DETECTION AND SEGMENTATION OF OPTIC DISC IN FUNDUS IMAGES

Objective: Image processing technique is utilized in the medical field widely nowadays. Hence, therefore, this technique is used to extract the different features like blood vessels, optic disk, macula, fovea etc. automatically of the retinal image of eye.Methods: This paper presents a simple and fast algorithm using Mathematical Morphology to find the fovea of fundus retinal image. The image for analysis is obtained from the DRIVE database. Also, this paper is enhanced to detect the Diabetic Retinopathy disease occurring in the eye.Results: Detection of optic disc boundary becomes important for the diagnosis of glaucoma. The iterative curve evolution was stopped at the image boundaries where the energy was minimum.Conclusion: The changes in the shape and size of the optic disc can be used to detect glaucoma and also cup ratio can be used as a measure of glaucoma

Electric Field Analysis of Breast Tumor Cells

An attractive alternative treatment for malignant tumors that are refractive to conventional therapies, such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, is electrical-pulse-mediated drug delivery. Electric field distribution of tissue/tumor is important for effective treatment of tissues. This paper deals with the electric field distribution study of a tissue model using MAXWELL 3D Simulator. Our results indicate that tumor tissue had lower electric field strength compared to normal cells, which makes them susceptible to electrical-pulse-mediated drug delivery. This difference could be due to the altered properties of tumor cells compared to normal cells, and our results corroborate this

AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF DIABETIC RETINOPATHY THROUGH OPTIC DISC USING MORPHOLOGICAL METHODS

This paper proposes a method for the automatic detection of optic disc in retinal images. In the diagnosis and grading, the essential step is recognition of optic disk for diabetic retinopathy. The analysis of directional cross section profile focused on the local maximum pixel of pre-processed image is realized by the proposed method using optic disc detection. Each profile is implemented by peak detection and property like shape, size and height of the peak are estimated. The statistical measure of the estimated values for the attributes, where the orientation of the cross-section changes the constitute feature used in morphological classification to exclude encourages candidates. The result is to find the patient is affected by diabetics or not.Keywords: Diabetic retinopathy, Optic disk, Naives Bayes algorithm, Local maximum region

Tomorrow's Surgery: Micromotors and Microrobots

Surgical procedures have changed radically over the last few years due to the arrival of new technology. What will technology bring us in the future? This paper examines a few of the forces whose timing are causing new ideas to congeal from the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, micromachining and smart materials. Intelligence systems for autonomous mobile robots can now enable simple insect level behaviors in small amounts of silicon. These software breakthroughs coupled with new techniques for microfabricating miniature sensors and actuators from both silicon and ferroelectric families of materials offer glimpses of the future where robots will be small, cheap and potentially useful to surgeons. In this paper we relate our recent efforts to fabricate piezoelectric micromotors in an effort to develop actuator technologies where brawn matches to the scale of the brain. We discuss our experiments with thin film ferroelectric motors 2mm in diameter and larger 8mm versions machined from bulk ceramic and sketch possible applications in the surgical field.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Report on swimbladder disorder in the honeycomb grouper, Epinephelus merra

Swimbladder or airbladder is a thin layered epithelial sac filled with air, lying above the alimentary canal of bony fishes that regulates buoyancy of the fish so that the specific gravity of the fish always matches the depth at which it is swimming. Swimbladder disorder (SBD) is a condition caused by sudden temperature changes impacted stomach resulting from improper feeding or due to bacterial or viral infections of the bladder characterised by inability of the fish to keep a normal upright position in water. Normally gold fishes suffer from SBD due to their globoid body shape. Fish with SBD may float on their side or their back, swim in circles or take head-down posture

Unusual foaming along Thiruvananthapuram coast

Unusual foaming was observed on 18 and 19 October 2009 along the coast of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. A similar phenomenon was reported in 1999, which suggested that foaming in coastal waters of the Northern Adriatic, the English Channel and beaches of France, the Netherlands and Germany was due to the mucilage formed from the extracellular polymeric substances

Study to evaluate the effectiveness of coagulation factor concentrate prophylaxis in children with severe hemophilia

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of prophylaxis with coagulation factor concentrates VIII/IX (FVII/IX) in children with severe hemophilia A/B, respectively. Materials and Methods: Retrospective observational study was done on children enrolled in our hemophilia clinic, who initially received “on demand” therapy and were on prophylaxis with factor VIII/IX concentrate at the time of the study. The study group consisted of 8 children. Annual hemarthrosis rate (AHR) over a period of 1-year during on demand therapy was compared with AHR during a period of 1-year on prophylaxis with FVIII/IX. Results: There was reduction in AHR by 87% in hemophilia A and 85% in hemophilia B during prophylaxis compared to on demand therapy. There was a significant reduction in hemarthrosis/patient/year from 2.5 to 0.3 on prophylaxis with factor concentrate compared to on demand therapy. There was also reduction in other bleeding manifestation like psoas muscle bleed, oral bleeds, epistaxis, and number of target joints involved. Conclusion: Prophylaxis with coagulation factor concentrate significantly reduces the AHR, and hence, decreases the disability associated with it compared to “on demand” therapy

STIFDB—Arabidopsis Stress Responsive Transcription Factor DataBase

Elucidating the key players of molecular mechanism that mediate the complex stress-responses in plants system is an important step to develop improved variety of stress tolerant crops. Understanding the effects of different types of biotic and abiotic stress is a rapidly emerging domain in the area of plant research to develop better, stress tolerant plants. Information about the transcription factors, transcription factor binding sites, function annotation of proteins coded by genes expressed during abiotic stress (for example: drought, cold, salinity, excess light, abscisic acid, and oxidative stress) response will provide better understanding of this phenomenon. STIFDB is a database of abiotic stress responsive genes and their predicted abiotic transcription factor binding sites in Arabidopsis thaliana. We integrated 2269 genes upregulated in different stress related microarray experiments and surveyed their 1000 bp and 100 bp upstream regions and 5′UTR regions using the STIF algorithm and identified putative abiotic stress responsive transcription factor binding sites, which are compiled in the STIFDB database. STIFDB provides extensive information about various stress responsive genes and stress inducible transcription factors of Arabidopsis thaliana. STIFDB will be a useful resource for researchers to understand the abiotic stress regulome and transcriptome of this important model plant system