Knowledge and Awareness of usage of Artificial Sweeteners among Indian type 2 diabetes individuals in a tertiary diabetes institute

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease primarily attributable to unhealthy, untimely food habits and lack of physical activity. Good glycemic control is one of the key aspects in preventing complications. This has led to a shift in replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners amongst the diabetic population. It is not known whether this is aimed to maintain blood glucose levels or to satisfy the sweet cravings. There is lack of awareness of the type and long-term side effects of artificial sweeteners among people with diabetes. Objectives: This study was conducted to assess the awareness and knowledge of usage of artificial sweeteners among adults with type 2 diabetes visiting a tertiary diabetes institute. Materials and Methods: The study population involved 297 adults (≥18 years) with type 2 diabetes attending tertiary diabetes institute. Data was collected from face-to-face interview technique along with a pre-validated questionnaire. Results: The total number of subjects (n=297) comprised 126 females and 171 males of age 18-88 with mean age of 56.5 years. Sucralose was the most popular sugar substitute amongst the subjects (45%) followed by Aspartame (32%), 13% of them are completely not aware of the type of artificial sweetener that they consumed. About 36.7% of the subjects belonged to pre-obese category with BMI 25-29.9kg/m2 with women on the upper scale. 57.91% of the respondents started consuming artificial sweeteners in the recent years i.e., between 1to 5 years. 87% of the subjects consumed artificial sweeteners in the form of pellets in tea or coffee as a medium and 51% consumed it to manage blood glucose levels. 51.2% had gastrointestinal side effects. Significant number of the subjects (81.5%) was unaware of the long-term side effects of artificial sweeteners. Conclusions: The study findings highlight the high rate of unawareness amongst the subjects regarding the side effects of long-term consumption of artificial sweeteners. Hence, reading nutrition label on the products, judicious consumption of artificial sweeteners and nutritional education can be helpful in making wise food choices

Early Callsign Highlighting using Automatic Speech Recognition to Reduce Air Traffic Controller Workload

The primary task of an air traffic controller (ATCo) is to issue instructions to pilots. However, the first contact is often initiated by the pilot. It is useful to have a controller assistance system, which could recognize and highlight the spoken callsign as early as possible, directly from the speech data. Therefore, we propose to use an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to obtain the speech-to-text translation, using which we extract the spoken callsign. As a high callsign recognition performance is required, we use surveillance data, which significantly improves the performance. We obtain callsign recognition error rates of 6.2% and 8.3% for ATCo and pilot utterances, respectively, but can improve to 2.8% and 4.5%, when using information from surveillance dat

Prevalence and Factors Associated With Depression among School Going Adolescents in Bengaluru: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction:The period of adolescence involves a lot of emotional changes as it is a period of transition to adulthood demanding independence.Adolescents with depression are more likely to have anxiety, disruptive behavior disorder and substance abuse when compared to those who are not depressed. Objective: To estimate the prevalence of depression among school going adolescents.and to assess the factors associated with depression among them. Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted among school going adolescents aged 13-16 years in the urban field practice area of a Medical College. Depression was assessed using Beck’s depression inventory (BDI). Total 896 adolescents were included in this study. Single stage cluster sampling method was done in which schools were considered as clusters and students constituted the sampling units. Schools were selected by simple random sampling technique using lottery method. Results: In this study about 45.2% of the adolescents had depressive disorder, out of which mild depression was reported among 22.2% students, 12.4% moderately depressed and 10.6% severe depression. Factors like mother’s education, lack of communication by father and mother with their children, lack of needs satisfied by the fathers of the adolescents (61.9%), father’s role in adolescents’ life (62%) and domestic violence in family (69.7%) were some of the important reasons for developing depression among adolescents. Adolescent whose parents were having conflict (69.2%) were found be depressed when compared to those adolescents whose parents had no conflicts this difference was statistically significant (p<0.05). Conclusion: The prevalence of depression was found to be 45.2%. Finding of the study emphasizes the need for creating awareness about the early identification of behavioral changes leading to depression among adolescents by the parents and teachers. It is also important to emphasize to the parents on how their relationship and behavior towards the family affects the mental wellbeing of the adolescents

Safety Aspects of Supporting Apron Controllers with Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Integrated into an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System

The information air traffic controllers (ATCos) communicate via radio telephony is valuable for digital assistants to provide additional safety. Yet, ATCos have to enter this information manually. Assistant-based speech recognition (ABSR) has proven to be a lightweight technology that automatically extracts and successfully feeds the content of ATC communication into digital systems without additional human effort. This article explains how ABSR can be integrated into an advanced surface movement guidance and control system (A-SMGCS). The described validations were performed in the complex apron simulation training environment of Frankfurt Airport with 14 apron controllers in a human-in-the-loop simulation in summer 2022. The integration significantly reduces the workload of controllers and increases safety as well as overall performance. Based on a word error rate of 3.1%, the command recognition rate was 91.8% with a callsign recognition rate of 97.4%. This performance was enabled by the integration of A-SMGCS and ABSR: the command recognition rate improves by more than 15% absolute by considering A-SMGCS data in ABSR

How to Measure Speech Recognition Performance in the Air Traffic Control Domain? The Word Error Rate is only half of the truth

Applying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the domain of analogue voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCo) and pilots has more end user requirements than just transforming spoken words into text. It is useless, when word recognition is perfect, as long as the semantic interpretation is wrong. For an ATCo it is of no importance if the words of greeting are correctly recognized. A wrong recognition of a greeting should, however, not disturb the correct recognition of e.g. a “descend” command. Recently, 14 European partners from Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain have agreed on a common set of rules, i.e., an ontology on how to annotate the speech utterance of an ATCo. This paper first extends the ontology to pilot utterances and then compares different ASR implementations on semantic level by introducing command recognition, command recognition error, and command rejection rates. The implementation used in this paper achieves a command recognition rate better than 94% for Prague Approach, even when WER is above 2.5

ELIXR: Towards a general purpose X-ray artificial intelligence system through alignment of large language models and radiology vision encoders

Our approach, which we call Embeddings for Language/Image-aligned X-Rays, or ELIXR, leverages a language-aligned image encoder combined or grafted onto a fixed LLM, PaLM 2, to perform a broad range of tasks. We train this lightweight adapter architecture using images paired with corresponding free-text radiology reports from the MIMIC-CXR dataset. ELIXR achieved state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot chest X-ray (CXR) classification (mean AUC of 0.850 across 13 findings), data-efficient CXR classification (mean AUCs of 0.893 and 0.898 across five findings (atelectasis, cardiomegaly, consolidation, pleural effusion, and pulmonary edema) for 1% (~2,200 images) and 10% (~22,000 images) training data), and semantic search (0.76 normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) across nineteen queries, including perfect retrieval on twelve of them). Compared to existing data-efficient methods including supervised contrastive learning (SupCon), ELIXR required two orders of magnitude less data to reach similar performance. ELIXR also showed promise on CXR vision-language tasks, demonstrating overall accuracies of 58.7% and 62.5% on visual question answering and report quality assurance tasks, respectively. These results suggest that ELIXR is a robust and versatile approach to CXR AI

The reverse claw: Report of an extremely rare facial talon cusp

Talon cusp is a rare developmental anomaly that occurs most commonly on the lingual side of the incisors. Occurrence of the labial talon cusp is rare in the dental literature. Till date only seven cases of isolated nonsyndromic labial talon cusps have been reported in the maxillary permanent dentition. However, a few cases of syndromic labial talon cusps and faciolingual talon cusps have been reported. The aim of our report is to highlight clinical and radiological features of this rare anomaly

Status of trace elements in saliva of oral precancer and oral cancer patients

Background: Several studies in recent years have linked association between micronutrient levels and various forms of cancer. Copper and zinc have been the most researched micronutrients. Aim: The aim of the study was to evaluate the levels of copper, zinc and iron in saliva of patients with oral leukoplakia, oral submucous fibrosis and oral squamous cell carcinoma. Results: There was a highly significant increase in the level of salivary copper in oral submucous fibrosis patients when compared to controls (P = 0.001). Salivary copper levels were also elevated in oral leukoplakia and oral cancer patients (P = 0.01). There was a significant decrease in the salivary zinc levels in all three study groups when compared to controls (P = 0.001). A highly significant reduction in salivary iron levels was noticed oral submucous fibrosis group. The copper to zinc ratio significantly increased in all the study groups when compared to controls. Conclusion: Results suggest that salivary copper zinc and iron could be used as biomarkers for oral precancer and cancer

Calcifying epithelial odontogenic tumor of the posterior maxilla

Calcifying epithelial odontogenic tumor (CEOT) is a rare odontogenic neoplasm comprising <1% of all odontogenic tumors. It is commonly seen in the third to fifth decades of life without any gender predilection. It usually occurs in the mandibular posterior region. A painless, slow growing swelling with bone expansion is the most common clinical feature of CEOT. Radiographically, it presents as a mixed lesion with or without an associated impacted tooth. Confirmation of the diagnosis is by histopathological examination. We describe an unusual case of CEOT occurring in the maxillary posterior region and involving the maxillary sinus. The associated impacted third molar was displaced to the lateral wall of the nose and root resorption was seen in all the teeth associated with the lesion. There was no evidence of calcification in conventional as well as computed tomography images

Microbiological evaluation of the disinfection of the root canal system using different irrigation protocol – An interventional study

Aim: The focus of the present research is to analyze the potential role of irrigants along with the activation system in the disinfection of the root canal space. Methods: Ninety root canals were randomly divided into two experimental groups based on the irrigants: Group I (n = 45) – Sodium hypochlorite irrigant and Group II (n = 45) –Chlorhexidine irrigant. The two groups are further subdivided into three subgroups base on the activation devices, i.e., passive ultrasonic irrigation, endoactivator, and laser. The first sample as a baseline, and the second sample was collected after the disinfection procedure. All the samples were streaked in brain − heart infusion agar plate to analyze the bacterial colony growth. The confirmatory analysis for the presence of Enterococcus faecalis was done using gram staining, biochemical analysis, and polymerase chain reaction. The nonparametric analysis was done using Kruskal–Wallis, Mann–Whitney U, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test and P < 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: The mean colony-forming unit was significantly reduced and there exhibited a statistically significant difference in pretreatment and posttreatment irrigated with sodium hypochlorite and chlorhexidine activated with passive ultrasonic activation with (P = 0.001), endoactivator with (P = 0.001), and laser with (P = 0.001). Conclusion: In consideration with advantage of the properties of both irrigants, the present study concludes a combined use with sodium hypochlorite during instrumentation followed by laser activation and a final rinse with chlorhexidine for a better eradication of the microbes from the root canal system thus preventing re-infection