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Cholelithiasis is a very common condition affecting the Gallbladder. Gallstones are present in 10 -15 % of the adult population. Females are three times more likely to develop Gallstones than male. Gall stones are classified into cholesterol and pigment stone. About 80% of them are cholesterol stone and 15-20% pigment stone. Obstruction and infections are the common complications of Cholelithiasis. Approximately 1-2% of the patients become symptomatic and warrants cholecystectomy (1). With this background we conducted a cross sectional study in the Institute of Microbiology, MMC & RGGGH, for 72 consecutive patients who underwent cholecystectomy. The most common age group affected 41-60 yrs. The most common symptoms are abdominal pain, dyspepsia and Jaundice. In this study Gallstones are collected after surgery, processed and Antibiogram pattern also studied as per standard guidelines. Out of 72 samples studied 35 (48.6%) are culture positive. Escherichia coli is the predominant organism isolated followed by Klebsiella pneumonia(52). Most of the isolates were sensitive to commonly used antibiotics for Gram Negative bacilli.

Bilateral filter is an edge-preserving smoother that has applications in image processing, computer vision, and computational photography. In the past, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations of the filter have been proposed that can achieve high throughput using parallelization and pipelining. An inherent limitation with direct implementations is that their complexity scales as $O(\omega ^2)$ with the filter width $\omega$ . In this paper, we propose an FPGA implementation of a fast bilateral filter that requires just $O(1)$ operations for any arbitrary $\omega$ . The attractive feature of the FPGA implementation is that it is both scalable and reconfigurable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scalable FPGA implementation of the bilateral filter. As an application, we use the FPGA implementation for image denoising.

Single crystals of undoped (pure) glycine potassium sulphate (GPS) and sodium sulphate doped glycine potassium sulphate have been grown by the free evaporation method and the grown crystals have been characterized by various studies. Effect of sodium sulphate on the properties of glycine potassium sulphate (GPS) has been investigated here. X-ray diffraction analysis indicates the structure of the crystals as orthorhombic. The functional groups have been identified using Fourier transform infrared spectral analysis. The UV –Vis-NIR spectral analysis shows that these crystals have their cut off wavelength around 200 nm. Second Harmonic generation (SHG) measurement shows that the grown crystals are NLO crystals. Microhardness measurement was carried out for samples. Solubility was measured for both the samples at different temperatures. LDT of the samples have been determined. Due to doping, there is an increase in optical transparency, microhardness, LDT and solubility of the GPS crystals., {"references":["1.\tM. N. Bhat and S. M. Dharmaprakash, J. Cryst. Growth 235 (2002)511-516\t. 2.\tA. Deepathyand H. L. Bhat, J.Cryst.Growth226 (2001)287-293. 3.\tR. Rajasekaran, P. M. Ushashree, R. Jayavel and P. Ramasamy, J.Cryst.Growth229 (2001)563-567. 4.\tG. Albrecht, R. B. Corey, J.Am.Chem.Soc.61, 1087(1939) 5.\tE. Fischer, Ber.Deutsch.Chem.Ges.38, 2917 (1905) 6.\tY. Iitaka, Acta.Cryst.11, 25 (1958) 7.\tY. Iitaka, Acta.Cryst.14,1 (1961) 8.\tM. N. Bhat and S.M. Dharmaprakash, J. Cryst.Growth236 (2002) 376-380. 9.\tJ. K. Mohan Rao and M.A. Vishwamitra, ActaCrystallogr. B 28 (1972) 1484. 10.\tS. A. Martin Britto and S. Natarajan, Mater. Lett. 62(2008) 2633-2636. 11.\tRa. Shanmugavadivu, G. Ravi and A. Nixon Azariah, J.Phys. and Chem. Solids 67 (2006) 1858-1861. 12.\tM. R. Suresh Kumar, H. J. Ravindra and S. M. Dharmaprakash, J. Cryst. Growth 306 (2007) 361-365. 13.\tT. Balakrishnan and K. Ramamurthi, Spectrochim. Acta Part A 68 (2007) 360-363. 14.\tT. Balakrishnan and K. Ramamurthi, Mater. Lett. 62(2008) 65-68. 15.\tR. Pepinsky, K. Vedam and Y. Okaya, Phys .Rev. 110(1958) 1309-1311. 16.\tS. Hoshino, T. Mitsui, F. Jona and R. Pepinsky, Phys.Rev. 107(1957) 1255-1258. 17.\tH. Lipson and H. Steeple Interpretation of X-ray power Diffraction Patterns, MacMillan, New York, 1970. 18.\tS. K. Kurtz and T. T. Perry, J. Appl. Crystallography 9 (1968) 3798-3813. 19.\tR. S. Krishnan, K. Sankaranarayanan and K. Krishnan, J.Indian Inst. Sci. 55 (1973) 313. 20.\tU. Le. Fur, R. Masse, M. Z. Cherkaoui and J. K. Nicoud, Z. Kristallogr. 210 (1995) 856. 21.\tP. N. Kotru, A. K. Razdan, B. M. Wanklyn, J. Matter. Sci. 24 (1989)793. 22.\tJ. B. Charles, F. D. Gnanam, J. Matter. Sci. Lett. 12 (1993) 1395."]}

Deaf or hard-of-hearing people mostly rely on lip-reading to understand speech. They demonstrate the ability of humans to understand speech from visual cues only. Automatic lip reading systems work in a similar fashion - by obtaining speech or text from just the visual information, like a video of a person's face. In this paper, an automatic lip reading system for spoken digit recognition is presented. The system uses simple dynamic features by creating difference images between consecutive frames of the video input. Using this technique, word recognition rates of 83.79 and 65.58 are achieved in speaker-dependent and speaker-independent testing scenarios, respectively. A novel, extended region-of-interest (ROI) which includes lower jaw and neck region is also introduced. Most lip-reading algorithms use only the mouth/lip region for relevant feature extraction. Over simple mouth as the ROI, the proposed ROI improves the performance by 4 in speaker-dependent tests and by 11 in speaker-independent tests. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

Single crystals of Potassium Ammonium Sulphate (PAS) have been grown by the free evaporation method and characterized structurally, electrically, optically and mechanically. X-ray diffraction analysis indicates the crystal system as orthorhombic .The functional groups have been identified using Fourier transform infrared spectral analysis. UV-visible transmittance spectra showed wide transparency window in visible and near IR region. The hardness values of the grown sample have been found by Vickers microhardness test. Studies of electrical properties of PAS crystal using a complex impedance spectroscopy (CIS) technique show the decrease of bulk resistance with rise in temperature indicating a typical negative temperature coefficient of resistance (NTCR) type behavior similar to that of an insulator. The nature of Nyquist plots reveals the presence of bulk and grain boundary effects in PAS crystal. Moreover, the variation in dc conductivity is found to increase with temperature.

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) deals with the task of extracting speech information from visual cues from a person's face while speaking. Accurate lip segmentation and modeling are essential in any VSR algorithm for good feature extraction. However, lip modeling is a complicated task and is not very robust in natural conditions. This paper describes a novel technique for limited vocabulary visual-only speech recognition that does not use lip modeling. For visual feature extraction, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) have been tested. An Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) multi-class model using Support Vector Machine (SVM) binary learners is used for recognition and classification of words.

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are biopolymers synthesized by bacteria under unbalanced growth conditions. These biopolymers are considered as potential biomaterials for future applications because they are biocompatible, biodegradable, and easy to produce and functionalize with strong mechanical strength. Currently, PHAs are being extensively innovated for biomedical applications due to their prerequisite properties. The wide range of biomedical applications includes drug delivery systems, implants, tissue engineering, scaffolds, artificial organ constructs, etc. In this article we review the utility of PHAs in various forms (bulk/nano) for biomedical applications so as to bring about the future vision for PHAs as biomaterials for the advancement of research and technology.

Correction for ‘Polyhydroxyalkanoates as biomaterials’ by Bhagyashri S. Thorat Gadgil et al., Med. Chem. Commun., 2017, 8, 1774–1787.

Background/Objectives: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important aspect of Human-Computer Interaction systems which is widely used in different sectors like healthcare, robotics, automatic call centres and distance education. Speech emotion recognition involves in depth analysis of the signal and identifying the appropriate emotion based on its trained database using extracted features. Method/Statistical Analysis: This paper aims in devising SER system using linear prediction of the causal part of the autocorrelation sequence (OSALPC) algorithm which has been proven to efficiently reduce noise along with Linear Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (LFCC), Linear Predictive Coding (LPC), MFCC, LPC using cepstrum for feature extraction. After extracting the feature vectors from the voice signal, it is modelled using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The MAP (Maximum a posteriori) rule is used for decision making. Findings: Performance was analysed and our proposed system showed an overall efficiency of 89% when tested on German database (Emo-DB) for 7 emotions. The overall efficiency has proven to increase compared to the studies made up to date on the German Database. The highest emotion recognition rate was for SAD using fused algorithm which was 95.56%. Also results were tabulated and compared using Modified MFCC. A Graphical unit interface of the proposed system is also devised. Application/Improvements: The applications of speech emotion recognition are farfetched. Further scope of this work will be a comparison of the achieved recognition rate using algorithms with recognition rate achieved by humans.

Enhanced Local Ternary Patterns (ELTP) significantly improves performance over other feature descriptor methods including Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Local Ternary Patterns (LTP). Sequential implementation of ELTP results in poor performance in terms of execution time for real time systems. Speed and accuracy are important characteristics of a real time face recognition system. With the aim of fulfilling both these criteria, this paper presents an implementation of GPU Accelerated Face Recognition System with ELTP using OpenCL framework. As a result of our Optimization techniques, we have achieved highest kernel execution speedup of 374x for ELTP image and histogram generation with 4096 x H 4096 (16MP) image resolution when it is implemented on GPU. Face recognition with ELTP showed higher recognition rates on ORL database. We also implemented LBP and LTP algorithms on GPU and compared their performances with ELTP. Similar Optimization techniques were applied for LBP kernel executions, which resulted in much higher speedups when compared to their previous implementations. Experimental results demonstrated that Parallel implementation with ELTP on GPU (AMD Radeon HD 7650M) outperforms CPU based face recognition system using LBP in terms of speed and accuracy.

Egg albumen (EA), a highly functional globular protein with desirable properties, is the least-explored material for biomaterial applications, although it is available in abundance. In our studies, we explored the viability of EA and various blends with biocompatible and non-toxic poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) to produce nanofibers for biomedical applications. EA and PVA blends were prepared in various compositions. Electrospinning was used to fabricate non-woven nanofibers. Solution properties, such as viscosity and electrical conductivity, were evaluated for various prepared solutions. Solution viscosity increased with increasing polymer concentration. Solutions with higher contents of EA recorded increased conductivity, which decreased with increasing PVA content. The influence of solution properties on the morphological appearance of as-spun products was studied using scanning electron microscopy. Instead of nanofibers, nanoparticles and microparticles of EA were produced at even higher contents. In contrast, a gradual increase in the addition of PVA content to 8% EA solution resulted in the transformation of particles from large agglomerates to very fine fibers (≈100 nm in diameter) because of the influence of polymer content, viscosity and conductivity. The polymer–polymer interactions in the prepared materials have been validated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction and gel electrophoresis. In our studies, we explored the viability of egg albumen (EA) and its blend poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) to produce nanofibers for biomedical applications. EA and PVA blends were prepared in various compositions. Electrospinning was used for fabrication of non-woven nanofibers. EA showed nanoparticles and microparticles instead of nanofibers at even higher contents. In contrast, a gradual increase in the addition of PVA content to 8% EA solution resulted in the transformation of nanoparticles from large agglomerates to very fine fibers (≈100 nm).

Distributed processing is a new paradigm to analyse the huge volume of video data in camera networks. This paper addresses the problem of distributed single target tracking considering false positives and missed detections. Target tracking is modelled as a dynamic state estimation problem with nonlinear process and measurement model. We propose to use the sigma point information filters combined with a consensus algorithm. Sigma point information filters are integrated with probabilistic data association filter to deal with false positives and missed detections. We use a distributed average consensus algorithm which converges in finite time. Unlike other related state of the art technique papers, we report results on real data and show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper presents a real-time face recognition system using kinect sensor. The algorithm is implemented on GPU using opencl and significant speed improvements are observed. We use kinect depth image to increase the robustness and reduce computational cost of conventional LBP based face recognition. The main objective of this paper was to perform robust, high speed fusion based face recognition and tracking. The algorithm is mainly composed of three steps. First step is to detect all faces in the video using viola jones algorithm. The second step is online database generation using a tracking window on the face. A modified LBP feature vector is calculated using fusion information from depth and greyscale image on GPU. This feature vector is used to train a svm classifier. Third step involves recognition of multiple faces based on our modified feature vector.

Tetraology of Fallot is the most common congenital heart disease causing intracardiac right-left shunts. It is characterized by presence of ventricular septal defect, aortic overriding, pulmonary artery outflow obstruction and right ventricular hypertrophy. When these features are associated with atrial septal defect, it is often referred to as Pentology of Fallot (POF). If the lesions remain uncorrected, they can cause significant morbidity and mortality to the patient. Pregnancy and labour in such a patient present with significant haemodynamic changes, which can be challenging to the anaesthesiologist. Our patient with POF was managed with labour analgesia and subsequently epidural anaesthesia for drainage of vulval haematoma with successful outcome.

This paper presents a novel approach for real time face detection using heterogeneous computing. The algorithm uses local binary pattern (LBP) as feature vector for face detection. OpenCL is used to accelerate the code using GPU[1]. Illuminance invariance is achieved using gamma correction and Difference of Gaussian(DOG) to make the algorithm robust against varying lighting conditions. This implementation is compared with previous parallel implementation and is found to perform faster.

With the advent of Internet, video over IP is gaining popularity. In such an enviroment, scalability and fault tolerance will be the key issues. Existing video on demand (VoD) service systems [1], [2], [3] are usually neither scalable nor tolerant to server faults and hence fail to comply to multi-user, failure-prone networks such as the Internet. Current research areas concerning VoD often focus on increasing the throughput and reliability of single server, but rarely addresses the smooth provision of service during server as well as network failures. Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool), being capable of providing high availability by using multiple redundant servers as single source point, can be a solution to overcome the above failures. During a possible server failure, the continuity of service is retained by another server. In order to achieve transparent failover, efficient state sharing is an important requirement. In this paper, we present an elegant, simple, efficient and scalable approach which has been developed to facilitate the transfer of state by the client itself, using extended cookie mechanism, which ensures that there is no noticeable change in disruption or the video quality.

Biodegradability and enhanced biocompatibility with pH-sensitivity of hydrogels are becoming very important issues for biomaterials applications so as to minimize the host-body reactions such as, inflammatory, antigenic, and immunogenic problems. This study involves development of hydrogel matrices of gelatin conjugated/modified with highly hydrophilic, pH-sensitive and biocompatible polymer, poly (2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) and glyoxylic acid respectively. Various compositions of gelatin conjugated/modified with poly (2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) (gp) and glyoxylic acid (gg) were synthesized. The swelling kinetics, cell viability and drug release capability from the gels at pH 4.5 and 7.4 were investigated. The results of swelling kinetics showed that, both the degree of swelling (DS) and the maximum degree of swelling (MDS) increased as function of modification (increase in modification) and pH with an increase of time, which is due to increase in ionic groups. The drug-release (1% chlorhexidine) studies at pH 7.4 and 4.5 confirmed a proportional drug release with an increase in degree of swelling. The results of in-vitro cytotoxicity tests using mouse embryonic 3T3 fibroblast cells indicated, an improved cell viability for gelatin gels conjugated/modified with poly (2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) (gp) and glyoxylic acid (gg) gels, when compared with 1% glutaraldehyde cross-linked gelatin gels (gx). Hence, cross-linked gelatin gels can be replaced with gp/gg for potential use in biomedical applications as a matrix for drug delivery.

Why stars become red giants has been a subject of investigation in many contexts, most recently in the discovery of the progenitor of the Supernova 1987A. Sanduleak 69°202 was found to be a blue supergiant star although it was generally presumed that type II SNe arise from red supergiants. Immediately after SN1987A, it was suggested that the blue spectral nature was due to lower metallicity in the LMC (Z = ZΘ/3 - ZΘ/4) although the existence of many red supergiants in the 30 Doradus region where SN1987A took place and in particular the observation of low-velocity nitrogen-rich gas presumed to be a circumstellar shell indicates that mass loss may also have played a significant role in bringing SK 69°202 from red to blue. We report here work in progress on the evolution of massive stars in the LMC with and without mass loss which can ultimately produce type II SNe.