Comparison of forced expiratory spirometric flow changes following intrathecal bupivacaine and bupivacaine with fentanyl

Background: Higher dermatomal block following spinal anaesthesia impairs inspiratory capacity and decreases forced expiratory flow rates. This decrease in forced expiratory flows can in turn decrease the effectiveness of cough. Intrathecal opioids are important adjuncts to intrathecal local anaesthetics. The objective of our study was to compare the decrease in forced expiratory flows from the baseline values after subarachnoid block with bupivacaine and bupivacaine with fentanyl.Methods: Institutional ethics committee approval was obtained. Forty ASA I and II adult males, scheduled for elective surgery were included in the study. Informed written consent was obtained from all patients who were randomly allocated into two groups. Group B received intrathecal anaesthesia 15 mgs of bupivacaine with 0.5 ml of normal saline and Group BF received 15 mgs of bupivacaine with 0.5 ml of fentanyl (25 μg) intrathecally. The patients were instructed about the performance of the spirometry on the previous evening of the surgery. Forced vital capacity, forced expiratory volume in one second, peak expiratory flow rate and maximum expiratory pressure (Forced expiratory flows) were measured in supine position before intrathecal block and at 10, 60 and 120 minutes, following the establishment of the block. Highest dermatomal level of sensory blockade was noted.Results: There was no statistically significant difference in the baseline values of FVC (Group B: 4.188 ± 0.821, Group BF: 4.186 ± 0.575, p – 0.127), FEV1 (Group B: 3.301 ± 0.846, Group BF: 3.276 ± 0.825, p – 0.240), PEFR (Group B: 458.6 ± 43.024, Group BF: 452.6 ± 41.036, p -0.091 ) and PEmax (Group B: 52.64 ± 4.029, Group BF: 53 ± 3.162, p – 0.119 ) between the two groups. There was highly significant reduction in the values of FVC, PEFR and PEmax when compared to the baseline in both the groups at all three study periods. There was an acute reduction in the values of FVC, FEV1, PEFR and PEmax at 10 minutes. The graphs then achieve a plateau from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. From 60 to 120 minutes there was a gradual upslope in the graph. With regards to FEV1, though at 10 and 60 minutes there were statistically significant reductions when compared to the baseline values in both the groups, at 120 minutes the reductions were not significant. At all three time periods there was no difference in the reductions in FVC, FEV1, PEFR and PEmax values among the two groups. None of the patients in both the groups had PEFR and PEmax values below the critical value. Conclusion: The addition of 25 μg of fentanyl to intrathecal bupivacaine did not have any adverse effect on forced expiratory flows. There was a decrease in forced expiratory flows in both groups, but the decrease in PEFR and PEmax were never below the critical values. It is unlikely that a combination of intrathecal local anaesthetic and opioids will impair the normal patient’s ability to cough effectively

Neuro-ensemble for air quality prediction

Neuro-ensemble for air quality predictio

Critical analysis of Prshta Marma (vital points in the back)

The concept of Marma is a fascinating step and breakthrough in understanding human body from a deeper perspective. Marmas are the vital points in human body where Pranah flows.[1] Upon injury it causes severe complications including death and upon careful manipulation results in desired healing effect. In Atharvaveda, Marmas are described for therapeutic and surgical purposes. In Dhanurveda, science of Marma is used for military approach and martial arts for protecting the vulnerable vital points of soldiers (including elephants and horses) by developing body armor in war.[2] Acharya Susrutha explains all the 107 Marmas in human body in detail. In this article with the detailed reference of Prstha Marmas (vital points of back), the concept of Marmas can be further understood

Range Shortest Unique Substring queries

Let be a string of length n and be the substring of starting at position i and ending at position j. A substring of is a repeat if it occurs more than once in; otherwise, it is a unique substring of. Repeats and unique substrings are of great interest in computational biology and in information retrieval. Given string as input, the Shortest Unique Substring problem is to find a shortest substring of that does not occur elsewhere in. In this paper, we introduce the range variant of this problem, which we call the Range Shortest Unique Substring problem. The task is to construct a data structure over answering the following type of online queries efficiently. Given a range, return a shortest substring of with exactly one occurrence in. We present an -word data structure with query time, where is the word size. Our construction is based on a non-trivial reduction allowing us to apply a recently introduced optimal geometric data structure [Chan et al. ICALP 2018]

Handwritten Digits and Optical Characters Recognition

The process of transcribing a language represented in its spatial form of graphical characters into its symbolic representation is called handwriting recognition. Each script has a collection of characters or letters, often known as symbols, that all share the same fundamental shapes. Handwriting analysis aims to correctly identify input characters or images before being analysed by various automated process systems. Recent research in image processing demonstrates the significance of image content retrieval. Optical character recognition (OCR) systems can extract text from photographs and transform that text to ASCII text. OCR is beneficial and essential in many applications, such as information retrieval systems and digital libraries

No demonstrable association between the Leningrad–Zagreb mumps vaccine strain and aseptic meningitis in a large clinical trial in Egypt

AbstractTo address the claim that the Leningrad–Zagreb (L-Z) mumps vaccine strain is causally associated with aseptic meningitis, a prospective, post-marketing safety study was conducted with a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) (TRESIVAC°; Serum Institute of India Ltd., Pune, India), which uses the L-Z strain as its mumps component in Egypt. In all, 453 119 children (65 423 children aged 16–24 months and 329 211 children aged 5–7 years) received MMR. The control groups which, as a result of local health regulations, were slightly younger than vaccinees, comprised 12 253 and 46 232 children, respectively. Using questionnaires, the parents recorded solicited local, systemic and neurological adverse events for up to 42 days post-vaccination. All data were analysed externally on an intention-to-treat basis by individuals not participating in the study. Local and/or systemic reactions were reported in a small percentage of participants, with pain, fever and parotitis being the most common signs among vaccinees in both age groups. No case of aseptic meningitis, encephalitis, anaphylaxis or convulsions was observed in any participant. Thus, in this series of more than 450 000 Egyptian children, the L-Z mumps vaccine strain in this vaccine did not cause aseptic meningitis. The vaccine is considerably cheaper than Western competitors and a valid alternative to other MMR vaccines

Suffix-prefix queries on a dictionary

In the all-pairs suffix-prefix (APSP) problem, we are given a dictionary R of k strings, S1, . . ., Sk, of total length n, and we are asked to find the length SPLi,j of the longest string that is both a suffix of Si and a prefix of Sj, for all i, j ∈ [1, k]. APSP is a classic problem in string algorithms with many applications in bioinformatics. When all strings of the dictionary are over an integer alphabet of size σ ≤ nO(1), APSP can be solved in the optimal O(n + k2) time with the use of the generalized suffix tree of the dictionary [Gusfield et al., Inf. Process. Lett. 1992]. In many bioinformatics applications, such as in sequence assembly, the size k of dictionary R is very large. In particular, k2 usually dominates n, and thus the k2 factor is the bottleneck both in the time and in the space complexity of such applications. We thus initiate a holistic study on several data structure variants of APSP. In particular, we consider the following types of queries: One-to-One(i, j): output SPLi,j. One-to-All(i): output SPLi,j for every j ∈ [1, k]. Report(i, ℓ): output all distinct j ∈ [1, k] such that SPLi,j ≥ ℓ, where ℓ ≥ 0 is an integer. Count(i, ℓ): output the number of distinct j ∈ [1, k] such that SPLi,j ≥ ℓ, where ℓ ≥ 0 is an integer. Top(i, K): output K distinct j ∈ [1, k] with the highest values of SPLi,j breaking ties arbitrarily. We assume the standard word RAM model of computation with word size w = Ω(log n) and an integer alphabet of size σ ≤ nO(1). We show the following upper bounds: Query Space (words) Query time Note One-to-One(i, j) O(n) O(log log k) Theorem 11 One-to-All(i) O(n) O(k) Theorem 14 Report(i, ℓ) O(n) O(log n/log log n + output) Theorem 19(i) Count(i, ℓ) O(n) O(log n/log log n) Theorem 19(ii) Top(i, K) O(n) O(log2 n/log log n + K) Theorem 22 We also present efficient algorithms for constructing these data structures

Efficient data structures for range shortest unique substring queries†

Let T[1, n] be a string of length n and T[i, j] be the substring of T starting at position i and ending at position j. A substring T[i, j] of T is a repeat if it occurs more than once in T; otherwise, it is a unique substring of T. Repeats and unique substrings are of great interest in computational biology and information retrieval. Given string T as input, the Shortest Unique Substring problem is to find a shortest substring of T that does not occur elsewhere in T. In this paper, we introduce the range variant of this problem, which we call the Range Shortest Unique Substring problem. The task is to construct a data structure over T answering the following type of online queries efficiently. Given a range [α, β], return a shortest substring T[i, j] of T with exactly one occurrence in [α, β]. We present an O(n log n)-word data structure with O(logw n) query time, where w = Ω(log n) is the word size. Our construction is based on a non-trivial reduction allowing for us to apply a recently introduced optimal geometric data structure [Chan et al., ICALP 2018]. Additionally, we present an O(n)-word data structure with O(√ n logɛ n) query time, where ɛ > 0 is an arbitrarily small constant. The latter data structure relies heavily on another geometric data structure [Nekrich and Navarro, SWAT 2012]

Mental health and physical activity: A COVID-19 viewpoint

COVID-19, which has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation, has become a public health emergency across the globe. It is a highly contagious disease, which elicits high levels of fear amongst the world population and is considered a threat to the world economy. As a response to this pandemic, international governments have devised unconventional measures to guard the health of their citizenry. Among these are the “new normal” country lockdown that mandates working from home, home-schooling of children, and physical/social distancing from friends and family. For the majority, this has resulted in momentary job loss and loneliness, and other psychological illnesses. Hence millions are frightened, depressed and panic easily as a result of the tension due to the uncertainty, which interferes with their job performance, livelihoods, international trade and the world economy. If not mitigated, this is likely to cause physical health deterioration, with severe mental illness being the outcome. To reduce mental health illnesses during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence suggests prioritising regular participation in physical activity and exercise across lifespan. It is also important for medical experts who specialise in the care and management of mental health to recognise physical activity and exercise as a medicine that can ameliorate some mental illnesses and their associated risk factors

Azimuthal anisotropy and correlations in p+p, d+Au and Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV

We present the first measurement of directed flow ($v_1$) at RHIC. $v_1$ is found to be consistent with zero at pseudorapidities $\eta$ from -1.2 to 1.2, then rises to the level of a couple of percent over the range $2.4 < |\eta| < 4$. The latter observation is similar to data from NA49 if the SPS rapidities are shifted by the difference in beam rapidity between RHIC and SPS. Back-to-back jets emitted out-of-plane are found to be suppressed more if compared to those emitted in-plane, which is consistent with {\it jet quenching}. Using the scalar product method, we systematically compared azimuthal correlations from p+p, d+Au and Au+Au collisions. Flow and non-flow from these three different collision systems are discussed.Comment: Quark Matter 2004 proceeding, 4 pages, 3 figure