Proactive strategies in personal dose monitoring, prevention and mitigation

At certain threshold, nuclear radiation (like x-rays and gamma-rays) may adversely impact the health of living tissues. The exposure to these radiations in nuclear facilities is measured by devices called dosimeters. The devices are generally worn on the torso and are monitored by health physics division to report the radiation dose received by the personnel. However, this approach is not proactive--since the dosimeters reflect the dose that has already been absorbed in the body of the wearer. This work presents a scheme to proactively avoid large dose acquisition at radiation-prone facilities. The work was divided into three major segments: (i) identify and characterize radioactive source(s), (ii) determine the impact of localized source(s), and (iii) estimate the integrated doses in traversing/evacuating the facility. The scope of this work does not extend to the development of proactive dosimeter. However, the approaches developed in these segments will be integrated into a dose monitoring system that would prevent or mitigate large dose acquisition. This work also has applications in nuclear facilities, hospitals, homeland security, and border protection --Abstract, page iv

Heterosis for post harvest and nutritional quality traits in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.)

A study was conducted in tomato using an 6 x 6 diallel crossing design excluding reciprocals to quantify the magnitude of heterosis and to identify the best heterotic combinations for post harvest and nutritional quality attributes viz. pericarp thickness (mm), fruit firmness (g/0.503 cm2), shelf life (days), total soluble solids (oBrix), lycopene content (mg/100g) and ascorbic acid (mg/100g) which are considered essential in present day hybrid varieties of tomato from consumer point of view. All the 22 entries (6 parents, 15 F1 hybrids and 1 standard check) were field evaluated using randomized complete block design with three replications during Kharif 2015-16. Highly significant heterosis (5% level of significance) of positive nature was found for pericarp thickness (22.90%, 32.20% and 5.62%), fruit firmness (17.32%, 56.72% and 9.21%), shelf life (17.54%, 24.87% and 9.57%), total soluble solids (24.44%, 51.44% and 34.20%), lycopene content (28.75%, 35.05% and 25.63%) and ascorbic acid (19.07%,30.00% and 17.85%) over the better, mid and standard check, respectively. Three promising crosses viz., Solan Lalima x EC-1055, Solan Lalima x EC-1057 and Solan Lalima x EC-1058 were identified as high yielding F1 combinations having superiority to post harvest and nutritional quality traits in tomato and can be promoted for release and commercial cultivation

A PROSPECTIVE STUDY DONE TO EVALUATE THE FUNCTIONAL OUTCOME OF KNEE AFTER ARTHROSCOPIC POSTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT RECONSTRUCTION USING IPSILATERAL PERONEUS LONGUS AUTOGRAFT.

Background: PCL is one of the major ligaments of the knee joint which stabilizes the tibia on the femur. It prevents posterior translation of the tibia. Aims and Objectives: To evaluate the functional outcome of knee joint after arthroscopic posterior cruciate ligament reconstruction using ipsilateral peroneus longus autograft and also to assess the donor site morbidity. Methods: A prospective study was conducted on 24 patients in the department of orthopaedics, Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Science, Sheikhpura, Patna. All patients (male or female; age range 18-40 years) with PCL tear coming in OPD and emergency department of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Patna; were included in the study. Results: The mean age of the patients was 29.5 years with a range from 19 years to 39 years. Most of the patients (37.5%) were in the age group of 25-32 years followed by 33.3% in the age group of 33-40 years, and 29.2% aged 18-25 years. All the patients were males. There was a significant improvement in IKDC and Tegner Lysholm score at 6-weeks, 3-months, 6-months, 1-year, 1.5 years, and 2-years compared with pre-operative IKDC and Tegner Lysholm score. The donor site morbidity was assessed with Foot and Ankle Disability Index (FADI) and found to be unaffected. Conclusion: Arthroscopic single bundle PCL reconstruction using ipsilateral peroneus  longus  tendon  autograft had significant improvement in functional outcome of the knee based on IKDC and Tegner Lysholm score. Ankle function was also found to be preserved based on FADI score at 2-years follow-up

Performance Evaluation of Quality of Service in Proposed Routing Protocol

Due to the recent developments in the hand-held devices and communication enhancements in wireless networks like mobile ad-hoc network (MANETs), these networks are targeted for providing real time services like video streaming, video conferencing, VOIP etc. Although, the basic design of MANETs is not fully capable to provide multimedia services, therefore some sort of quality-of-service is required in these networks. In this paper, I have proposed a delay-aware routing protocol that discovers routes for a source-destination pair with the application provided delay constraints. The methodology is focused on using a reactive routing approach, AODV, to discover the delay-aware routes during its route discovery phase. In this way, we are able to provide the QoS to the requesting application in terms of delay metric

Correlation of acute physiological parameters with immediate outcome among neonates transported to special care newborn unit: A prospective study

Background: Several sick neonates require transfer to tertiary level care neonatal unit for treatment. The facilities of neonatal transport in India are not optimal and the newborn thus transported can become hypothermic, hypoxic, and/or hypoglycemic which can affect the neonatal outcome. These parameters can be maintained during transport by adopting simple measures. Aim: Study impact of acute physiological parameters during transfer of neonates on their immediate outcome by using TOPS score. TOPS Score -temperature, oxygensaturation, perfusion (assessed by capillary refill time), blood Sugar. Materials and Methods: This prospective observational study was conducted at the special care newborn unit, Indore enrolling 513 transported neonates. TOPS scoring for each neonate was done at admission, and then the parameters of the TOPS score were correlated with the outcome at 48 h of admission. Results: A total of 513 transported newborns were assessed, 48.73% newborns were hypothermic, 33.91% had poor perfusion, 28.46% were hypoxemic, and 22.22% were hypoglycemic. Hypoxemia and hypoglycemia had the highest sensitivity (93.39% and 80.18%, respectively) while hypoglycemia had the highest specificity (92.87%). Conclusion: TOPS score is a useful and easy to use the method to assess the physiological status and predict early mortality in transported neonates

Exploring the Electromagnetically Interacting Dark Matter at the International Linear Collider

Dark Matter being electrically neutral does not participate in electromagnetic interactions at leading order. However, we discuss here fermionic dark matter (DM) with permanent magnetic and electric dipole moment that interacts electromagnetically with photon at loop-level through a dimension-5 operator. We discuss the search prospect of the dark matter at the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) and constrain the parameter space in the plane of the DM mass and the cutoff scale $\Lambda$. At the 500 GeV ILC with $4$ ab$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity we probed the mono-photon channel and utilizing the advantages of beam polarization we obtained an upper bound on the cutoff scale that reaches up to $\Lambda = 3.72$ TeV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

BIOMARKERS IN SERUM, URIC ACID AS A RISK FACTOR FOR TYPE 2 DIABETES ASSOCIATED WITH HYPERTENSION

ABSTRACTObjectives: Uric acid (UA) is the end product of purine metabolism in humans. UA is the final oxidation product of purine catabolism and has beenimplicated in diabetes mellitus (DM) as well as in hyperlipidemias. Hyperuricemia can cause serious health problems including renal insufficiency.Hyperuricemia is associated with many diseases including hypertension (HTN), DM, hypertriglyceridemia, and obesity. The aim was to determine theserum UA (SUA) level in Patients of Type 2 DM with HTN.Methods: Out of 100 samples, 50 were found as cases of Type 2 diabetic with HTN, and the 50 control samples were without Type 2 diabetic HTN.Results: SUA, glycosylated hemoglobin, and low-density lipoprotein of male and female cases of Type 2 DM with HTN compared to control were(p<0.05) highly significant and also serum triglycerides and total cholesterol of both sex groups of Type 2 DM with HTN compared to control werefound to be (p<0.05) highly significance.Conclusion: It is concluded from our present study that level of SUA >7.0 mg/dl were significantly seen in cases of diabetes with HTN. SUA ≤5.0 mg/dlwas significantly seen in subjects without diabetes with HTN. Our data showed hyperuricemia and glycated hemoglobin as significant risk factors inthe progression of DM, atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, renal disorder, hypertriglyceridemia, and obesity. Further large sample size studies areneeded to be done in the direction with more focused mechanistic approaches to fortify the fact. Very little is known about the relationship betweenUA, DM, and HTN in India.Keywords: Diabetes mellitus, Hypertension, Uric acid, Glycosylated hemoglobin, Lipid profil

Growth and yield responses of West Indian lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) to bio-inoculants under field conditions

The efficacy of commercial microbial treatment on plant growth, nutrient uptake and yield is very well recognized for medicinal plants grown in field conditions. However, the use of commercial and native microbes for Cymbopogon citratus has rarely been exploited under field conditions. Therefore, in the present study we evaluated the efficacy of single and native arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal species (AMF) to mixture of mycorrhizal fungal species plus commercial plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPR) on morphological, biochemical and traits of mycorrhizal fungi associated with C. citratus. Two native AMF species, i.e. Glomus mosseae (G) and Acaulospora laevis (A), and Pseudomonas fluorescens (P) as commercial PGPR were used in this study. Three different treatments composition of selected microbes, i.e. G, G+P, and G+A+P, were utilized along control for crop production under open field conditions in a randomized complete block design. The plantlets were grown without external application of synthetic fertilizers. The results showed that the mixture of AMF and PGPR significantly increased the survival, biomass, P content of shoot as well as root, essential oil yield, and in vitro antibacterial potential of C. citratus against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. In general, this study provides useful insight into the mixture AMF and PGPR treatment that can be applied to improve not only the biomass, phosphorus content, antibacterial potential, and yield attributes of C. citratus under open field conditions but also to improve AMF diversity in rhizosphere soil

A comprehensive survey on generative adversarial networks

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a class of neural network architectures that have been used to generate a wide variety of realistic data, including images, videos, and audio. GANs consist of two main components: a generator network, which produces new data, and a discriminator network, which attempts to distinguish the generated data from real data. The two networks are trained in a competitive manner, with the generator trying to produce data that can fool the discriminator, and the discriminator trying to correctly identify the generated data. Since their introduction in 2014, GANs have been applied to a wide range of tasks, such as image synthesis, image-to-image translation, and text-to-image synthesis. GANs have also been used in various fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Despite their success, GANs have several limitations and challenges, including mode collapse, where the generator produces only a limited number of distinct samples, and instability during training. Several methods have been proposed to address these challenges, including regularization techniques, architectural modifications, and alternative training algorithms. Overall, GANs have proven to be a powerful tool for generating realistic data, and research on GANs is an active area of study in the field of machine learning. This survey paper aims to provide an overview of the GANs architecture and its variants, applications and challenges, and the recent developments in GANs