Increased erythrocyte osmotic fragility in hypothyroidism

Hypothyroidism a quite common thyroid disorder is often associated with anemia. Osmotic fragility is altered with an alteration of the thyroid profile. Hypothyroidism induced reduction of membrane cholesterol and compromised the activity of Na+K+ATPase and increased peroxidation of membrane lipids appear to be responsible for damaging the red blood corpuscle (RBC) membranes which alter the permeability of themembrane and thus ionic environment within the cell. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relation between the association of hypothyroidism and RBC membrane lipid peroxidation in the development of increased RBC osmotic fragility. A complete clinical history and biochemical investigations, including thyroid function tests namely, thyroid -stimulating hormone (TSH) and free T4 (fT4), RBC membrane osmotic fragility test by gradient concentration of NaCl, and RBC membrane peroxidation using thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) tests were performed among thirty two hypothyroidism patients and healthy controls. Serum TSH & TBARS in the RBC membrane were significantly higher (P <0.001) than healthy controls which also showed a significant positive correlation (r =0.8, P =0.01) when compared without grouping. Osmotic fragility of RBC was found significantly increased among hypothyroid patients (P <0.001) at NaCl conc. of 0.3%, 0.4%, 0.5% & (P <0.05) at NaCl conc. of 0.6%. In conclusion, the results indicated that RBC osmotic fragility increases significantly in hypothyroidism possibility due to increased membrane lipid peroxidation as observed in the study

Increased erythrocyte osmotic fragility in hypothyroidism

213-218Hypothyroidism a quite common thyroid disorder is often associated with anemia. Osmotic fragility is altered with an alteration of the thyroid profile. Hypothyroidism induced reduction of membrane cholesterol and compromised the activity of Na+K+ATPase and increased peroxidation of membrane lipids appear to be responsible for damaging the red blood corpuscle (RBC) membranes which alter the permeability of themembrane and thus ionic environment within the cell. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relation between the association of hypothyroidism and RBC membrane lipid peroxidation in the development of increased RBC osmotic fragility. A complete clinical history and biochemical investigations, including thyroid function tests namely, thyroid -stimulating hormone (TSH) and free T4 (fT4), RBC membrane osmotic fragility test by gradient concentration of NaCl, and RBC membrane peroxidation using thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) tests were performed among thirty two hypothyroidism patients and healthy controls. Serum TSH & TBARS in the RBC membrane were significantly higher (P <0.001) than healthy controls which also showed a significant positive correlation (r =0.8, P =0.01) when compared without grouping. Osmotic fragility of RBC was found significantly increased among hypothyroid patients (P <0.001) at NaCl conc. of 0.3%, 0.4%, 0.5% & (P <0.05) at NaCl conc. of 0.6%. In conclusion, the results indicated that RBC osmotic fragility increases significantly in hypothyroidism possibility due to increased membrane lipid peroxidation as observed in the study

Recursive dynamics algorithms for serial, parallel, and closed-chainmultibody systems

Abstract In this paper, it is shown how to obtain recursive dynamics algorithms for multibody systems with serial, parallel, and closed-loop chains using the concept of Decoupled Natural Orthogonal Complement (DeNOC) matrices. The DeNOC is the product of two block matrices to yield the Natural Orthogonal Complement (NOC), which is a velocity transformation matrix orthogonal to the kinematic constraint matrix of the system at hand. Note that one of the two DeNOC matrices is a lower block triangular and the other one is a block diagonal. This representation allows one to compute the inverse and forward dynamics algorithms of the constrained multibody systems recursively, which was not possible with the original representation of the NOC. As a result, the computational complexities of the algorithms are reduced in many instances, particularly, in forward dynamics with large number of bodies in a system, e.g., space robots, parallel robots, vehicle systems, etc. Moreover, many physical interpretations are available, for example, articulated body inertia, etc., which can be exploited for debugging of a program and architecture design. Illustrations with several multibody systems, e.g., two six-degrees-of-freedom serial manipulators, a parallel manipulator, a carpet scrapping machine with general closed-chain, are presented

Trianthema portulacastrum L.: Traditional medicine in healthcare and biology

127-145Medicinal plants are the major folk and traditional medicine for the prevention of diseases worldwide. Trianthema portulacastrum L. (family: Aizoaceae), a small perennial weed, found in the America, Africa, India, and other regions of the world, and are extensively used not only as medicine but also as vegetable for its various health benefits. Phytochemical analysis of T. portulacastrum reveals the presence of alkaloids, phytosterols, terpenoids, saponins, flavonoids and phenolic compounds. In vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated its pharmacological and biological activities. Different parts of T. portulacastrum L. are conventionally being used as analgesic, anti-pyretic, lipid lowering and microbicide agent; and protect liver and kidney from carcinogen, inflammation and oxidant chemicals

Slim U-Net: Efficient Anatomical Feature Preserving U-net Architecture for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

We investigate the applicability of U-Net based models for segmenting Urinary Bladder (UB) in male pelvic view UltraSound (US) images. The segmentation of UB in the US image aids radiologists in diagnosing the UB. However, UB in US images has arbitrary shapes, indistinct boundaries and considerably large inter- and intra-subject variability, making segmentation a quite challenging task. Our study of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation network, U-Net, for the problem reveals that it often fails to capture the salient characteristics of UB due to the varying shape and scales of anatomy in the noisy US image. Also, U-net has an excessive number of trainable parameters, reporting poor computational efficiency during training. We propose a Slim U-Net to address the challenges of UB segmentation. Slim U-Net proposes to efficiently preserve the salient features of UB by reshaping the structure of U-Net using a less number of 2D convolution layers in the contracting path, in order to preserve and impose them on expanding path. To effectively distinguish the blurred boundaries, we propose a novel annotation methodology, which includes the background area of the image at the boundary of a marked region of interest (RoI), thereby steering the model's attention towards boundaries. In addition, we suggested a combination of loss functions for network training in the complex segmentation of UB. The experimental results demonstrate that Slim U-net is statistically superior to U-net for UB segmentation. The Slim U-net further decreases the number of trainable parameters and training time by 54% and 57.7%, respectively, compared to the standard U-Net, without compromising the segmentation accuracy.Comment: Accepted in 9th ACM International Conference on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Engineering (ICBBE) 2022 http://www.icbbe.com

Trianthema portulacastrum L.: Traditional medicine in healthcare and biology

Medicinal plants are the major folk and traditional medicine for the prevention of diseases worldwide. Trianthema portulacastrum L. (family: Aizoaceae), a small perennial weed, found in the America, Africa, India, and other regions of the world, and are extensively used not only as medicine but also as vegetable for its various health benefits. Phytochemical analysis of T. portulacastrum reveals the presence of alkaloids, phytosterols, terpenoids, saponins, flavonoids and phenolic compounds. In vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated its pharmacological and biological activities. Different parts of T. portulacastrum L. are conventionally being used as analgesic, anti-pyretic, lipid lowering and microbicide agent; and protect liver and kidney from carcinogen, inflammation and oxidant chemicals

A Prospective study to evaluate the demographic variation of gender independent sequences in cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) concentration and to predict pregnancy outcomes by non-kit based economical method

This gender-independent detection of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma using RASSF1A/β-actin has curtained off a new dimension regarding its utility to predict the adverse pregnancy outcomes. Recent efforts have been directed at developing sequences from cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) as markers for pregnancy outcomes. The utility of cffDNA using the methylation-dependent DSCR3 and RASSF1A markers along with total cell-free DNA (cf-DNA) in maternal serum by HYP2 marker are useful in predicting adverse pregnancy outcomes. Increased amount (&gt;95th percentile) of cffDNA fraction in the second trimester is associated with preterm birth. Indigenously developed low-cost method of the gender-independent sequence markers from cffDNA was investigated and evaluated with the standardized commercial kits as predictive markers for adverse pregnancy outcomes. Our results indicated that indigenously developed method for detection of geneder-independent cffDNA can be applicable for screening test of adverse pregnancy outcome

A Prospective study to evaluate the demographic variation of gender independent sequences in cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) concentration and to predict pregnancy outcomes by non-kit based economical method

185-191This gender-independent detection of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma using RASSF1A/β-actin has curtained off a new dimension regarding its utility to predict the adverse pregnancy outcomes. Recent efforts have been directed at developing sequences from cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) as markers for pregnancy outcomes. The utility of cffDNA using the methylation-dependent DSCR3 and RASSF1A markers along with total cell-free DNA (cf-DNA) in maternal serum by HYP2 marker are useful in predicting adverse pregnancy outcomes. Increased amount (>95th percentile) of cffDNA fraction in the second trimester is associated with preterm birth. Indigenously developed low-cost method of the gender-independent sequence markers from cffDNA was investigated and evaluated with the standardized commercial kits as predictive markers for adverse pregnancy outcomes. Our results indicated that indigenously developed method for detection of geneder-independent cffDNA can be applicable for screening test of adverse pregnancy outcome

Grape extract protect against ionizing radiation-induced DNA damage

Grape extracts of different cultivars (Flame seedless, Kishmish chorni, Red globe and Thompson seedless) were investigated for in vitro antioxidant activity by ABTS assay, and compared protective efficacy against radiation-induced DNA damage. Seed extract showed the highest scavenging activity, followed by skin extract. Among different cultivars, ‘flame seedless’ skin extract showed higher scavenging activity followed by ‘Kishmish chorni’ skin extract. Grape extracts significantly prevented radiation-induced plasmid DNA damage. Super-coiled pBR 322 plasmid DNA (~93%) is completely converted to open circular (~97%) and linear (~2%) form at a dose of 150 Gy γ-radiation. Pretreatment with different grape extracts showed various degree of protection against radiation-induced DNA damage. Pretreatment with 1.6 µg grape skin extract of ‘Thompson seedless’ cultivar or grape flesh extract of any tested cultivar diminished the DNA strand breaks, and there was an increase in the super coiled form of DNA against 150 Gy of γ-radiation. However, pretreated pBR 322 DNA with the skin of ‘Kishmish chorni’ cultivars or seed of ‘red globe’ grape cultivars remained static during electrophoresis and confined in the groove on exposure to 150 Gy γ-radiation treatment. Co-treatment with the skin of red globe cultivar also partially confined plasmid DNA in the groove. The same trend was observed when plasmid DNA was exposed to 1.2 kGy γ-radiation. Our investigation revealed that anthocyanin present in grape skin was probably involved in radio protective activities through the formation of co-pigmentation with DNA

Expert-Agnostic Ultrasound Image Quality Assessment using Deep Variational Clustering

Ultrasound imaging is a commonly used modality for several diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. However, the diagnosis by ultrasound relies heavily on the quality of images assessed manually by sonographers, which diminishes the objectivity of the diagnosis and makes it operator-dependent. The supervised learning-based methods for automated quality assessment require manually annotated datasets, which are highly labour-intensive to acquire. These ultrasound images are low in quality and suffer from noisy annotations caused by inter-observer perceptual variations, which hampers learning efficiency. We propose an UnSupervised UltraSound image Quality assessment Network, US2QNet, that eliminates the burden and uncertainty of manual annotations. US2QNet uses the variational autoencoder embedded with the three modules, pre-processing, clustering and post-processing, to jointly enhance, extract, cluster and visualize the quality feature representation of ultrasound images. The pre-processing module uses filtering of images to point the network's attention towards salient quality features, rather than getting distracted by noise. Post-processing is proposed for visualizing the clusters of feature representations in 2D space. We validated the proposed framework for quality assessment of the urinary bladder ultrasound images. The proposed framework achieved 78% accuracy and superior performance to state-of-the-art clustering methods.Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 202