SSSDET: Simple Short and Shallow Network for Resource Efficient Vehicle Detection in Aerial Scenes

Detection of small-sized targets is of paramount importance in many aerial vision-based applications. The commonly deployed low cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for aerial scene analysis are highly resource constrained in nature. In this paper we propose a simple short and shallow network (SSSDet) to robustly detect and classify small-sized vehicles in aerial scenes. The proposed SSSDet is up to 4x faster, requires 4.4x less FLOPs, has 30x less parameters, requires 31x less memory space and provides better accuracy in comparison to existing state-of-the-art detectors. Thus, it is more suitable for hardware implementation in real-time applications. We also created a new airborne image dataset (ABD) by annotating 1396 new objects in 79 aerial images for our experiments. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on the existing VEDAI, DLR-3K, DOTA and Combined dataset. The SSSDet outperforms state-of-the-art detectors in term of accuracy, speed, compute and memory efficiency.Comment: International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2019, Taipei, Taiwa

Juvenile Ossifying Fibroma in a 14-year-old female: A Case Report

Juvenile Ossifying Fibroma is a rare benign bone neoplasm affecting age-group of 5-15 which tends to mimic malignant lesions. This is in opposition to its conventional variant which occurs mostly in middle aged cohort and is relatively docile. It's aetiology remains unknown and it is characterized by substitution of normal bone by mineralized fibrous tissue. The rapid progression, aggressive nature and high recurrence potential are features that makes JOF of vying attention. Additionally it's prognosis being greatly dependent on time and type of intervention employed is widely documented. In this study JOF with a history of only 7 months is reported in a 14 year old female. The affected bone was maxilla with dental and palatal involvement. Partial Maxillectomy and BIPP for reconstruction were applied as treatment of choice for this patient. Yearly follow up protocol for next 5 years was devised. No post op complications were observed

Factors Affecting Career Choices of Newly Admitted and Graduating Medical Students

To assess factors affecting career choices of newly admitted and graduating medical students .Methods: A cross sectional study was carried out in four private medical colleges of Islamabad. Two hundred students of first and final year were selected for this study. Data was collected by using self-developed questionnaire after extensive literature review by the researchers. Questionnaire was pilot tested. Data was analyzed by using SPSS v. 16.0.Results: Study results indicated mean age 21.13 years (± 2.48), 101 (53.72%) males and 87 (46.28%) female. Majority (96.80%) were unmarried., 51.10% (96) MBBS first year and 48.90% (92) in final year students. Although medical specialties remain of overall highest preference of all medical students but male students preferred surgical specialty as first choice as compared to female students. Study results revealed that interest and motivation to help others were main factors to affect choice of a particular specialty. Students of both gender and years agreed with the influence from a mentor/teacher, however male students thought expected income (51) and good working atmosphere (74) are main factors affecting careers. Among social factors parent’s choice or wish, having doctor in the family and personal interest were highly associated with career choice (p-value less than 0.05).Conclusion: Factors affecting on career choice should be identified and managed timely

SOCIALITE-LLAMA: An Instruction-Tuned Model for Social Scientific Tasks

Social science NLP tasks, such as emotion or humor detection, are required to capture the semantics along with the implicit pragmatics from text, often with limited amounts of training data. Instruction tuning has been shown to improve the many capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as commonsense reasoning, reading comprehension, and computer programming. However, little is known about the effectiveness of instruction tuning on the social domain where implicit pragmatic cues are often needed to be captured. We explore the use of instruction tuning for social science NLP tasks and introduce Socialite-Llama -- an open-source, instruction-tuned Llama. On a suite of 20 social science tasks, Socialite-Llama improves upon the performance of Llama as well as matches or improves upon the performance of a state-of-the-art, multi-task finetuned model on a majority of them. Further, Socialite-Llama also leads to improvement on 5 out of 6 related social tasks as compared to Llama, suggesting instruction tuning can lead to generalized social understanding. All resources including our code, model and dataset can be found through bit.ly/socialitellama.Comment: Short paper accepted to EACL 2024. 4 pgs, 2 table

Determination of α1-acid glycoprotein (AGP) concentration by HPLC in patients following local infiltration analgesia for primary total hip arthroplasty and its relation to ropivacaine (total and unbound)

Introduction: This study was performed to determine the levels of α1-acid glycoprotein (AGP) in old-age patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty. AGP is considered an acute phase protein produced during the acute phase reaction in the body to various stimuli; their proper monitoring is thus important.Methods: In order to study how AGP concentrations in old age patients change in response to surgical stress (total hip arthroplasty), a high-performance liquid chromatography assay was performed to measure AGP levels. AGP was isolated from the plasma by adding perchloric acid and was analyzed using PLRP-S 4000°A column. The mobile phase consisted of 1 mL TFA/L of water (Solvent A pH 2) and 1 mL TFA/L of acetonitrile (Solvent B). The gradient used was as follows: 0 min 18% B and 82% A, 15 min 60% B and 40% A, and 17 min 60% B and 40% A followed by column re-equilibration for 7 min before the next injection. AGP peak was obtained between 8.8 and 8.9 min. The method was fully optimised according to established guidelines.Results: The data obtained were analyzed on ChromQuest software. AGP concentrations were determined in all samples, including baseline and samples taken at different timed intervals. The peak for AGP was obtained between 8.8 and 8.9 min for both standard AGP and patient plasma. The graphs indicate that AGP concentration in almost all patient samples increased considerably, especially after 4 h and 24 h—for example, initial concentration in patient 1 was 10.36 mg/100 mL but, after 24 h, increased to 23.50 mg/100 mL. There was thus almost a 13 mg/100 mL increase in 24 h, which is confirmed by AGP concentration increasing after various conditions, including surgery. The increased plasma protein binding was comparatively associated with the unchanged free fraction of the drug.Conclusion: This surgically induced increase in AGP concentration resulted in increased plasma protein binding of the drug (ropivacaine), which in turn kept the free portion of ropivacaine stable during the postoperative period

An exploration of the effect of proprioceptive knee bracing on biomechanics during a badminton lunge to the net, and the implications to injury mechanisms

The aim of this study was to determine changes in knee biomechanics during badminton lunges due to fatigue, lunge strategy and knee bracing. Kinetic and kinematic data were collected from sixteen experienced right-handed badminton players. Three factor repeated measures ANOVAs (lunge direction – fatigue – brace) were performed with Least Significant Difference pairwise comparisons. In addition, clinical assessments including; Y-balance test, one leg hop distance and ankle dorsiflexion range of motion were performed pre and post fatigue. The knee showed significantly greater flexion during the forehand lunge compared to backhand. In contrast, the internal rotation velocity and the knee extension moment were greater during backhand. Knee angular velocity in the sagittal plane, peak knee moment and range of moment in the coronal plane and stance time showed significantly lower values post fatigue. In addition, the peak knee adduction moment showed significantly lower values in the braced condition in both the fatigued and non-fatigues states, and no significant differences were seen for peak vertical force, loading rate, approach velocity, or in any of the clinical assessment scores. There appears to be greater risk factors when performing a backhand lunge to the net compared to a forehand lunge, and proprioceptive bracing appears to reduce the loading at the knee

Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies High-Impact Susceptibility Loci for HCC in North America

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Despite the substantial impact of environmental factors, individuals with a family history of liver cancer have an increased risk for HCC. However, genetic factors have not been studied systematically by genome-wide approaches in large numbers of individuals from European descent populations (EDP). APPROACH AND RESULTS: We conducted a 2-stage genome-wide association study (GWAS) on HCC not affected by HBV infections. A total of 1872 HCC cases and 2907 controls were included in the discovery stage, and 1200 HCC cases and 1832 controls in the validation. We analyzed the discovery and validation samples separately and then conducted a meta-analysis. All analyses were conducted in the presence and absence of HCV. The liability-scale heritability was 24.4% for overall HCC. Five regions with significant ORs (95% CI) were identified for nonviral HCC: 3p22.1, MOBP , rs9842969, (0.51, [0.40-0.65]); 5p15.33, TERT , rs2242652, (0.70, (0.62-0.79]); 19q13.11, TM6SF2 , rs58542926, (1.49, [1.29-1.72]); 19p13.11 MAU2 , rs58489806, (1.53, (1.33-1.75]); and 22q13.31, PNPLA3 , rs738409, (1.66, [1.51-1.83]). One region was identified for HCV-induced HCC: 6p21.31, human leukocyte antigen DQ beta 1, rs9275224, (0.79, [0.74-0.84]). A combination of homozygous variants of PNPLA3 and TERT showing a 6.5-fold higher risk for nonviral-related HCC compared to individuals lacking these genotypes. This observation suggests that gene-gene interactions may identify individuals at elevated risk for developing HCC. CONCLUSIONS: Our GWAS highlights novel genetic susceptibility of nonviral HCC among European descent populations from North America with substantial heritability. Selected genetic influences were observed for HCV-positive HCC. Our findings indicate the importance of genetic susceptibility to HCC development

Global prevalence and genotype distribution of hepatitis C virus infection in 2015 : A modelling study

Publisher Copyright: © 2017 Elsevier LtdBackground The 69th World Health Assembly approved the Global Health Sector Strategy to eliminate hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection by 2030, which can become a reality with the recent launch of direct acting antiviral therapies. Reliable disease burden estimates are required for national strategies. This analysis estimates the global prevalence of viraemic HCV at the end of 2015, an update of—and expansion on—the 2014 analysis, which reported 80 million (95% CI 64–103) viraemic infections in 2013. Methods We developed country-level disease burden models following a systematic review of HCV prevalence (number of studies, n=6754) and genotype (n=11 342) studies published after 2013. A Delphi process was used to gain country expert consensus and validate inputs. Published estimates alone were used for countries where expert panel meetings could not be scheduled. Global prevalence was estimated using regional averages for countries without data. Findings Models were built for 100 countries, 59 of which were approved by country experts, with the remaining 41 estimated using published data alone. The remaining countries had insufficient data to create a model. The global prevalence of viraemic HCV is estimated to be 1·0% (95% uncertainty interval 0·8–1·1) in 2015, corresponding to 71·1 million (62·5–79·4) viraemic infections. Genotypes 1 and 3 were the most common cause of infections (44% and 25%, respectively). Interpretation The global estimate of viraemic infections is lower than previous estimates, largely due to more recent (lower) prevalence estimates in Africa. Additionally, increased mortality due to liver-related causes and an ageing population may have contributed to a reduction in infections. Funding John C Martin Foundation.publishersversionPeer reviewe