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Thrombocytopenia absent radius (TAR) syndrome is a very rare and infrequently seen congenital disorder with an approximate frequency of 0.42/100,000 live births. It is associated with bilateral absence of radii, hypo-megakaryocytic thrombocytopenia, and presence of both thumbs. The other systems which are affected by TAR syndrome include skeletal, hematologic, and cardiac systems. Intracranial hemorrhages due to thrombocytopenia and cardiac disorders are a common association usually seen with this syndrome and are usual cause of death. We describe a 3-month-old infant who was diagnosed with TAR syndrome on the basis of clinical features (thrombocytopenia and bilateral absent radius bone and confirmed by genetic analysis). The patient was diagnosed to have Tetralogy of Fallot, for which the infant was managed with definitive repair and thrombocytopenia was managed with platelet transfusion. Infants with TAR syndrome should be assessed for other associated malformations of various systems and followed up regularly and parents should be counseled for associated expected complications in these patients. We report an infant with TAR syndrome with Tetralogy of Fallot, which has not been reported in medical literature until now and this is the first case of its type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Of the various cytokines and growth factors regulating angiogenesis, the most potent agent acting on vascular endothelium is vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF). The present study aims to access VEGF concentration in periodontal diseases and the effect of periodontal therapy on its concentration in gingival crevicular fluid (GCF). Materials and Methods: Ninety five subjects (47 females and 48 males) 25- 47 y of age were divided into healthy (group-1), gingivitis (group-2), and periodontitis (group-3). GCF samples were collected using micro-capillary pipettes & were transferred immediately to plastic vials and stored at -70°C until the time of the assay. The concentration of VEGF was determined using commercially available ELISA kit. Results: The mean VEGF concentration was highest in periodontitis patients (Group 3) (88.08±8.04pg/ml), with lowest in healthy patients (Group 1). VEGF levels reduced significantly after therapy in Groups 2 and 3. Conclusion: VEGF levels in GCF had a significant correlation with both periodontal disease progression and healing after therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There are various techniques developed to treat the exposed roots, a recent innovation in dentistry is the use of second generation platelet concentrate which is an autologous platelet‑rich fibrin gel (PRF) with growth factors and cicatricial properties for root coverage procedures. Therefore, the present research was undertaken to study the additional benefits of PRF when used along with coronally advanced flap (CAF). Materials and Methods: Total of 15 systemically healthy subjects presenting bilateral isolated Miller’s class I and II recession were enrolled into the study. Each patient was randomly treated with a combination of CAF along with a platelet‑rich fibrin (PRF) membrane on the test site and CAF alone on the control site. Recession depth, clinical attachment level (CAL), and width of keratinized gingiva (WKG) were compared with baseline at 1, 3, and 6 months between test and control sites. Results: Mean percentage root coverage in the test group after 1, 3, and 6 months was 34.58, 70.73, and 100, respectively. Differences between the control and test groups were statistically significant. This study also showed a statistically significant increase in WKG in the test group (2.94 ± 0.77 at baseline to 5.38 ± 1.67 at 6 months). Conclusion: CAF is a predictable treatment for isolated Miller’s class I and II recession defects. The addition of PRF membrane with CAF provides superior root coverage with additional benefits of gain in CAL and WKG at 6 months postoperatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that, depending upon the particular stage in the evolution of conflict, external parties can bring a variety of technologies to bear upon the process of internal conflict resolution. Satellite communications, environmental impact assessments, computer modeling, remote earth‐sensing technologies, the Internet, and nonviolent crowd control techniques, such as those employed by the United States during the UN withdrawal from Somalia, can all be brought to bear upon the process of conflict resolution.

The identification of sequence (amino acids or nucleotides) motifs in a particular order in biological sequences has proved to be of interest. This paper describes a computing server, SSMBS, which can locate and display the occurrences of user-defined biologically important sequence motifs (a maximum of five) present in a specific order in protein and nucleotide sequences. While the server can efficiently locate motifs specified using regular expressions, it can also find occurrences of long and complex motifs. The computation is carried out by an algorithm developed using the concepts of quantifiers in regular expressions. The web server is available to users around the clock at http://dicsoftl.physics.iisc.ernet.in/ssmbs/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prospect of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in the presence of topological information of participants is often left unexplored in most of the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Additionally, the usage of these modalities together in the field of multimodality analysis to support multiple brain signals toward improving BCI performance is not fully examined. This study first presents a multimodal data fusion framework to exploit and decode the complementary synergistic properties in multimodal neural signals. Moreover, the relations among different subjects and their observations also play critical roles in classifying unknown subjects. We developed a context-aware graph neural network (GNN) model utilizing the pairwise relationship among participants to investigate the performance on an auditory task classification. We explored standard and deviant auditory EEG and fNIRS data where each subject was asked to perform an auditory oddball task and has multiple trials regarded as context-aware nodes in our graph construction. In experiments, our multimodal data fusion strategy showed an improvement up to 8.40% via SVM and 2.02% via GNN, compared to the single-modal EEG or fNIRS. In addition, our context-aware GNN achieved 5.3%, 4.07% and 4.53% higher accuracy for EEG, fNIRS and multimodal data based experiments, compared to the baseline models.

Introduction: Of the various cytokines and growth factors regulating angiogenesis, the most potent agent acting on vascular endothelium is vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF). The present study aims to access VEGF concentration in periodontal diseases and the effect of periodontal therapy on its concentration in gingival crevicular fluid (GCF)., Materials and Methods: Ninety five subjects (47 females and 48 males) 25- 47 y of age were divided into healthy (group-1), gingivitis (group-2), and periodontitis (group-3). GCF samples were collected using micro-capillary pipettes & were transferred immediately to plastic vials and stored at -70˚C until the time of the assay. The concentration of VEGF was determined using commercially available ELISA kit., Results: The mean VEGF concentration was highest in periodontitis patients (Group 3) (88.08±8.04pg/ml), with lowest in healthy patients (Group 1). VEGF levels reduced significantly after therapy in Groups 2 and 3., Conclusion: VEGF levels in GCF had a significant correlation with both periodontal disease progression and healing after therapy.