How do we treat dental patients under influence of marijuana?

BACKGROUND Marijuana is the third most widely used illicit substance in the United States. In the past 20 years, its use has increased 30-fold; It is estimated that 22.2 million Americans of age 12 years and older report current marijuana use.1 Massachusetts reported that 45% of adults between the age of 18-25 years used marijuana along with 22% increase in marijuana consumption in 2017 after legalization.2 This review explores the latest trends in the use of marijuana and reviews oral health implications and guidelines for treating dental patients under the influence. Dental patient on marijuana use are high and impaired to provide informed consent, these patients are most often noncompliant, long term treatment prognosis are questionable. Such patients also often seek cosmetic dental treatment, such as veneers and whitening, due to these unaesthetic dental complications; this represents another opportunity for the dentist to discuss suspected substance misuse, provide appropriate referrals for treatment, and encourage cessation of use as part of the treatment process prior to initiating any cosmetic treatments that may otherwise fail

A survey of Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS): Past, present and future

Virtual Private LAN services (VPLS) is a Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) service that has gained immense popularity due to a number of its features, such as protocol independence, multipoint-to-multipoint mesh connectivity, robust security, low operational cost (in terms of optimal resource utilization), and high scalability. In addition to the traditional VPLS architectures, novel VPLS solutions have been designed leveraging new emerging paradigms, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), to keep up with the increasing demand. These emerging solutions help in enhancing scalability, strengthening security, and optimizing resource utilization. This paper aims to conduct an in-depth survey of various VPLS architectures and highlight different characteristics through insightful comparisons. Moreover, the article discusses numerous technical aspects such as security, scalability, compatibility, tunnel management, operational issues, and complexity, along with the lessons learned. Finally, the paper outlines future research directions related to VPLS. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to furnish a detailed survey of VPLS.University College DublinAcademy of Finlan

Global text mining and development of pharmacogenomic knowledge resource for precision medicine

Understanding patients' genomic variations and their effect in protecting or predisposing them to drug response phenotypes is important for providing personalized healthcare. Several studies have manually curated such genotype-phenotype relationships into organized databases from clinical trial data or published literature. However, there are no text mining tools available to extract high-accuracy information from such existing knowledge. In this work, we used a semiautomated text mining approach to retrieve a complete pharmacogenomic (PGx) resource integrating disease-drug-gene-polymorphism relationships to derive a global perspective for ease in therapeutic approaches. We used an R package, pubmed.mineR, to automatically retrieve PGx-related literature. We identified 1,753 disease types, and 666 drugs, associated with 4,132 genes and 33,942 polymorphisms collated from 180,088 publications. With further manual curation, we obtained a total of 2,304 PGx relationships. We evaluated our approach by performance (precision = 0.806) with benchmark datasets like Pharmacogenomic Knowledgebase (PharmGKB) (0.904), Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) (0.600), and The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) (0.729). We validated our study by comparing our results with 362 commercially used the US- Food and drug administration (FDA)-approved drug labeling biomarkers. Of the 2,304 PGx relationships identified, 127 belonged to the FDA list of 362 approved pharmacogenomic markers, indicating that our semiautomated text mining approach may reveal significant PGx information with markers for drug response prediction. In addition, it is a scalable and state-of-art approach in curation for PGx clinical utility

Multivariate verification for sybil attack detection in VANET

Wireless vehicular communication is used to enhance traffic safety and to minimize congestion, thereby leading to increased driving efficiency. A malicious node can transmit an inaccurate message to trigger inevitable situations by pretending to be multiple (other) vehicles. Therefore, it is critical to identify malicious nodes as well as fake messages generated by such nodes, and discard such messages quickly. In a Sybil attack, an attacker participates in the network with multiple forged identities in order to disrupt the fundamental operations of VANET. Sybil attacks are particularly easy to launch in VANETs due to the open and broadcast nature of communication medium. In this paper, we present the implementation of simulated Sybil attack scenario in VANET and its consequences on the performance of the network. We also propose a lightweight, scalable and distributed detection approach based on the difference in movement patterns of Sybil nodes and legitimate nodes. In our approach, each Road Side Unit (RSU) computes, stores and verifies various parameter values including RSS, distance, angle of passing-by vehicles through passive overhearing process to detect Sybil attackers. The combination of different parameters makes our detection approach highly accurate. We validate our results on realistic traces obtained from a multi-agent microscopic traffic simulator (MMTS). Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach to locate Sybil nodes with a different number of network parameters

Allosteric inhibitors of plasma membrane Ca2+ pumps: Invention and applications of caloxins

Plasma membrane Ca2+ pumps (PMCA) play a major role in Ca2+ homeostasis and signaling by extruding cellular Ca2+ with high affinity. PMCA isoforms are encoded by four genes which are expressed differentially in various cell types in normal and disease states. Therefore, PMCA isoform selective inhibitors would aid in delineating their role in physiology and pathophysiology. We are testing the hypothesis that extracellular domains of PMCA can be used as allosteric targets to obtain a novel class of PMCA-specific inhibitors termed caloxins. This review presents the concepts behind the invention of caloxins and our progress in this area. A section is also devoted to the applications of caloxins in literature. We anticipate that isoform-selective caloxins will aid in understanding PMCA physiology in health and disease. With strategies to develop therapeutics from bioactive peptides, caloxins may become clinically useful in cardiovascular diseases, neurological disorders, retinopathy, cancer and contraception

Vimprint: Exploring Alternative Learning through Low-end Mobiles

Abstract. The Internet today provides a plethora of applications to assist anyone wanting to learn a new subject, language or a concept. Resources available include dictionaries, translation engines, downloadable e-books, tutorials, online courses etc. The rapid proliferation of smart phones has further provided richer visual applications that assist the user in learning on the go. However, all these applications are dependent upon the availability of Internet and/or an expensive computing device such as a smartphone or a computer. This puts them out of reach for a large section of society that consists of underprivileged people (economically or literacy-wise) and who probably need such tools the most. Also, many learning applications are pull-based and depend on the user’s motivation to keep coming back for more. We present Vimprint- a system that offers an alternative mode of learning through telephony voice applications over any touchtone phone with a push-based interaction module. We present its design in the context of vocabulary building. Application of Vimprint system in the field is a work-in-progress and we present the results of a preliminary study conducted to assess its effectiveness

Computational insight into the halogen bonded self-assembly of hexa-coordinated metalloporphyrins

We demonstrate herein a computational study probing the influence of metalloporphyrin ring current directionality on intermolecular halogen bonding (XB) during supramolecular self-assembly. The results demonstrate that porphyrin ring current can activate or deactivate halogen bonding interactions, an essential superamolecular driving force.</p

Visual Conversational Interfaces to Empower Low-literacy Users

Abstract. Mobile phones have come a long way from being plain voice calling devices to becoming multipurpose handy tools powered by ever increasing new applications available on-the-go. For many, the mobile phone of today has become the essential device one does not leave home without. However, for a large percentage of human population mobile phone apps are not of much use as they are not literate or IT savvy enough to be able to benefit from them. Recent advances in voice-based telecom information systems enable underprivileged and low-literacy users to access and offer online services without requiring expensive devices or specialized technical knowledge. However, voice applications are limited in their capability due to their time consuming nature. In this paper, we demonstrate an interaction modality that combines the power of voice communication with graphical interfaces in smartphones to break the barrier of illiteracy

New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase - type carbapenemases producing Escherichia coli isolates from hospitalized patients: A pilot study

Background & objectives: Resistances to carbapenem group of antimicrobials among Escherichia coli due to production of carbapenemases, especially the New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase (NDM) types, pose serious challenges in the treatment of infections in healthcare settings. This study was undertaken to detect NDM producing E. coli isolates from hospitalized patients with urinary tract infection (UTI). Methods: A total of 30 non-repetitive isolates of E. coli from hospitalized patients with clinical suspicion of UTI were subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility testing. Screening for the production of extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBL) was carried out by minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test strip ESBL followed by phenotypic confirmation by double-disc synergy test. Phenotypic confirmation of carbapenemase production was carried out by MIC test strip metallo-β-lactamases. Molecular identification of the blaNDM gene was carried out by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequencing of the amplified fragment. Results: Seventeen of the 30 isolates were detected as ESBL producers, of which three were found to be carbapenemase producers. NDM genes were detected by PCR followed by gene sequencing in all three isolates positive for ESBL as well as carbapenemase. The amino acid sequence of the three isolates showed complete identity to the reference sequences of NDM-1, NDM-4 and NDM-8, respectively. Interpretation & conclusions: Our study showed the circulation of NDM variants among the clinical isolates of E. coli that were producers of ESBL as well as carbapenemase