Case series to study the clinical features, risk factors, prognostic factors, and to assess the different management modalities of EPN and its outcomes

Background: Emphysematous pyelonephritis is an acute necrotising infection of the kidney, often associated with high rate of renal loss and mortality. EPN mostly present with triad of fever, flank pain and nausea. The diagnostic tool of choice is CT KUB. E. coli is the most common pathogen. Methods: It was prospective study done on 52 patients who were diagnosed to have EPN from department of nephrology and urology in Narayana Medical College, Nellore from March 2022 to January 2024. The diagnosis of EPN was confirmed by plain CT KUB scan. Results: Among 52 patients 48 patients had diabetes mellitus (DM). left kidney involved in 28 patients and right kidney involved in 16 patients and bilateral kidney involvement in 8. Fever (92%), flank pain (88%) are the most common presentation in patients. Shock during initial presentation was seen in 19.5% of patients. E. coli growth was seen in 26.9% cases. 8 patients were treated conservatively with antibiotics according to culture and sensitivity. 32 patients required double J stenting, 7 patients required percutaneous nephrostomy. Nephrectomy was done in 5 patients. Mortality rate in our study was zero. Conclusions: Nephrectomy should be promptly attempted for patients not responding to conservative methods. Pre-existing CKD status, shock at presentation and altered sensorium are the factors determining the prognosis and management

CGuard: Efficient Spatial Safety for C

Spatial safety violations are the root cause of many security attacks and unexpected behavior of applications. Existing techniques to enforce spatial safety work broadly at either object or pointer granularity. Object-based approaches tend to incur high CPU overheads, whereas pointer-based approaches incur both high CPU and memory overheads. SGXBounds, an object-based approach, is so far the most efficient technique that provides complete out-of-bounds protection for objects. However, a major drawback of this approach is that it can't support address space larger than 32-bit. In this paper, we present CGuard, a tool that provides object-bounds protection for C applications with comparable overheads to SGXBounds without restricting the application address space. CGuard stores the bounds information just before the base address of an object and encodes the relative offset of the base address in the spare bits of the virtual address available in x86_64 architecture. For an object that can't fit in the spare bits, CGuard uses a custom memory layout that enables it to find the base address of the object in just one memory access. Our study revealed spatial safety violations in the gcc and x264 benchmarks from the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite and the string_match benchmark from the Phoenix benchmark suite. The execution time overheads for the SPEC CPU2017 and Phoenix benchmark suites were 42% and 26% respectively, whereas the reduction in the throughput for the Apache webserver when the CPUs were fully saturated was 30%. These results indicate that CGuard can be highly effective while maintaining a reasonable degree of efficiency

An Empirical Investigation on the Relationship between Onshore and Offshore Indian Rupee Market

Exchange rate movements have important ramifications for the economy’s business cycle, trade and capital flows. For India, the exchange rates fluctuations have consequences for being competitive in terms of international trade and capital flows, tourist destination and for maintaining a healthy international reserve. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between rupee-dollar exchange rate in spot market, domestic forward market and off-shore forward i.e. non-delivery forward market (Singapore) to understand the information flow in between these markets. Suitable econometric techniques including causality analysis was used for the study for the period 2002 to 2014 after considering structural breaks and sub period analysis was also done. It was found that the relationship between all three markets is quite dynamic with evidences of causality in one sub period and reverse direction or no causality in other sub periods, conditional upon intervention done by RBI to curb the volatility and on various macroeconomic shocks such global financial crisis

Network science based quantification of resilience demonstrated on the Indian Railways Network

The structure, interdependence, and fragility of systems ranging from power grids and transportation to ecology, climate, biology and even human communities and the Internet, have been examined through network science. While the response to perturbations has been quantified, recovery strategies for perturbed networks have usually been either discussed conceptually or through anecdotal case studies. Here we develop a network science-based quantitative methods framework for measuring, comparing and interpreting hazard responses and as well as recovery strategies. The framework, motivated by the recently proposed temporal resilience paradigm, is demonstrated with the Indian Railways Network. The methods are demonstrated through the resilience of the network to natural or human-induced hazards and electric grid failure. Simulations inspired by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2012 North Indian blackout as well as a cyber-physical attack scenario. Multiple metrics are used to generate various recovery strategies, which are simply sequences in which system components should be recovered after a disruption. Quantitative evaluation of recovery strategies suggests that faster and more resource-effective recovery is possible through network centrality measures. Case studies based on two historical events, specifically the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2012 North Indian blackout, and a simulated cyber-physical attack scenario, provides means for interpreting the relative performance of various recovery strategies. Quantitative evaluation of recovery strategies suggests that faster and more resource-effective restoration is possible through network centrality measures, even though the specific strategy may be different for sub-networks or for the partial recovery

An Investigation into Neuromorphic ICs using Memristor-CMOS Hybrid Circuits

The memristance of a memristor depends on the amount of charge flowing through it and when current stops flowing through it, it remembers the state. Thus, memristors are extremely suited for implementation of memory units. Memristors find great application in neuromorphic circuits as it is possible to couple memory and processing, compared to traditional Von-Neumann digital architectures where memory and processing are separate. Neural networks have a layered structure where information passes from one layer to another and each of these layers have the possibility of a high degree of parallelism. CMOS-Memristor based neural network accelerators provide a method of speeding up neural networks by making use of this parallelism and analog computation. In this project we have conducted an initial investigation into the current state of the art implementation of memristor based programming circuits. Various memristor programming circuits and basic neuromorphic circuits have been simulated. The next phase of our project revolved around designing basic building blocks which can be used to design neural networks. A memristor bridge based synaptic weighting block, a operational transconductor based summing block were initially designed. We then designed activation function blocks which are used to introduce controlled non-linearity. Blocks for a basic rectified linear unit and a novel implementation for tan-hyperbolic function have been proposed. An artificial neural network has been designed using these blocks to validate and test their performance. We have also used these fundamental blocks to design basic layers of Convolutional Neural Networks. Convolutional Neural Networks are heavily used in image processing applications. The core convolutional block has been designed and it has been used as an image processing kernel to test its performance.Comment: Bachelor's thesi

Laparoscopic repair of traumatic intraperitoneal bladder rupture: a rare case report

Laparoscopic repair of traumatic intraperitoneal bladder rupture is safe and effective technique. We here report case of 49 year male with traumatic intraperitoneal bladder rupture proven by CT urogram after sustaining blunt trauma abdomen injury, repaired by laparoscopy technique. Patient recovered without any complications and was discharged on postoperative day 6 under stable condition. we here by conclude that if bladder injury identified early and conditions if feasible, laparoscopic repair is one of the good options for further management without involving open laparotomy

Congenital malaria: Is it really rare? A case report

A 7-day-old term male infant weighing 2.4 kg was admitted with fever, pallor, icterus, and splenomegaly for 3 days. The primi mother was treated for pyrexia in the last trimester. Investigation revealed anemia, hyperbilirubinemia, and thrombocytopenia and demonstrated Plasmodium vivax in peripheral blood smear and card test. C-reactive protein was raised and blood culture was sterile. The baby was responded well to intravenous (IV) artesunate. Recent studies suggest that congenital malaria (CM) is not as rare as previously thought. Cord blood shows greater parasitemia as compared to neonatal blood. Besides light microscopy, plasmodium antigen detection and polymerase chain reaction of blood may help in diagnosis. CM can be confused with toxoplasmosis, rubella, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex syndrome, and neonatal sepsis