ASSESSMENT OF CLINICAL PROFILE AND TREATMENT CHART REVIEW FOR ALCOHOLIC LIVER DISEASE (ALD) PATIENTS: A PROSPECTIVE AND OBSERVATIONAL STUDY

Background/Aim: Alcohol remains one of most common cause of liver disease in India, hence the present study was undertaken to assess the clinical profile and treatment chart review of alcoholic liver disease (ALD) patients. Materials and Methods: Hospital based prospective and observational study was carried out for a period of nine months in a tertiary care hospital of south India.  All the patients of either gender diagnosed with ALD were enrolled in the study and patient consent was taken, the data related to the patients of ALD were documented in a structured patient data collection form and analyzed carefully. Results: ALD was mainly affected in male with age group of 41-50 years.Out of 130 patients 43.8% patients were suffered from Fatty Liver disease while 23.1% were suffered from Alcoholic Hepatitis and 33.1% were suffered from Cirrhosis of Liver. The secondary developments to ALD were portal hypertension (13.8%) followed by Ascities (10.8%) and Hepatitis (10%). The major risk factors involved in ALD was alcohol per se (52.3%) and, alcohol and smoking exaggerate the disease condition. The Periodic (61.5%) and regular basis (38.5%) of alcoholism for chronic period of time may land up with ALD. Polypharmacy is essential for the treatment of ALD as it inoved multiple secondary development to ALD. The patients were intervened and counselled on their individual basis for ALD consequences, and motivated for cessation of alcohol and smoking. Conclusion: The study enlightens that the early diagnosis and its beneficial outcomes that can exponentially curtail the mortality rate of ALD. Similarly the optimal drug therapy regimen and patient counseling may improve the patient’s quality of life. Keywords: Alcoholic Liver Disease; Optimal Drug Therapy; Patient Counselling; Improved Quality of Lif

Water Contaminants Detection Using Sensor Placement Approach in Smart Water Networks

Incidents of water pollution or contamination have occurred repeatedly in recent years, causing significant disasters and negative health impacts. Water quality sensors need to be installed in the water distribution system (WDS) to allow real-time water contamination detection to reduce the risk of water contamination. Deploying sensors in WDS is essential to monitor and detect any pollution incident at the appropriate time. However, it is impossible to place sensors on all nodes of the network due to the relatively large structure of WDS and the high cost of water quality sensors. For that, it is necessary to reduce the cost of deployment and guarantee the reliability of the sensing, such as detection time and coverage of the whole water network. In this paper, a dynamic approach of sensor placement that uses an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) is proposed and implemented. The proposed method generates a multiple set of water contamination scenarios in several locations selected randomly in the WDS. Each contamination scenario spreads in the water networks for several hours, and then the proposed approach simulates the various effect of each contamination scenario on the water networks. On the other hand, the multiple objectives of the sensor placement optimization problem, which aim to find the optimal locations of the deployed sensors, have been formulated. The sensor placement optimization solver, which uses the EA, is operated to find the optimal sensor placements. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated using two different case studies on the example of water networks: Battle of the Water Sensor Network (BWSN) and another real case study from Madrid (Spain). The results have shown the capability of the proposed method to adapt the location of the sensors based on the numbers and the locations of contaminant sources. Moreover, the results also have demonstrated the ability of the proposed approach for maximising the coverage of deployed sensors and reducing the time to detect all the water contaminants using a few numbers of water quality sensor

Understanding Nutritional Disorders - A Comprehensive Analysis of Ayurvedic Concepts

Nutrition is a vital component of health at individual and community levels. Food system has changed dramatically after green revolution, but malnutrition still persists as a challenge. Coexistence of nutritional deficiency along with overweight and obesity is the double burden faced by most of the countries. Ayurveda explains nutrition, giving utmost importance to the state of individual, in a much customised manner. Conventionally the meaning of ‘Santarpana’ is understood as superfluity and ‘Apatarpana’ as deficiency. There are some inadequacies in this understanding. While examining the descriptions in Ayurvedic classics and comparing them with contemporary knowledge it is seen that Santarpana can lead to some deficiencies also. This understanding is very much important in present scenario. Nutritional disorder is not a single entity as far as Ayurveda is considered. It is spreading throughout a wide range of diseases, since Ahara is an essential component in the development of many diseases. Various kinds of nutritional deficiencies occur due to the impairment in Ahara parinamakara bhava, Ashtahara vidhi viseshayatana and Ahara vidhi vidhana. The primary and secondary causes of nutritional deficiency in modern science are mainly related to food and body respectively. But, for bringing out a better classification, this should be revised by including tertiary causes consisting of psychological factors and feeding habits

Improved H.264 /AVC video broadcast /multicast

This paper investigates the transmission of H.264 /AVC video in the 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast /Multicast Streaming service (MBMS). Application-layer forward error correction (FEC) codes are used to combat transmission errors in the radio access network. In this FEC protection scheme, the media RTP stream is organized into source blocks spanning many RTP packets, over which FEC repair packets are generated. This paper proposes a novel method for unequal error protection that is applicable in MBMS. The method reduces the expected tune-in delay when a new user joins into a broadcast. It is based on four steps. First, temporally scalable H.264 /AVC streams are coded including reference and non-reference pictures or sub-sequences. Second, the constituent pictures of a group of pictures (GOP) are grouped according to their temporal scalability layer. Third, the interleaved packetization mode of RFC3984 is used to transmit the groups in ascending order of relevance for decoding. As an example, the non-reference pictures of a GOP are sent earlier than the reference pictures of the GOP. Fourth, each group is considered a source block for FEC coding and the strength of the FEC is selected according to its importance. Simulations show that the proposed method improves the quality of the received video stream and decreases the expected tune-in delay. Keywords: Video streaming, H.264 /AVC, MBMS, 3GPP, FEC 1

Self-assembling peptide nanofibers containing phenylalanine for the controlled release of 5-fluorouracil

Narayanan Ashwanikumar,1 Nisha Asok Kumar,2 Padma S Saneesh Babu,2 Krishnankutty C Sivakumar,3 Mithun Varghese Vadakkan,1 Parvathi Nair,1 Ilamathi Hema Saranya,1 Sivakumari Asha Nair,2 Gopalakrishnapillai S Vinod Kumar1 1Chemical Biology, Nano Drug Delivery Systems, Bio-Innovation Center, 2Cancer Research Programme, 3Distributed Information Sub-Centre (Bioinformatics Centre), Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Poojappura, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India Abstract: The study shows that RADA-F6 peptide with pH-responsive self-assembling nature can be effectively used as a drug delivery system for the sustained release of a potent anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) at basic pH. As 5-FU contains the aromatic pyrimidine ring, RADA-F6 system is suitable for entrapping an aromatic drug due to effective π–π stacking with phenylalanine and be able to show better controlled release behavior. The stability and controlled release nature of RADA-F6 in different conditions followed by 5-FU entrapment at in silico conditions was confirmed by molecular dynamics simulation taking RADA-16 as control. Cytotoxicity of the drug-loaded RADA-F6 was measured by MTT assay and cellular uptake by confocal microscopy. Physicochemical characterization and further Western blot analysis and flow cytometric studies confirm that RADA-F6 can be successfully used as an efficient vector for pH-sensitive, controlled 5-FU delivery system. Keywords: scaffold, drug delivery, nanofibrous, aromati