ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION ON KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE, AND PRACTICES OF RURAL COMMUNITY PHARMACISTS OF MYSURU DISTRICT TOWARD ADVERSE DRUG REACTION REPORTING

Objective: A prospective interventional study was conducted to evaluate the impact of educational intervention on knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP)(of rural community pharmacists toward adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting.Methods: A validated KAP questionnaire was administered on the enrolled community pharmacists in the study. SPSS software package version-19 was used to calculate the influence of educational intervention on KAP scores of the participants. Pre-training KAP scores were compared with the post-training KAP scores.Results: About 49 community pharmacists have participated in the study, 95.91% (n=47) were males, and 4.08% (n=2) were females. The mean±SD age of the participants was 40.93±7.84 years. The mean ± SD score in the knowledge component was significantly increased from 4.87±2.015 to 7.09 ± 0.68 (n=49, p<0.05). After the educational intervention, 77.55% (n=38) of participants could correctly define the ADRs, and 73.46% (n=36) of participants were aware of the consequence of ADRs. About 57.34% of participants disagree with the statement reporting of ADRs incurs the addtional workload with post education intervention. At the end of the study, the participants' knowledge was significantly increased and participant pharmacists felt responsible toward ADR reporting.Conclusion: Educational interventional program have shown a tremendous change in knowledge and awareness of the respondents towards adverse drug reaction monitoring and reporting. It is well understood that there is a need for promoting the pharmacovigilance activities among community pharmacists

Are Saddles Good Enough for Deep Learning?

Recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding deep neural networks from an optimization perspective. It is understood now that converging to low-cost local minima is sufficient for such models to become effective in practice. However, in this work, we propose a new hypothesis based on recent theoretical findings and empirical studies that deep neural network models actually converge to saddle points with high degeneracy. Our findings from this work are new, and can have a significant impact on the development of gradient descent based methods for training deep networks. We validated our hypotheses using an extensive experimental evaluation on standard datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, and also showed that recent efforts that attempt to escape saddles finally converge to saddles with high degeneracy, which we define as `good saddles'. We also verified the famous Wigner's Semicircle Law in our experimental results

IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION ON KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE, AND PRACTICES OF URBAN COMMUNITY PHARMACISTS TOWARD ADVERSE DRUG REACTION REPORTING IN A SOUTH INDIAN CITY

ABSTRACTObjective: To assess the knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) of community pharmacists toward adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting and alsoto evaluate the impact of the educational program on community pharmacist's knowledge and perception toward ADR reporting.Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was carried out by administering a validated questionnaire before and after the educational programon a sample of 26 community pharmacists. The baseline score of pre-training KAP was compared with the post-training KAP. The SPSS statisticalversion 19 was used to compare the difference in the KAP of the pharmacists before and after the educational program. Frequencies and percentagewere used to measure demographic details of the participants.Results: 26 community pharmacists have participated in the study. The mean pre-training KAP score was increased from 4.30±2.02 to mean posttrainingscoreof 7.32±0.94. Afterthe educational program,92.30%(n=24)ofparticipants wereable toidentify potentialriskfactorsresponsibletocauseADRs,and 80.76% (n=21)ofparticipants wereawareof the consequenceof ADRs.Upon educational intervention73.07% (n=19)ofparticipantsdisagreewith thestatementofADR reportingin thecommunity pharmacieslead toadditional workloadandwereconfident about theirknowledgeinADR reportingand monitoring.Conclusion: The study concludes that the educational intervention has increased the KAP of the trained community pharmacists toward ADRreporting.Keywords: Community pharmacists, Adverse drug reaction reporting, Educational intervention, Knowledge, Attitude and practices.Â

Dissimilarity Based Contrastive Divergence for Anomaly Detection

This paper describes training of a Re- stricted Boltzmann Machine(RBM) using dissimilarity-based contrastive divergence to obtain an anomaly detector. We go over the merits of the method over other approaches and describe the method's usefulness to ob- tain a generative model

Temporal Coherence in Energy-based Deep Learning Machines for Action Recognition

Deep Learning, a sub-area of machine learning, has become a buzz word in recent days due to its great successes in many applications of machine learning, including speech processing, computer vision and natural language processing. Deep learning became famous in the initial days through the successful application of Convolutional Neural Networks as well as Energy-based Models -or Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) - on handwritten digit recognition. While the last decade has seen the growing use of convolution-based deep learning methods for image analysis, limited work has been done in adapting deep learning to video analysus. Existing methods have largely extended the ideas based on convolution applied to images into the video analysis setting. The primary deep learning approaches that have been proposed so far explicitly for video sequences are the 3D Convolutional Neural Networks and the Convolutional Gated RBM

BatchRank: A Novel Batch Mode Active Learning Framework for Hierarchical Classification

Active learning algorithms automatically identify the salient and exemplar instances from large amounts of unlabeled data and thus reduce human annotation effort in inducing a classification model. More recently, Batch Mode Active Learning (BMAL) techniques have been proposed, where a batch of data samples is selected simultaneously from an un- labeled set. Most active learning algorithms assume a at label space, that is, they consider the class labels to be in- dependent. However, in many applications, the set of class labels are organized in a hierarchical tree structure, with the leaf nodes as outputs and the internal nodes as clusters of outputs at multiple levels of granularity. In this paper, we propose a novel BMAL algorithm (BatchRank) for hi- erarchical classification. The sample selection is posed as an NP-hard integer quadratic programming problem and a convex relaxation (based on linear programming) is derived, whose solution is further improved by an iterative truncated power method. Finally, a deterministic bound is established on the quality of the solution. Our empirical results on sev- eral challenging, real-world datasets from multiple domains, corroborate the potential of the proposed framework for real- world hierarchical classification applications

Villagers and Illiterates are More Prone to HIV

This study aims to find out how far villagers and illiterates are aware of HIV in 104 patients both men women belonging to rural area around suryapet district. Non – co-operative and pregnant women are excluded from the study. Data collection was done in the period from December 8th to January 13th and analysed there education and occupational status and we found very interestingly more than 90% of the patients are not aware of HIV and its consequences and many of them don’t what is HIV and how can it will be prevented, many of the patients are spreading HIV to their spouse without unknowing that is sexually transmissible. Few patients don’t know that HIV will cause from undisposed needles. Interestingly whoever said they are affected due to un-disposed needles are not drug abusers they are affected due to malpractice done by RMPs who are using multiple use of single needle. And very few answered that HIV will transmitted through blood transfusion after they get affected. The people whoever effected mostly belongs to daily wage labour, farmers and truck drivers. So there is need to create awareness in villagers and illiterates to prevent further progression of disease and to prevent the transmission of disease to younger generation

Towards learning and verifying invariants of cyber-physical systems by code mutation

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate algorithmic control with physical processes, often consist of physically distributed components communicating over a network. A malfunctioning or compromised component in such a CPS can lead to costly consequences, especially in the context of public infrastructure. In this short paper, we argue for the importance of constructing invariants (or models) of the physical behaviour exhibited by CPS, motivated by their applications to the control, monitoring, and attestation of components. To achieve this despite the inherent complexity of CPS, we propose a new technique for learning invariants that combines machine learning with ideas from mutation testing. We present a preliminary study on a water treatment system that suggests the efficacy of this approach, propose strategies for establishing confidence in the correctness of invariants, then summarise some research questions and the steps we are taking to investigate them.Comment: Short paper accepted by the 21st International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2016

A Study on Impact of Clinical Pharmacist Interventions on Medication Adherence and Quality of Life in Rural Hypertensive Patients

Hypertension is the very common chronic disease in rural, urban and semi-urban areas of today's world, which needs continuous monitoring and treatment through out the life. Lack of education, lifestyle modification, and low level of understanding on disease management in rural people will influence directly on their quality of life (QOL). The objective of this study was to know the impact of clinical pharmacist interventions on medication adherence and QOL. It was a prospective, randomized and interventional study. Fifty-six patients were enrolled; only 52 patients completed the study. Interventional group patients received patient counselling, patient information leaflets (PILS), and frequent telephonic reminding. In the baseline, first and second follow-ups, medication adherence and QOL were assessed by using Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) and Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS) Questionnaires and SF-12v2 Quality of life Questionnaire in both the groups. The results showed that systolic blood pressure P value in the second follow-up was 0.086+ when compared to baseline follow-up P value 0.094. The diastolic blood pressure reading of the intervention group at the second follow-up was 77.73 ± 3.63 in mmHg when compared to the baseline, i.e. 86.62 ± 11.35 in mmHg. The MMAS and MARS scores P values were 0.007**, 1.000, <0.001**; 0.007, 0.014 and 0.000 at the baseline, first and second follow-ups, respectively. The QOL score P values of physical component scale and mental component scale showed highly significant. This study concluded/showed that the impact of clinical pharmacist provided patient counselling had a positive impact on medication adherence and QOL

Systematic Review of Medicine-Related Problems in Adult Patients with Atrial Fibrillation on Direct Oral Anticoagulants

New oral anticoagulant agents continue to emerge on the market and their safety requires assessment to provide evidence of their suitability for clinical use. There-fore, we searched standard databases to summarize the English language literature on medicine-related problems (MRPs) of direct oral anticoagulants DOACs (dabigtran, rivaroxban, apixban, and edoxban) in the treatment of adults with atri-al fibrillation. Electronic databases including Medline, Embase, International Pharmaceutical Abstract (IPA), Scopus, CINAHL, the Web of Science and Cochrane were searched from 2008 through 2016 for original articles. Studies pub-lished in English reporting MRPs of DOACs in adult patients with AF were in-cluded. Seventeen studies were identified using standardized protocols, and two reviewers serially abstracted data from each article. Most articles were inconclusive on major safety end points including major bleeding. Data on major safety end points were combined with efficacy. Most studies inconsistently reported adverse drug reactions and not adverse events or medication error, and no definitions were consistent across studies. Some harmful drug effects were not assessed in studies and may have been overlooked. Little evidence is provided on MRPs of DOACs in patients with AF and, therefore, further studies are needed to establish the safety of DOACs in real-life clinical practice