Overview of Sepsis and Sepsis Biomarker Detection

Sepsis being a fatal physiological state due to an imbalance in the immune system caused by infection, and one of the most common cause for millions of deaths in the non-coronary intensive care unit worldwide requires special attention in its diagnostic methods and cure. Therefore an understanding of literature related to sepsis is of utmost importance. With the advent of inter-disciplinary research, the study and diagnosis of sepsis problem are not limited to the medical field, rather it requires interventions and active participation of other fields of science and technology. However, often subject matter from interdisciplinary research is expounded in an abstruse manner and hence it becomes elusive for a researcher from different research domain to understand it, leading to loss of quality and efficiency in research. In this survey report, the material is presented in a form that facilitates easy comprehension for the non-medical researchers and has been focused on introducing sepsis, it\u27s causes, extent, comparison of diagnosis techniques: conventional labeled and label-free detections; with special emphasis on sepsis biomarkers to help researchers from multi-disciplinary domain to develop and fabricate devices and ideas to compliment the existing sepsis diagnosis system present in the medical field. A future direction of sepsis diagnosis along with the implementation of novel techniques for sepsis biomarker quantification is also reported

Citation Polarity Identification From Scientific Articles Using Deep Learning Methods

The way in which research articles are cited reflects how previous work is utilized by other researchers or stakeholders and can indicate the impact of that work on subsequent experiments. Based on human intuition, citations can be perceived as positive, negative, or neutral. While current citation indexing systems provide information on the author and publication name of the cited article, as well as the citation count, they do not indicate the polarity of the citation. This study aims to identify the polarity of citations in scientific research articles using pre-trained language models like BERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTa, Bio-RoBERTa, SPECTER, ERNIE, LongFormer, BigBird, and deep-learning methods. Most citations have a neutral polarity, resulting in imbalanced datasets for training deep-learning models. To address this issue, a class balancing technique is proposed and applied to all datasets to improve consistency and results. Pre-trained language models are used to generate optimal features, and ensemble techniques are utilized to combine all model predictions to produce the highest precision, recall, and F1-scores for all three labels

Self-Attentive Pooling for Efficient Deep Learning

Efficient custom pooling techniques that can aggressively trim the dimensions of a feature map and thereby reduce inference compute and memory footprint for resource-constrained computer vision applications have recently gained significant traction. However, prior pooling works extract only the local context of the activation maps, limiting their effectiveness. In contrast, we propose a novel non-local self-attentive pooling method that can be used as a drop-in replacement to the standard pooling layers, such as max/average pooling or strided convolution. The proposed self-attention module uses patch embedding, multi-head self-attention, and spatial-channel restoration, followed by sigmoid activation and exponential soft-max. This self-attention mechanism efficiently aggregates dependencies between non-local activation patches during down-sampling. Extensive experiments on standard object classification and detection tasks with various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures demonstrate the superiority of our proposed mechanism over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pooling techniques. In particular, we surpass the test accuracy of existing pooling techniques on different variants of MobileNet-V2 on ImageNet by an average of 1.2%. With the aggressive down-sampling of the activation maps in the initial layers (providing up to 22x reduction in memory consumption), our approach achieves 1.43% higher test accuracy compared to SOTA techniques with iso-memory footprints. This enables the deployment of our models in memory-constrained devices, such as micro-controllers (without losing significant accuracy), because the initial activation maps consume a significant amount of on-chip memory for high-resolution images required for complex vision tasks. Our proposed pooling method also leverages the idea of channel pruning to further reduce memory footprints.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, conferenc

Brickwall, Normal Modes and Emerging Thermality

In this article, we demonstrate how black hole quasi-normal modes can emerge from a Dirichlet brickwall model normal modes. We consider a probe scalar field in a BTZ geometry with a Dirichlet brickwall and demonstrate that as the wall approaches the event horizon, the corresponding poles in the retarded correlator become dense and yield an effective branch-cut. The associated discontinuity of the correlator carries the information of the black hole quasi-normal modes. We further demonstrate that a non-vanishing angular momentum non-perturbatively enhances the pole-condensing. We hypothesize that it is also related to quantum chaotic features of the corresponding spectral form factor, which has been observed earlier. Finally, we discuss the underlying algebraic justification of this approximate thermalization in terms of the trace of the algebra

Surface wave scattering by an elastic plate submerged in water with uneven bottom

Wave interaction with a vertical elastic plate in presence of undulating bottom topography is considered, assuming linear theory and utilizing simple perturbation analysis. First order correction to the velocity potential corresponding to the problem of scattering by a vertical elastic plate submerged in a fluid with a uniform bottom is obtained by invoking the Green’s integral theorem in a suitable manner. With sinusoidal undulation at the bottom, the first-order transmission coefficient (T1) vanishes identically. Behaviour of the first order reflection coefficient (R1) depending on the plate length, ripple number, ripple amplitude and flexural rigidity of the plate is depicted graphically. Also, the resonant nature of the first order reflection is observed at a particular value of the ratio of surface wavelength to that of the bottom undulations. The net reflection coefficient due to the joint effect of the plate and the bottom undulation is also presented for different flexural rigidity of the plate. When the rigidity parameter is made sufficiently large, the results for R1 reduce to the known results for a surface piercing rigid plate in water with bottom undulation

Distress Healthcare Financing among Informal-sector Workers: A Study in Purulia District, West Bengal, India

Based on a micro-level field investigation conducted in the Purulia district of West Bengal (a state in India), the present paper investigates the factors influencing the incidence of distress healthcare financing among the households whose principal earning members are working as informal workers. Distress healthcare financing is defined as a situation when a household has to borrow money with interest, and/or sell assets/livestock to pay its out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. It was found that distress healthcare financing was highly influenced by catastrophic healthcare expenditure, the proportion of working members & occupation of principal earning members