Should eye protection be worn during dermatological surgery: prospective observational study

Background There is a potential risk of infection with blood-borne viruses if a doctor receives a blood splash to a mucous membrane. The quantification of facial contamination with blood has never been documented in the context of dermatological surgery. Objectives (i) To identify the number of facial blood splashes that occur during skin surgery and to identify the procedures that present higher risks for the operator and assistant. (ii) To assess the provision of eye protection and attitudes to its use in dermatological surgery in the U.K. Methods (i) Prospective, observational study in the skin surgery suite of a U.K. teaching hospital assessing 100 consecutive dermatological surgery procedures, plus 100 consecutive operations in which an assistant was present. Primary outcome: number of face-mask visors with at least one blood splash. Secondary outcomes: to identify if any of the following variables influenced the occurrence of a blood splash: grade of operator, site and type of procedure, and the use of electrocautery. (ii) A postal survey of all U.K.-based members of the British Society of Dermatological Surgery (BSDS) was conducted assessing facilities available and the attitudes of U.K.-based clinicians to the use of face masks during surgery. Results (i) In 33% of all surgical procedures there was at least one facial splash to the operator (range 1–75) and in 15% of procedures the assistant received at least one splash (range 1–11). Use of monopolar electrocautery was significantly less likely to result in splashes to the mask compared with bipolar electrocautery [odds ratio (OR) 0Æ04; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0Æ01–0Æ19]. Compared with the head/neck, operations on the body were significantly more likely to result in splashes to the mask (OR 6Æ52) (95% CI 1Æ7–25Æ07). The type of procedure and the status of the operator did not have a bearing on the likelihood of receiving a splash to the mask. (ii) From the survey, 33 of 159 (20Æ8%) of BSDS members had no face masks available and 54 of 159 (34Æ0%) did not wear any facial protection while operating. The majority (53Æ5%) thought they received a splash in £ 1% of procedures. Conclusions There is a substantial risk of a splash of blood coming into contact with the face during dermatological surgery for both the operator and assistant, regardless of the procedure. The risk of receiving a blood splash to the face may be substantially underestimated by U.K.-based dermatologists. The use of protective eyewear is advisable at all times, but particularly when using bipolar electrocautery, or when operating on high-risk individuals

On Kostant Sections and Topological Nilpotence

Let G denote a connected, quasi-split reductive group over a field F that is complete with respect to a discrete valuation and that has a perfect residue field. Under mild hypotheses, we produce a subset of the Lie algebra g(F) that picks out a G(F)-conjugacy class in every stable, regular, topologically nilpotent conjugacy class in g(F). This generalizes an earlier result obtained by DeBacker and one of the authors under stronger hypotheses. We then show that if F is p-adic, then the characteristic function of this set behaves well with respect to endoscopic transfer.Comment: 23 pages, accepted for publication in the Journal of the London Mathematical Societ

Effect of oral and intravenous hydration therapy on amniotic fluid index, maternal and perinatal outcome in borderline oligohydramnios

Background: The aim was to determine whether oral route of maternal hydration was advantageous over intravenous route in terms of increasing AFI and improving maternal and perinatal outcome in women having borderline oligohydramnios.Methods: At Aarogya hospital, 150 women in third trimester with borderline oligohydramnios (BO) AFI 5.1-8 cm, were divided randomly into two groups, oral hydration group (OG) and intravenous hydration (IVG). Each case was studied on OPD basis. After 2 hours, 48 hours and 1 week of oral or IV hydration. AFI was reassessed by same sonographer. Pre-delivery AFI and various outcome measures were recorded for both groups.Results: There was an increase in AFI by 44.5% in OG from 0 hour till delivery as compared to 30.7% increase in IVG. MSL occurred in 8 (10.7%) women in OG compared to 17 (22.6%) in IVG. FD was found in 4 (5.3%) in OG requiring LSCS compared to 16 (21.3%) in IVG. Total of 59 (78.7%) patients in OG has spontaneous vaginal delivery as compared to 42 (56%) in IVG. Perinatal outcome was better with OG than IVG 67 (89%) had Apgar at 1 min >8 in OG than 58 (77%) in IVG. Apgar score <8 at 1 min was seen in 8 (10.7%) in OG while 17 (22.7 %) in IVG. Overall, 7 (9.3%) required NICU admission in OG and 12 (16%) in IVG.Conclusions: AFI increment persisted longer in OG as compared to IVG. Maternal and perinatal outcome were better with oral hydration therapy than IV hydration

FInC Flow: Fast and Invertible k×kk \times k Convolutions for Normalizing Flows

Invertible convolutions have been an essential element for building expressive normalizing flow-based generative models since their introduction in Glow. Several attempts have been made to design invertible $k \times k$ convolutions that are efficient in training and sampling passes. Though these attempts have improved the expressivity and sampling efficiency, they severely lagged behind Glow which used only $1 \times 1$ convolutions in terms of sampling time. Also, many of the approaches mask a large number of parameters of the underlying convolution, resulting in lower expressivity on a fixed run-time budget. We propose a $k \times k$ convolutional layer and Deep Normalizing Flow architecture which i.) has a fast parallel inversion algorithm with running time O$(n k^2)$ ($n$ is height and width of the input image and k is kernel size), ii.) masks the minimal amount of learnable parameters in a layer. iii.) gives better forward pass and sampling times comparable to other $k \times k$ convolution-based models on real-world benchmarks. We provide an implementation of the proposed parallel algorithm for sampling using our invertible convolutions on GPUs. Benchmarks on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CelebA datasets show comparable performance to previous works regarding bits per dimension while significantly improving the sampling time.Comment: accepted: VISAPP'2

Verification in Privacy Preserving Data Publishing

Privacy preserving data publication is a major concern for both the owners of data and the data publishers. Principles like k-anonymity, l-diversity were proposed to reduce privacy violations. On the other side, no studies were found on verification on the anonymized data in terms of adversarial breach and anonymity levels. However, the anonymized data is still prone to attacks due to the presence of dependencies among quasi-identifiers and sensitive attributes. This paper presents a novel framework to detect the existence of those dependencies and a solution to reduce them. The advantages of our approach are i) privacy violations can be detected, ii) the extent of privacy risk can be measured and iii) re-anonymization can be done on vulnerable blocks of data. The work is further extended to show how the adversarial breach knowledge eventually increased when new tuples are added and an on the fly solution to reduce it is discussed. Experimental results are reported and analyzed

Differential induction of chitinase in Piper colubrinum in response to inoculation with Phytophthora capsici, the cause of foot rot in black pepper

AbstractPlant chitinases have been of particular interest since they are known to be induced upon pathogen invasion. Inoculation of Piper colubrinum leaves with the foot rot fungus, Phytophthora capsici leads to increase in chitinase activity. A marked increase in chitinase activity in the inoculated leaves was observed, with the maximum activity after 60h of inoculation and gradually decreased thereafter. Older leaves showed more chitinase activity than young leaves. The level of chitinase in black pepper (Piper nigrum L.) upon inoculation was found to be substantially high when compared to P. colubrinum. RT–PCR using chitinase specific primers revealed differential accumulation of mRNA in P. colubrinum leaves inoculated with P. capsici. However, hyphal extension assays revealed no obvious differences in the ability of the protein extracts to inhibit growth of P. capsici in vitro