Histopathological Outcome of Testicular Lesions at PIMS

Objective: This study was undertaken to determine the incidence, Age wise distribution and Histopathological outcome of the testicular lesion at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences Islamabad.Methodology: A retrospective study of 69 patients in which orchiectomies was done for testicular lesion from January 2013 to March 2016 at Department of Urology Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, Islamabad. The epidemiological data were retrieved from case files and histopathological reports. Data was analyzed in respect of side involvement, age and histological type of tumors.Results: A total of 69 patients included in the study, of which 49(71.01%) were Non-neoplastic and 20(28.98%) were neoplastic lesions. Among Non- neoplastic lesions 24(48.98%) were undescended testis, 24(48.98%) were torsion and 1(2.04%) were an abscess. A maximum number of cases were diagnosed in the second decade of life (30.62%), left side involvement (59.18%) was common then right side involvement (40.82%).Among neoplastic lesions 40% were Yolk sac tumors,30% were Mixed germ cell tumors,20% were seminoma, 5% were teratoma and 5 % were B-cell lymphoma. Most of the cases were diagnosed in the third decade of life (45%), Right side involvement (70%) was more common than left side involvement (30%).Conclusion: Testicular tumors is still common in our population, but in our study, there is no evidence of malignancy in the undescended testis

PATTERNS AND PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE-MIXING IN PAKISTANI URDU NEWSPAPERS

Multilingualism has become a significant feature of today’s linguistic scenario. When languages are in contact, one of them tends to dominate the others on account of the role given or due to the attitude of the language users. Language contact results in language-mixing. Language-mixing in formal, written, corpora in Pakistan manifests the spread of English. The present study aimed to investigate frequency of the occurrence of language-mixing in Urdu newspapers. Thus it investigated the extent to which language-mixing is prevalent and the processes it takes when it occurs in Pakistani Urdu newspapers. Two Urdu newspapers (published in morning) were taken (from February 1 to 15, 2014) as sample. The data from Urdu newspapers for linguistic analysis were analyzed through content analysis. The findings of the study showed that language-mixing is frequently done in Urdu newspapers and it takes various processes-insertion, hybridization and synthesis

Preference elicitation from pairwise comparisons in multi-criteria decision making

Decision making is an essential activity for humans and often becomes complex in the presence of uncertainty or insufficient knowledge. This research aims at estimating preferences using pairwise comparisons. A decision maker uses pairwise comparison when he/she is unable to directly assign criteria weights or scores to the available options. The judgments provided in pairwise comparisons may not always be consistent for several reasons. Experimentation has been used to obtain statistical evidence related to the widely-used consistency measures. The results highlight the need to propose new consistency measures. Two new consistency measures - termed congruence and dissonance - are proposed to aid the decision maker in the process of elicitation. Inconsistencies in pairwise comparisons are of two types i.e. cardinal and ordinal. It is shown that both cardinal and ordinal consistency can be improved with the help of these two measures. A heuristic method is then devised to detect and remove intransitive judgments. The results suggest that the devised method is feasible for improving ordinal consistency and is computationally more efficient than the optimization-based methods. There exist situations when revision of judgments is not allowed and prioritization is required without attempting to remove inconsistency. A new prioritization method has been proposed using the graph-theoretic approach. Although the performance of the proposed prioritization method was found to be comparable to other approaches, it has practical limitation in terms of computation time. As a consequence, the problem of prioritization is explored as an optimization problem. A new method based on multi-objective optimization is formulated that offers multiple non-dominated solutions and outperforms all other relevant methods for inconsistent set of judgments. A priority estimation tool (PriEsT) has been developed that implements the proposed consistency measures and prioritization methods. In order to show the benefits of PriEsT, a case study involving Telecom infrastructure selection is presented.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A hybrid group-based movie recommendation framework with overlapping memberships

Recommender Systems (RS) are widely used to help people or group of people in finding their required information amid the issue of ever-growing information overload. The existing group recommender approaches consider users to be part of a single group only, but in real life a user may be associated with multiple groups having conflicting preferences. For instance, a person may have different preferences in watching movies with friends than with family. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a Hybrid Two-phase Group Recommender Framework (HTGF) that takes into consideration the possibility of users having simultaneous membership of multiple groups. Unlike the existing group recommender systems that use traditional methods like K-Means, Pearson correlation, and cosine similarity to form groups, we use Fuzzy C-means clustering which assigns a degree of membership to each user for each group, and then Pearson similarity is used to form groups. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed framework using a movies data set. The experiments were conducted on MovieLens 1M dataset where we used Neural Collaborative Filtering to recommend Top-k movies to each group. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the traditional approaches when compared in terms of group satisfaction parameters, as well as the conventional metrics of precision, recall, and F-measure

Relationship of BMI and age with gallstone disease

Objective: To find out the relationship of BMI and age in patients with gallstone disease.  Methodology: This is a cross-sectional study done from March 2019 to February 2020 at the Department of General Surgery PIMS, Islamabad. All patients admitted with a diagnosis of Cholelithiasis were included and patients with previous abdominal surgery were excluded from the study. Patients’ data was collected about their age, sex, dietary habits, occupation and medical history. Their weight in kilograms and heights in centimeters were measured and BMI was calculated in kg/cm2. All data was collected, recorded and analyzed using SPSS 22. Results: A total of 158 patients were included in the study with mean age was 46.2±6.7 years (18 - 83 years). Majority (63%) of the patients were between 41 and 60 age group. There were 120 females and 38 males with ratio of 3:1. The mean BMI of the study population was 25.8 ± 7.61 (Range 19.37 - 33.12). Most of the patients were healthy (n=86, 54.4%) having their BMIs between 18 and 24.9 whereas 72 (46.6%) patients were overweight and obese. Conclusion: Increased frequency of cholelithiasis is found with increasing age even with normal BMI