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Objective: To assess the bacterial profile for catheter associated UTI and the antimicrobial sensitive to most commonly used antibiotics in Sheikh Zayed Hospital, Rahim Yar Khan. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Urology Ward of Sheikh Zayed Medical College/Hospital Rahim Yar Khan. Period: 01 February, 2021 to 31 July, 2021. Material & Methods: The urine samples were collected from 100 patients. Clinical and microbiological data were analyzed from patients with CAUTI. Results: A total of 100 patients were included in the study in which 82 samples were positive for bacterial growth and 18 samples did not show growth. Out of 82 strains, E. coli (46) was the most frequently isolated pathogen followed by Klebsiella pneumonia (17), Pseudomonas (10), Proteus (4), Candida (3) and Staphylococci (2). Conclusion: Study concluded that most common cause of UTI was E. coli in catheter associated patients while the meropenem and colistin were the most sensitive drugs of choice.

Considering rising number of older people worldwide, provision of quality healthcare services has become matter of concern. Since, healthcare practitioners’ attitudes towards ageism affect quality of the care provided to the older population. Objective: To evaluate the ageism attitude of clinical physical therapists towards older people. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted at various public and private sector clinical settings in Faisalabad. 118 participants who were clinical physical therapists with at least one-year clinical experience, currently practicing and willing to participate were included. Geriatrics attitude scale and facts on aging scale were used as outcome measures. SPSS (V.24) was used for analyzing the data and results were interpreted using frequency tables and chi square. Results: The 83.1% participants belonging to age group 24-30 years while 79.7% were female physical therapists.80.5% had been working for more than one year. Attitude was measured with GAS at once time. 68.5% of the people gave positive attitude toward older people. Knowledge was measured with FAQ scale at once time. 51.1% of the participants have maximum knowledge about older people. Interpretation of chi square showed there was no correlation between attitude and knowledge of the physical therapy clinicians (p > 0.05). Conclusion: This study concluded that clinical physical therapists were bearing positive attitude towards older people being aware of the ageism facts. However, there was no correlation found between clinician’s knowledge and ageism attitude

Objective: To determine the prevalance of Candida albicans amongst patients attending the Gynae& Obstetrics Department at Sheikh Zayed Hospital, Rahim Yar Khan (SZH-RYK). Study Design: Descriptive Cross-sectional hospital-based study. Setting: Department of Pathology, SZH-RYK. Period: November 2018 to February 2019. Material & Method: The data on vaginal swabs were collected from different women with symptoms of vaginal infection, cultured on Sabouraud Dextrose agar. For identification of the isolated organisms,colony morphology, wet preparation, Gram staining procedure, a Germ tube test was carried out. A proforma was designed with the help of the supervisor includes various variables. Results: Out of 215 HVS samples, about 125 of Candida spp. were isolated, C. Albicans isolated was 64% while yeast other than C. Albicans isolated was 36%. 26-30 years age group had a higher percentage of 65.6% of C. Albicans. Prevalence of C. Albicans was highest in pregnant women 43.2% especially in third trimester 55.6%. The pruritus was found to be 77.9%, the cheesy discharge was found to be 73.9%, prevalence among diabetic women was highest 52.0% and prevalence among antibiotic users was also highest 45.0%. Conclusion: This study concluded that pruritus as a key symptom of VVC and prevalence of C. Albicans among pregnant women is more than in non-pregnant women.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is one of the most prevalent childhood-onset causes of permanent disability affecting gross motor functioning and postural control ability. Objective: To determine the effects of neurodevelopmental treatment on the gross motor function postural control among children with spastic CP. Methods: A single-blinded randomized controlled trial was carried out at Sher e Rabbani Hospital, Department of Pediatric Rehabilitation, Sheikhupura. 66 children fulfilling the inclusion criteria were recruited using the non-probability sampling technique. Participants were divided into two groups, Group A which received beuro developmental techniques along with routine physical therapy while Group B received only routine physical therapy treatment. To collect data, Gross motor function measure scale (GMFM-88) and posture and postural ability scale (PPAS) were employed as outcome measures. Results: Repeated measure ANOVA and an independent t-test were executed for parametric data after assuming normality. Pairwise comparison of both groups demonstrated that gross motor function was significantly improved from baseline to 4th, 8th, and 12th week after applying NDT treatment (p-value≤ 0.05). Pairwise comparison of both groups revealed that postural ability post NDT treatment and significant improvement was observed after 12 weeks in comparison to baseline. While within-group comparison at different follows up for gross motor function measure and postural control also expressed p≤ 0.05 as significant. Conclusions: Children with spastic CP who received Neurodevelopmental Therapy along with conventional physical therapy treatment showed significant improvements in gross motor function and postural control as compared to the control group.

Chromothripsis is a form of genomic instability characterized by the occurrence of tens to hundreds of clustered DNA double-strand breaks in a one-off catastrophic event. Rearrangements associated with chromothripsis are detectable in numerous tumor entities and linked with poor prognosis in some of these, such as Sonic Hedgehog medulloblastoma, neuroblastoma and osteosarcoma. Hence, there is a need for therapeutic strategies eliminating tumor cells with chromothripsis. Defects in DNA double-strand break repair, and in particular homologous recombination repair, have been linked with chromothripsis. Targeting DNA repair deficiencies by synthetic lethality approaches, we performed a synergy screen using drug libraries (n = 375 compounds, 15 models) combined with either a PARP inhibitor or cisplatin. This revealed a synergistic interaction between the HDAC inhibitor romidepsin and PARP inhibition. Functional assays, transcriptome analyses and in vivo validation in patient-derived xenograft mouse models confirmed the efficacy of the combinatorial treatment.

Background Medulloblastomas with chromothripsis developing in children with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome (germline TP53 mutations) are highly aggressive brain tumors with dismal prognosis. Conventional photon radiotherapy and DNA-damaging chemotherapy are not successful for these patients and raise the risk of secondary malignancies. We hypothesized that the pronounced homologous recombination deficiency in these tumors might offer vulnerabilities that can be therapeutically utilized in combination with high linear energy transfer carbon ion radiotherapy. Methods We tested high-precision particle therapy with carbon ions and protons as well as topotecan with or without PARP inhibitor in orthotopic primary and matched relapsed patient-derived xenograft models. Tumor and normal tissue underwent longitudinal morphological MRI, cellular (markers of neurogenesis and DNA damage-repair), and molecular characterization (whole-genome sequencing). Results In the primary medulloblastoma model, carbon ions led to complete response in 79% of animals irrespective of PARP inhibitor within a follow-up period of 300 days postirradiation, as detected by MRI and histology. No sign of neurologic symptoms, impairment of neurogenesis or in-field carcinogenesis was detected in repair-deficient host mice. PARP inhibitors further enhanced the effect of proton irradiation. In the postradiotherapy relapsed tumor model, median survival was significantly increased after carbon ions (96 days) versus control (43 days, P < .0001). No major change in the clonal composition was detected in the relapsed model. Conclusion The high efficacy and favorable toxicity profile of carbon ions warrants further investigation in primary medulloblastomas with chromothripsis. Postradiotherapy relapsed medulloblastomas exhibit relative resistance compared to treatment-naïve tumors, calling for exploration of multimodal strategies.

In recent years governments become more concern about health care monitoring which cannot be accomplished without enhancing trust on underlying system as various citizens hesitate to upload their sample because of privacy reasons and obviously the governmental decisions are based on the data collected by various PHCs and third party medical agencies. The accuracy and authenticity of this third party owned data is always doubtful. Crowd sourcing(a collaborative framework) make its sound presence in development of large scale health projects Scientist also impressed from crowd sourcing which is a faster and better alternative to traditional methods for predicting and monitoring infectious diseases. However the success of this type of crowd sourcing depends on the trust on underlying system as the user is always looking firm commitment to preserve their privacy and win a promise of not being re-identified later. Here in this work we suggest a privacy protecting framework for upload process which could fulfill user's diverse privacy requirements while guaranteeing the quality of health care data.

Traditional object detection answers two questions; “what” (what the object is?) and “where” (where the object is?). “what” part of the object detection can be fine grained further i-e. “what type”, “what shape” and “what material” etc. This results in shifting of object detection task to object description paradigm. Describing object provides additional detail that enables us to understand the characteristics and attributes of the object (“plastic boat” not just boat, “glass bottle” not just bottle). This additional information can implicitly be used to gain insight about unseen objects (e.g. unknown object is “metallic”, “has wheels”), which is not possible in traditional object detection. In this paper, we present a new approach to simultaneously detect objects and infer their attributes, we call it Detectand- Describe (DaD) framework. DaD is a deep learning-based approach that extends object detection to object attribute prediction as well. We train our model on aPascal train set and evaluate our approach on aPascal test set. We achieve 97.0% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) for object attributes prediction on aPascal test set. We also show qualitative results for object attribute prediction on unseen objects, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for describing unknown objects.

Recent studies have addressed the concern of detecting and rejecting the out-of-distribution (OOD) samples as a major challenge in the safe deployment of deep learning (DL) models. It is desired that the DL model should only be confident about the in-distribution (ID) data which reinforces the driving principle of the OOD detection. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective generalized OOD detection method independent of out-of-distribution datasets. Our approach relies on self-supervised feature learning of the training samples, where the embeddings lie on a compact low-dimensional space. Motivated by the recent studies that show self-supervised adversarial contrastive learning helps robustify the model, we empirically show that a pre-trained model with self-supervised contrastive learning yields a better model for uni-dimensional feature learning in the latent space. The method proposed in this work referred to as RODD outperforms SOTA detection performance on an extensive suite of benchmark datasets on OOD detection tasks. On the CIFAR-100 benchmarks, RODD achieves a 26.97 $\%$ lower false-positive rate (FPR@95) compared to SOTA methods., Comment: Accepted in CVPR Art of Robustness Workshop Proceedings

The problem of simultaneous column and row subset selection is addressed in this paper. The column space and row space of a matrix are spanned by its left and right singular vectors, respectively. However, the singular vectors are not within actual columns/rows of the matrix. In this paper, an iterative approach is proposed to capture the most structural information of columns/rows via selecting a subset of actual columns/rows. This algorithm is referred to as two-way spectrum pursuit (TWSP) which provides us with an accurate solution for the CUR matrix decomposition. TWSP is applicable in a wide range of applications since it enjoys a linear complexity w.r.t. number of original columns/rows. We demonstrated the application of TWSP for joint channel and sensor selection in cognitive radio networks, informative users and contents detection, and efficient supervised data reduction.

In agriculture, the search for higher net profit is the main challenge in the economy of the producers and nano biochar attracts increasing interest in recent years due to its unique environmental behavior and increasing the productivity of plants by inducing resistance against phytopathogens. The effect of rice straw biochar and fly ash nanoparticles (RSBNPs and FNPs, respectively) in combination with compost soil on bacterial leaf spot of pepper caused by Xanthomonascampestris pv. vesicatoria was investigated both in vitro and in vivo. The application of nanoparticles as soil amendment significantly improved the chili pepper plant growth. However, RSBNPs were more effective in enhancing the above and belowground plant biomass production. Moreover, both RSBNPs and FNPs, significantly reduced (30.5 and 22.5%, respectively), while RSBNPs had shown in vitro growth inhibition of X.campestris pv. vesicatoria by more than 50%. The X-ray diffractometry of RSBNPs and FNPs highlighted the unique composition of nano forms which possibly contributed in enhancing the plant defence against invading X.campestris pv. vesicatoria. Based on our findings, it is suggested that biochar and fly ash nanoparticles can be used for reclaiming the problem soil and enhance crop productivity depending upon the nature of the soil and the pathosystem under investigation.

Chromothripsis is a form of genomic instability characterized by the occurrence of tens to hundreds of clustered DNA double-strand breaks in a one-off catastrophic event. Rearrangements associated with chromothripsis are detectable in numerous tumor entities and linked with poor prognosis in some of these, such as Sonic Hedgehog medulloblastoma, neuroblastoma and osteosarcoma. Hence, there is a need for therapeutic strategies eliminating tumor cells with chromothripsis. Defects in DNA double-strand break repair, and in particular homologous recombination repair, have been linked with chromothripsis. Targeting DNA repair deficiencies by synthetic lethality approaches, we performed a synergy screen using drug libraries (n = 375 compounds, 15 models) combined with either a PARP inhibitor or cisplatin. This revealed a synergistic interaction between the HDAC inhibitor romidepsin and PARP inhibition. Functional assays, transcriptome analyses, and in vivo validation in patient-derived xenograft mouse models confirmed the efficacy of the combinatorial treatment.

In vitro assays for clustered DNA lesions will facilitate the analysis of the mechanisms underlying complex genome rearrangements such as chromothripsis, including the recruitment of repair factors to sites of DNA double-strand breaks. We present a novel method generating localized DNA double-strand breaks using UV-irradiation with photomasks. The size of the damage foci and the spacing between lesions are fully adjustable, making the assay suitable for different cell types and targeted areas. We validated this set-up with genomically stable epithelial cells, normal fibroblasts, pluripotent stem cells and patient-derived primary cultures. Our method does not require a specialized device such as a laser, making it accessible to a broad range of users. Sensitization by BrdU incorporation is not required, which enables analyzing the DNA damage response in post-mitotic cells. Irradiated cells can be cultivated further, followed by time-lapse imaging or used for downstream biochemical analyses, thanks to the high-throughput of the system. Importantly, we showed genome rearrangements in the irradiated cells, providing a proof of principle for the induction of structural variants by localized DNA lesions.