Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a topic of high interest in this day and age. AI has emerged through the early nineties and continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. The idea of having machines that are able to process certain cognition to come to a decision without the intervention of humans is the ultimate idea that is being pursued. Though the stage in which AI is able to completely outperform humans in its cognitive skills is yet to be achieved, there has been remarkable progress towards that area. This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction about AI and the area covered under the topic. Various algorithms are used in programming AI on machines such as evolutionary algorithms, genetic algorithms, and swarm intelligence. AI encompasses machine learning, which will be further discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, the impact of AI on society and futuristic predictions the chapter reviews

Psychotropic prescribing after hospital discharge in survivors of critical illness, a retrospective cohort study (2012–2019)

Background:Many people survive critical illness with the burden of new or worsened mental health issues and sleep disturbances. We examined the frequency of psychotropic prescribing after critical illness, comparing critical care to non-critical care hospitalised survivors, and whether this varied in important subgroups.Methods:This retrospective cohort study included 23,340 critical care and 367,185 non-critical care hospitalised adults from 2012 through 2019 in Lothian, Scotland, who survived to discharge.Results:One-third of critical care survivors (32 7527/23,340) received a psychotropic prescription within 90 days after hospital discharge (25 14hypnotics; 4mania medicines). In contrast, 1554,589/367,185) of non-critical care survivors received a psychotropic prescription (12 5hypnotics; 2mania medicines). Among patients without psychotropic prescriptions within 180 days prior to hospitalisation, after hospital discharge, the critical care group had a higher incidence of psychotropic prescription (10.3 1610/15,609) compared with the non-critical care group (3.2 9743/307,429); unadjusted hazard ratio (HR) 3.39, 95 3.22–3.57. After adjustment for potential confounders, the risk remained elevated (adjusted HR 2.03, 95 1.91–2.16), persisted later in follow-up (90–365 days; adjusted HR 1.38, 95 1.30–1.46), and was more pronounced in those without recorded comorbidities (adjusted HR 3.49, 95 3.22–3.78).Conclusions:Critical care survivors have a higher risk of receiving psychotropic prescriptions than hospitalised patients, with a significant proportion receiving benzodiazepines and other hypnotics. Future research should focus on the requirement for and safety of psychotropic medicines in survivors of critical illness, to help guide policy for clinical practice

Torsion and the Gravity Dual of Parity Symmetry Breaking in AdS4/CFT3 Holography

We study four dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant deformed by the Nieh-Yan torsional topological invariant with a spacetime-dependent coefficient. We find an exact solution of the Euclidean system, which we call the torsion vortex, having two asymptotic AdS4 regimes supported by a pseudoscalar with a kink profile. We propose that the torsion vortex is the holographic dual of a three dimensional system that exhibits distinct parity breaking vacua. The torsion vortex represents a (holographic) transition between these distinct vacua. We expect that from the boundary point of view, the torsion vortex represents a `domain wall' between the two distinct vacua. From a bulk point of view, we point out an intriguing identification of the parameters of the torsion vortex with those of an Abrikosov vortex in a Type I superconductor. Following the analogy, we find that external Kalb-Ramond flux then appears to support bubbles of flat spacetime within an asymptotically AdS geometry.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor improvements, references adde

Transglutaminases and Obesity in Humans: Association of F13A1 to Adipocyte Hypertrophy and Adipose Tissue Immune Response

Transglutaminases TG2 and FXIII-A have recently been linked to adipose tissue biology and obesity, however, human studies for TG family members in adipocytes have not been conducted. In this study, we investigated the association of TGM family members to acquired weight gain in a rare set of monozygotic (MZ) twins discordant for body weight, i.e., heavy–lean twin pairs. We report that F13A1 is the only TGM family member showing significantly altered, higher expression in adipose tissue of the heavier twin. Our previous work linked adipocyte F13A1 to increased weight, body fat mass, adipocyte size, and pro-inflammatory pathways. Here, we explored further the link of F13A1 to adipocyte size in the MZ twins via a previously conducted TWA study that was further mined for genes that specifically associate to hypertrophic adipocytes. We report that differential expression of F13A1 (ΔHeavy–Lean) associated with 47 genes which were linked via gene enrichment analysis to immune response, leucocyte and neutrophil activation, as well as cytokine response and signaling. Our work brings further support to the role of F13A1 in the human adipose tissue pathology, suggesting a role in the cascade that links hypertrophic adipocytes with inflammation

HIV and cancer registry linkage identifies a substantial burden of cancers in persons with HIV in India.

We utilized computerized record-linkage methods to link HIV and cancer databases with limited unique identifiers in Pune, India, to determine feasibility of linkage and obtain preliminary estimates of cancer risk in persons living with HIV (PLHIV) as compared with the general population.Records of 32,575 PLHIV were linked to 31,754 Pune Cancer Registry records (1996-2008) using a probabilistic-matching algorithm. Cancer risk was estimated by calculating standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) in the early (4-27 months after HIV registration), late (28-60 months), and overall (4-60 months) incidence periods. Cancers diagnosed prior to or within 3 months of HIV registration were considered prevalent.Of 613 linked cancers to PLHIV, 188 were prevalent, 106 early incident, and 319 late incident. Incident cancers comprised 11.5% AIDS-defining cancers (ADCs), including cervical cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), but not Kaposi sarcoma (KS), and 88.5% non-AIDS-defining cancers (NADCs). Risk for any incident cancer diagnosis in early, late, and combined periods was significantly elevated among PLHIV (SIRs: 5.6 [95% CI 4.6-6.8], 17.7 [95% CI 15.8-19.8], and 11.5 [95% CI 10-12.6], respectively). Cervical cancer risk was elevated in both incidence periods (SIRs: 9.6 [95% CI 4.8-17.2] and 22.6 [95% CI 14.3-33.9], respectively), while NHL risk was elevated only in the late incidence period (SIR: 18.0 [95% CI 9.8-30.20]). Risks for NADCs were dramatically elevated (SIR > 100) for eye-orbit, substantially (SIR > 20) for all-mouth, esophagus, breast, unspecified-leukemia, colon-rectum-anus, and other/unspecified cancers; moderately elevated (SIR > 10) for salivary gland, penis, nasopharynx, and brain-nervous system, and mildly elevated (SIR > 5) for stomach. Risks for 6 NADCs (small intestine, testis, lymphocytic leukemia, prostate, ovary, and melanoma) were not elevated and 5 cancers, including multiple myeloma not seen.Our study demonstrates the feasibility of using probabilistic record-linkage to study cancer/other comorbidities among PLHIV in India and provides preliminary population-based estimates of cancer risks in PLHIV in India. Our results, suggesting a potentially substantial burden and slightly different spectrum of cancers among PLHIV in India, support efforts to conduct multicenter linkage studies to obtain precise estimates and to monitor cancer risk in PLHIV in India

Incompressible image registration using divergence-conforming B-splines

Anatomically plausible image registration often requires volumetric preservation. Previous approaches to incompressible image registration have exploited relaxed constraints, ad hoc optimisation methods or practically intractable computational schemes. Divergence-free velocity fields have been used to achieve incompressibility in the continuous domain, although, after discretisation, no guarantees have been provided. In this paper, we introduce stationary velocity fields (SVFs) parameterised by divergence-conforming B-splines in the context of image registration. We demonstrate that sparse linear constraints on the parameters of such divergence-conforming B-Splines SVFs lead to being exactly divergence-free at any point of the continuous spatial domain. In contrast to previous approaches, our framework can easily take advantage of modern solvers for constrained optimisation, symmetric registration approaches, arbitrary image similarity and additional regularisation terms. We study the numerical incompressibility error for the transformation in the case of an Euler integration, which gives theoretical insights on the improved accuracy error over previous methods. We evaluate the proposed framework using synthetically deformed multimodal brain images, and the STACOM11 myocardial tracking challenge. Accuracy measurements demonstrate that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods whilst achieving volume preservation.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 201