A Low Cost Wireless Sensor Interface for the Quantification of Tremor in Parkinson’s Disease

Deep brain stimulation surgery involves placing an electrode in the deep brain to suppress the motor symptoms of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Currently physicians use the standard Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale to describe the tremor. This scale involves subjective anchor-based observations by the clinical expert. A wireless accelerometer system is presented that was built from off the shelf components to objectively quantify tremor scores. The system consists of a Teensy microcontroller and two accelerometers. It wirelessly transmits the readings through a Bluetooth module. The data is received by a custom C/C++ that parses and transmits the data to the Simulink environment for realtime visualization and analysis. The system is used to record data from patients with PD during and after DBS surgery. In this thesis, we describe the wireless accelerometer system in detail and study the correlation of sensor readings with UPDRS scores in the different DBS states. In particular, we provide data showing that such a system can be used for the objective quantification of tremor symptoms in PD patients.Biomedical Engineering, Department o

Central nervous system lymphomas: a histologic and immunophenotypic analysis

Objective: To observe the spectrum of non-Hodkin’s lymphomas involving the central nervous system including morphological subtypes and immunophenotypic status. Setting: Retrospective analysis of eleven years (1986 to 1996) data from surgical pathology files of Department of Pathology. Results: orty-three cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas were diagnosed during the period of eleven years (from 1986 to 1996), all of which were diffuse types. A total of 1177 Central Nervous CNS biopsies were examined, out of which 937 cases were diagnosed as CNS neoplasms, the remaining were non-neoplastic in nature. Among 937 CNS neoplasms, 43 cases (4.6%) were reported as non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. As most of the cases were outside referrals, the primary or secondary nature of the lymphomatous process could not he assessed. Seventeen cases were intracranial, while 26 cases were spinal in location. Majority of the intracranial Eymphomas were hiopsied from the cereherum (12 cases). Male to female ratio was 1:2. The median age for intracranial lvmphomas was 50 years and for spinal lymphomas 29 years. There were 16 cases (37%) of diffuse large cell lymphomas; 7 cases (16%) of diffuse mixed small and large cell lymphomas; 3 cases (7%) of diffuse large cell immunoblastic lvmphomas; 2 cases (4.6%) of lymphoblastic lymphomas and diffuse small non-cleaved cell lymphomas and one case of small Iyrnphocytic lymphoma and diffuse small cleaved cell Ivmphoma. One case of T cell rich B cell lvmphoma was also diagnosed in the thoracic spine as primary extranodal lymphoma. Eight cases were unclassifiable and in 2 cases the features were suggestive of lymphoma. Immunophenotypic analysis was performed in 20 cases, however, in 2 cases the results were inconclusive. Fifteen cases (83%) showed immunoreactivity for B cell markers and 3 cases showed T cell phenotype out of which one case was lymphoblastic lymphoma. Conclusion: CNS lymphomas were uncommon tumors and comprised 4.6% of the total CNS neoplasms in our study. Moreover, these CNS lymphomas accounted for 2.2% of the total non-Hodgkin’s lvmphomas, including both nodal and extranodal. There was a higher incidence of location of these lymphomas within the spinal cord than brain. Most of the lymphomas were of intermediate or high grade (75%) according to the working phenotype in 84% 3f the lymphomas, in which it was formulation. lmmunophenotypical status revealed B-cell teste

Growth and Fluctuations in the Output of Major Crops in Pakistan, 1950-51 to 1979-80

Since the crop environment in Pakistan is still greatly influenced by the vagaries of Nature, it is important to separate this effect from The true process of crop growth. Attempts to capture the large random fluctuations from the trend line by using a single variable for weather arc not fruitful at all. In the absence of a composite index of weather, the indirect method used in this study allows identification of normal and abnormal years, which can then be used for forecasting or even insurance {planning} purposes

Upregulation of long noncoding RNA MIAT in aggressive form of chronic lymphocytic leukemias.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-proten-coding transcripts of more than 200 nucleotides generated by RNA polymerase II and their expressions are tightly regulated in cell type specific- and/or cellular differential stage specific- manner. MIAT, originally isolated as a candidate gene for myocardial infarction, encodes lncRNA (termed MIAT). Here, we determined the expression level of MIAT in established leukemia/lymphoma cell lines and found its upregulation in lymphoid but not in myeloid cell lineage with mature B cell phenotype. MIAT expression level was further determined in chronic lymphocytic leukemias (CLL), characterized by expansion of leukemic cells with mature B phenotype, to demonstrate relatively high occurrence of MIAT upregulation in aggressive form of CLL carrying either 17p-deletion, 11q-deletion, or Trisomy 12 over indolent form carrying 13p-deletion. Furthermore, we show that MIAT constitutes a regulatory loop with OCT4 in malignant mature B cell, as was previously reported in mouse pulripotent stem cell, and that both molecules are essential for cell survival

Using Plan Decomposition for Continuing Plan Optimisation and Macro Generation

This thesis addresses three problems in the field of classical AI planning: decomposing a plan into meaningful subplans, continuing plan quality optimisation, and macro generation for efficient planning. The importance and difficulty of each of these problems is outlined below. (1) Decomposing a plan into meaningful subplans can facilitate a number of postplan generation tasks, including plan quality optimisation and macro generation – the two key concerns of this thesis. However, conventional plan decomposition techniques are often unable to decompose plans because they consider dependencies among steps, rather than subplans. (2) Finding high quality plans for large planning problems is hard. Planners that guarantee optimal, or bounded suboptimal, plan quality often cannot solve them In one experiment with the Genome Edit Distance domain optimal planners solved only 11.5% of problems. Anytime planners promise a way to successively produce better plans over time. However, current anytime planners tend to reach a limit where they stop finding any further improvement, and the plans produced are still very far from the best possible. In the same experiment, the LAMA anytime planner solved all problems but found plans whose average quality is 1.57 times worse than the best known. (3) Finding solutions quickly or even finding any solution for large problems within some resource constraint is also difficult. The best-performing planner in the 2014 international planning competition still failed to solve 29.3% of problems. Re-engineering a domain model by capturing and exploiting structural knowledge in the form of macros has been found very useful in speeding up planners. However, existing planner independent macro generation techniques often fail to capture some promising macro candidates because the constituent actions are not found in sequence in the totally ordered training plans. This thesis contributes to plan decomposition by developing a new plan deordering technique, named block deordering, that allows two subplans to be unordered even when their constituent steps cannot. Based on the block-deordered plan, this thesis further contributes to plan optimisation and macro generation, and their implementations in two systems, named BDPO2 and BloMa. Key to BDPO2 is a decomposition into subproblems of improving parts of the current best plan, rather than the plan as a whole. BDPO2 can be seen as an application of the large neighbourhood search strategy to planning. We use several windowing strategies to extract subplans from the block deordering of the current plan, and on-line learning for applying the most promising subplanners to the most promising subplans. We demonstrate empirically that even starting with the best plans found by other means, BDPO2 is still able to continue improving plan quality, and often produces better plans than other anytime planners when all are given enough runtime. BloMa uses an automatic planner independent technique to extract and filter “self-containe” subplans as macros from the block deordered training plans. These macros represent important longer activities useful to improve planners coverage and efficiency compared to the traditional macro generation approaches

Characterization of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Central Asian Strain1 using mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit genotyping

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Central Asian Strain1 (CAS1) genogroup of <it>Mycobacterium tuberculosis </it>(MTB) is the most prevalent in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units variable number tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing is a reliable and reproducible method for differentiation of MTB isolates. However, information of its utility in determining the diversity of CAS1 strain is limited. We performed standard 12 loci based MIRU-VNTR typing on previously spoligotyped CAS1 strains and 'unique' strains in order to evaluate its discriminatory power for these isolates.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Twelve loci based MIRU- VNTR typing was used to type178 CAS1 and 189 'unique' MTB strains. The discriminatory index for each of the loci was calculated using the Hunter Gaston Discriminatory Index (HGDI). A subset of these strains (n = 78) were typed using IS<it>6110 </it>restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). MIRU-VNTR profiles were studied together with their drug susceptibility patterns.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 349 MIRU patterns were obtained for the 367 strains tested. The CAS1 strains were subdivided into 160 distinct patterns; 15 clusters of 2 strains each, 1 cluster of four strains and 144 unique patterns. Using HGDI, seven MIRU loci, (numbers 26, 31, 27, 16, 10, 39, and 40) were found to be "highly discriminatory" (DI: ≥0.6), four MIRU loci (numbers 20, 24, 23, and 4) were "moderately discriminatory" (DI: 0.3–0.59), and one locus (number 2) was "poorly discriminatory" (DI< 0.3). Loci 26 and 31 were the most discriminatory for the CAS1 isolates. Amongst 'unique' strains in addition to loci 26, 31, 27, 16, 10, 39, and 40, locus 23 was highly discriminatory, while no locus was poorly discriminating. DI values for loci 4, 10 and 26 were significantly lower (P-value < .01) in CAS1 strains than in 'unique' strains. The association between CAS1 strains and MDR was not found to be significant (p value = 0.21).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We propose that MIRU typing could be used to estimate the phylogenetic relatedness amongst prevalent CAS1 strains, for which MIRU loci 26, 31, 16, 10, 27, 39 and 40 were found to be the most discriminatory.</p

Minimally invasive technique of placing a dual chamber permanent pacemaker in children

Objective: To share the experience of a minimally invasive technique in the implantation of a dual chamber permanent pacemaker in paediatric population. Methods: The retrospective study was conducted at Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and comprised data of patients aged up to1 6 years who underwent epicardial dual chamber permanent pacemaker insertion via xiphisternal incision between April 2011 and August 2016. Demographic data included age, weight and gender of the patient. Indications for pacemaker insertion, electrocardiography findings, concomitant cardiac procedures and procedural complications were reviewed. Pacemaker thresholds and impedance at the time of implantation and throughout the course of follow-up were extracted from the clinical data. Results: Of the 10 patients, 5(50% were males and 5(50%) were females. The overall mean age was 3.43.8 years range:1 month - 13 years. The mean weight at the time of operation was 11.4 6.8 kg range: 4.3 27 kg. Indications for permanent pacemaker insertion included postoperative advanced or complete atrioventricular block in 7(70% and complete congenital heart block in 3(30% There was no reported morbidity. Conclusion: Dual chamber permanent pacemaker insertion via xiphisternal incision was found to be of benefit to the patients and the surgeons alike

Resveratrol-loaded nanoparticles based on polymeric blend for prostsate cancer treatment

The trans-resveratrol (RSV) has been reported to act as an antiproliferative and chemopreventive agent against a wide variety of tumors, including prostate cancer (PCa)I,2. Nanoencapsulation of RSV represents a powerful strategy to provide protection of degradation, enhancement of bioavailability, improvement of intracellular penetration and control delivery,4. We developed novel polymeric nanoparticles (NPs) encapsulating RSV (nano-RSV), based on a polymeric blend, as effective prototypes for PCa treatment. Our results support the potential use of these prototypes for the controlled delivery ofRSV for PCa treatment