Can perineal tear be predicted by severity of striae gravidarum score?

Background: The objective of this study was to wether perineal tear predicted by scoring of severity of striae gravidarum. The objective of this study was to predict perineal tear by simple non-invasive method and help to prevent maternal morbidity.Methods: Three hundred ninety four patients delivered normally were included in this study. Striae gravidarum score was assessed using the Atwal numerical scoring system. The association was examined between striae and perineal tear as the outcome measure, defined by tears or laceration, and the total striae scores (TSS) was obtained.Results: In present study population mean age was 25.16 years ranging from 16-40 , mean gravidity was 2.16 ranging from 1 -8 ,average baby birth weight was 2.713 kg ranging from  1.62-4.58 The only predictors of perineal tears that were found to be statistically significant in our study were severity of striae gravidarum and episiotomy given or not. In patients with moderate to severe striae there was tear in 90 patients as compared to 29 patients with no or mild striae. 224 patients belonging to no or mild striae group delivered without any perineal tear whereas 51 patients in moderate to severe striae group delivered without tear. Out of these 51 patients 5 were given episiotomy. 2 patients who were given episiotomy had perineal tear as compared to 117 patients who were not given episiotomy. This shows that patients who had an episiotomy were less likely to have perineal tear in most cases.Conclusions: This study demonstrates a significant relation between severity of striae gravidarum and perineal tear. The findings suggest that striae gravidarum assessment may be used in the clinical setting even by paramedical staff as a simple and noninvasive tool to better define women at risk for perineal tear

Grant proposal: education outcomes in children with nonsyndromic orofacial clefts undergoing various therapies for speech problems in western Pennslyvania

The purpose of this grant proposal is to evaluate education outcomes in children with nonsyndromic orofacial clefts who have undergone medical therapies to assist in problems with speech. The public health implications for orofacial clefts include its prevalence as well as the exorbitant costs of medical interventions without a consensus of treatment outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year approximately 7000 children are born in the United Stated with orofacial clefts. With respect to healthcare expenditures, multiple reports have shown intervention costs in children with orofacial clefts are five to six times higher than those who are unaffected by orofacial clefts. Early goals of care for this population include improving speech function. Speech problems have been categorized as trouble with speech sound development, velopharyngeal dysfunction, and hearing loss. Therapies include speech therapy and medical interventions such insertion of ventilation grommets in the middle ear and the use of continuous positive airway pressure. Studies have shown speech delay in children with orofacial clefts. However, outcomes have focused on results such as test scores and grade point average (academic performance). This proposal looks to evaluate education outcomes that include not only academic performance but also classroom participation and peer to peer interaction. Other studies that consider all speech disorders have used the child’s education plan under the IEP at their school to evaluate education outcomes. This study will evaluate education performance through a similar method. An abstraction form will be used to collect information from social work notes on education plans and medical chart review to see if there is a correlation between various treatments and improved education outcomes. If improvements are seen as it relates to speech function and education outcomes, then a protocol can be developed from which children with orofacial clefts can enroll in to better help meet their needs and achieve success in education

A Critical Study on Impact of Leadership Style of Sales Managers on Performance of Sales Teams

Purpose: Sales department is one of the most important verticals for any organization it has a direct impact on both the top-line and the bottom-line of the organisation. Sales leadership has an important role to play to drive the sales executives to achieve the organisational agenda. Hence, it becomes important to maintain a positive relationship between sales managers and the sales executives. so this study is to find out the impact of the leadership style of the sales managers on the performance of the sales team.   Theoretical Framework: This conceptual framework identifies major components like leadership, sales team & manager. The study focuses on the two major companies of the BFSI industry. The industry has performed well in past few years and the ICICI group of companies has been a major player in the industry.   Design/Methodology/approach: The conceptual framework has been proposed after identifying the components that are significant & analyses leadership style in two major domains – People Oriented Leaders and Task Oriented Leaders.   Findings: The components identified for this study & can be considered to have an influence on success.   Research, Practical and Social implication: The model attempts to achieve     a good fitment of sales managers and sales teams in order to achieve continued good results.   Originality/Value: This article is a contribution to the industry has performed well in past few years and the ICICI group of companies

GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIPComment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202

Laparoscopic Excision of an Omental Leiomyoma with a Giant Cystic Component

This case report suggests that laparoscopic resection of omental leiomyoma with a large cystic component is feasible and safe

Estimating fuel-efficient air plane trajectories using machine learning

Airline industry has witnessed a tremendous growth in the recent past. Percentage of people choosing air travel as first choice to commute is continuously increasing. Highly demanding and congested air routes are resulting in inadvertent delays, additional fuel consumption and high emission of greenhouse gases. Trajectory planning involves creation identification of cost-effective flight plans for optimal utilization of fuel and time. This situation warrants the need of an intelligent system for dynamic planning of optimized flight trajectories with least human intervention required. In this paper, an algorithm for dynamic planning of optimized flight trajectories has been proposed. The proposed algorithm divides the airspace into four dimensional cubes and calculate a dynamic score for each cube to cumulatively represent estimated weather, aerodynamic drag and air traffic within that virtual cube. There are several constraints like simultaneous flight separation rules, weather conditions like air temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction that pose a real challenge for calculating optimal flight trajectories. To validate the proposed methodology, a case analysis was undertaken within Indian airspace. The flight routes were simulated for four different air routes within Indian airspace. The experiment results observed a seven percent reduction in drag values on the predicted path, hence indicates reduction in carbon footprint and better fuel economy

Structurally flexible pyrrolidinium- and morpholinium-based ionic liquid electrolytes

Ion transport measures and details as well as physico-chemical and electrochemical properties are presented for a small set of structurally flexible pyrrolidinium (Pyrr) and morpholinium (Morph) cation-based ionic liquids (ILs), all with oligoether phosphate-based anions. All have high thermal stabilities, low glass transition temperatures, and wide electrochemical stability windows, but rather moderate ionic conductivities, where both the anions and the cations of the Pyrr-based ILs diffuse faster than those of the Morph-based ILs. Overall, the Pyrr-based ILs show significantly more promise as high-temperature supercapacitor electrolytes, rendering a specific capacitance of 164 F g(-1) at 1 mV s(-1), a power density of 609 W kg(-1) and a specific energy density of 27 W h kg(-1) at 90 & DEG;C in a symmetric graphite supercapacitor