Role of CT enterography in evaluation of small bowel disorders

Background: Small bowel pathologies are an enigma for clinicians and difficult to assess and evaluate for clinicians. In order to establish the efficacy of MDCT Enterography in diagnostic characterisation of small bowel lesions, the current study was undertaken.Methods: A prospective observational cross-sectional study was carried out in a tertiary care hospital. 30 patients with clinically suspected small bowel disease underwent CT enterography using iso-osmotic mannitol as neutral enteral contrast. CT enterography diagnoses were compared with clinical, surgical and histopathological results.Results: CT enterography showed a sensitivity (95.83%), specificity (100%), positive predictive value (100%), negative predictive value (85.71%), accuracy (96.66%) in diagnosis of small bowel diseases.Conclusions: CTE is a non-invasive well tolerated and reliable imaging modality for the depiction of small-bowel diseases. It provides excellent visualization of luminal, mural and extraintestinal findings

A ‘never before’ presentation of a common Mullerian abnormality

Transvaginal septum is one of uncommon Mullerian anomalies which may lead to infertility. We all depend so often on HSG and MRI for investigating these infecund patients. Here we bring out how a distended vaginal cavity with contrast mimicked the uterine cavity on HSG misleading the clinician. The septum was missed on MRI too initially. A simple surgical correction and the patient was able to conceive in her very first cycle

Ruptured ovarian artery aneurysm in puerperium: a rare occurrence

We present a rare case of Ovarian Artery Aneurysm in a puerperium. It was managed by endocopic banding of the ovarian artery following failed attempts at endovascular embolisation. The patient remained stable on three months follow up. The pathogenesis of this rare condition is also discussed.

Gravid uterus in post caesarean incisional hernia: a rare occurrence

Incisional hernia following section caesarean is a not so uncommon a complication following sepsis in the postoperative period. An ever rising primary caesarean rates in many developed countries like USA and emerging economies like China is leading to rising trend of incisional hernia following c-section. The contents of hernial sac in these cases are usually small gut loops or omentum. Only about a dozen cases having gravid uterus as hernial content have been recorded in literature. Paucity of cases has meant that there are no established guidelines for its management, which is totally individualized. We report here a very rare case of protrusion of gravid uterus in post caesarean incisional ventral hernia and its successful management resulting in delivery of a healthy baby

Unusual clinical presentation and complications following preoperative embolization of a large adrenal tumor

Authors present a case of a young female presenting with secondary amenorrhea which on further investigation revealed a large intra-abdominal mass, likely arising from the left adrenal gland. As the tumor was highly vascular with large feeders, she was referred for pre-operative embolization to reduce the blood loss during surgery. Post embolization, the patient suffered from an unusual complication of tumor rupture along with excessive secretion of catecholamines resulting in myocarditis and myocardial infarction. Patient ultimately died of the myocardial infarction. Preoperative embolization of a large, hypervascular adrenal mass lesion is not devoid of unusual complications like tumor rupture and subsequent cardiovascular complications even if the tumor is hormonally inactive. This complication is extremely rare and has never been reported in adrenal tumors after embolization

Decision-making: Path to Effectiveness

Abstract The emphasis is on investigating an aspect of managerial decision-making style with the potential to enhance managerial performance. In this context, it is important to examine the relat ionship between decision-ma king styles with conflict handling. Th is study focuses primarily on exp loring the role of conflict management used in the organizat ion as predictors of decision-making styles. The Data collected fro m 307 executives belonging to banking sector fro m West Bengal, India. The Data analysed using descriptive and simp le regressions analysis techniques. Results suggest that conflict-handling style used in the organization in addition to decision maker's education and management levels are good predictors of decision-making styles in such an environment. Results also indicate that a tendency towards the analytical style prevails among managers. Further, the implication o f the contribution made by this study to the body of management theory and practice discussed

Screening Strains of the Mulberry Silkworm, Bombyx mori, for Thermotolerance

A tropical climate prevails in most of the sericultural areas in India, where temperature increases during the summer lead to adverse effects on temperate bivoltine silkworm rearing and cause crop losses. Screening for thermotolerance in the silkworm, Bombyxmori L. (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae) is an essential prerequisite for the development of thermotolerant breeds/hybrids. In the current study, the aim was to identify potential bivoltine silkworm strains specific for tolerance to high temperature. The third day of fifth stage silkworm larvae of bivoltine strains were subjected to high temperature of 36 ± 1° C with RH of 50 ± 5 % for six hours (10:00–16:00) every day until spinning for three consecutive generations. Highly significant differences were found among all genetic traits of bivoltine silkworm strains in the treated groups. Three groups of silkworm resulted including susceptible, moderately tolerant, and tolerant by utilizing pupation rate or survival rate with thermal stress as the index for thermotolerance. Furthermore, based on the overall silkworm rearing performance of nine quantitative genetic traits such as larval weight, cocoon yield by number and weight, pupation, single cocoon and shell weight, shell ratio, filament length and denier, three bivoltine silkworm strains, BD2-S, SOF-BR and BO2 were developed as having the potential for thermotolerance. The data from the present study enhance knowledge for the development of thermo tolerant silkworm breeds/ hybrids and their effective commercial utilization in the sericulture industry

Multi-resolution Spectral Entropy Based Feature for Robust ASR

Recently, entropy measures at different stages of recognition have been used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) task. In a recent paper, we proposed that formant positions of a spectrum can be captured by multi-resolution spectral entropy feature. In this paper, we suggest modifications to the spectral entropy feature extraction approach and compute entropy contribution from each sub-band to the total entropy of the normalized spectrum. Further, we explore the ideas of overlapping sub-bands and the time derivatives of the spectral entropy feature. The modified feature is robust to additive wide-band noise and performs well at low SNRs. In the last, in the frame work of TANDEM, we show that the system using combined entropy and PLP features works better than the baseline PLP feature for additive wide-band noise at different SNRs

Entropy Based Combination of Tandem Representations for Noise Robust ASR

In this paper, we present an entropy based method to combine tandem representations of the recently proposed Phase AutoCorrelation (PAC) based features and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features. PAC based features, derived from a nonlinear transformation of autocorrelation coefficients and shown to be noise robust, improve their robustness to additive noise in their tandem representation. On the other hand, MFCC features in their tandem representation show a significant improvement in recognition performance on clean speech. An entropy based combination method investigated in this paper adaptively gives a higher weighting to the representation of MFCC features in clean speech and to the representation of PAC based features in noisy speech, thus yielding a robust recognition performance in all conditions