A prospective analytical study of intrauterine fetal death cases and associated maternal condition at a tertiary centre

Background: Intrauterine fetal death (IUFD) is a cataclysmic event for the parents and a lamentable event for the caregiver. Intrauterine fetal death is an important indicator of maternal and perinatal health of a given population. This study was undertaken to study the maternal and fetal factors associated with intrauterine fetal death. In this traumatic time, it is important to ensure that the emotional needs of the family are met. The objective of the study was to evaluate and understand the prevalence, socio-epidemiological and etiological factors of IUFD.Methods: This was a prospective analytical study carried out at Umaid Hospital associated to Dr. S. N. Medical College, Jodhpur, Rajasthan from August 2015 to Jan 2016 for a duration of 6 months. Informed consent was taken from all the participants. A predesigned proforma was used to collect relevant information from all those who gave consent to participate in the study. The details of complaints at admission, obstetrical history, menstrual history, examination findings, per vaginal examination findings, mode and method of delivery, and fetal outcome and investigation reports were recorded.Results: A total of 435 intrauterine fetal deaths were reported amongst 11615 deliveries conducted during the study period in our hospital. The incidence of IUFD was 37/1000 live births. 327 (75.17%) deliveries were unbooked and unsupervised and had no antenatal check-up. 306(70.74%) patients were from rural areas and 243 (50.11%) were preterm and 430(98.85%) were singleton delivery. Amongst the identifiable causes, hypertensive disorders (22.75%) and very severe anaemia (13.10%) were the most common ones followed by placental causes (9.97%). Congenital malformations were responsible for 11.03% cases of IUFD and in rest 10.57% cases no obvious cause could be identified. Induction was done in 195 patients, 174 patients had spontaneous onset of labour and caesarean section was done in 66 patients.Conclusions: The incidence of intrauterine fetal deaths in our population is higher than that reported from the developed countries. The present study is an effort to compile a profile of maternal, fetal and placental causes culminating in IUFD at our centre. This emphasizes the importance of proper antenatal care and identification of risk factors and its treatment. Institutional deliveries should be promoted to prevent IUFD. Decrease in the incidence of IUFD would significantly reduce the perinatal mortality. Majority of fetal wastage can be prevented with universal and improved antenatal care

A study of dengue fever in pregnancy and its maternal and fetal prognosis

Background: Dengue is a vector borne viral disease. Female Anopheles mosquito is the vector for the disease. Recently, there is an increase in the incidence of dengue fever in adult population in South Asian countries. With increasing rate of adult dengue fever victims, the number of infected pregnant women has also been increased. Dengue, during pregnancy may be associated with various complications, including abortions, preterm delivery, maternal mortality, low birth weight, neonatal admissions and fetal anomalies. Timely intervention can improve the maternal as well as fetal outcome. This study was aimed to assess the clinical profile, maternal and fetal outcome of dengue fever during pregnancy.Methods: The study was carried out on 25 pregnant females diagnosed and serologically confirmed to have dengue fever and were admitted in Umaid hospital, associated to Dr. S. N. Medical College Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. Patients were included irrespective of the period of gestation of contracting the disease. Serological testing for dengue virus specific antigen and antibody was done for the diagnosis of dengue fever. The World Health Organization (WHO) classification and case definitions 2009 were used to categorize the dengue patients. A predesigned proforma was used to collect data related to maternal and fetal consequences both during pregnancy and at birth, as well as the effect on the newborn. Informed and written consent was taken from all those who participated in the study.Results: Thrombocytopenia (platelet count <1.5lakh/mm3) was found in 22 (88%) patients out of which 6 (24%) of them had platelet count below 20,000 cells/mm3 and 3(12%) patients required platelet transfusion. Other complications observed were spontaneous abortions (4%); preterm birth (16%), oligohydramnios (8%) and antepartum hemorrhage (4%). One patient was admitted to Intensive Care Unit. Fetal distress and meconium stained amniotic fluid was observed in 16% and 12% patients respectively. Adverse fetal outcome was observed in form of low birth weight, prematurity. 8% of the babies required NICU admission and 4% were Intra Uterine Fetal Death (IUFD).Conclusions: Maternal infection with the dengue virus during antenatal period represents a real risk of premature birth. Early onset or late onset in pregnancy appeared to have a bad prognosis.  A high index of clinical suspicion is essential in any pregnant woman with fever during the epidemic. The treatment of dengue in pregnancy is mainly conservative as in non-pregnant adults. In case of high risk cases early referral to well-equipped health centres where technical, transfusion and intensive care facilities are available may prove lifesaving

Elucidating the interactive impact of tillage, residue retention and system intensification on pearl millet yield stability and biofortification under rainfed agro-ecosystems

Micronutrient malnutrition and suboptimal yields pose significant challenges in rainfed cropping systems worldwide. To address these issues, the implementation of climate-smart management strategies such as conservation agriculture (CA) and system intensification of millet cropping systems is crucial. In this study, we investigated the effects of different system intensification options, residue management, and contrasting tillage practices on pearl millet yield stability, biofortification, and the fatty acid profile of the pearl millet. ZT systems with intercropping of legumes (cluster bean, cowpea, and chickpea) significantly increased productivity (7–12.5%), micronutrient biofortification [Fe (12.5%), Zn (4.9–12.2%), Mn (3.1–6.7%), and Cu (8.3–16.7%)], protein content (2.2–9.9%), oil content (1.3%), and fatty acid profile of pearl millet grains compared to conventional tillage (CT)-based systems with sole cropping. The interactive effect of tillage, residue retention, and system intensification analyzed using GGE statistical analysis revealed that the best combination for achieving stable yields and micronutrient fortification was residue retention in both (wet and dry) seasons coupled with a ZT pearl millet + cowpea–mustard (both with and without barley intercropping) system. In conclusion, ZT combined with residue recycling and legume intercropping can be recommended as an effective approach to achieve stable yield levels and enhance the biofortification of pearl millet in rainfed agroecosystems of South Asia

A review on various green methods for synthesis of Schiff base ligands and their metal complexes

The purpose of green synthesis is to limit the amount of hazardous compounds used in synthesis and their discharge into the environment. Compared to traditional approaches, green techniques must improve selectivity, minimise reaction time, and simplify product separation. Schiff base ligands and their metal complexes are well-known for their pharmacological effects and diverse uses in a wide range of industries. They are engaged in a variety of critical biological and pharmacological functions. The purpose of this research is to focus on environment friendly synthetic procedures used in the synthesis of Schiff bases in order to discover the most efficient ways which provide better yield in lesser time along with being environment friendly. The study considers seven green synthesis strategies for synthesising Schiff base ligands and their metal complexes, including the use of natural acids as a catalyst, water as a green solvent, microwave irradiation, grinding, ball milling, industrial waste, and egg white

Analysing Local Sparseness in the Macaque Brain Network.

Understanding the network structure of long distance pathways in the brain is a necessary step towards developing an insight into the brain's function, organization and evolution. Dense global subnetworks of these pathways have often been studied, primarily due to their functional implications. Instead we study sparse local subnetworks of the pathways to establish the role of a brain area in enabling shortest path communication between its non-adjacent topological neighbours. We propose a novel metric to measure the topological communication load on a vertex due to its immediate neighbourhood, and show that in terms of distribution of this local communication load, a network of Macaque long distance pathways is substantially different from other real world networks and random graph models. Macaque network contains the entire range of local subnetworks, from star-like networks to clique-like networks, while other networks tend to contain a relatively small range of subnetworks. Further, sparse local subnetworks in the Macaque network are not only found across topographical super-areas, e.g., lobes, but also within a super-area, arguing that there is conservation of even relatively short-distance pathways. To establish the communication role of a vertex we borrow the concept of brokerage from social science, and present the different types of brokerage roles that brain areas play, highlighting that not only the thalamus, but also cingulate gyrus and insula often act as "relays" for areas in the neocortex. These and other analysis of communication load and roles of the sparse subnetworks of the Macaque brain provide new insights into the organisation of its pathways

Characterization of Social Media Response to Natural Disasters

Online social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook often serve a breaking-news role for natural disasters: these websites are among the first ones to mention the news, and because they are visited by millions of users regularly the websites also help communicate the news to a large mass of people. In this paper, we examine how news about these disasters spreads on the social network. In addition to this, we also examine the countries of the Tweeting users. We examine Twitter logs from the 2010 Philippines typhoon, the 2011 Brazil flood and the 2011 Japan earthquake. We find that although news about the disaster may be initiated in multiple places in the social network, it quickly finds a core community that is interested in the disaster, and has little chance to escape the community via social network links alone. We also find evidence that the world at large expresses concern about such largescale disasters, and not just countries geographically proximate to the epicenter of the disaster. Our analysis has implications for the design of fund raising campaigns through social networking websites

Analysing Local Sparseness in the Macaque Brain Network.

Understanding the network structure of long distance pathways in the brain is a necessary step towards developing an insight into the brain's function, organization and evolution. Dense global subnetworks of these pathways have often been studied, primarily due to their functional implications. Instead we study sparse local subnetworks of the pathways to establish the role of a brain area in enabling shortest path communication between its non-adjacent topological neighbours. We propose a novel metric to measure the topological communication load on a vertex due to its immediate neighbourhood, and show that in terms of distribution of this local communication load, a network of Macaque long distance pathways is substantially different from other real world networks and random graph models. Macaque network contains the entire range of local subnetworks, from star-like networks to clique-like networks, while other networks tend to contain a relatively small range of subnetworks. Further, sparse local subnetworks in the Macaque network are not only found across topographical super-areas, e.g., lobes, but also within a super-area, arguing that there is conservation of even relatively short-distance pathways. To establish the communication role of a vertex we borrow the concept of brokerage from social science, and present the different types of brokerage roles that brain areas play, highlighting that not only the thalamus, but also cingulate gyrus and insula often act as "relays" for areas in the neocortex. These and other analysis of communication load and roles of the sparse subnetworks of the Macaque brain provide new insights into the organisation of its pathways

Cognition-Cognizant Sentiment Analysis With Multitask Subjectivity Summarization Based on Annotators' Gaze Behavior

For document level sentiment analysis (SA), Subjectivity Extraction, ie., extracting the relevant subjective portions of the text that cover the overall sentiment expressed in the document, is an important step. Subjectivity Extraction, however, is a hard problem for systems, as it demands a great deal of world knowledge and reasoning. Humans, on the other hand, are good at extracting relevant subjective summaries from an opinionated document (say, a movie review), while inferring the sentiment expressed in it. This capability is manifested in their eye-movement behavior while reading: words pertaining to the subjective summary of the text attract a lot more attention in the form of gaze-fixations and/or saccadic patterns. We propose a multi-task deep neural framework for document level sentiment analysis that learns to predict the overall sentiment expressed in the given input document, by simultaneously learning to predict human gaze behavior and auxiliary linguistic tasks like part-of-speech and syntactic properties of words in the document. For this, a multi-task learning algorithm based on multi-layer shared LSTM augmented with task specific classifiers is proposed. With this composite multi-task network, we obtain performance competitive with or better than state-of-the-art approaches in SA. Moreover, the availability of gaze predictions as an auxiliary output helps interpret the system better; for instance, gaze predictions reveal that the system indeed performs subjectivity extraction better, which accounts for improvement in document level sentiment analysis performance