Evaluate the effectiveness of tonsillectomy and long-acting penicillin on the levels of the antistreptolysin O titer in children with recurrent tonsillitis

Background: Tonsillitis is widespread among children and has serious poststreptococcal complications, and both the patients and clinician have to face the question on what is the role and benefit of using long-acting penicillin and whether it is an alternative method of treatment to surgery?. This study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of tonsillectomy compared with long-acting penicillin in the treatment of recurrent tonsillitis, comparing their effects on the levels of the antistreptolysin O titer (ASOT).Methods: A total of 100 patients aged 4-15 years with recurrent tonsillitis and signs of chronic tonsillitis, after exclusion of patients with bleeding diathesis, anemia, chronic illness, and criteria of rheumatic fever, were included in this study, they were divided to two groups comprising 50 patients each. The first group was treated by tonsillectomy, whereas the second group was treated using long-acting penicillin monthly for 6 months. They were clinically evaluated, ASOT levels were recorded for all patients before management and after 6 months.Results: The mean ASOT readings before management and after 6 months for the tonsillectomy group were 518.29 and 117.13 IU/ml, respectively (P value <0.004), whereas for the penicillin group, they were 526.70 and 262.98 IU/ml, respectively (P value <0.072).Conclusions: This study demonstrates that the first line of treatment of recurrent chronic tonsillitis is tonsillectomy, as it is both clinically effective and cost-effective for children and that the second line of treatment is long-acting penicillin with a long-term follow-up and in patients have contraindications for surgery such as bleeding diathesis

Multimapper: Data Density Sensitive Topological Visualization

Mapper is an algorithm that summarizes the topological information contained in a dataset and provides an insightful visualization. It takes as input a point cloud which is possibly high-dimensional, a filter function on it and an open cover on the range of the function. It returns the nerve simplicial complex of the pullback of the cover. Mapper can be considered a discrete approximation of the topological construct called Reeb space, as analysed in the $1$-dimensional case by [Carriere et al.,2018]. Despite its success in obtaining insights in various fields such as in [Kamruzzaman et al., 2016], Mapper is an ad hoc technique requiring lots of parameter tuning. There is also no measure to quantify goodness of the resulting visualization, which often deviates from the Reeb space in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new cover selection scheme for data that reduces the obscuration of topological information at both the computation and visualisation steps. To achieve this, we replace global scale selection of cover with a scale selection scheme sensitive to local density of data points. We also propose a method to detect some deviations in Mapper from Reeb space via computation of persistence features on the Mapper graph.Comment: Accepted at ICDM

Recurrent decidual cast with membranous dysmenorrhea

Decidual cast is the entire sloughed endometrium that takes the form of the endometrial cavity. It causes membranous dysmenorrhea because the intact cast passes through an undiluted cervix. It may be associated with ectopic pregnancy, incomplete abortion, non-pregnant state with use of progesterone, Depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), rarely with oral contraceptive pills. Authors are reporting a case of recurrent decidual caste formation with membranous dysmenorrhoea in 33 years old women P3L3 who was on norethisterone acetate treatment for a typical uterine bleed (AUB). She presented with heavy menstrual bleeding with severe dysmenorrhea in Gynae causality of ESI Basaidarapur medical college, Delhi. She expelled decidual caste and required therapeutic Dilation and Curettage (D and C) to control bleeding per vaginum. Her histopathology report showed marked decidua like change of the stroma but no villi suggestive of endometrial caste

Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion

While generative models produce high-quality images of concepts learned from a large-scale database, a user often wishes to synthesize instantiations of their own concepts (for example, their family, pets, or items). Can we teach a model to quickly acquire a new concept, given a few examples? Furthermore, can we compose multiple new concepts together? We propose Custom Diffusion, an efficient method for augmenting existing text-to-image models. We find that only optimizing a few parameters in the text-to-image conditioning mechanism is sufficiently powerful to represent new concepts while enabling fast tuning (~6 minutes). Additionally, we can jointly train for multiple concepts or combine multiple fine-tuned models into one via closed-form constrained optimization. Our fine-tuned model generates variations of multiple new concepts and seamlessly composes them with existing concepts in novel settings. Our method outperforms or performs on par with several baselines and concurrent works in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations while being memory and computationally efficient.Comment: Updated v2 with results on the new CustomConcept101 dataset https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~custom-diffusion/dataset.html Project webpage: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~custom-diffusio

Translational vibration evaluation of tractor seats for ride comfort

An investigation was carried out on tractor seat design for better operator comfort during operation. The project objectives were mainly aimed to increase the ride comfort by improving the seat suspension which is used in Indian tractors. Tests were conducted for haulage operation and also for field operation. During haulage operation tests were carried out onexisting seats used in Indian tractors with three new selected suspension systems of the two most selling models of MF 241 and MF 1035. The model MF 241 equipped with a existing seat is mostly used in India, while the model MF 1035 consists of exported benchmark seat (for comparison) which is a seat whose suspension appeared to majority of operators is used for more comfortable and rest three selected seat suspensions were replaced to same existing seat used in India. Tests were conducted with three different operators representing 5th, 50th and 95th percentile (SM1, SM2 and SM3) of the population of India. Best suspension system was selected, based on weighted RMS acceleration awx, awy, awz for each axis and the acceleration vector sum av performance. The values of weighted RMS acceleration awx, awy, awz, and acceleration vector sum av of different suspension systems were compared with exported benchmark seat as well as existing seat mostly used in India. The changes in the vibration peak along with speed were compared graphically. It was observed that the SP2 suspension gives better result amongthree selected suspensions. The results were comparable with exported benchmark seat in higher speed range which was available in developed countries.Keywords: seat suspension, weighted R.M.S acceleration, spring constan

Association of volume of first trimester subchorionic hemorrhage with pregnancy outcome

Background: Vaginal bleeding during the first trimester of pregnancy may or may not be associated with subchorionic hemorrhage (SCH). The volume of SCH may affect foetal growth or development. The aim of the study was to determine the impact of first trimester pregnancy SCH on pregnancy outcome. Methods: 151 women each in two groups (with and without SCH), all with first trimester bleeding were enrolled, monitored throughout pregnancy and outcome noted. Results: 72.8% women with SCH and 78.1% women without SCH gave birth to a live neonate. The relative risk of pregnancy wastage (spontaneous abortion, antepartum or intrapartum stillbirth) for the women with SCH was 1.22 (95% CI 0.81-1.82; p value =0.33) as compared to those with no SCH. 97% of women with SCH>10 ml had pregnancy wastage (mostly aborted before 20 weeks), 40% of women with SCH>5-10 ml had pregnancy wastage (p<0.001). Conclusions: The mere presence of SCH did not increase the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, a large volume of SCH significantly increased the risk of pregnancy wastage in comparison to a smaller SCH.