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Detection of word boundaries in continuous speech is a tedious process due to the absence of a definite pause or silence in the word boundary position. Thus, continuous speech recognition is a very challenging task. However, the prosodic word boundaries, unlike the written word boundaries, can be predicted using the prosodic parameters of continuous speech. This paper proposes a method for detecting such prosodic word boundaries from Bengali continuous speech. Bengali is a bound-stress language, where stress is observed on the first syllable of a prosodic word. Empirical Mode Decomposition is applied to the logarithm of fundamental frequency (F0) contour of continuous speech to detect prosodic word boundaries. 200 Bengali readout sentences, read by ten speakers, are analyzed for the present work. An overall prosodic boundary detection accuracy of 88.05% is achieved, whereas precision and recall values are 90.73% and 88.31%, respectively, with f-score as 89.5. A prosodic word dictionary comprising 5031 prosodic words has been developed by analyzing 1526 Bengali sentences with the proposed prosodic word boundary detection method.

Background Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the debilitating movement disorder, distinguished by dopaminergic and norepinephrinergic neurodegeneration. Apart from candidate gene mutations, several modifier loci have been reported to be associated with the disease manifestation. The Dopamine β-Hydroxylase (DBH) maintains cellular dopamine content and regulates dopamine turn over in neurons. Genetic polymorphisms of DBH are associated with PD and are found to alter plasma DBH activity in patients compared to healthy controls. Therefore, DBH activity in plasma could be a potential and easily detectable biomarkers for alteration of dopaminergic neuronal function in PD. Methods Plasma DBH activity has been assessed among PD cases and age-matched controls to identify correlation with PD. To elucidate the role of DBH polymorphisms in Eastern Indian PD patients, three SNPs (rs1611115, rs1108580 and rs129882) were selected and screened by PCR-RFLP and DNA sequencing analysis. Results The T-allele of rs129882 was more prevalent among patients than controls posing risk (p-value = 0.02, OR = 1.404, 95% CI = 1.047–1.883) towards PD. The dual-Luciferase assay in SHSY5Y cell line revealed that the T-allele of rs129882 increases Luciferase signal (p = 0.0269). However, the rs1611115 and rs1108580 did not show association with PD; plasma DBH activity was not significantly different between patients and controls (p-value > 0.05). Haplotypes constructed with three SNPs showed that the CAT haplotype to pose risk, TAC haplotype to provide protection against early disease onset and CGT being protective against non-motor symptoms. Conclusion These data suggest that DBH might influence the susceptibility of PD.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease with complex etiology. Both genetic and environmental factors play significant role. Apart from candidate genes, some modifier genes have been reported to be associated with the altered risk of PD. Previous studies have identified Apolipoprotein E (APOE), Cathepsin D (CTSD), and Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) as key players of neurodegenerative pathways with their variants associated with different neurodegenerative diseases. Hence, this study aims to identify the potential role of these modifier genes in the pathogenesis of PD among Eastern Indian PD patients. A case-control study was performed using 302 clinically diagnosed PD patients and 304 ethnically matched controls. Promoter SNPs of APOE (rs449647, rs405509) and BDNF (rs56164415), and coding SNPs of APOE (rs429358, rs7412 resulting in ε2, ε3, and ε4 alleles), CTSD (rs17571), and BDNF (rs6265) were analyzed by PCR-RFLP and bidirectional sequencing. The effect of rs56164415 on BDNF expression was characterized by Luciferase assay. APOEε4 allele was significantly overrepresented (p value = 0.0003) among PD patients, whereas ε3 allele was predominant in the control population. The promoter haplotype (A-rs449647, G-rs405509) of APOE was preponderant among female PD patients posing risk. No association was found for CTSD polymorphism. The 'T/T' genotype of BDNF rs56164415 was overrepresented (p-value = 0.02) among early onset PD patients. Expression of BDNF for the 'T/T' variant was significantly lower (p-value = 0.012) than the 'C/C' variant, suggesting a possible role in PD pathogenesis. This study suggests that APOE and BDNF may serve as modifier loci among eastern Indian PD patients.

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.

Isolated dystonia is a common movement disorder often caused by genetic mutations, although it is predominantly sporadic in nature. Common variants of dystonia-related genes were reported to be risk factors for idiopathic isolated dystonia. In this study, we aimed to analyse the roles of previously reported GTP cyclohydrolase (GCH1) and Torsin family 1 member A (TOR1A) polymorphisms in an Indian isolated dystonia case-control group. A total of 292 sporadic isolated dystonia patients and 316 control individuals were genotyped for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of GCH1 (rs3759664:G > A, rs12147422:A > G and rs10483639:C > G) and TOR1A (rs13300897:G > A, rs1801968:G > C, rs1182:G > T and rs3842225:G > Δ) using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and confirmed by direct Sanger sequencing. The statistical significance of allelic, genotypic and haplotypic associations of all of the SNPs were evaluated using the two-tailed Fisher exact test. The minor allele (A) of rs3759664 is significantly associated with isolated limb dystonia as a risk factor (p = 0.005). The minor allele (C) of rs1801968 is strongly associated with isolated dystonia (p

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.

Background Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease and has a complex etiology. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the 3′-untranslated region of Fibroblast growth factor 20 (FGF 20) have been reported to be associated with PD; however, the results are controversial. Although FGF20 enhances the survival of dopaminergic neurons, it may also result in PD susceptibility by altering alpha-synuclein expression. Materials and methods To identify and characterize genetic risk variants in FGF 20 in Eastern Indian PD patients, 2 SNPs of FGF 20 (rs1721100 and rs2720208) were genotyped in 336 PD cases and 313 ethnically matched controls by PCR-RFLP. Results We observed statistically significant differences in genotypic and allelic frequencies of rs1721100 between PD cases and controls but not for rs12720208. Haplotype G-C showed a significant protective effect against PD. A functional assay revealed that the risk allele C at rs1721100 has little or no effect on relative luciferase activity from a reporter construct in the presence of miR-3189-3p, whereas allele G results in significant dose-dependent reduction. Conclusion Our results suggest that FGF 20 is a susceptibility gene for PD in Eastern Indians.

The phonological features are the most basic unit of a speech knowledge hierarchy. This paper reports about detection and classification of phonological features from Bengali continuous speech. The phonological features are based on place and manner of articulation. All the experiments are performed by a deep neural network based framework. Two different models are designed for the detection and classification task. The deep-structured models are pre-trained by stacked autoencoder. The C-DAC speech corpus is used for continuous spoken Bengali speech data. Frame wise cepstral representation is provided in the input layer of the deep-structured model. Speech data from multiple speakers has been used to confirm speaker-independency. In detection task, the system achieved 86.19% average overall accuracy. In the classification task, accuracy for the classification of place of articulation remains low with 50.2% while in manner-based classification, the system delivered an improved performance with 98.9% accuracy.

English lexical stress is acoustically related to combination of duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel quality. At phonetic level, the current study investigates L1 Bengali speakers’ acoustic manipulation of English lexical stress to produce English lexical stress contrast. This study compares the use of these correlates in the production of English lexical stress contrasts by 10 L1 English and 20 L1 Bengali speakers. The result showed that, although L1 Bengali speakers did use all four acoustic correlates to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables, they produced significantly less native-like stress patterns. In particular, there was a significant difference in formant patterns across speaker groups, where L1 Bengali speakers produced English like vowel reduction in some unstressed syllables, but in other cases, L1 Bengali speakers had tendency to either not reduce or incorrectly reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. The results suggest that L1 Bengali speakers’ production of English lexical stress contrast is influenced by L1 language experience and L1 phonology.

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.

On one side, pregnancy is a bliss, a beautiful journey for most women while on other, it increases the risk of several diseases which may cause considerable morbidity and mortality in young women in the most productive period of their lives. Neurological emergencies in pregnancy often have grave prognosis and so, must be promptly diagnosed and treated. This article reviews the clinical features and management of some of the common severe neurological emergencies in pregnancy.

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.

Wilson’s disease (WD), an inborn error of copper metabolism caused by mutations in the ATPase copper transporting beta (ATP7B) gene, manifests variable age of onset and different degrees of hepatic and neurological disturbances. This complex phenotypical outcome of a classical monogenic disease can possibly be explained by modifier loci regulating the clinical course of the disease. The brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), critical for the survival, morphogenesis, and plasticity of the neurons, and the dopamine receptor D2 (DRD2), one of the most abundant dopamine receptors in the brain, have been highlighted in the pathophysiology of various neuropsychiatric diseases. This study aims to identify the potential association between BDNF and DRD2 gene polymorphisms and WD and its clinical characteristics. A total of 164 WD patients and 270 controls from India were included in this study. Two BDNF polymorphisms [p.Val66Met (c.G196A) and c.C270T] and the DRD2 Taq1A (A2/A1 or C/T) polymorphism were examined for their association with WD and some of its clinical attributes, using polymerase chain reaction, restriction fragment length digestion, and bidirectional sequencing. The C allele and CC genotype of BDNF C270T were significantly overrepresented among controls compared to WD patients. In addition, a significantly higher proportion of the allele coding for Val and the corresponding homozygous genotype of BDNF Val66Met polymorphism was found among WD patients with age of onset later than 10 years. Furthermore, the A1A1 genotype of DRD2 Taq1A polymorphism was significantly more common among WD patients with rigidity. Our data suggest that both BDNF and DRD2 may act as potential modifiers of WD phenotype in the Indian context.

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.

This paper proposed a phoneme recognition and classification model for Bengali continuous speech. A Deep Neural Network based model has been developed for the recognition and classification task where the Stacked Denoising Autoencoder is used to generatively pre-train the deep network. Autoencoders are stacked to form the deep-structured network. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients are used as input data vector. In hidden layer, 200 numbers of hidden units have been utilized. The number of hidden layers of the deep network is kept as three. The phoneme posterior probability has been derived in the output layer. This proposed model has been trained and tested using unconstrained Bengali continuous speech data collected from the different sources (TV, Radio, and normal conversation in a laboratory). In recognition phase, the Phoneme Error Rate is reported for the deep-structured model as 24.62% and 26.37% respectively for the training and testing while in the classification task this model achieves 86.7% average phoneme classification accuracy in training and 82.53% in the testing phase.

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.

Wilson disease (WD) is an autosomal-recessive disorder caused by mutations in the ATP7B gene leading to abnormal copper deposition in liver and brain. WD manifests diverse neurological and hepatic phenotypes and different age of onset, even among the siblings, with same mutational background suggesting complex nature of the disease and involvement of other candidate genes. In that context, Apolipoprotein E (APOE) and Prion Protein (PRNP) have been proposed to be potential candidates for modifying the WD phenotype and age of onset. This study aims to identify the contribution of APOE and PRNP polymorphisms on the variable phenotypic expression of Indian WD patients. A total of 171 WD patients and 291 controls from Indian population were included in this study. Two APOE cSNPs (rs429358 and rs7412) resulting in three isoforms and M129V (rs1799990) polymorphism of PRNP were examined for their association with WD and its clinical phenotypes. The APOE ԑ4 allele was found to be significantly overrepresented in WD patients compared to controls. However, the frequency of the APOE ԑ3 allele and ԑ3/ԑ3 genotype was significantly higher in WD patients without cognitive behavior impairment compared to the ones with the impairment. On the contrary, the PRNP allele representing Val129 was found to be present in higher proportion in WD patients with cognitive behavioral decline. Our data suggest that the APOE ԑ4 allele could act as a potential risk for the pathogenesis of WD. Also, APOE and PRNP might contribute toward the cognitive behavioral decline in a section of WD patients.

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.

Wilson disease (WD) is an autosomal genetic disorder characterized by excessive copper deposition initially in liver (hepatic variant) followed by brain (neuropsychiatric variant) and other organs such as cornea and kidney due to defect in biliary copper excretion. Predominant presentations of neuropsychiatric variant are extrapyramidal motor dysfunctions such as dystonias, Parkinsonism, choreoathetosis, tremor, and ataxias. Nonmotor symptoms (NMS) can appear before clinical disease expression and during ongoing disease process. NMS may cause confusion and delay in clinical diagnosis. In the early stage, presence of asymptomatic or symptomatic evidence of acute or chronic liver disease with or without KF ring in young subjects against the background of family history of liver disease may be indicative of underlying WD. In WD, common NMS are personality disorders, mood changes, psychosis, cognitive abnormalities, sleep disorders, and autonomic disturbances besides few systemic dysfunctions. Cognitive changes can be diagnosed by neuropsychological assessment, MRI, and SPECT study of brain. Nonmotor manifestations can be managed by metal chelator, antipsychotic agents, mood stabilizers, rarely electroconvulsive therapy, and occasional hepatic transplantation.

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.

Wilson disease (WD) is caused by defects in ATP7B gene due to impairment of normal function of the copper transporting P-type ATPase. This study describes a comprehensive genetic analysis of 199 Indian WD patients including mutations detected in our previous studies, undertakes functional assessment of the nucleotide variants in ATP7B promoter and correlates genotype with disease phenotype. The patient cohort harbors a total of 10 common and 48 rare mutations in the coding region of ATP7B including 21 novel changes. The common mutations represent 74% of characterized coding mutant alleles with p.C271X (63/260) and p.G1101R (7/31) being the most prevalent in eastern and western Indian patients, respectively. The mutation spectrum between east and west is mostly different with only three mutations (p.G1061E, p.N1270S and p.A1049A-fs) being shared between both the groups. Eight novel and 10 reported variants have been detected in the promoter and non-coding regions (5' and 3'UTRs) of ATP7B. Promoter reporter assay demonstrated that 3 novel variants and 5 reported polymorphisms alter the gene expression to a considerable extent; hence might play important role in ATP7B gene regulation. We devised the neurological involvement score to capture the spectrum of neurological involvement in WD patients. By utilizing the age at onset, neurological involvement score and ATP7B mutation background, we generated a genotype-phenotype matrix that could be effectively used to depict the phenotypic spectra of WD affected individuals and serve as a platform to identify prospective "outliers" to be investigated for their remarkable phenotypic divergence.

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.

Green machining of ceramics through Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is efficient for near net shape fabrication due to minimum consumption of energy, less tool wear, and high material removal rate. However, there are numerous critical issues need to be addressed while manufacturing customized components through green state machining including fabrication of machinable green ceramics, designing of suitable mold for slurry casting, manufacture of suitable sample holders for mounting the fragile green samples during machining, and designing of machining tools for good surface finishing. This article introspects these critical issues and its possible solutions for efficient fabrication of dental crowns as a case study via green state machining. Highly loaded (55vol%) alumina slurry was prepared for the fabrication of machinable dense alumina compacts by Protein Coagulation Casting (PCC) technique. Cylindrical alumina compacts were fabricated by casting alumina slurry into the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) mold. Metallic cylindrical sample holder was fabricated for mounting the green alumina samples for CNC machining. Diamond impregnated tool (∼3mm diameter) was used for near net shaping of dental crown by grinding/milling. Dental crown (incisor) was successfully fabricated by optimizing different machining parameters.

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.

This Author Reply Letter was written in response to a Letter to the Editor: Lee D, Ahn T. Glycemic choreoballism. Tremor Other Hyperkinet Mov. 2016; 6. doi: 10.7916/D8QJ7HNF The Letter to the Editor, above, was written in response to these two Case Reports: Roy U, Das SK, Mukherjee A, et al. Irreversible hemichoreahemiballism in a case of nonketotic hyperglycemia presenting as the initial manifestation of diabetes mellitus. Tremor Other Hyperkinet Mov. 2016; 6. doi: 10.7916/D8QZ2B3F Cosentino C, Torres L, Nuñez Y, et al. Hemichorea/hemiballism associated with hyperglycemia: report of twenty cases. Tremor Other Hyperkinet Mov. 2016; 6. doi: 10.7916/D8DN454P, Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements, Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements

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.