Nonesophageal Eosinophilic Gastrointestinal Disorders: Clinical Care and Future Directions

Eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders are a set of conditions with a wide range of clinical manifestations and treatment modalities. The disorders are suspected to result from an abnormal inflammatory response to allergen(s), and individuals may develop a relapsing or chronic disease, if the allergen is not eliminated. Mechanisms of disease pathogenesis, including the humoral immune response, need to be fully elucidated. A variety of therapies are used, though there is a lack of well-defined randomized, prospective studies. Other therapeutic options are needed as the current treatments have potential concerns; elimination diets may impair a child’s quality of life, and corticosteroids have adverse risks with long-term use. We review what is known about non-esophageal eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders, and discuss research investigations which need to be conducted to facilitate diagnosis and enhance treatment methods

Steroids in pediatric eosinophilic esophagitis

Swallowed fluticasone and oral viscous budesonide are effective first-line therapies for eosinophilic esophagitis in children. Side effects are minimal without evidence of Cushing syndrome, as seen in treatment with systemic corticosteroids. New studies on alternative delivery systems and different corticosteroids (eg, ciclesonide) are encouraging. As knowledge of corticosteroids in eosinophilic esophagitis expands, newer questions continue to arise concerning dose, delivery, and choice of corticosteroids; long-term adverse effects; and maintenance therapies

Evaluation of ground water quality near Chandi Devi bridge solid waste dumping site at Hairdwar city, (Uttarakhand), India : A case study

The present study observed groundwater quality around Chandi Devi bridge open dumping site at Hardwar (Uttarakhand), India. Five experimental sites viz. sites 2,3 and 5 (hand pumps) and  two sites 4,6  (tubewells) within the vicinity of the dumpsite and a reference site viz. site 1 (hand pump) (Bilkeshwar temple) as a control about 5000 meter away, were selected to ascertain the influence of solid waste dumping on groundwater quality around the area. The study showed that physicochemical parameters viz temperature, colour, turbidity, pH, hardness, BOD, COD, fluoride  and heavy metals ( lead and iron) of the ground water near the dumping sites-2,3,4,5,6 were higher than their counterpart parameters of the ground water at control site. However, arsenic was not detected in any sample of all the sites. The parameters viz., colour (2.08-3.49 hazen), turbidity (3.05-5.35 NTU), odour (agreeable), pH (7.46-7.80),fluoride (0.10-0.38 ppm), lead (0.00-0.032 ppm), iron (0.01-0.03 ppm) of ground water of all experimental sites were within permissible limits while the parameters BOD (3.73-3.21 ppm), hardness (240.41-203.15 ppm) at site-2, site-3 and DO (5.38-6.28 ppm) of all experimental sites were not found within permissible limits  as prescribed by Bureau  of Indian standards (2012). Although water was safe for drinking which may be due to higher infiltration rate of river Ganga and Eastern Ganga Canal water but higher value of temperature (oC), colour (hazen), turbidity (ppm), hardness (ppm), BOD (ppm), COD (ppm) fluoride (ppm), iron (ppm) and lead (ppm) at site- 2 was quite alarming. The study would help in making public awareness for waste sorting, adopting green technology and to predict level of contaminants in ground water produced by land filling dumping site

Protocol optimizations for the CRL distributed shared memory system

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-175).by Sandeep K. Gupta.M.S

Breast metastasis of ilial carcinoid tumor: Case report and literature review

BACKGROUND: Metastatic breast carcinoids are rare neoplasms. They can be mistaken for primary breast carcinoma both clinically and radiologically, even with known history of carcinoid tumor elsewhere in the body. CASE PRESENTATION: We report a case of unilateral breast metastasis from carcinoid tumor of the small intestine in a 52-year-old woman who was successfully treated by lumpectomy and radiation therapy. An extensive review of the literature reveals only a few cases of metastatic carcinoid to the breast from small intestinal primaries. CONCLUSION: Clinical suspicion for metastasis should be high in a patient with breast mass and history of known carcinoid elsewhere in the body. Lumpectomy alone may be effective in these patients. Mastectomy and especially axillary dissection could be avoided. Their histological appearance may mimic ductal adenocarcinoma of the breast. However, the distinction is important due to differences in management and prognosis

A questionnaire-based comparison of conventional teaching methods to computer assisted learning in experimental pharmacology for undergraduate medical students

Background: Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) for teaching experimental pharmacology is now widely accepted as alternative to animal experiments. The objective of this study was to compare the performance of undergraduate medical students by conventional teaching methods (lecture and discussion) and CAL.Methods: This was a questionnaire based observational study involving 109 MBBS students of fifth semester. The students were taught experimental pharmacology practical by both conventional methods (lecture with discussion) and computer assisted learning (CAL). Questionnaire and their filled responses by these students were taken at the end of lecture-discussion (pre-CAL) and after the CAL experiments (post-CAL), covering the same topics of experimental pharmacology. Pre-CAL and post-CAL data were assessed statistically.Results: In the pre-CAL session, only 53.39%, 47.56%, 53.39% and 49.5% of the students were having the scores above 40% in the rabbit eye, DRC and potentiation, frog heart and dog BP experiment respectively, which was increased to 77.44%, 75.48%, 75.47% and 75.48% of the students respectively in the post-CAL assessment. A statistically significant difference (p <0.05) in the performance was observed among the students in the pre-CAL and post-CAL assessment.Conclusions: CAL is a good alternative to animal experimentation. Lecture with discussion, followed by CAL experiments on the same topics, enhanced the performance of students as shown by improvement in post-CAL scores

Eosinophilic esophagitis: search for non-invasive techniques for long-term monitoring

Comment on: Unsedated transnasal esophagoscopy for monitoring therapy in pediatric eosinophilic esophagitis. [Gastrointest Endosc. 2016

Transfer: Cross Modality Knowledge Transfer using Adversarial Networks -- A Study on Gesture Recognition

Knowledge transfer across sensing technology is a novel concept that has been recently explored in many application domains, including gesture-based human computer interaction. The main aim is to gather semantic or data driven information from a source technology to classify / recognize instances of unseen classes in the target technology. The primary challenge is the significant difference in dimensionality and distribution of feature sets between the source and the target technologies. In this paper, we propose TRANSFER, a generic framework for knowledge transfer between a source and a target technology. TRANSFER uses a language-based representation of a hand gesture, which captures a temporal combination of concepts such as handshape, location, and movement that are semantically related to the meaning of a word. By utilizing a pre-specified syntactic structure and tokenizer, TRANSFER segments a hand gesture into tokens and identifies individual components using a token recognizer. The tokenizer in this language-based recognition system abstracts the low-level technology-specific characteristics to the machine interface, enabling the design of a discriminator that learns technology-invariant features essential for recognition of gestures in both source and target technologies. We demonstrate the usage of TRANSFER for three different scenarios: a) transferring knowledge across technology by learning gesture models from video and recognizing gestures using WiFi, b) transferring knowledge from video to accelerometer, and d) transferring knowledge from accelerometer to WiFi signals