Extensive pelvic hydatid disease mimicking ovarian malignant tumour

Hydatid disease is one of the commonest parasitic infections of the liver, endemic in many countries. Rupture into the peritoneal cavity leading to secondary echinococcosis is a difficult problem to manage. A case of 37 year old female patient presenting with disseminated intra-abdominal hydatid disease mimicking malignant multilocular cystic tumor of the ovary involving the mesentery of the small intestine, omentum and spleen is presented along with a brief review of literature

Voice Feature Extraction for Gender and Emotion Recognition

Voice recognition plays a key role in spoken communication that helps to identify the emotions of a person that reflects in the voice. Gender classification through speech is a widely used Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as it is not easy to identify gender by computer. This led to the development of a model for “Voice feature extraction for Emotion and Gender Recognition”. The speech signal consists of semantic information, speaker information (gender, age, emotional state), accompanied by noise. Females and males have different voice characteristics due to their acoustical and perceptual differences along with a variety of emotions which convey their own unique perceptions. In order to explore this area, feature extraction requires pre- processing of data, which is necessary for increasing the accuracy. The proposed model follows steps such as data extraction, pre- processing using Voice Activity Detector (VAD), feature extraction using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), feature reduction by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed combination of techniques produced better results which can be useful in the healthcare sector, virtual assistants, security purposes and other fields related to the Human Machine Interaction domain.&nbsp

SUPPORTIVE THERAPY: AN OPTION TO ENHANCE HOST IMMUNITY AGAINST COVID-19

The threat posed by COVID 19 outbreak, which is considered to be a global pandemic, is immeasurably affecting all the communities worldwide. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, which can affect birds, humans and, other animals. The emergence of this pandemic has been creating a tragic situation worldwide by affecting more people through human-human transmission. The burden (both healthwise and economic) placed by the disease is so huge that any measures to improve the current situation, to fasten up the recovery of already affected patients and, to reduce the risk of death and health deterioration should be considered. Vaccination, being the hope in the scenario, helps in preventing the condition to an extent, but in the absence of availability of a proper drug regimen to fight off COVID 19, the requirement of the need to find a system to control the severity of the infection is a necessity Nutritional supplementation helps in boosting up the immune system especially, vitamins like vitamin C, Vitamin D, Zinc, Omega 3 fatty acids, etc. They also exhibit established immunomodulatory, antiviral as well as anti-inflammatory effects. Pieces of evidence have also highlighted the importance of supportive therapy using nutrient supplements in covid patients as it helps in prominent decreasing of SARS CoV2 load of the virus and also significantly reduces the hospitalization period. Hence the nutritional levels of each of the infected person must be assessed before initiating the anti-viral therapy. The search criteria used were PubMed, Medscape, google scholar, etc. The keywords used to search were COVID 19 Supportive therapy, Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Nutrient supplementation, Host immunity, etc. The range of years is between 1978 and 2021

Thiopurine monotherapy is effective in ulcerative colitis but significantly less so in Crohn’s disease: long-term outcomes for 11 928 patients in the UK inflammatory bowel disease bioresource

Objective: Thiopurines are widely used as maintenance therapy in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) but the evidence base for their use is sparse and their role increasingly questioned. Using the largest series reported to date, we assessed the long-term effectiveness of thiopurines in ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD), including their impact on need for surgery. Design: Outcomes were assessed in 11 928 patients (4968 UC, 6960 CD) in the UK IBD BioResource initiated on thiopurine monotherapy with the intention of maintaining medically induced remission. Effectiveness was assessed retrospectively using patient-level data and a definition that required avoidance of escalation to biological therapy or surgery while on thiopurines. Analyses included overall effectiveness, time-to-event analysis for treatment escalation and comparison of surgery rates in patients tolerant or intolerant of thiopurines. Results: Using 68 132 patient-years of exposure, thiopurine monotherapy appeared effective for the duration of treatment in 2617/4968 (52.7%) patients with UC compared with 2378/6960 (34.2%) patients with CD (p<0.0001). This difference was corroborated in a multivariable analysis: after adjusting for variables including treatment era, thiopurine monotherapy was less effective in CD than UC (OR 0.47, 95% CI 0.43 to 0.51, p<0.0001). Thiopurine intolerance was associated with increased risk of surgery in UC (HR 2.44, p<0.0001); with a more modest impact on need for surgery in CD (HR=1.23, p=0.0015). Conclusion: Thiopurine monotherapy is an effective long-term treatment for UC but significantly less effective in CD

Voice Feature Extraction for Gender and Emotion Recognition

Voice recognition plays a key function in spoken communication that facilitates identifying the emotions of a person that reflects within the voice. Gender classification through speech is a popular Human Computer Interaction (HCI) method on account that determining gender through computer is hard. This led to the development of a model for "Voice feature extraction for Emotion and Gender Recognition". The speech signal consists of semantic information, speaker information (gender, age, emotional state), accompanied by noise. Females and males have specific vocal traits because of their acoustical and perceptual variations along with a variety of emotions which bring their own specific perceptions. In order to explore this area, feature extraction requires pre-processing of data, which is necessary for increasing the accuracy. The proposed model follows steps such as data extraction, pre-processing using Voice Activity Detector(VAD), feature extraction using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient(MFCC), feature reduction by Principal Component Analysis(PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed combination of techniques produced better results which can be useful in healthcare sector, virtual assistants, security purposes and other fields related to Human Machine Interaction domain

Cerium doped NiO nanoparticles: A novel electrode material for high performance pseudocapacitor applications

10.1166/sam.2014.1684Science of Advanced Materials6194-10

Spectrum of pediatric brain tumors in India: A multi-institutional study

Background : Till date there is no published multi-institutional data regarding the epidemiological profile of pediatric brain tumors in India. Aim : The present retrospective study analyses the histological spectrum of pediatric age group brain tumors in seven tertiary care hospitals in India. Material and Methods : Data regarding frequencies of various primary brain tumors (diagnosed according to the World Health Organization (WHO) classification), in 3936 pediatric patients (<18 yrs of age), was collected from seven tertiary care hospitals in India. Results : The most common primary pediatric brain tumors were astrocytic tumors (34.7%), followed by medulloblastoma and supratentorial primitive neuro-ectodermal tumors (22.4%), craniopharyngiomas (10.2%) and ependymal tumors (9.8%). The most common astrocytic tumor was pilocytic astrocytoma. In comparison to adults, oligodendrogliomas and lymphomas were rare in children. Conclusions : Our study is the first such report on the histological spectrum of brain tumors in children in India. Except for a slightly higher frequency of craniopharyngiomas, the histological profile of pediatric brain tumors in India is similar to that reported in the Western literature