Vacuum Assisted Closure Therapy versus Standard Wound Therapy for Open Musculoskeletal Injuries

Background. This study was performed to evaluate the results of vacuum assisted wound therapy in patients with open musculoskeletal injuries. Study Design and Setting. Prospective, randomized, and interventional at tertiary care hospital, from 2011 to 2012. Materials and Methods. 30 patients of open musculoskeletal injuries underwent randomized trial of vacuum assisted closure therapy versus standard wound therapy around the upper limb and lower limb. Mean patient age was 39 ± 18 years (range, 18 to 76 years). Necrotic tissues were debrided before applying VAC therapy. Dressings were changed every 3 or 4 days. For standard wound therapy, debridement followed by daily dressings was done. Data Management and Statistical Analysis. The results obtained were subjected to statistical analysis. Results. The size of soft tissue defects reduced more than 5 mm to 25 mm after VAC (mean decrease of 26.66%), whereas in standard wound therapy, reduction in wound size was less than 5 mm. A free flap was needed to cover exposed bone and tendon in one case in standard wound therapy group. No major complication occurred that was directly attributable to treatment. Conclusion. Vacuum assisted wound therapy was found to facilitate the rapid formation of healthy granulation tissue on open wounds in the upper limb and lower limb, thus to shorten healing time and minimize secondary soft tissue defect coverage procedures

Asynchronous suppression of visual cortex during absence seizures in stargazer mice

Absence epilepsy is a common childhood disorder featuring frequent cortical spike-wave seizures with a loss of awareness and behavior. Using the calcium indicator GCaMP6 with in vivo 2-photon cellular microscopy and simultaneous electrocorticography, we examined the collective activity profiles of individual neurons and surrounding neuropil across all layers in V1 during spike-wave seizure activity over prolonged periods in stargazer mice. We show that most (~80%) neurons in all cortical layers reduce their activity during seizures, whereas a smaller pool activates or remains neutral. Unexpectedly, ictal participation of identified single-unit activity is not fixed, but fluctuates on a flexible time scale from seizure to seizure. Pairwise correlation analysis of calcium activity reveals a surprising lack of synchrony among neurons and neuropil patches in all layers during seizures. Our results demonstrate asynchronous suppression of visual cortex during absence seizures, with potential implications for understanding cortical network function during EEG states of reduced awareness

S\={a}mayik: A Benchmark and Dataset for English-Sanskrit Translation

We release S\={a}mayik, a dataset of around 53,000 parallel English-Sanskrit sentences, written in contemporary prose. Sanskrit is a classical language still in sustenance and has a rich documented heritage. However, due to the limited availability of digitized content, it still remains a low-resource language. Existing Sanskrit corpora, whether monolingual or bilingual, have predominantly focused on poetry and offer limited coverage of contemporary written materials. S\={a}mayik is curated from a diverse range of domains, including language instruction material, textual teaching pedagogy, and online tutorials, among others. It stands out as a unique resource that specifically caters to the contemporary usage of Sanskrit, with a primary emphasis on prose writing. Translation models trained on our dataset demonstrate statistically significant improvements when translating out-of-domain contemporary corpora, outperforming models trained on older classical-era poetry datasets. Finally, we also release benchmark models by adapting four multilingual pre-trained models, three of them have not been previously exposed to Sanskrit for translating between English and Sanskrit while one of them is multi-lingual pre-trained translation model including English and Sanskrit. The dataset and source code is present at https://github.com/ayushbits/saamayik.Comment: LREC-COLING, 202

Catalyst deactivation in finite hollow cylindrical pellets

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25600/1/0000147.pd

May Measurement Month 2018: a pragmatic global screening campaign to raise awareness of blood pressure by the International Society of Hypertension

Aims Raised blood pressure (BP) is the biggest contributor to mortality and disease burden worldwide and fewer than half of those with hypertension are aware of it. May Measurement Month (MMM) is a global campaign set up in 2017, to raise awareness of high BP and as a pragmatic solution to a lack of formal screening worldwide. The 2018 campaign was expanded, aiming to include more participants and countries. Methods and results Eighty-nine countries participated in MMM 2018. Volunteers (≥18 years) were recruited through opportunistic sampling at a variety of screening sites. Each participant had three BP measurements and completed a questionnaire on demographic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Hypertension was defined as a systolic BP ≥140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥90 mmHg, or taking antihypertensive medication. In total, 74.9% of screenees provided three BP readings. Multiple imputation using chained equations was used to impute missing readings. 1 504 963 individuals (mean age 45.3 years; 52.4% female) were screened. After multiple imputation, 502 079 (33.4%) individuals had hypertension, of whom 59.5% were aware of their diagnosis and 55.3% were taking antihypertensive medication. Of those on medication, 60.0% were controlled and of all hypertensives, 33.2% were controlled. We detected 224 285 individuals with untreated hypertension and 111 214 individuals with inadequately treated (systolic BP ≥ 140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥ 90 mmHg) hypertension. Conclusion May Measurement Month expanded significantly compared with 2017, including more participants in more countries. The campaign identified over 335 000 adults with untreated or inadequately treated hypertension. In the absence of systematic screening programmes, MMM was effective at raising awareness at least among these individuals at risk

Circuit and signaling techniques for on -chip interconnects

As VLSI progresses into Very Deep Submicron (VDSM) realms, global interconnects play an increasingly important role in the overall performance and power consumption of high-performance chips. This thesis proposes circuit and signaling solutions to the on-chip interconnect design problem. Current-sensing and phase coded signaling are proposed as potential techniques to transmit logic in current and time respectively. A test-chip verifying these techniques has been fabricated in a TSMC 0.18μ technology through MOSIS. Using a novel receiver circuit for differential current-sensing, a performance benefit of 20% was obtained over the delay-optimal repeater insertion technique. The proposed single ended current-sensing provides more delay benefits (45% on average) and like repeaters uses one wire to transmit a data bit. The static power dissipation in current-sensing is mitigated by using transition encoded current-sensing and current-pulse signaling. These techniques are faster and lower power than repeater insertion. A hybrid circuit technique that exploits the advantages of both current-sensing and repeater insertion is proposed. Phase coding is presented as a multi-bit signaling technique which encodes multiple bits on a single wire in terms of phase information. Transmitting multiple bits saves power and increases bandwidth. DLL based closed loop encoding and decoding schemes provide process-variation immune operation