Minimal Intervention in Pediatric Dentistry

Dental caries is an infectious disease, identifying the risk factors and controlling them is important in preventing tooth demineralization. Early recognition of risk factors allows dentistto implement preventive regimes. Prevention includes rebalancing the oral environment to its natural state and preventing oral diseases progression. Once cavitation occursrestoring with minimal intervention technique shall minimize tooth loss and restore function

Successful transcatheter closure of very large ruptured sinus of Valsalva aneurysm

Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm, usually a congenital anomaly, almost always ruptures into the right side of the heart causing a left-to-right shunt with profound hemodynamic consequences. With the availability of devices and hardware, transcatheter closure is gradually replacing surgical one. Till now, most of closures have been performed by Amplatzer duct occluder. To the best of our knowledge, the present case is first to be reported with this rare defect undergoing successful transcatheter closure of largest ruptured sinus of Valsalva aneurysm arising from right coronary sinus by using 20/18 mm Cocoon Duct Occluder (Vascular Innovations, Nonthaburi, Thailand)

Bilateral variant testicular arteries with double renal arteries

© 2009 Sylvia et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Towards Fair Allocation in Social Commerce Platforms

Social commerce platforms are emerging businesses where producers sell products through re-sellers who advertise the products to other customers in their social network. Due to the increasing popularity of this business model, thousands of small producers and re-sellers are starting to depend on these platforms for their livelihood; thus, it is important to provide fair earning opportunities to them. The enormous product space in such platforms prohibits manual search, and motivates the need for recommendation algorithms to effectively allocate product exposure and, consequently, earning opportunities. In this work, we focus on the fairness of such allocations in social commerce platforms and formulate the problem of assigning products to re-sellers as a fair division problem with indivisible items under two-sided cardinality constraints, wherein each product must be given to at least a certain number of re-sellers and each re-seller must get a certain number of products. Our work systematically explores various well-studied benchmarks of fairness -- including Nash social welfare, envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), and equitability up to one item (EQ1) -- from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. We find that the existential and computational guarantees of these concepts known from the unconstrained setting do not extend to our constrained model. To address this limitation, we develop a mixed-integer linear program and other scalable heuristics that provide near-optimal approximation of Nash social welfare in simulated and real social commerce datasets. Overall, our work takes the first step towards achieving provable fairness alongside reasonable revenue guarantees on social commerce platforms

Primary skin fibroblasts as a model of Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is the second most frequent neurodegenerative disorder. While most cases occur sporadic mutations in a growing number of genes including Parkin (PARK2) and PINK1 (PARK6) have been associated with the disease. Different animal models and cell models like patient skin fibroblasts and recombinant cell lines can be used as model systems for Parkinson's disease. Skin fibroblasts present a system with defined mutations and the cumulative cellular damage of the patients. PINK1 and Parkin genes show relevant expression levels in human fibroblasts and since both genes participate in stress response pathways, we believe fibroblasts advantageous in order to assess, e.g. the effect of stressors. Furthermore, since a bioenergetic deficit underlies early stage Parkinson's disease, while atrophy underlies later stages, the use of primary cells seems preferable over the use of tumor cell lines. The new option to use fibroblast-derived induced pluripotent stem cells redifferentiated into dopaminergic neurons is an additional benefit. However, the use of fibroblast has also some drawbacks. We have investigated PARK6 fibroblasts and they mirror closely the respiratory alterations, the expression profiles, the mitochondrial dynamics pathology and the vulnerability to proteasomal stress that has been documented in other model systems. Fibroblasts from patients with PARK2, PARK6, idiopathic Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 demonstrated a distinct and unique mRNA expression pattern of key genes in neurodegeneration. Thus, primary skin fibroblasts are a useful Parkinson's disease model, able to serve as a complement to animal mutants, transformed cell lines and patient tissues

Scalable noninvasive amplicon-based precision sequencing (SNAPseq) for genetic diagnosis and screening of β-thalassemia and sickle cell disease using a next-generation sequencing platform

β-hemoglobinopathies such as β-thalassemia (BT) and Sickle cell disease (SCD) are inherited monogenic blood disorders with significant global burden. Hence, early and affordable diagnosis can alleviate morbidity and reduce mortality given the lack of effective cure. Currently, Sanger sequencing is considered to be the gold standard genetic test for BT and SCD, but it has a very low throughput requiring multiple amplicons and more sequencing reactions to cover the entire HBB gene. To address this, we have demonstrated an extraction-free single amplicon-based approach for screening the entire β-globin gene with clinical samples using Scalable noninvasive amplicon-based precision sequencing (SNAPseq) assay catalyzing with next-generation sequencing (NGS). We optimized the assay using noninvasive buccal swab samples and simple finger prick blood for direct amplification with crude lysates. SNAPseq demonstrates high sensitivity and specificity, having a 100% agreement with Sanger sequencing. Furthermore, to facilitate seamless reporting, we have created a much simpler automated pipeline with comprehensive resources for pathogenic mutations in BT and SCD through data integration after systematic classification of variants according to ACMG and AMP guidelines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the NGS-based high throughput SNAPseq approach for the detection of both BT and SCD in a single assay with high sensitivity in an automated pipeline

Visually Similar Products Retrieval for Shopsy

Visual search is of great assistance in reseller commerce, especially for non-tech savvy users with affinity towards regional languages. It allows resellers to accurately locate the products that they seek, unlike textual search which recommends products from head brands. Product attributes available in e-commerce have a great potential for building better visual search systems as they capture fine grained relations between data points. In this work, we design a visual search system for reseller commerce using a multi-task learning approach. We also highlight and address the challenges like image compression, cropping, scribbling on the image, etc, faced in reseller commerce. Our model consists of three different tasks: attribute classification, triplet ranking and variational autoencoder (VAE). Masking technique is used for designing the attribute classification. Next, we introduce an offline triplet mining technique which utilizes information from multiple attributes to capture relative order within the data. This technique displays a better performance compared to the traditional triplet mining baseline, which uses single label/attribute information. We also compare and report incremental gain achieved by our unified multi-task model over each individual task separately. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated using the in-house dataset of product images from the Lifestyle business-unit of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company. To efficiently retrieve the images in production, we use the Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) index. Finally, we highlight our production environment constraints and present the design choices and experiments conducted to select a suitable ANN index.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

The Temperature-Dependent Adsorption Behaviour of Benzene Molecules in ZSM-5 Zeolite Pores: TPD and FT-IR Spectroscopy Studies

Temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) and in situ Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopic methods were employed to investigate the effect of loading and sample temperature on the state of benzene molecules inside the channels of NaZSM-5 zeolite. TPD profiles revealed the existence of at least three distinct states of benzene adsorption, characterized by desorption peak maxima at ca. 120°C, 170°C and 220°C, respectively. Based on the growth behaviour of these bands, it is suggested that the benzene molecules occupy sinusoidal channels, straight channels and external surfaces, in that order. A reverse trend was observed during the subsequent flushing of the sample at varying temperatures. A virtually fixed amount of benzene was occluded at these three locations, depending upon the loading. The FT-IR studies revealed that the benzene molecule exists in a compressed state in the zeolitic channels, with the molecular clusters formed in the process dispersing only at temperatures above 150°C. For initial benzene loadings of up to ca. 1.5 molecules/unit cell, the spectrum obtained showed that in the O—H stretch region the bridge-bonded OH groups and hydroxyl groups associated with the internal zeolitic channels were perturbed simultaneously. The results show that even for a loading lower than necessary for saturation, a considerable amount of benzene remains condensed at the external surface of ZSM-5 zeolite

Conservative Approach in the Management of Radicular Cyst in a Child: Case Report

Radicular cyst is the most common odontogenic cystic lesion of inflammatory origin. It is also known as periapical cyst, apical periodontal cyst, root end cyst, or dental cyst. It arises from epithelial residues in the periodontal ligament as a result of inflammation. The inflammation usually follows the death of dental pulp. This paper presents a case report of a patient with radicular cyst associated with a primary molar