A prospective assessment of antimicrobial agents utilization pattern in a tertiary care hospital

Background: The antimicrobial resistance is increasing globally and, concurrently, downward trend in development of newer antibiotics is leading to a serious public health problem and economic consequences.Methods: Prescriptions with at least one antimicrobial were included in the study. A total of 242 prescriptions were included in the study. The antimicrobials were classified into different classes based on WHO-ATC classification.Results: A total of 281 antimicrobials prescribed in 242 prescriptions with an average of 1.16 per prescription. In most of the prescriptions, 1 antimicrobial were prescribed (88.43%). The routes of the antimicrobial administration were mostly oral 268 (95.37%) followed by injectable 13 (4.63%). The most commonly prescribed classes of antimicrobial in this study were antibacterials for systemic use (J01) (74.02%) followed by antimycobacterials (J04) (13.88%), antiparasitic drugs (P) (8.19%), antimycotics for systemic use (J02) (2.49%) and antivirals for systemic use (J05) (1.42%). Among antibacterials, the most commonly prescribed classes of antibacterial was various antibacterial FDCs (19.22%), followed by quinolones (18.86%), macrolides (18.15%), β-lactams (11.03%) cephalosporins (6.76%), penicillins (4.27%), aminoglycosides (2.84%), metronidazole (1.78%), clindamycin (1.78%) and tetracycline (0.36%). The total percentage of antimicrobials prescribed as Fixed Dose Combinations (FDCs) were 32.38%.Conclusions: The present study has reported that most commonly prescribed antimicrobials were quinolones followed by macrolides and β-lactams. Recommendations to change the ongoing prescribing practices should be based on the Standard Treatment Guidelines, EDL and Antibiotic policy or by following the information, education, and communication (IEC) interventions

An Unusual Case of Cut-Throat Injury: a Medico-Legal Masquerade

Background: Psychological autopsy is one of the most valuable tools in equivocal deaths.Case Report: Hereby we present an unusual case of cut-throat injuries wherein an adult female was found dead in her house having single entry/exit which was locked from outside. On examination multiple incised wounds were found on the front aspect of the neck. Scene circumstances were equivocal.Conclusion: Crime scene investigation and psychological autopsy plays a vital role in differentiating suicide from homicide in all cases of equivocal deaths

Disinfection by 1% sodium hypochlorite through cold fogging: an innovative appropriate technology against COVID-19 in public health

Background: SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus with a fragile outer lipid envelope that makes it more susceptible to disinfectants compared to non-enveloped viruses. In this article, dispensation through cold Fogger was innovated as a measure against aerosol-based transmission of COVID-19 in large, enclosed spaces like hospitals, nursing homes, isolation centers and quarantine facilities.Methods: Ecological exploratory study, to ours effectiveness of 1% sodium hypochlorite through cold fogging against SARS COV-2 technology. Study setting included medical college in Western Maharashtra and the selected COVID-19 hospitals. The data was collated in MS excel and analysed using IBM SPSS version 23.0.Results: Average of 2.9 % HCWs got infected in hospitals where this innovation was used to disinfect, as compared to infections rates of 21.5% and 14.7% in other premier health institutes. There was strong negative correlation between percentage of health care infected and liters of sodium hypochlorite used with R2=0.56. Also, on applying Spearman correlation coefficient there was good negative correlation (-0.8).Conclusions: This appropriate technology has shown significant reduction in infection, with antecedent benefit of decreased morbidity and mortality of precious trained manpower. It gives much better dis-infection at 07 times less the cost and can be conveniently used for dis-infection against COVID-19 at the very periphery of primary health care delivery done at Sub-centres and PHCs

FinderNet: A Data Augmentation Free Canonicalization aided Loop Detection and Closure technique for Point clouds in 6-DOF separation

We focus on the problem of LiDAR point cloud based loop detection (or Finding) and closure (LDC) in a multi-agent setting. State-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques directly generate learned embeddings of a given point cloud, require large data transfers, and are not robust to wide variations in 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) viewpoint. Moreover, absence of strong priors in an unstructured point cloud leads to highly inaccurate LDC. In this original approach, we propose independent roll and pitch canonicalization of the point clouds using a common dominant ground plane. Discretization of the canonicalized point cloud along the axis perpendicular to the ground plane leads to an image similar to Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs), which exposes strong spatial priors in the scene. Our experiments show that LDC based on learnt embeddings of such DEMs is not only data efficient but also significantly more robust, and generalizable than the current SOTA. We report significant performance gain in terms of Average Precision for loop detection and absolute translation/rotation error for relative pose estimation (or loop closure) on Kitti, GPR and Oxford Robot Car over multiple SOTA LDC methods. Our encoder technique allows to compress the original point cloud by over 830 times. To further test the robustness of our technique we create and opensource a custom dataset called Lidar-UrbanFly Dataset (LUF) which consists of point clouds obtained from a LiDAR mounted on a quadrotor

Spin re-orientation induced anisotropic magnetoresistance switching in LaCo0.5_{0.5}Ni0.5_{0.5}O3−δ_{3-\delta} thin films

Realization of novel functionalities by tuning magnetic interactions in rare earth perovskite oxide thin films opens up exciting technological prospects. Strain-induced tuning of magnetic interactions in rare earth cobaltates and nickelates is of central importance due to their versatility in electronic transport properties. Here we reported the spin re-orientation induced switching of anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) and its tunability with strain in epitaxial LaCo$_{0.5}$Ni$_{0.5}$O$_{3-\delta}$ thin films across the ferromagnetic transition. Moreover, with strain tuning, we could observe a two-fold to four-fold symmetry crossover in AMR across the magnetic transition temperature. The magnetization measurements revealed an onset of ferromagnetic transition around 50 K, and a further reduction in temperature showed a subtle change in the magnetization dynamics, which reduced the ferromagnetic long-range ordering and introduced glassiness in the system. X-ray absorption and X-ray magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy measurements over Co and Ni L edges revealed the Co spin state transition below the magnetic transition temperature leading to the AMR switching and also the presence of Ni$^{2+}$ and Co$^{4+}$ ions evidencing the charge transfer from Ni to Co ions. Our work demonstrated the tunability of magnetic interactions mediated electronic transport in cobaltate-nickelate thin films, which is relevant in understanding Ni-Co interactions in oxides for their technological applications such as in AMR sensors