Application of caries assessment spectrum and treatment instrument for staging and evaluating treatment needs of an adult population - A hospital based cross-sectional study

Background: Application of caries assessment spectrum and treatment (CAST) instrument for staging and evaluating treatment needs of an adult population suffering from dental carious lesionObjectives: Study was conducted with aim of applying CAST instrument for staging adult urban Indian population according to severity of carious lesion and treatment needs required.Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 300 adult patients. After training session and calibration of examiner, all patients were examined for the caries experience and CAST codes were recorded on a structured proforma.Results: Of 300 adult patients, 18% (54) adults have healthy dentition denoted by codes 0,1, and 2. 12 % and 15.3% adults were in reversible premorbidity stage (code 3) and morbidity stage (codes 4 and 5) respectively. The largest number of adults 29.7% were seen in serious morbidity stage (codes 6 and 7) followed by 21.3% adults in mortality stage (code 8) requiring either root canal treatment or extraction and replacement of teeth as treatment needs.Conclusion: CAST instrument has been found useful in staging adult population suffering with dental carious lesion and evaluating their treatment needs. Moreover, CAST is easy to apply for staging the carious lesion due its hierarchical structure and reporting results in an understandable manner.Keywords: Adults; Caries Assessment Spectrum and Treatment; Dental Caries; Treatment needs

Ruptured thoracic intraspinal dermoid cyst in a patient with skeletal abnormalities of thoracic spine – A case report

AbstractSpinal dermoids are congenital multi- or unilocular benign cystic tumors lined by squamous epithelium containing skin appendages. The tumours become acutely symptomatic following infection or rupture. We present a very rare case of ruptured thoracic spinal dermoid cyst in a 12year old girl with congenital vertebral abnormalities, who presented with back ache of recent onset and a 5year history of unnoticed slipping of footwear while walking. Magnetic resonance imaging reveals a lesion in the thoracic spine with fat droplets in bilateral frontal horns of lateral ventricle and cisterns of brain. Other additional findings were also noted

RobustL2S: Speaker-Specific Lip-to-Speech Synthesis exploiting Self-Supervised Representations

Significant progress has been made in speaker dependent Lip-to-Speech synthesis, which aims to generate speech from silent videos of talking faces. Current state-of-the-art approaches primarily employ non-autoregressive sequence-to-sequence architectures to directly predict mel-spectrograms or audio waveforms from lip representations. We hypothesize that the direct mel-prediction hampers training/model efficiency due to the entanglement of speech content with ambient information and speaker characteristics. To this end, we propose RobustL2S, a modularized framework for Lip-to-Speech synthesis. First, a non-autoregressive sequence-to-sequence model maps self-supervised visual features to a representation of disentangled speech content. A vocoder then converts the speech features into raw waveforms. Extensive evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our setup, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the unconstrained Lip2Wav dataset and the constrained GRID and TCD-TIMIT datasets. Speech samples from RobustL2S can be found at https://neha-sherin.github.io/RobustL2S

Traumatic avulsion of female urethra: a case report

Traumatic female urethral avulsion in the absence of a pelvic fracture is an exceedingly rare entity. We report a case of 26 years old lady with crescentic tear of anterior urethra from pubic symphysis. Management consisted of primary urethral repair

A retrospective study on ectopic pregnancy aspiration by transvaginal ultrasound at Institute of Kidney Diseases And Research Centre

Background: Majority of the reports suggest that the frequency of ectopic pregnancies have grown in the last 30 years, especially in patients conceived through artificial reproductive techniques (ART). To prevent severe morbidity and mortality its prompt diagnosis and appropriate management is important. In a select patient population, most of the unruptured, live ectopic pregnancies can be successfully managed without surgical intervention using trans-vaginal ultrasound guided aspiration and instillation of local injection KCl or administration of systemic Inj. Methotrexate. Methods: This study is a hospital based retrospective cohort study from January 2014 to December 2022 on patients who presented to Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre (IKDRC) with unruptured ectopic pregnancy confirmed with ultrasound and β HCG. All the patients were analyzed according to history, clinical presentation, investigations, treatment and complications. Results: β-HCG day 1 or 2 post procedure dropped in all cases but in variable levels ranging from 1.3% to 85.88%, while the drop during days 7-10, was more significant and reassuring; ranged from 48.69% to 98.95%. Conclusions: By aspiration of ectopic gestational sac transvaginally under ultrasonographic guidance it is able to preserve the integrity of uterus and fallopian tube and thus the future fertility. The study will educate other healthcare professionals.

An overview of advances in biomass gasification

Biomass gasification is a widely used thermochemical process for obtaining products with more value and potential applications than the raw material itself. Cutting-edge, innovative and economical gasification techniques with high efficiencies are a prerequisite for the development of this technology. This paper delivers an assessment on the fundamentals such as feedstock types, the impact of different operating parameters, tar formation and cracking, and modelling approaches for biomass gasification. Furthermore, the authors comparatively discuss various conventional mechanisms for gasification as well as recent advances in biomass gasification. Unique gasifiers along with multi-generation strategies are discussed as a means to promote this technology into alternative applications, which require higher flexibility and greater efficiency. A strategy to improve the feasibility and sustainability of biomass gasification is via technological advancement and the minimization of socio-environmental effects. This paper sheds light on diverse areas of biomass gasification as a potentially sustainable and environmentally friendly technology

Luteoma in pregnancy: a rare cause of threatened preterm labour!

Pregnancy luteoma is a rare non-neoplastic tumor-like mass of the ovary. They are usually asymptomatic and found incidentally during ultrasound imaging or surgery. Rarely do they present with pain abdomen mimicking threatened preterm labor. They regress spontaneously after delivery. We presented a case of a 29-year-old G4A3 with twin pregnancies and chronic hypertension who presented with acute flank pain, constipation, and occasional hardening of the uterus. A provisional diagnosis threatened preterm labor with suspected ureteric colic and cystitis was made. The patient was initially managed on the same line but on a detailed in-patient evaluation her ultrasound revealed bilateral multicystic ovaries with few hypoechoic areas inside it mostly suggestive of ‘luteoma of pregnancy’. The patient had acne, hirsutism, and chronic hypertension well controlled on antihypertensives. The patient delivered twins successfully by cesarean section and luteoma and symptoms were resolved postpartum after 4 months. Recognition of this entity is important so that malignancy can be ruled out and unnecessary surgery, with concomitant risk to both the mother and the fetus, is avoided

Caesarean section under spinal and epidural anesthesia in complete atrioventricular block without a pacemaker: a rare case report

Complete heart block (CHB) during pregnancy is rarely encountered. Management requires a multidisciplinary approach involving the obstetrician, cardiologist, anesthetist, and neonatologist. Treatment varies from medical management to temporary or permanent pacemaker insertion. Complete atrioventricular block comprises complete absence of AV conduction - none of the supraventricular impulses are conducted to the ventricles. Perfusing rhythm is maintained by a junctional or ventricular escape rhythm. Typically, the patient will have severe bradycardia with independent atrial and ventricular rates. The incidence is 1 in 15,000 to 20,000 live births. We successfully managed caesarean section in a pregnancy with complete atrioventricular block under spinal and epidural anesthesia without a pacemaker. Asymptomatic pregnant women with congenital complete atrioventricular block can tolerate caesarean section under spinal and epidural anesthesia without a pacemaker

A successful outcome of pregnancy with Berger disease

With the increasing prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the general population, female patients of fertile age with impaired kidney function are becoming more common. The presence of CKD in pregnant patients has been associated with poorer pregnancy outcomes. IgA nephropathy is the most common glomerulonephritis worldwide. The outcome of pregnancy in patients with CKD is related to impaired glomerular filtration rate and the degree of proteinuria. In non-aggressive IgA nephropathy, there is traditionally a slow progression to chronic kidney failure in 25–30% of cases during a period of 20 years. Women with immunoglobulin g A nephropathy (IgAN) are at higher risk of hypertension, preeclampsia, and fetal loss; the prognosis is worse for those who have advanced chronic kidney disease and proteinuria. Here we present two case reports who successfully delivered having aggressive IgA nephropathy and chronic hypertension in pregnancy.

ParrotTTS: Text-to-Speech synthesis by exploiting self-supervised representations

We present ParrotTTS, a modularized text-to-speech synthesis model leveraging disentangled self-supervised speech representations. It can train a multi-speaker variant effectively using transcripts from a single speaker. ParrotTTS adapts to a new language in low resource setup and generalizes to languages not seen while training the self-supervised backbone. Moreover, without training on bilingual or parallel examples, ParrotTTS can transfer voices across languages while preserving the speaker specific characteristics, e.g., synthesizing fluent Hindi speech using a French speaker's voice and accent. We present extensive results in monolingual and multi-lingual scenarios. ParrotTTS outperforms state-of-the-art multi-lingual TTS models using only a fraction of paired data as latter