Short term analysis of total hip replacement done with constrained acetabular component - functional and radiological outcome

Background: Dislocation remains at the forefront of complications after primary total hip arthroplasty (THA). In our study, we talk about the use of constrained liners and its outcomes in an unstable hip.Methods: The total number of patients included in the study was 15. The total number of hips in the study were 15. The age group of the patients varied between 51 years and 89 years with mean age group of 73 years. The most common indication in our study was dislocation contributing 60% (n=9) of the hips.Results: The post-operative mean Harris hip score (HHS) at immediate post-operative was 67.6. There was a gradual improvement in the HHS through 6 months (77.6), one year (83.3), two years (86.7) and 3 years (90.33). There were no cases with post-operative septic or aseptic loosening in the radiological analysis. The mean cup inclination was 34.3. Out of the 13 hips, in eight hips the femoral stem was in varus. Five hips had a centrally placed femoral stem. Stability management in THA have seen the component design take centre stage, primarily with the use of larger diameter femoral heads and the rise in popularity of constrained acetabular liners (CAL). Several authors have done studies which talk about the stability of this implant design and the reliability of this implant in unstable hips and in hips where instability was expected.Conclusions: In our study, proximal femur tumours, dislocated total hips, abductor insufficiencies and aseptic loosening all showed good results

Middle third clavicle fractures are the most common fractures in head injuries: a biomechanical and epidemiological study in 1000 patients

A consecutive series of 1000 cases of head injury, out of which 385 patients presented with fractures. In the 385 patients with fractures, 179 patients presented with clavicle fractures, among that, 127 are middle third fractures. Out of the 189 patients who had clavicle fractures, 90% of them had direct blow to shoulders and 10% had fallen on the outstretched hand. This variation with the mechanism of injury was further investigated by biomechanical analysis of the forces involved in clavicular fractures.

Sodium Intake, Blood Pressure, and Dietary Sources of Sodium in an Adult South Indian Population

BackgroundThe association between prevalence of hypertension and its relationship with dietary sodium intake has never been published from large epidemiological studies in the South Indian population before.ObjectivesTo assess sodium intake and its association with blood pressure, and major dietary sources of sodium in an adult population in southeastern India.MethodsThis study included a representative population-based sample of 8080 individuals (57% women) >20 years of age. Individuals with previous history of hypertension and outliers for sodium intake were excluded, resulting in a sample size of 6876, with 4269 from semi-urban/urban and 2607 from rural areas. Baseline measurements included evaluation of systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressures, anthropometric, sociodemographic, and psychosocial parameters. Based on 24-hour recall, we calculated total daily sodium intake and the percentage contributed by each food group to the total sodium intake. Participants were assigned based on quintiles of dietary sodium intake. Mixed-effects multivariable linear regression models assessed the association of SBP and DBP with sodium intake.FindingsMen had higher mean sodium intake (4.1 ± 2 versus 3.2 ± 1.7 g/day; 'P' ConclusionIn a South Indian population, the dietary intake of sodium was higher than recommendations by major dietary guidelines and was an independent predictor of SBP

In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit

Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)---deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs (caches, out-of-order execution, multithreading, multiprocessing, prefetching, ...) that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X - 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X - 80X higher. Moreover, using the GPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 8 tables. To appear at the 44th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Toronto, Canada, June 24-28, 201

Charting the NF-κB Pathway Interactome Map

Inflammation is part of a complex physiological response to harmful stimuli and pathogenic stress. The five components of the Nuclear Factor κB (NF-κB) family are prominent mediators of inflammation, acting as key transcriptional regulators of hundreds of genes. Several signaling pathways activated by diverse stimuli converge on NF-κB activation, resulting in a regulatory system characterized by high complexity. It is increasingly recognized that the number of components that impinges upon phenotypic outcomes of signal transduction pathways may be higher than those taken into consideration from canonical pathway representations. Scope of the present analysis is to provide a wider, systemic picture of the NF-κB signaling system. Data from different sources such as literature, functional enrichment web resources, protein-protein interaction and pathway databases have been gathered, curated, integrated and analyzed in order to reconstruct a single, comprehensive picture of the proteins that interact with, and participate to the NF-κB activation system. Such a reconstruction shows that the NF-κB interactome is substantially different in quantity and quality of components with respect to canonical representations. The analysis highlights that several neglected but topologically central proteins may play a role in the activation of NF-κB mediated responses. Moreover the interactome structure fits with the characteristics of a bow tie architecture. This interactome is intended as an open network resource available for further development, refinement and analysis

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc

Does overvaluation of bidder stock drive acquisitions? The case of public and private targets

We test the implications of the Misvaluation hypothesis (Shleifer and Vishny, 2003) for a large sample of acquirers of private and public target firms. Consistent with the Misvaluation hypothesis we find that acquirers are overvalued. The overvaluation is higher for stock acquisitions of private targets. We find that the announcement period returns are lower for firms that are overvalued at the time of acquisition. Announcement period returns are lower for larger acquisitions of public targets and higher for larger acquisitions of private targets. We also examine the factors that determine stock as the method of payment. Consistent with the Misvaluation hypothesis we find that firms that have higher valuation measures at the time of acquisition tend to use stock. Acquirers of public targets tend to use stock more frequently