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This study aimed to distinguish the various types of informational text structure present in the text data. Classification of informational text structure in a given text is an essential area of research for discovering knowledge present in the text content. Several previous studies defined a set of categories of informational text structure which can be identified based on their respective signal words. The paper proposed a methodology for automatic extraction of those text informational structures from school textbook data. The task was to classify a text into one or more of the given predefined categories. Human annotators have performed the categorization, who have sufficient domain knowledge about the subjects of the book. For automatic classification, the occurrence frequency of the signal words was used as a feature vector. A Naive Bayes based classifier was trained using 120 manually annotated text data. Forty text data was used to test the classifier. The classifier had a precision rate of 92% and F1 score of 95.6%.

Background and Aims: To study the clinical profile of genetically proven Huntington's disease (HD) patients from eastern India. Methods: This cross sectional study selected patients of HD after genetic confirmation of expanded CAG repeats in Huntingtin (HTT) gene. We performed detail clinical evaluation including cognitive and neuropsychological assessment, and imaging of brain. Results: This study included 75 patients (male: 57.3%; female: 42.7%). Mean age at onset was 37.12 (range 16-62) years; juvenile variety (onset below 20 years) was detected in 5.3%. Paternal transmission was commoner. Manifestations at onset were motor in 81.3% patients, behavioral in 10.7% and cognitive impairment in 8%. After chorea, next common movement disorder was dystonia. Frontal lobe dysfunction was found in 77.3% patients. Behavioral disturbances were observed in 77.3% patients and commonly manifested as depression, irritable behavior and anxiety. Among the three onset groups (motor/behavioral/cognitive), there was no significant difference regarding age at onset, gender distribution, pattern of inheritance (paternal/maternal), and at the time of evaluation, all groups had essentially similar pattern of clinical features. Mean CAG repeat of the patients was 48.25 (range 40-79). Our study showed some differing clinical characteristics compared to previous studies from the Indian subcontinent. Conclusion: Clinical features in our study showed differences from previous studies from the Indian subcontinent. We had more cognitive-onset patients. However, behavioral onset was lower in our study. Motor, behavioral and cognitive onset groups of HD were comparable regarding demographics, family history, CAG repeat lengths and major clinical features at the time of evaluation.

Dopa-responsive dystonia (DRD), a movement disorder, is characterized by young onset dystonia and dramatic response to levodopa treatment. However, the wide range of phenotypic spectrum of the disease often leads to misdiagnosis. DRD is usually caused by mutation in GCH1 gene coding for GTP cyclohydrolase 1 (GTPCH1) enzyme, which is involved in biosynthesis of tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) and dopamine. In this study, the entire GCH1 gene was screened in 14 Indian DRD patients and their family members. A family was identified where the proband was found to be a compound heterozygote for GCH1 (p.R184H and p.V204I) variants; the former variant being inherited from the father and the latter from the mother. All other family members harboring one of these GCH1 variants were asymptomatic except for one (heterozygous for p.R184H) who was diagnosed with DRD. In silico analyses predicted these two variants to be pathogenic and disruptive to GCH1enzymatic activity. This proband was misdiagnosed as cerebral palsy and remained untreated for 25 years. He developed retrograde movements and gait problems in lower limbs, deformity in upper limbs, and difficulty in swallowing, and became mute. However, most of his symptoms were alleviated upon levodopa administration. Our study confirms the variability of DRD phenotype and the reduced penetrance of GCH1 mutations. It also emphasizes the need of molecular diagnostic test and L-dopa trial especially for those with atypical DRD phenotype.

Background Parkinson's disease (PD) is a multifaceted illness affecting ~ 0.3% of the world population. The genetic complexity of PD has not been, fully elucidated. Several studies suggest that mitochondrial DNA variants are associated with PD. Objective Here, we have explored the possibility of genetic association between mitochondrial haplogroups as well as three independent SNPs with PD in a representative east Indian population. Methods and material The Asian mtDNA haplogroups: M, N, R, B, D, M7, and 3 other SNPs: 4336 T/C, 9055 G/A, 13708 G/A were genotyped in 100 sporadic PD patients and 100 matched controls via conventional PCR-RFLP-sequencing approach. Results The distribution of mtDNA haplogroups, as well as 3 single polymorphisms, did not show any significant differences (P > 0.05) between patients and controls. Conclusion This is the first of its kind of study from India that suggests no association of selected mitochondrial DNA variations with PD.

Introduction GBA mutations have been reported in PD, PDD and DLB - but not associated with cognitive impairment for example in PSP, AD or MSA. However, frequencies of GBA mutations are ethnicity dependent. The present study aims to identify commonly reported GBA mutations (mostly from Asia), among eastern Indian patients with neurodegenerative disorders. Methods The patient cohort consisting of 198 classical PD cases, 136 PD cases with cognitive impairment, 184 cases with Parkinson Plus syndrome, 46 AD and 241 unrelated controls, from eastern India. Subjects were analyzed for IVS2 + 1A > G, p.Arg120Trp, p.His255Gln, p.Arg257Gln, p.Glu326Lys, p.Asn370Ser, p.Asp409His, p.Leu444Pro, & RecNciI by PCR-RFLP techniques and confirmed by Sanger sequencing method. Results We have identified only p.Leu444Pro variant among nine cases; three PDD, one DLB, two PD, two PSP and one AD patients in heterozygous condition. The highest frequency for p.Leu444Pro variant was found among PDD subgroup (3.95 %, P = 0.0134). An overall significant overrepresentation of positive family history (P = 0.000049), impaired recent memory (P = 0.0123) was observed among p.Leu444Pro carriers. Further, subgroup analysis for PD, PD-MCI and PDD, revealed statistically significant higher frequency of early age at onset (P = 0.0455), positive family history (P = 0.0025), higher UPDRS III score (off state) (P = 0.006), advanced H&Y stage (P = 0.045) and anxious behaviour (P = 0.0124) among p.Leu444Pro positive patients. Conclusion The p.Leu444Pro mutation of GBA was found in patients with PD, PDD, DLB, PSP and AD. An Overall higher frequency of positive family history and impaired recent memory are significantly associated with for p.Leu444Pro carriers from eastern India. Our study also ascertains contribution of p.Leu444Pro to an earlier onset of PD, PD-MCI and PDD, higher UPDRS III score (off state) against positive family history background. Furthermore, taking into consideration other Indian studies, we can conclude that p.Leu444Pro mutation plays a limited role in PD and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The proposed work analyzes the cognitive complexity of given text-based learning material. Cognitive complexity refers to the thinking skills that are required to process the information which is present in the content of the text. A standard methodology to identify cognitive complexity is the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, as observed from the experiments that some of the action verbs are often present in multiple cognitive levels causing ambiguity about the true sense of cognition. To overcome this drawback, signal words of informational text structure has been used as an added feature. Based on both cognitive action verbs of Bloom’s Taxonomy and signal words together, a computational approach using the SVM model has been used for an experiment on the NCERT dataset. It was observed that using signal words as an additional feature has significantly improved the classification task as compared to using only Bloom’s Taxonomy action verbs.

Aims: To evaluate the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), to determine their correlation with types and stages of dementia and patient demographics, and to assess the impact on caregiver distress. Methods: This cross-sectional study recruited consecutive dementia patients and caregivers who attended our cognitive clinic. Standard criteria were used to classify types of dementia. BPSD were assessed with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory, and its distress scale was used for caregiver distress. Results: Of a total 107 patients, nearly all (99.1%) had at least one BPSD; 71% had ≥4 symptoms. Most frequent were apathy and agitation, followed by irritability, sleep and appetite disorders, and mood disorders; disinhibition and euphoria were least frequent. BPSD were less prominent with increasing age; males showed more agitation. Apathy and eating disorders were more prevalent in the rural community. BPSD were highest in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), followed by dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), and least in vascular dementia. Hallucinations were more common in DLB, aberrant motor behaviour in FTD. All domains of BPSD, except for anxiety and euphoria, were more prominent with increasing severity of dementia. Increasing BPSD (except for euphoria) caused higher caregiver distress. Conclusion: BPSD are universally present, bear correlates with dementia type and severity, and cause significant caregiver distress.

In today's age of virtually instantaneous access to a vast repository of knowledge and information, learning resources are often considered as key intellectual property in a competitive world, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing e learning resources over the Internet openly and without cost, as open educational resources OER . But in student's learning domain it got reverse impact even in spite of several favourable impact, depending on how prudently is used,as it leads to unsupervised education system and that may prone to develop misconception.This study is fashioned to create a scalable intervention to measure the relationship between the e learningand its propersubset blended learning of the students of higher education, perceived by their teachers. To address this issue college teachers ofKolkata WB constitute the population. A sample of 200 teachers were selected. A16 items self developed questionnaire r = 0.87362 was used to measure the teachers' perception aboute learning and blended learning of their students. The obtained data were analysed and interpreted by using descriptive statistics, t test, and one way ANOVA. The result reveals blended learning encourages healthy learning to the students. Shyamal Kumar Das | Radheswar Roy "A Critical Study on the Relationship between E-Learning & its Proper Subset Blended Learning in Higher Education" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-1 | Issue-6 , October 2017, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd4711.pdf

Background Wilson's disease (WD) is a rare copper metabolism disorder with hepatic and neurological symptoms. Dopamine β hydroxylase (DBH) encodes a copper-dependent mono-oxygenase that converts dopamine to norepinephrine, thereby regulating the endogenous dopamine content in the neurons. Polymorphisms of DBH have been reported to be associated with several neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which have overlapping neurological symptoms with WD. The present study aimed to assess the role of DBH polymorphisms on the clinical course of WD. Methods In total, 141 WD patients from India were included in the present study. Three polymorphisms of DBH (rs1611115 in the promoter, rs1108580 in exon 2 and rs129882 in 3'-UTR) were screened for their association with the clinical attributes (hepatic and neurological features) and age of onset of WD using a polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphsm method and sequencing approach. The distribution of genotype or allele frequencies was tested using 2 × 2 contingency chi-squared and logistic regression analysis (additive, dominant and recessive model). Results The genotypic and allelic frequencies of these single nucleotide polymophisms did not vary significantly along with the clinical symptoms (hepatic and neurological) or the age of onset of WD. No significant association was observed when we analyzed our samples with respect to harboring different kinds of ATP7B mutations (nonsense/in-del and missense). Conclusions The data obtained in the present study suggest that the selected DBH variants are unlikely to have any significant contribution towards modifying the clinical symptoms of Indian WD patients.

Background: Frontal assessment battery (FAB) was devised as a specific study design to assess frontal lobe dysfunction. Since Parkinson's disease (PD) is often associated with cognitive and other higher mental function complications, FAB test has been carried out by a number of workers to assess the integrity of the frontal lobe. On the other hand, the other frequently conducted test, performed in order to evaluate the mental status, is the Mini Mental State examination of Folstein (MMSE), but its reliability has been questioned in PD, since it does not assess the functions of the frontal lobe alone. Material and Methods: The present study was undertaken in order to assess the suitability of application of the FAB test in Indian patients and to perform its comparative analysis with the MMSE scale. Results and Conclusions: It was observed that the FAB test correlated with the age and the level of education of the patient. The results also correlated with that of the MMSE study, in spite of the fact that the latter is not considered to be a test which can assess exclusively the status of the frontal lobe. To the best of our knowledge, this is first study undertaken in India in this regard.

Owing to the antihemostatic property of viper venom, hemorrhagic complications including intracerebral hemorrhage are the most commonly encountered after viper bite. Ischemic strokes have been rarely reported after viper envenomation, and its occurrence has been attributed to multiple mechanisms. Postsnakebite seizures are known to occur after neurotoxic bite. Here, we report the case of a viper bite victim who developed status epilepticus within 3 h after viper bite. He had only mild signs of local envenomation, and prolonged whole blood clotting time was the only manifestation of systemic envenomation. Subsequently, he was found to have developed right hemiparesis and global aphasia. Brain imaging revealed large infarcts in bilateral middle cerebral artery (MCA) territories. We report this as a unique case of viper bite which presented to the emergency room with status epilepticus. Moreover, bilateral MCA infarct, as was found in this case, is genuinely rare in scientific literature. Finally, the absence of overt features of envenomation makes this case stand out from other similar reported occurrences.

Background Mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes, the most common maternally inherited mitochondrial disease, can present with a wide range of neurological manifestations including both central and peripheral nervous system involvement. The most frequent genetic mutation reported in mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes syndrome is A3243G in MT-TL1 gene. Stroke-like episodes, dementia, epilepsy, lactic acidemia, myopathy, recurrent headaches, hearing impairment, diabetes, and short stature constitute the known presentations in this syndrome. Among the abnormal involuntary movements in mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes syndrome, myoclonus is the commonest. Other movement disorders, including chorea, are rarely reported in this disorder. Case presentation A 14-year-old South Asian boy from rural Bengal (India), born of a second degree consanguineous marriage, with normal birth and development history, presented with abnormal brief jerky movements involving his trunk and limbs, with recurrent falls for 10 months. We present here a case of heteroplasmic mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes syndrome with A3251G mutation, in which the clinical picture was dominated by a host of involuntary abnormal movements including chorea-ballism, myoclonus, and oromandibular dystonia in a backdrop of cognitive decline, seizure, and stroke-like episode. A final diagnosis was established by muscle biopsy and genetic study. Haloperidol was administered to control the involuntary movements along with introduction of co-enzyme Q, besides symptomatic management for his focal seizures. Six months into follow-up his seizures and abnormal movements were controlled significantly with slight improvement of cognitive abilities. Conclusion The dominance of hyperkinetic movements in the clinical scenario and the finding of a point mutation A3251G in MT-TL1 gene make this a rare presentation.

We have developed an embedded software application, especially for health-conscious people concerned with air pollution. It helps to search an optimal path based on the concentration of pollutants in the air from available alternatives. The interface takes the advantage of Google Map Application Programming Interface (API) which is widely used for localization and navigation. In this article, we present a software development framework based on an Android Platform that displays real-time ambient air quality from data acquisition systems installed on roadways. It also recommends the users to find out the best path with minimum pollution index. The proposed system is simulated globally based on synthetically generated data, while locally verified with sensor data using a wireless local area network based cloud server. The optimization algorithm is provided, which provides the optimal path.

In this paper, we present a novel formulation of exemplar-based image inpainting as a metric labeling problem, and solve it through the simulated annealing algorithm. Due to their greedy nature, exemplar-based methods sometimes produce inpainted images, which are visually inconsistent. These methods are highly dependent upon the initialization. To solve these problems, we generate five images with a different initialization. A suitable mixture of these five images produces a good inpainted image. The cost function of the proposed metric labeling problem consists of three components, namely, neighbor cost, total variation cost, and structure cost. A linear combination among these components is used to maintain better visual consistency in the inpainted region having smooth transition from the bordering regions of the source image. We use a quality measure to this end. Our experiments on a wide variety of images demonstrate that the proposed technique produces better inpainting images as compared with some other state-of-the-art techniques.

Objectives Increase in aging population is expected to lead to increasing prevalence of dementia in India. In this study, we aimed to determine prevalence, incidence, and mortality of dementia and its subtypes and assess dementia burden in terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALY). Methods A community study was conducted over 5 years (2003-2008) in Kolkata, India, on 100,802 (males 53,209) randomly selected subjects to assess prevalence and capture data on incident cases and deaths. Standard case definitions were used. The data were used to estimate years of life lost (YLL) due to premature mortality, years of life lived with disability (YLD), and DALY, based on Global Burden of Disease 2010 approach. Results During 2003-2004, there were 103 (men 55) cases of dementia. The prevalence was 1.53% (age adjusted 1.12%) at age ≥65 years. In those ≥55 years age, average annual incidence rate of dementia was 72.57 per 100,000. All-cause standardized mortality ratio in dementia cases was 4.74 (men 6.19, women 3.03). The burden of dementia in 2007-2008 revealed that overall YLL was 47.13 per 100,000 and YLD ranged from 1.87 to 16.95 per 100,000 depending on the clinical severity of dementia. The overall DALY lost per 100,000 due to dementia for the year 2007-2008 was 74.19. Conclusions This community study revealed a low prevalence and incidence of dementia with consequent low DALY-derived burden of illness compared with many industrialized nations. YLL formed major component of DALY indicating premature mortality to be an outcome of dementia burden. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Background: The rising incidence of stroke in India indicates the importance of evaluating the existing knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) in the community, which is essential for stroke control. Objective: To explore and compare stroke-related KAP among participants from stroke-affected families (SAFs) and nonstroke-affected families (NSFs). Design: Using stratified random sampling, a three-phase house-to-house survey was conducted in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. First, field investigators screened subjects of stroke; second, the neurologist confirmed positive cases; and third, under supervision of the neuropsychologist, a validated questionnaire on KAP was administered to participants from SAFs and age-matched NSAFs from the same neighborhood. Results: The KAP questionnaire was administered to 282 participants each from both groups. Knowledge about stroke prevailed in 97% participants and was significantly higher in the SAF group. Both SAF and NSAF groups had better knowledge about prominent symptoms of stroke (loss of consciousness and paralysis) and admitted it as emergency situation requiring hospitalization and that it was potentially preventable. Those persons belonging to the SAF group, however, had lesser knowledge of the risk factors such as diabetes (P < 0.001), smoking (P < 0.014), alcoholism (P < .0.0001), family history (P < .0.0001) and mild stroke symptoms such as headache, (P < 0.001), vomiting (P < 0.001), and fits (P 0.003) as compared to the NSAF group. Conclusions: Persons from both SAF and non-SAF groups are aware about stroke but possess lesser knowledge about the many symptoms of stroke and risk factors, indicating the necessity of enhancement of existence knowledge on symptoms for better diagnosis and of risk factors for better prevention.

Currently, the stroke incidence in India is much higher than Western industrialized countries. Large vessel intracranial atherosclerosis is the commonest cause of ischemic stroke in India. The common risk factors, that is, hypertension, diabetes, smoking, and dyslipidemia are quite prevalent and inadequately controlled; mainly because of poor public awareness and inadequate infrastructure. Only a small number of ischemic stroke cases are able to have the benefit of thrombolytic therapy. Benefits from stem cell therapy in established stroke cases are under evaluation. Presently, prevention of stroke is the best option considering the Indian scenario through control and/or avoiding risk factors of stroke. Interventional studies are an important need for this scenario.

Cognitive learning complexity identification of assessment questions is an essential task in the domain of education, as it helps both the teacher and the learner to discover the thinking process required to answer a given question. Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive levels are considered as a benchmark standard for the classification of cognitive thinking (learning complexity) in an educational environment. However, it was observed that some of the action verbs of Bloom’s Taxonomy are overlapping in multiple levels of the hierarchy, causing ambiguity about the real sense of cognition required. The paper describes two methodologies to automatically identify the cognitive learning complexity of given questions. The first methodology uses labelled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as a machine learning approach. The second methodology uses the BERT framework for multi-class text classification for deep learning. The experiments were performed on an ensemble of 3000+ educational questions, which were based on previously published datasets along with the TREC question corpus and AI2 Biology How/Why question corpus datasets. The labelled LDA reached an accuracy of 83% while BERT based approach reached 89% accuracy. An analysis of both the results is shown, evaluating the significant factors responsible for determining cognitive knowledge.

Background & objectives Parkinsonian disorder, including Parkinson's disease (PD), is an aetiologically complex neurodegenerative disorder. Mutations in leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) gene have been implicated in an autosomal dominant form of PD with variable penetrance. The identification of a common LRRK2 variant (p.Gly2019Ser) in dementia with Lewy bodies indicated its potential role in Parkinsonian disorder. The current study was aimed to identify the p.Gly2019Ser variant in Indian patients with Parkinsonian disorder. Methods The patient group consisting of 412 classical PD patients, 107 PD patients with cognitive impairment, 107 patients with Parkinson plus syndrome and 200 unrelated controls were recruited from eastern part of India. The allele representing p.Gly2019Ser variant was screened by polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. Results The p.Gly2019Ser variant was identified in an East Indian young-onset female PD patient in a heterozygous state having several motor and autonomic problems without disturbed cognition. Her younger brother, sister and elder son harbouring the same mutation were asymptomatic carriers for the variant. However, the influence of DNM3 on decreased disease onset in this family was not clear. Interpretation & conclusions Identification of the p.Gly2019Ser variant in only one patient among a large number of Indian patients (n=626) with Parkinsonian disorder in our study suggests a limited role of the LRRK2 variant towards disease pathogenesis.

Engineering education in India has been facing considerable challenges in regard to good teaching and knowledge deployment. Therefore demands new teaching methods and learning approaches thus must be developed in the field. The present review explores the concept of good teaching practices affecting performance of students in higher education with special reference to engineering education in India. With the advent of new technologies and tools, it is also vital to study the effectiveness of teaching methodologies; therefore, the review is intended to demarcate the factors which can be used to evaluate the good teaching among students. This study also explains the research done on engineering education in India in the past and recognizes the major factors influencing the same.

Restoration of cave paintings is the process of improving visual quality of degraded images. Source-constrained exemplar-based inpainting has been used in this work to restore the images of old degraded cave paintings. A modification to the traditional exemplar-based inpaintings, named PAtch Modified exemplar-based InpainTing (PAMIT), has been proposed. Traditional exemplar-based techniques use fixed patch size, which needs to be adjusted for different images. The proposed technique automates this process of adjustment. Results obtained by the proposed technique have been compared with various other inpainting techniques applied under the same source-constrained framework. The restored images by the proposed technique have been found to be visually better than those obtained by other exemplar-based techniques. In this regard, an objective measure of the BRISQUE score has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Study on use of botulinum toxin A (BTX-A) in subjects with spastic cerebral palsy is rare in Indian literature. So, we planned to observe the role of BTX-A in subjects with spastic cerebral palsy unresponsive to conventional therapy. This open label study was conducted with the approval of Institutional Ethics Committee and parents. A total of 63 cases (age range 1 to 19 years; mean 6.07 years) received the toxin (dose range 50-200 units) after proper assessment based on modified Ashwort h scale, visual analogue scale, passive range of motion with goniometer, physician rating scale and assessment of global functional status. A total of 13 cases were lost in follow up. Out of 50 cases who received the injection, tone and pain reduction was significant in different subgroup of patients. Improvement of functional status was noticed in 10% of cases. Thus, BTX-A is effective in reduction of tone and pain, but significant func tional improvement was noted in a limited number of cases.

In this paper the place and manner of articulation based phonological features are detected and classified. Deep Neural Network based model has been used for detection and classification task. The deep structured model is pre-trained by stacked denoising autoencoder. The system obtained 89.17% overall accuracy in detection task. In case of classification task, 50.2% of classification accuracy is observed for classifying the place of articulation based features. The manner of articulation is divided into 15 groups based on some manner based knowledge combination and classification task is performed to achieve 98.9% of classification accuracy.

HMM based Bengali speech synthesis system (Bengali-HTS) generates highly intelligible synthesized speech but its naturalness is not adequate even though it is trained with a very good amount of speech corpus. In case of interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences, naturalness of the synthesized speech falls drastically. This paper proposes a method to overcome this problem by modifying the $$\hbox {F}_{0}$$F0 contour of synthetic speech based on Fujisaki model. The Fujisaki model features for different types of Bengali sentences are analyzed for the generation of $$\hbox {F}_{0}$$F0 contour. These features depend on prosodic word/phrase boundary of the sentence. So a two layer supervised classification and regression tree is trained to predict the prosodic word/phrase boundary. Fujisaki model then generates $$\hbox {F}_{0}$$F0 contour from input text using the prosodic word/phrase boundary and segmental duration information from HMM-based speech synthesis system. Moreover, for HMM training purpose, prosodic structure of sentence has been employed rather than lexical structure. From MOS and preference test it is found that proposed method significantly improved the overall quality of synthesized speech than that of Bengali-HTS.

Objective Post-stroke depression (PSD) is a disabling entity among stroke survivors (SS). Longitudinal studies on PSD, essential to determine its prognosis, are lacking from developing countries. This prospective study was undertaken to assess the prevalence, natural history, and correlates of depression among SS in an Indian community. Methods From a community based stroke registry, SS were assessed annually for cognition, disability, and depression using Bengali validated scales. PSD was diagnosed if score on geriatric depression scale was greater than or equal to 21. Complex sample strategy was considered when calculating prevalence of post stroke depression. An age- and sex-matched case–control study was undertaken to determine the odds of depression in SS. Results Prevalence of PSD was 36.98% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 31.89%–42.06%) among 241 patients assessed at baseline. About 17% developed depression annually and a similar proportion had spontaneous improvement. Peak rate of PSD was beyond 3 months and continued up to 18 months after stroke. Compared to the non-depressed group, PSD subjects were significantly older, had higher age at first stroke, less education, lower socioeconomic status, and greater cognitive impairment and disability. Education had a protective role. Mortality in PSD was nearly twice that in non-depressed patients, though not significant statistically (hazard ratio: 1.84; 95% CI: 0.90–3.77). Compared with controls, odds ratio of PSD was 19.95 (95% CI: 10.09–39.47). Conclusions Approximately one-third of SS develop PSD, similar to developed countries. Prevalence remains stable annually. Delayed peak of PSD suggested later realization of underlying disability. Predictors of PSD have been described and higher literacy was protective in this study.

There is no previously published well-designed study on long-term outcome of stroke from India. The present study has examined the case fatality rate and survival pattern in patients with stroke in a stratified, randomly selected sample from a large Indian metropolitan area. This prospective study was conducted over 7 years (March 2003 to February 2010) using a validated questionnaire administered by a field team and headed by a neurologist. A cross-sectional house-to-house survey was repeated twice yearly. A verbal autopsy was performed to assess cases of death. The Kaplan-Meier method was applied for survival analysis. A cohort of 763 stroke cases were followed up. The overall stroke fatality was approximately 59% at 5 years and 61% at 7 years. Early fatality was 33% within 7 days and 42% within 30 days. Men were at greater risk of death than women. Logistic regression analysis revealed male sex and diabetes to be important predictors of fatality. The majority of deaths were attributable to the index stroke (70%), followed by recurrent stroke (19%) and cardiovascular causes (7%). Beyond the first year, recurrent stroke was by far the most common cause of death. Median survival time exceeded the 84-month observation period when 30-day fatalities were excluded. Early stroke fatality is higher in this study compared with reports from developed countries, but long-term survival is similar. Beyond 1 year, the causes of stroke fatality are similar to that reported in other Asian populations. Access to acute stroke care and appropriate preventive strategy are urgently needed to reduce early stroke fatality in India.

Background/Aims: The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a new time-based measure of disease burden incorporating both disability and mortality. Our study aims to determine the DALYs lost due to stroke using a direct methodology and the implications. Methods: A population-based, house-to-house, 2-stage, prospective study on stroke was conducted over 7 years in Kolkata, India, on 100,802 randomly selected subjects to capture the incident cases of first-ever stroke and those with fatal stroke. The data were utilized to estimate years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs) and DALYs lost. Results: Over 7 years, there were 763 incident cases of first-ever stroke; of these, 320 had a fatal stroke within 30 days and 443 were stroke survivors. The overall DALYs lost due to stroke were computed as 795.57 per 100,000 person-years (730.43 in men and 552.86 in women). The overall YLL and YLD values were 593.14 and 202.43 per 100,000 person-years, respectively. The YLLs comprised 74.5% of the total DALYs. Conclusions: This is the first study in India where DALYs lost due to stroke were derived by a direct method. High YLL values demand urgent measures for controlling premature stroke death.

We present a novel algorithm to remove near regular, fence or wire like foreground patterns from an image. The fence detection or fence removal algorithms, developed so far, have poor performance in detecting the fence. We use signal demixing to utilize the sparsity and regularity property of fences to detect them. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique as compared to other state of the art techniques.

Automatic Speech Attribute Transcription framework is a recently proposed paradigm for detection based bottom-up speech recognition. Speech signal contains a large set of related information, known as speech attributes that include a set of fundamental speech sound with their linguistic identification that is phonological features. In this study, a bank of Deep Neural Network based attribute detectors has been applied to Bengali continuous speech corpus to detect phonological features of Bengali language. 89.17% of average attribute detection accuracy was achieved for Bengali continuous speech. This experiment was repeated using TIMIT speech corpus to ensure the system robustness, and the average detection accuracy was 89.40%.

In this paper, place and manner of articulation based phonological features have been successfully identified with high accuracy using very minimal amount of training data. In detection-based, bottom-up speech recognition approach, the phonological feature based acoustic-phonetic speech attributes are considered as a key component. After identifying the features, they are merged together to get the phonemes. So this type of feature detection using low corpus size shows a path with which continuous speech can be recognized using inadequate data repository also. To execute the experiment, both the language, Bengali and English have been considered. The sentences were trained using deep neural network. Training procedure is carried out for Bengali using three different corpus sizes with a number of 100, 200, and 500 sentences. The average frame level accuracies were obtained as 87.88%, 88.43% and 88.96% respectively for CDAC speech corpus. Whereas using the same training procedure for TIMIT corpus, the accuracies were 87.97%, 88.84%, and 89.39% respectively. So the average frame level accuracy is almost same irrespective of number of training data. This ensures, in case of small speech corpora, phonological feature based speech attributes can be detected with the bottom-up approach.

Early involvement of gut is observed in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and symptoms such as constipation may precede motor symptoms. α-Synuclein pathology is extensively evident in the gut and appears to follow a rostrocaudal gradient. The gut may act as the starting point of PD pathology with spread toward the central nervous system. This spread of the synuclein pathology raises the possibility of prion-like propagation in PD pathogenesis. Recently, the role of gut microbiota in PD pathogenesis has received attention and some phenotypic correlation has also been shown. The extensive involvement of the gut in PD even in its early stages has led to the evaluation of enteric α-synuclein as a possible biomarker of early PD. The clinical manifestations of gastrointestinal dysfunction in PD include malnutrition, oral and dental disorders, sialorrhea, dysphagia, gastroparesis, constipation, and defecatory dysfunction. These conditions are quite distressing for the patients and require relevant investigations and adequate management. Treatment usually involves both pharmacological and non-pharmacological measures. One important aspect of gut dysfunction is its contribution to the clinical fluctuations in PD. Dysphagia and gastroparesis lead to inadequate absorption of oral anti-PD medications. These lead to response fluctuations, particularly delayed-on and no-on, and there is significant relationship between levodopa pharmacokinetics and gastric emptying in patients with PD. Therefore, in such cases, alternative routes of administration or drug delivery systems may be required.

Background Primary Dystonia is a common movement disorder manifested by dystonic symptoms only. DYT6 , a major genetic factor, plays a significant role in primary pure dystonia pathogenesis. In this study we analyzed THAP1 (DYT 6) gene in primary pure dystonia patients, which has been widely studied in other populations but not in Indians. Methods The study cohort contained 227 index primary pure dystonia patients with the involvement of cervical region and 254 neurologically control individuals collected from East Indian population. All three exons of THAP1 and their flanking sequences, including exon-intron boundaries, were screened by PCR, DNA sequencing and/or RFLP analysis. Results A total of three nucleotide variants were detected, which include a reported missense mutation (c.427 A > G; p.Met143Val) in a juvenile onset generalized dystonia patient, a novel frameshift deletion mutation (c.208-209 ΔAA; p.K70VfsX15) in a juvenile onset cervical dystonia patient and a rare variant in 3′ UTR of THAP1 (c.*157 T > C) in an adult-onset blepharospasm patient. In addition, two SNPs (rs71521601 and rs111989331) were detected both in the patients and controls with the major allele of the latter being significantly over represented in the patients. Conclusions Our study suggests that the THAP1 is likely to have a causative role in the pathogenesis of Indian primary pure dystonia patients. Though the phenotypic spectrum is extensively diverse, the cervical involvement with dystonic tremor and speech problem is common amongst the patients harboring mutations.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative movement disorder. Among the candidate genes,DJ-1accounts for about 1% of the cases in different populations. We aim to find the contribution of the gene towards PD among Indians. By screeningDJ-1in 308 PD patients of eastern India and 248 ethnically matched controls, a total of 21 nucleotide variants – including two nonsynonymous changes – were detected. p.Arg98Gln was identified in 6 unrelated patients and 2 controls while p.Val35Ile, a novel change, was found only in 2 unrelated patients. A SNP (rs7517357) was observed to be moderately associated with increased risk of PD (p< 0.05). The deletion allele (g.168–185del) of a known 18 bp del/ins/dup polymorphism was found to be over represented (p< 0.05) among older patients (> 40 years) compared to the controls (> 45 years). Two of the patients, also heterozygotes forPINK1mutation, had more severe disease phenotypes, consistent with the reported interaction betweenPINK1andDJ-1gene products [19]. Our results demonstrate that up to 3.9% (12/308) of PD patients of eastern India harborDJ-1variants that should be explored further for any causal relationship with PD.

Summary Purpose: This study aimed to determine the prevalence, incidence, and mortality rates of epilepsy in the city of Kolkata, India. This is the first such longitudinal study in a heterogeneous urban Indian population. Methods: A two-stage door-to-door survey of a stratified random sample was undertaken within the municipal limits of Kolkata. Trained field workers detected and interviewed the cases using a simple screening questionnaire, and the detailed follow-up was done by neurologists. The survey was conducted annually for five consecutive years from March 2003 through February 2008. Results: A total of 52,377 (52.74% men) individuals were screened. There were 309 prevalent and 66 incident cases of active epilepsy. The prevalence and average annual incidence rate (AAIR) with 95% confidence interval (CI), age-standardized to World Standard Population, were 572.8 (509.79–641.54) per 100,000 and 27.27 (21.03–34.80) per 100,000 per year, respectively. The age-specific incidence rates of epilepsy showed bimodal distribution. During the 5-year period, 20 cases of active epilepsy died. The average annual mortality rate (AAMR) was 7.63 (95% CI 4.45–11.26) per 100,000 population per year. Compared to the general population of Kolkata, the all-cause standardized mortality ratio (SMR) for persons with epilepsy was 2.58 overall (men 3.67; women 1.77). There was no significant difference between slum and nonslum dwellers in epidemiologic parameters. Conclusions: The AAIR of epilepsy is comparable to that observed in developed countries, but AAMR is higher. The all-cause SMR for epilepsy relative to the general population is, however, similar to that of developed nations.

Background and purpose: Prevalence of essential tremor (ET), one of the most common movement disorders, has not been properly evaluated amongst heterogeneous population in India. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional epidemiological study on the prevalence of ET in a randomly stratified population in the metropolitan city of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), India, by a field team headed by a specialist doctor. A two-stage house-to-house survey was carried out with a validated screening instrument. Results: A population of 52377 was screened and a total of 184 cases of ET were identified as per pre-defined criteria and the prevalence rate adjusted to World Standard Population was 3.95 per 1000 (95% CI: 3.40–4.56). Age-specific prevalence showed increasing prevalence with aging. Sex-specific prevalence did not show significant difference between men and women. Socio-economic factors appeared to influence the prevalence and risk of ET was higher amongst slum dwellers versus non-slum population (odd ratio-2.29). Family history was positive in about one-fifth of the cases. Conclusion: This study has documented that the prevalence of ET above 40 years in India is similar to that of many countries globally and common amongst slum dwellers and there are fewer familial cases.

An epidemiological study on dystonia has not been reported from India. As part of a major study to find out the prevalence of major neurological disorders in the large urban city of Kolkata, Eastern India, we planned to determine the prevalence of primary dystonia. The study design was a cross-sectional study of a sample population obtained through stratified random selection and conducted in a two-stage procedure of screening by a nonprofessional team followed by confirmation of screened positive cases by the study neurologist. A total population of 52,377 was screened, and 29 subjects with dystonia were diagnosed. Out of them 23 subjects had primary dystonias [crude prevalence rate (CPR), 43.91/100,000; 95% confidence interval (CI), 28.41-64.81; age-standardized rates to world standard population, 49.06 (95% CI,31.74-72.41)] and all cases were focal type and predominantly of limb dystonia variety. Mean onset of dystonias were earlier in women (43.5 years) as compared to men (46.6 years). Thus our study on primary dystonia shows higher prevalence when compared with that of many studies globally, predominantly of focal type, earlier onset among women, and more cases of limb dystonias when compared with more prominent blepharospasm and cervical dystonias in western reports.

Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has contributed greatly in the area of speech recognition during last two decades. However, in recent days, detection-based, bottom-up speech recognition techniques achieve high success rate. In this detection-based, bottom-up approach of speech recognition, first step is detection of speech attributes like place and manner of articulation of the phonemes. This paper describes about the detection of attributes which leads to identification of place and manner of articulation of Bengali phonemes using Deep Neural Network (DNN).

The prevalence pattern of hypertension in developing countries is different from that in the developed countries. In India, a very large, populous and typical developing country, community surveys have documented that between three and six decades, prevalence of hypertension has increased by about 30 times among urban dwellers and by about 10 times among the rural inhabitants. Various factors might have contributed to this rising trend and among others, consequences of urbanization such as change in life style pattern, diet and stress, increased population and shrinking employment have been implicated. In this paper, we study the prevalence of hypertension in an urban community of India using the JNC VII criteria, with the aim of identifying the risk factors and suggesting intervention strategies. A total of 1609 respondents out of 1662 individuals participated in our cross-sectional survey of validated and structured questionnaire followed by blood pressure measurement. Results showed pre-hypertensive levels of blood pressures among 35.8% of the participants in systolic group (120-139mm of Hg) and 47.7% in diastolic group (80-89 mm of Hg). Systolic hypertension (140 mm of Hg) was present in 40.9% and diastolic hypertension (90 mm of Hg) in 29.3% of the participants. Age and sex-specific prevalence of hypertension showed progressive rise of systolic and diastolic hypertension in women when compared to men. Men showed progressive rise in systolic hypertension beyond fifth decade of life. Bivariate analysis showed significant relationship of hypertension with age, sedentary occupation, body mass index (BMI), diet, ischemic heart disease, and smoking. Multivariate analysis revealed age and BMI as risk factors, and non-vegetarian diet as protective factor with respect to hypertension. Prevalence of prehypertensives was high among younger subjects - particularly students and laborers who need special attention. Role of non-vegetarian diet as a protective factor might have been related to fish-eating behavior of the sample population, who also use mustard oil as cooking medium - both of which have significant level of essential polyunsaturated fatty acids. The observed prevalence of hypertension in this study and other studies suggest the need for a comprehensive national policy to control hypertension in India, and, in other similar developing countries.

Background: Headache is common in communities; however, epidemiological research regarding its prevalence is infrequent in India. Aim: We planned to study the prevalence of migraine, its disease burden, and the associated risk factors. Setting and Design: This is an urban community study conducted in Kolkata with a cross-sectional and nested case-control design. Materials and Methods: The criteria to study headache among a representative sample (aged 20–50 years) was based on the International Classification of Headache Disorders-II. Sex- and age-matched controls without headache were evaluated for putative risk factors. The disease burden was measured as disability adjusted life years (DALY). Results: Screening of 2421 individuals revealed that the 1-year prevalence of migraine was 14.12%. Education, environmental exposure, travel, and oral contraceptives determine approximately 75% of the underlying risks. DALY showed maximum burden among women in the age range of between 30 and 34 years. Conclusion: The community-based prevalence of migraine in India is similar to that observed in other countries except Africa. The burden was maximum among women. The risk factors responsible for migraine should be addressed and institution of public health measures are warranted.

Stroke survivors (SS) are rising with higher incidence of stroke in developing countries. In addition to physical impairment, other factors such as cognition, social interaction, and depression determine the functional outcome after stroke. Considering the paucity of data from developing countries, we planned to determine the change in various functional parameters among SS. This community-based prospective study was carried out in Kolkata, India among 283 SS between 2006 and 2010. Functional outcome was assessed at baseline and at 3 annual follow-up visits using validated tools. A stepwise regression analysis was performed with demographic and stroke-related covariates against various measures of functional outcome. Result showed that mean Barthel Index score at baseline was 76.4 ± 30.8. Bengali version of mental status examination and Geriatric Depression Scale scores trended down over time with a negative regression coefficient of −.2061 (standard error [SE], .0937) and −.4488 (SE, .2145). Other outcomes did not change. Female gender, depression, and cognitive dysfunction had an unfavorable impact, whereas education correlated positively. In conclusions female gender and neuropsychiatric disturbances showed poor functional outcome compared with education, which correlates with better outcome. This information will be helpful for patients in developing countries for planning stroke rehabilitation.

Background Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease affecting at least 1% of the population over age of 55. It is characterized by selective loss of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra pars compacta and the appearance of intracellular inclusions termed Lewy bodies. As the age progresses, neurons in the other regions of brain are also degenerated. Depletion of brain dopamine initiates aberrant motor activities including rest tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, postural instability. Apart from motor symptoms, cognitive impairments, like depression, psychiatric illness, and decreased mental ability are also observed in the patients. Genetic and non-genetic components are believed to govern the pathogenesis of PD. Genes in dopaminergic pathway & also dopamine synthesis, storage, binding, metabolism are needed to be studied which seem to be major determinants conferring differential risk of developing PD.

The paper describes an automatic parts-of-speech tagging for Bengali sentences using Global Linear Model (GLM) which learns to represent the whole sentence through a feature vector called Global feature. Tagger has been trained using averaged perceptron algorithm. Performance of this tagger has been compared to Conditional Random Field (CRF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Maximum Entropy (ME) based Bengali POS tagger. Experimental results show that GLM based Bengali POS tagger has the accuracy of 93.12 %.

Movement disorder (MD) is an important branch of neurology and has great potentiality in management because of improved diagnosis and therapeutic strategies. Over the last three decades, emphasis has been laid on the evaluation of various MDs in India by a limited number of interested neurologists and basic scientists. In this review, we want to highlight common problems of MDs in India with regard to epidemiology, clinical features and genetics.