USG guided indices as a tool for prediction of difficult airway in obese: an observational study

Background: Now a days, Ultrasound has been the gold standard and an invaluable tool in the field of regional anaesthesia, especially for upper limb and truncal blocks where general anesthesia is associated with high risk and also in patients posted for general anesthesia with anticipated difficult airway. Recently, few studies have published the importance of Ultrasound in the evaluation of airway and related procedures. Aim of this study is to evaluate the use of USG guided indices for prediction of difficult airway in obese patients and correlating them with clinical parameters. Methods: This study was a prospective observational study done in a tertiary health care center, Government General hospital, Kakinada over a duration of two months from August 2022 to September 2022. Eight Ultrasound parameters like tongue thickness, skin to hyoid distance, pre-epiglottic space, skin to midpoint of vocal cords, skin to thyroid isthmus, anterior soft tissue thickness at suprasternal notch, hyomental distance and thyromental distance were correlated with clinical evaluation (Cormacke-lehane grading) in this study and conclusions were drawn. Results: Out of 30 cases studied, 20 (70%) were predicted to be difficult with Ultrasound airway examination and 16 (53.3%) were found to have difficulty in intubation clinically. Conclusions: The following USG indices like pre-epiglottic space, Skin to midpoint of vocal cords, Anterior soft tissue thickness at Suprasternal notch, Hyomental distance in mid-extended position and thyromental distance were found to be clinically correlated to predict difficult airway and intubation in obese patients

GenSelfDiff-HIS: Generative Self-Supervision Using Diffusion for Histopathological Image Segmentation

Histopathological image segmentation is a laborious and time-intensive task, often requiring analysis from experienced pathologists for accurate examinations. To reduce this burden, supervised machine-learning approaches have been adopted using large-scale annotated datasets for histopathological image analysis. However, in several scenarios, the availability of large-scale annotated data is a bottleneck while training such models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is an alternative paradigm that provides some respite by constructing models utilizing only the unannotated data which is often abundant. The basic idea of SSL is to train a network to perform one or many pseudo or pretext tasks on unannotated data and use it subsequently as the basis for a variety of downstream tasks. It is seen that the success of SSL depends critically on the considered pretext task. While there have been many efforts in designing pretext tasks for classification problems, there haven't been many attempts on SSL for histopathological segmentation. Motivated by this, we propose an SSL approach for segmenting histopathological images via generative diffusion models in this paper. Our method is based on the observation that diffusion models effectively solve an image-to-image translation task akin to a segmentation task. Hence, we propose generative diffusion as the pretext task for histopathological image segmentation. We also propose a multi-loss function-based fine-tuning for the downstream task. We validate our method using several metrics on two publically available datasets along with a newly proposed head and neck (HN) cancer dataset containing hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) stained images along with annotations. Codes will be made public at https://github.com/PurmaVishnuVardhanReddy/GenSelfDiff-HIS.git

Genetics of fertility restoration in Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.)

ABSTRACT For employing diverse CMS lines belonging to different cytosterile sources in breeding programmes, knowledge on genetics of fertility restoration is pre requisite. With this objective an investigation was carried out to study the genetics on fertility restoration Fourteen crosses were made for studying the genetics of fertility restoration, five possessing PET1, three possessing PET 2, four with GIG1 and two with ARG cytoplasmic sources. Among these fourteen fertile crosses studied, F 2 segregation of 11 crosses revealed 3 : 1 ratio for fertile and sterile plants, respectively indicating the presence of a single dominant gene for fertility restoration. In the remaining three crosses, F 2 generation segregated in the ratio of 9 fertile and:7 sterile, suggesting the presence of two complementary genes for the fertility restoration

Seed Systems for Rainfed Agriculture: Village Based Seed Enterprise for Seed Production and Dissemination of Improved Varieties of Chickpea and Pigeonpea in India; Information Bulletin No. 96

The crops grown under rainfed agriculture are described as farming practices that rely on rainfall for crop production and their seed systems describe, how farmers in these regions are sourcing seeds for cultivating these crops. The objective of this publication is to share information and experiences of some success stories of seed value chain models developed for production and supply of improved varieties of seed of rainfed crops to resource poor farmers in the semi-arid tropical regions to enhance productivity. Majority of legume crop varieties grown under rainfed agriculture system are open pollinated varieties or self-pollinated crops especially, cereals and legumes grown in semi-arid tropics of the globe. The importance of rainfed agriculture varies regionally but produces high percentage of food for poor communities in the developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa more than 95% of the farmed land is rainfed, while the corresponding figure for Latin America is almost 90%, for South Asia it is about 60%, 65% for East Asia and 75% for the Near East and North Africa..

Antiretroviral Therapy Outcomes in HIV-Infected Children after Adjusting Protease Inhibitor Dosing during Tuberculosis Treatment

Modification of ritonavir-boosted lopinavir (LPV/r)-based antiretroviral therapy is required for HIV-infected children co-treated for tuberculosis (TB). We aimed to determine virologic and toxicity outcomes among TB/HIV co-treated children with the following modifications to their antiretroviral therapy (ART): (1) super-boosted LPV/r, (2) double-dose LPV/r or (3) ritonavir.A medical record review was conducted at two clinical sites in Johannesburg, South Africa. The records of children 6-24 months of age initiating LPV/r-based therapy were reviewed. Children co-treated for TB were categorized based on the modifications made to their ART regimen and were compared to children of the same age at each site not treated for TB. Included are 526 children, 294 (56%) co-treated for TB. All co-treated children had more severe HIV disease, including lower CD4 percents and worse growth indicators, than comparisons. Children in the super-boosted group (n = 156) were as likely to be virally suppressed (<400 copies/ml) at 6 months as comparisons (69.2% vs. 74.8%, p = 0.36). Children in the double-dose (n = 47) and ritonavir groups (n = 91) were significantly less likely to be virally suppressed at 6 months (53.1% and 49.3%) than comparisons (74.8% and 82.1%; p = 0.02 and p<0.0001, respectively). At 12 months only children in the ritonavir group still had lower rates of virological suppression relative to comparisons (63.9% vs 83.3% p<0.05). Grade 1 or greater ALT elevations were more common in the super-boosted (75%) than double-dose (54.6%) or ritonavir (33.9%) groups (p = 0.09 and p<0.0001) but grade 3/4 elevations were observed in 3 (13.6%) of the super-boosted, 7 (15.9%) of the double-dose and 5 (8.9%) of the ritonavir group (p = 0.81 and p = 0.29).Good short-term virologic outcomes were achieved in children co-treated for TB and HIV who received super-boosted LPV/r. Treatment limiting toxicity was rare. Strategies for increased dosing of LPV/r with TB treatment warrant further investigation

Genomic regions associated with resistance to peanut bud necrosis disease (PBND) in a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population

Parents and 318 F8 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from the cross, TAG 24 × ICGV 86031 were evaluated for peanut bud necrosis disease (PBND) resistance and agronomic traits under natural infestation of thrips at a disease hotspot location for 2 years. Significant genotype, environment and genotype × environment interaction effects suggested role of environment in development and spread of the disease. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis using QTL Cartographer identified a total of 14 QTL for six traits of which five QTL were for disease incidence. One quantitative trait locus q60DI located on LG_AhII was identified using both QTL Cartographer and QTL Network. Another QTL q90DI was detected with a high PVE of 12.57 using QTL Cartographer. A total of nine significant additive × additive (AA) interactions were detected for PBND disease incidence and yield traits with two and seven interactions displaying effects in favour of the parental and recombinant genotype combinations, respectively. This is the first attempt on QTL discovery associated with PBND resistance in peanut. Superior RILs identified in the study can be recycled or released as variety following further evaluations

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Not AvailableQualitative and quantitative parameters of oilseed crops significantly increased with honey bee pollination. Integration of beekeeping as part of Best Management Practices (BMP) should be adopted to enhance productivity in oilseed crops.Not Availabl