Purpose: Cerebral aspergillosis is a notorious disease that causesrapid clinical deterioration and carries a poor prognosis. Therefore, it requires timelydiagnosis and prompt management.Case Report: This study reports a case of fungal cerebral abscess in a 26years old manfollowing hemodialysis,2 months afterdengue-induced acute kidney disease. Aspergillus fumigatus was recovered from a brain abscess specimen that was subjected to a parietal craniotomy. The patient was successfully treated with oral Voriconazole 400mg BD for 2 days, followed by 200 mg BD for 3monthsConclusion: Hemodialysis patients are at high risk offungal infections due to thefrequent use of catheters or the insertion of needles to access the bloodstream. Therefore, a high index of suspicion of fungal infection is required in patients with hemodialysis by the clinician for early diagnosis and treatment

Disseminated tuberculosis in a newborn infant

Tuberculosis (TB) remaining as one of the deadliest communicable diseases. Congenital infection by vertical transmission is rare but high neonatal mortality (up to 60%) and morbidity warrant early and accurate diagnosis of newborns suffering from TB. Intrauterine infection of tuberculosis is most commonly caused by haematogenous spread from the mother causing placental seedling. The organisms reach the fetus via the umbilical vein and the primary focus is often in the fetal liver in hematgenous spread. Another route of infection is by direct ingestion or aspiration of infected amniotic fluid if the placental caseous lesion ruptures directly into the amniotic cavity. Transplacental infection occurs late in pregnancy and aspiration from amniotic fluid occurs in the perinatal period. We report here one case of disseminated tuberculosis in a new born infant

Legionella pneumophila Serogroup 1 in the Water Facilities of a Tertiary Healthcare Center, India

Proactive environmental surveillance for Legionella pneumophila in hospitals that treat immunocompromised patients is a useful strategy for preventing nosocomial Legionnaires’ disease. We report the presence of L. pneumophila serogroup 1 in 15.2% of the water systems of our tertiary healthcare center, which should prompt health officials to formulate mitigation policies

Computer Vision-Based Assessment of Autistic Children: Analyzing Interactions, Emotions, Human Pose, and Life Skills

In this paper, the proposed work implements and tests the computer vision applications to perform the skill and emotion assessment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by extracting various bio-behaviors, human activities, child-therapist interactions, and joint pose estimations from the recorded videos of interactive single- or two-person play-based intervention sessions. A comprehensive data set of 300 videos is amassed from ASD children engaged in social interaction, and three novel deep learning-based vision models are developed, which are explained as follows: (i) activity comprehension to analyze child-play partner interactions (activity comprehension model); (ii) an automatic joint attention recognition framework using head and hand pose; and (iii) emotion and facial expression recognition. The proposed models are also tested on children’s real-world, 68 unseen videos captured from the clinic, and public datasets. The activity comprehension model has an overall accuracy of 72.32%, the joint attention recognition models have an accuracy of 97% for follow eye gaze and 93.4% for hand pointing, and the facial expression recognition model has an overall accuracy of 95.1%. The proposed models could extract behaviors of interest, events of activities, emotions, and social skills from free-play and intervention session videos of long duration and provide temporal plots for session monitoring and assessment, thus empowering clinicians with insightful data useful in diagnosis, assessment, treatment formulation, and monitoring ASD children with limited supervision

Bartonella henselae infection in diverse clinical conditions in a tertiary care hospital in north India

Background & objectives: Bartonella henselae causes infections which closely resemble febrile illness and chronic diseases such as tuberculosis and haematological malignancies. There are not many studies on Bartonella infections from India. The present study was undertaken to diagnose B. henselae infection in diverse clinical conditions in a tertiary care hospital in north India. Methods: A total of 145 patients including those with fever and lymphadenopathy, infective endocarditis and neuroretinitis were enrolled in the study. Whole blood, serum and lymph node aspirate and valvular vegetations if available, were obtained. Samples were plated on chocolate agar and brain-heart infusion agar containing five per cent fresh rabbit blood and were incubated at 35°C for at least four weeks in five per cent CO2with high humidity. Immunofluorescent antibody assay (IFA) was done for the detection of IgM antibodies in the serum using a commercial kit. Whole blood was used to perform polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the citrate synthase gene (gltA). Results: IFA was positive in 11 of 140 (7.85%) patients and PCR was positive in 3 of 140 (2.14%) patients. Culture was negative in all the cases. A higher incidence of Bartonella infection was seen in patients with fever and lymphadenopathy (n=30), seven of whom were children. In ophthalmological conditions, four cases were IFA positive. Interpretation & conclusions: The present study shows that the threat of Bartonella infection is a reality in India. It is also an important treatable cause of fever and lymphadenopathy in children. Serology and PCR are useful tests for its diagnosis. Clinicians should consider Bartonella infection in the differential diagnosis of febrile illnesses and chronic diseases

International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortiu (INICC) report, data summary of 43 countries for 2007-2012. Device-associated module

We report the results of an International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) surveillance study from January 2007-December 2012 in 503 intensive care units (ICUs) in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. During the 6-year study using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) U.S. National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) definitions for device-associated health care–associated infection (DA-HAI), we collected prospective data from 605,310 patients hospitalized in the INICC's ICUs for an aggregate of 3,338,396 days. Although device utilization in the INICC's ICUs was similar to that reported from ICUs in the U.S. in the CDC's NHSN, rates of device-associated nosocomial infection were higher in the ICUs of the INICC hospitals: the pooled rate of central line–associated bloodstream infection in the INICC's ICUs, 4.9 per 1,000 central line days, is nearly 5-fold higher than the 0.9 per 1,000 central line days reported from comparable U.S. ICUs. The overall rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia was also higher (16.8 vs 1.1 per 1,000 ventilator days) as was the rate of catheter-associated urinary tract infection (5.5 vs 1.3 per 1,000 catheter days). Frequencies of resistance of Pseudomonas isolates to amikacin (42.8% vs 10%) and imipenem (42.4% vs 26.1%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates to ceftazidime (71.2% vs 28.8%) and imipenem (19.6% vs 12.8%) were also higher in the INICC's ICUs compared with the ICUs of the CDC's NHSN