A comparative study of feto-maternal outcome in expectant management versus active management in pre-labor rupture of membranes at term

Background: Premature rupture of the membranes at term is spontaneous rupture of the membranes after 37 weeks of gestation and before the onset of the regular painful uterine contractions, complicates 5-10% of pregnancies, 80% of cases of PROM occur at term. It complicates the pregnancy leading to maternal and fetal complications, immediate risks such as cord prolapse, cord compression and placental abruptions, and later risks such as maternal or neonatal infection and the interventions such as caesarean section and instrumental vaginal delivery. These cases are either managed conservatively or by immediate induction of labour. Objective of present study is to compare the efficacy and safety of induction of labor versus expectant management at term PROM, in terms of maternal and fetal outcome.Methods: A randomized control trial of 100 women coming to KIMSH from 01 /04 /2015 to 01 /05 /2016 with PROM at term with duration of leak ≤6 hours and a Bishop score ≤5 were assigned to group A immediate induction group and group B expectant management group with 50 cases in each group.Results: The mean interval from PROM to delivery was significantly shorter in the induction Group 15.62±4.97 as compared with expectant group 17.58±4.78. Incidence of maternal morbidity and neonatal morbidity was comparable in both the groups. Intrapartum complications and mode of delivery were similar in both groups.Conclusions: Immediate induction of labour in cases of PROM at term using oral misoprostol resulted in shorter induction delivery interval and hospital stay. Maternal morbidity and neonatal morbidity was comparable in both groups. It is concluded that immediate induction is better than expectant management. With active management many patients delivered vaginally within 24 hours without increase in the Caesarean section rate and decreased the need for oxytocin augmentation

Crack kinking at the tip of a mode I crack in an orthotropic solid.

The competition between crack penetration and crack kinking is addressed for a mode I macroscopic crack in an orthotropic elastic solid. Cohesive zones of finite peak strength and finite toughness are placed directly ahead of and orthogonal to the plane of the parent crack. The cohesive zone ahead of the crack tip is tensile in nature and leads to crack penetration, whereas the inclined zones slide without opening under a combined shear and normal traction, and give crack kinking. Thereby, the competition between continued crack growth by penetration ahead of the crack tip versus kinking is determined as a function of the relative strength and relative toughness of the cohesive zones. This competition is plotted in the form of a failure mechanism map, with the role of material orthotropy emphasized. Synergistic toughening is observed, whereby the parent crack tip is shielded by the activation of both the tensile and shear (kinking) cohesive zones, and the macroscopic toughness is elevated. The study is used to assess the degree to which various classes of composite have the tendency to undergo kinking

A questionnaire based survey to evaluate the usage pattern of carbapenems for sepsis management in intensive care unit

Background: Sepsis remains one of the most common critical illnesses for patients to be admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) and has very high associated morbidity and mortality ranging from 18 to 50%. It is a well-known fact that early goal directed therapy with broad spectrum antibiotics, IV fluids and other supportive therapies improve outcome. The current study was done to know the importance of carbapenems in the management of sepsis focusing on perceived use and the clinical outcome in real time setting in tertiary care hospitals.Methods: A structured questionnaire designed to collect information on the perceived use of carbapenems, the clinical outcome, response period for clinical cure and combination antibiotic therapy preferred with carbapenem was circulated among 50 clinicians in tertiary care hospitals and nursing homes in and around Mangalore between January 2015 to March 2015.Results: Majority of doctors (>80%) felt that carbapenems a broad spectrum antibiotic administration provided good clinical improvement in hospital infections along with improvement in blood cell count and bacteriological cure.Conclusions: Our study provides an important insight regarding the knowledge, practice pattern and clinical outcome through the use of carbapenem in Sepsis management in ICU’s around Mangalore. The experience of practice patterns and clinical outcomes with carbapenem shared by doctors through this survey is similar to that in other studies

Suppression of electron spin decoherence of the diamond NV center by a transverse magnetic field

We demonstrate that the spin decoherence of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond can be suppressed by a transverse magnetic field if the electron spin bath is the primary decoherence source. The NV spin coherence, created in "a decoherence-free subspace" is protected by the transverse component of the zero-field splitting, increasing the spin-coherence time about twofold. The decoherence due to the electron spin bath is also suppressed at magnetic fields stronger than ~25 gauss when applied parallel to the NV symmetry axis. Our method can be used to extend the spin-coherence time of similar spin systems for applications in quantum computing, field sensing, and other metrologies.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

ICP-OES Analysis of Samanya and Vishesha Shodhita Loha

Rasashastra is a science which deals with metals and minerals and their therapeutic effects. These can cause hazardous effects if not purified. Purificatory procedures can be generally classified into two, namely – Samanya Shodhana and Vishesha Shodhana. In this study, reference from Rasatarangini was adopted for Samanya and Vishesha Shodhana of Loha. The Analysis of Raw sample of iron, Samanya Shoditha Loha and Vishesha shoditha Loha was done to analyse the difference physically and chemically by ICP-OES method. The discussions are made on the Shodhana procedures and results obtained with giving probable reasons. From Samanya and Vishesha Shodhana of Loha it is evident that the particle size was reducing drastically after each procedure making it more brittle and fine. There were many changes observed from the raw sample of Loha to the Vishesha shodhita Loha physically and analytically. Thus we can adopt Samanya Shodhana, Vishesha Shodhana or together depending on the requirement

SEM-EDAX Analysis of Jarita Vanga and Vanga Bhasma

Use of Vanga Bhasma can traced back from ancient era. Detailed description regarding the procedure is available in various Rasagranthas. Jarana is a special technique mentioned in recent Rasa treatises for Puti Lohas which is an intermediate stage between Shodhana and Marana. In this study, after performing both Samanya and Vishesha Shodhana, Vanga was subjected to Jarana using Ashwatha Twak as per the reference of Rasa Tarangini followed by Prakshalana to remove its alkaline nature. Later Vanga was subjected to Putapaka using Bhavana Dravya as Kumari Swarasa. Organoleptic and Elemental constitutions of both Jarita Vanga and Vanga Bhasma where analysed to see the differences and to observe the changes due to Samanya Shodhana and Vishesha Shodhana

PCA-RECT: An Energy-efficient Object Detection Approach for Event Cameras

We present the first purely event-based, energy-efficient approach for object detection and categorization using an event camera. Compared to traditional frame-based cameras, choosing event cameras results in high temporal resolution (order of microseconds), low power consumption (few hundred mW) and wide dynamic range (120 dB) as attractive properties. However, event-based object recognition systems are far behind their frame-based counterparts in terms of accuracy. To this end, this paper presents an event-based feature extraction method devised by accumulating local activity across the image frame and then applying principal component analysis (PCA) to the normalized neighborhood region. Subsequently, we propose a backtracking-free k-d tree mechanism for efficient feature matching by taking advantage of the low-dimensionality of the feature representation. Additionally, the proposed k-d tree mechanism allows for feature selection to obtain a lower-dimensional dictionary representation when hardware resources are limited to implement dimensionality reduction. Consequently, the proposed system can be realized on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device leading to high performance over resource ratio. The proposed system is tested on real-world event-based datasets for object categorization, showing superior classification performance and relevance to state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, we verified the object detection method and real-time FPGA performance in lab settings under non-controlled illumination conditions with limited training data and ground truth annotations.Comment: Accepted in ACCV 2018 Workshops, to appea

Determination of residual stresses by local annealing to laser speckle pattern interferometry

One of the most common methods of experimentally determining residual stresses is Blind Hole Drilling (BHD). A new method which is a thermo-optical analog to BHD is being developed. This method uses local heating to anneal a tiny spot and uses laser speckle interferometry to measure the strain that results. This strain is used to determine the state of stress prior to heating. The peak temperatures are on the order of 200 Celsius so that for most metals, there will be no changes in phase or other material properties except for a slight reduction in yield stress. Preliminary experiments with type 304 stainless steel were performed using resistance heating. The experimental results were in excellent agreement with finite element model predictions of the process. Subsequently, the resistance heating was replaced with laser heating. The heat input (22.5 Watt peak) from a small sealed radio frequency excited Carbon Dioxide laser was used. In order to both control the heating temperature and efficiently couple the infrared photons from the laser into the test specimen, a substance known as Liquid Temperature Indicating Paint was used. Without this substance the laser power would be so large as to make this approach impractical. Furthermore the measurement and control for the heat input would be very complicated. Using this laser heating approach was successful in obtaining similar results to those obtained in other work. Since this laser based technique is a thermo-optical analog to blind hole drilling a simple stress model is required to interpret the measured results. This simple stress model is presented. As in BHD, the simple model must be modified by empirical coefficients to be useful. These empirical coefficients are determined by experimentation and/or numerical analysi