Supporting Persons with Disabilities in Somalia

The purpose of this report is to identify how persons with disabilities can be included in humanitarian and development programmes in Somalia. There is little data on persons with disabilities in Somalia, therefore this report gains insights from organisations that are actively working in Somalia supporting persons with disabilities. Many organisations in Somalia do not have data or information available on persons with disabilities. This report details the recommendations of organisations that have data and information readily available. The report provides a list of organisations identified as working on disability issues in Somalia and Somaliland and an overview of these active organisations to illustrate their activities. It also reports recommendations they have made on how donor operations can explicitly include persons with disabilities

The molecular genetic basis of the association of TNFSF4 with SLE

The tumour necrosis factor ligand superfamily member 4 gene (TNFSF4), also known as OX40L, is an established susceptibility locus in the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Genetic association studies map polymorphisms that associate with disease, but linkage disequilibrium often hinders the identification of the actual casual allele(s) at a disease susceptibility locus. At TNFSF4 genetic association studies had shown that an extended 100kb haplotype upstream of the coding region of the gene was associated with SLE risk. The principle aim of the project was to conduct genetic association analyses in cohorts with different ancestry in an attempt to fine map the TNFSF4 association signal and thereby identify the causal genetic variants that underlie the genetic risk. Utilizing >17,900 subjects of European, African-American, Hispanic-American and Southeast Asian ancestry a transancestral fine mapping analysis was performed. The results demonstrate the strong association of TNFSF4 risk alleles in all populations tested. The most consistent and strongest evidence of association came from the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs2205960-T (P = 7.1 x 10-32, odds ratio = 1.63). This variant was also associated with autoantibody production in three independent cohorts. In silico analysis of the DNA sequence encompassing rs2205960-T predicts it to form part of a decameric motif, which binds the RelA (p65) component of the NF-κB transcription factor complex. A second associated SNP, rs16845607-A in TNFSF4 intron 1 was identified in Hispanic-Americans (P = 9.17 x 10-9, odds ratio = 2.06). In an attempt to further refine the association, resequencing was performed in 80 individuals who were selected on the basis of their genotype to carry risk or non-risk haplotypes upstream of TNFSF4. This sequencing study identified >200 novel variants, mostly small insertion-deletion polymorphisms indels. The data presented in this thesis largely resolves the genetic basis of the immediate upstream association signal observed at TNFSF4 with SLE and will facilitate the unraveling of the molecular basis of this genetic risk in systemic autoimmunity.Open Acces

Stepwise uterine devascularisation and/or internal iliac artery ligation: an alternative to obstetric hysterectomy in the management of intractable postpartum haemorrhage

Background: Objectives of the study was to estimate the effectiveness and safety of stepwise uterine devascularisation and/or internal iliac artery ligation as alternative to obstetric hysterectomy in the management of uncontrollable postpartum haemorrhage.Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study at a university affiliated tertiary obstetric referral hospital in the year 2020-2021 at the department of obstetrics and gynaecology, government medical college, Amritsar. Stepwise uterine devascularisation and/or hypogastric artery ligation were performed in 35 of the 335 patients (10.45%) who had intractable postpartum haemorrhage after caesarean deliveries not responding to classic management. This technique entails ‘three’ successive procedures of bilateral vascular ligations performed in step-by-step fashion until bleeding stops. The steps were as follows: (1) Bilateral uterine artery ligation. (2) If bleeding did not stop, bilateral ovarian artery ligation was performed. (3) Additionally, bilateral ligation of the anterior division of internal iliac artery was done in a few cases in which bleeding failed to stop. After each procedure, assessment of bleeding was done before proceeding to the next step.Results: Of the 35 women who were primarily treated with stepwise uterine devascularisation, the success rate to preserve the uterus was 100%. None of the patients required hysterectomy. The postpartum period was uneventful. There were no complications and the survival rate was 100%. Among the patients followed up, normal menstruation and pregnancy occurred.Conclusions: Stepwise uterine devascularisation is an effective and safe alternative to hysterectomy for management of intractable postpartum haemorrhage

Trends of various techniques of tubectomy among eligible couples: a five year study in a tertiary hospital

Background: Female sterilization is one of the most popular methods of permanent contraception for women who have completed their families. Tubectomy during caesarean section and tubal sterilization either laparoscopically or by minilaparotomy are the favoured methods in the developing countries. The aim of the current study was to assess the incidence, details of the procedure and complications of various techniques of tubectomy among women at our tertiary institute. Methods: A retrospective analytical study was conducted in the postpartum unit of the department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Government Medical College, Amritsar from January 2018 to December 2022. 3680 married women between 20-45 years were included in the study. The cases were grouped as caesarean tubectomy, postabortal tubal sterilization, laparoscopic sterilization and minilaparotomy. Results: A total of 3680 cases of female sterilization were performed during the study period. Caesarean tubectomy was performed in 2921 women. 159 cases underwent postabortal sterilization while interval tubectomy by laparoscopic technique was performed in 583 cases. Only 17 cases had undergone tubectomy by minilaparotomy. Caesarean tubectomy and postabortal tubal sterilization were highly popular for puerperal sterilization. Conclusions: Female sterilization technique in the puerperal or interval period need to be individualized based upon the timing, place and the surgical skills of the operating surgeon. An increasing trend of puerperal sterilization either by Caesarean tubectomies or postabortal laparoscopic sterilization was seen in our institute. Laparoscopic tubal ligation was preferred over minilaparotomy in the interval period

DeepCuts: Single-Shot Interpretability based Pruning for BERT

As language models have grown in parameters and layers, it has become much harder to train and infer with them on single GPUs. This is severely restricting the availability of large language models such as GPT-3, BERT-Large, and many others. A common technique to solve this problem is pruning the network architecture by removing transformer heads, fully-connected weights, and other modules. The main challenge is to discern the important parameters from the less important ones. Our goal is to find strong metrics for identifying such parameters. We thus propose two strategies: Cam-Cut based on the GradCAM interpretations, and Smooth-Cut based on the SmoothGrad, for calculating the importance scores. Through this work, we show that our scoring functions are able to assign more relevant task-based scores to the network parameters, and thus both our pruning approaches significantly outperform the standard weight and gradient-based strategies, especially at higher compression ratios in BERT-based models. We also analyze our pruning masks and find them to be significantly different from the ones obtained using standard metrics.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, 10 equations, initial preprin

Exploiting the Synergy Between Gossiping and Structured Overlays

In this position paper we argue for exploiting the synergy between gossip-based algorithms and structured overlay networks (SON). These two strands of research have both aimed at building fault-tolerant, dynamic, self-managing, and large-scale distributed systems. Despite the common goals, the two areas have, however, been relatively isolated. We focus on three problem domains where there is an untapped potential of using gossiping combined with SONs. We argue for applying gossip-based membership for ring-based SONs---such as Chord and Bamboo---to make them handle partition mergers and loopy networks. We argue that small world SONs---such as Accordion and Mercury---are specifically well-suited for gossip-based membership management. The benefits would be better graph-theoretic properties. Finally, we argue that gossip-based algorithms could use the overlay constructed by SONs. For example, many unreliable broadcast algorithms for SONs could be augmented with anti-entropy protocols. Similarly, gossip-based aggregation could be used in SONs for network size estimation and load-balancing purposes

Virtual Reality in Healthcare – what stops hospitals and patients o adopt the technology?

Virtual Reality (VR) has been used in healthcare for nearly a decade but on it’s infancy in the UK. Innovation adoption is still a struggle based on recent reports, specially adoption of high tech innovation. This study looks into the barriers of adoption of VR in pain management in National Health Services in Dorset. The study investigates this from patient and staff point of view

Deterministic Sampling and Range Counting in Geometric Data Streams

We present memory-efficient deterministic algorithms for constructing epsilon-nets and epsilon-approximations of streams of geometric data. Unlike probabilistic approaches, these deterministic samples provide guaranteed bounds on their approximation factors. We show how our deterministic samples can be used to answer approximate online iceberg geometric queries on data streams. We use these techniques to approximate several robust statistics of geometric data streams, including Tukey depth, simplicial depth, regression depth, the Thiel-Sen estimator, and the least median of squares. Our algorithms use only a polylogarithmic amount of memory, provided the desired approximation factors are inverse-polylogarithmic. We also include a lower bound for non-iceberg geometric queries.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur