Ensemble Based Feature Extraction and Deep Learning Classification Model with Depth Vision

It remains a challenging task to identify human activities from a video sequence or still image due to factors such as backdrop clutter, fractional occlusion, and changes in scale, point of view, appearance, and lighting. Different appliances, as well as video surveillance systems, human-computer interfaces, and robots used to study human behavior, require different activity classification systems. A four-stage framework for recognizing human activities is proposed in the paper. As part of the initial stages of pre-processing, video-to-frame conversion and adaptive histogram equalization (AHE) are performed. Additionally, watershed segmentation is performed and, from the segmented images, local texton XOR patterns (LTXOR), motion boundary scale-invariant feature transforms (MoBSIFT) and bag of visual words (BoW) based features are extracted. The Bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) and the Bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) classifiers are used to detect human activity. In addition, the combined decisions of the Bi-GRU and Bi-LSTM classifiers are further fused, and their accuracy levels are determined. With this Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) technique, it is more likely that the results obtained from the analysis are accurate. Various metrics are used to assess the effectiveness of the deployed approach

A community based study on menstrual hygiene among adolescent girls in an urban slum of Patna

Aim: To study the menstrual hygiene practices of adolescent girls residing in urban slums of Patna .Material and Methods: A community based cross sectional study of 65 adolescent(10-19 years) girls available with Anganwadi workers from ICDS centres were interviewed on a pre -designed semi structured and pre-validated questionnaire to collect data on menstrual hygiene over a period of 3 months(January to March 2017). Result: Out of 65 adolescent enrolled girls 58.8% girls consulted their mother for menstruation related issues and 47% faced social restriction during menstruation. 61% girls were using sanitary pads. Only 7% girls had safe and hygienic practice of throwing used clothes after single use. Use of sanitary napkins and religion were not significantly (p>0.05) associated while monthly family income and educational status were significantly associated. Conclusion: The menstrual hygiene practices were poor among girls with social restriction and taboos. Education about proper menstruation hygiene practices is essential to overcome these barriers. Key words: Adolescent, menstrual hygiene, sanitary napkins, social restriction

Pharmacotherapeutic Options for Visceral Leishmaniasis—Current Scenario

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) or Kala-azar is a protozoal disease, which was previously regarded as one of the most neglected tropical diseases. Management of this disease is quite difficult, because it is said to affect the poorest of the poor. Previously Sodium Stibogluconate (SSG) was regarded as the gold standard treatment for VL. But due to the increasing unresponsiveness, to this drug various other drugs were tried and are still being tried. Pentamidine is very toxic and has been discarded of late. Amphotericin B and its lipid formulations are very effective but require hospital admission and monitoring. Oral drugs like Miltefosine have already been launched. An amino glycoside Paromomycin and another oral drug Sitamaquine are in the pipe line. Interferon gamma has been used with discouraging results

Large intramuscular plexiform neurofibroma of thigh: a multidisciplinary team approach

Large plexiform neurofibroma of lower extremity involving the muscle is a rare entity. In this article we present the case of plexiform neurofibroma of right thigh involving the muscular plane and entrapment of the sciatic nerve. A 28 year lady presented with a plexiform neurofibroma of right thigh of size 60 cm×30 cm×25 cm with a positive family history of neurofibromatosis type 1. MRI was done for the assessment of the tumour and the adjacent structure involvement. The neurofibroma was removed with a multidisciplinary team approach with an intensive peri operative management. The pathological diagnosis was plexiform neurofibroma with diffuse neurofibroma. We have reported a rare case of large plexiform neurofibroma of lower extremity with muscle involvement and nerve entrapment

Phase 4 Pharmacovigilance Trial of Paromomycin Injection for the Treatment of Visceral Leishmaniasis in India

Background. A phase 3 study demonstrated the safety and efficacy of paromomycin (paromomycin IM injection) for treatment of VL in an inpatient setting. Methods. This phase 4 study was conducted to assess the safety and efficacy of paromomycin in children and adults in an outpatient setting in Bihar, India. Results. This study enrolled 506 adult and pediatric patients. Of the 494 patients in the intent-to-treat (ITT) population, 98% received a full course of treatment. The overall study completion rate was 94% (462/494) for the ITT population and 96% (461/479) for the efficacy-evaluable (EE) population. Initial clinical cure was 99.6%, and final clinical cure 6 months after treatment was 94.2%. Grade 3 or 4 adverse events occurred in 5% of patients; events with a frequency of ≥1% were increases in alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase. Conclusions. This study confirms the safety and efficacy of paromomycin to treat VL in an outpatient setting

Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

We consider the problem of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Our proposed solution trains models to produce well calibrated confidence scores for their results on individual paragraphs. We sample multiple paragraphs from the documents during training, and use a shared-normalization training objective that encourages the model to produce globally correct output. We combine this method with a state-of-the-art pipeline for training models on document QA data. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on several document QA datasets. Overall, we are able to achieve a score of 71.3 F1 on the web portion of TriviaQA, a large improvement from the 56.7 F1 of the previous best system.Comment: 11 pages, updated a referenc

Performance criteria for verbal autopsy-based systems to estimate national causes of death: development and application to the Indian Million Death Study.

BACKGROUND: Verbal autopsy (VA) has been proposed to determine the cause of death (COD) distributions in settings where most deaths occur without medical attention or certification. We develop performance criteria for VA-based COD systems and apply these to the Registrar General of India's ongoing, nationally-representative Indian Million Death Study (MDS). METHODS: Performance criteria include a low ill-defined proportion of deaths before old age; reproducibility, including consistency of COD distributions with independent resampling; differences in COD distribution of hospital, home, urban or rural deaths; age-, sex- and time-specific plausibility of specific diseases; stability and repeatability of dual physician coding; and the ability of the mortality classification system to capture a wide range of conditions. RESULTS: The introduction of the MDS in India reduced the proportion of ill-defined deaths before age 70 years from 13% to 4%. The cause-specific mortality fractions (CSMFs) at ages 5 to 69 years for independently resampled deaths and the MDS were very similar across 19 disease categories. By contrast, CSMFs at these ages differed between hospital and home deaths and between urban and rural deaths. Thus, reliance mostly on urban or hospital data can distort national estimates of CODs. Age-, sex- and time-specific patterns for various diseases were plausible. Initial physician agreement on COD occurred about two-thirds of the time. The MDS COD classification system was able to capture more eligible records than alternative classification systems. By these metrics, the Indian MDS performs well for deaths prior to age 70 years. The key implication for low- and middle-income countries where medical certification of death remains uncommon is to implement COD surveys that randomly sample all deaths, use simple but high-quality field work with built-in resampling, and use electronic rather than paper systems to expedite field work and coding. CONCLUSIONS: Simple criteria can evaluate the performance of VA-based COD systems. Despite the misclassification of VA, the MDS demonstrates that national surveys of CODs using VA are an order of magnitude better than the limited COD data previously available

Tuberous sclerosis with visceral leishmaniasis: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Visceral leishmaniasis, a tropical infectious disease, is a major public health problem in India. Tuberous sclerosis, a congenital neuro-ectodermosis, is an uncommon disease which requires life long treatment.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 15-year-old Indian patient, presented to the outpatient department of our institute with a high-grade fever for two months, splenomegaly and a history of generalized tonic-clonic convulsions since childhood. The clinical and laboratory findings suggested visceral leishmaniasis with tuberous sclerosis. The patient was treated with miltefosine and antiepileptics.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The patient responded well and in a follow up six months after presentation, she was found free of visceral leishmaniasis and seizures. Diagnosis and treatment of this rare combination of diseases is difficult.</p