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Latent fingerprint developed at the site of crime is considered as crucial physical evidence in forensic investigation. The mixed metal oxides (MXOY, M = Ba, Zn, Al, Ce) nanophosphor was synthesised by irradiating the precursor solution with 60Co gamma radiation followed by solution combustion method. The structural, morphological, optical characteristics and fingerprint imaging were studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy, UV–visible spectroscopy and powder dusting method, respectively. The XRD results revealed that the average crystallite size is found to be 30 nm with the estimated bandgap of 3.18 eV. The broadband UV exited luminescence of the phosphors was observed at λMax = 330 nm. The PL spectrum shows three emission bands at 432, 444 and 460 nm that corresponds to blue regions, suggesting that the synthesised nanophosphor is a potential luminous material for latent fingerprinting and luminescent devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assistive tools that recognize impaired speech due to neurological disorders are emerging and its a fairly complex task. An Intelligent Impaired Speech Recognition system helps persons with speech impairment to improve their interactions with outside world. Impaired speakers have difficulty in pronouncing words which results in partial or incomplete speech contents. Existing Automatic Speech Recognition systems are not effective for Impaired Speech Recognition due to the speaker specific variations which depend on the severity of the neurological disorders. In this work, we have investigated two important approaches namely, Deep Neural Network-Hidden Markov Model and Lattice Free Maximum Mutual Information approach for effective recognition of impaired speech in Tamil language. The training and testing samples are collected from persons with different neurological disorders at varied intelligibility levels such as high, medium, low and very low. The recognition accuracy is evaluated and compared using two datasets namely 20 acoustically similar words and 50 words Impaired Speech Corpus in Tamil.

Automated monitoring of videos is becoming mandatory due to its widespread applications over public and private domains. Especially, research over detecting anomalous human behavior in crowded scenes has created much attention among computer vision researchers. Understanding patterns in crowded scenes is always challenging due to the rapid movement of the crowd, occlusions and cluttered backgrounds. In this work, we explore spatio-temporal autocorrelation of gradient-based features to efficiently recognize violent activities in crowded scenes. A discriminative classifier is then used to recognize violent actions in videos. Experimental results have shown improved performance of the proposed approach when compared to existing state-of-art-approaches.

Efficient assistive speech technology is essential for persons with cognitive disorders to improve their standard of life. Various kinds of cognitive disorders affect the speech articulation. Disordered Speech Recognition (DSR) can be used for rehabilitation and gain much importance as the disordered speakers population keeps increasing in recent years. The speech utterance is commonly represented in the form of spectrogram. Since the spectrograms are noisy and incomplete, the corresponding spectrograms need to be enhanced. We propose an approach that explores Denoising Convolutional Autoencoder (DCAE) to enhance the spectrograms of disordered speech utterances which are then utilized to train CNN to recognize the disordered words. Evaluation of proposed approach is carried out using the 20 words (acoustically similar word classes) dataset and 50 words dataset of Impaired speech corpus in Tamil and 100 common words dataset of UA-Speech database. Significantly better performance is achieved by proposed approach than HMM, DNN-HMM, LFMMI and CNN without enhancement. The spectrogram enhancement using DCAE helps to obtain better discrimination among overlapping disordered word classes and achieves a maximum Word Recognition Accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare inherited syndrome characterized by progressive bone marrow failure (BMF), abnormal skin pigmentation, short stature, and increased cancer risk. BMF in FA is multifactorial and largely results from the death of hematopoietic stem cells due to genomic instability. Also, inflammatory pathology in FA has been previously reported, however the mechanism is still not clear. In literature, decreased NK-cell count and/or impaired NK-cell activity, along with other immunological abnormalities have been described in FA-patients (1). However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing a defective degranulation mechanism leading to abnormal NK-cell cytotoxicity in FA-patients, which may explain the development of a hyperinflammatory response in these patients. This may predispose some patients to develop Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) which manifests with prolonged fever, progressive cytopenias and organomegaly. Early diagnosis and initiation of immunosuppressive therapy in these patients will help to better manage these patients. We also propose FA genes to be listed as a cause of familial HLH.

Romiplostim is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapy for immune thrombocytopenia (ITP). Biosimilar is a biological product that has no clinical meaningful difference from an existing FDA-approved reference product. It has a potential of lowering health-care-related cost. Biosimilar of romiplostim can be made available to patients with ITP at a low cost and can be beneficial in providing the best therapy. Thus, the efficacy and safety of biosimilar romiplostim (ENZ110) was compared with innovator romiplostim (Nplate) with respect to platelet response in patients with chronic ITP. This was a prospective, multicenter, randomized, and double-blind clinical trial. Patients with chronic ITP, aged 18–65 years, were enrolled in a study and were randomized to receive either ENZ110 or Nplate in a 3:1 ratio for a treatment period of 12 weeks, respectively. After completion of the treatment period, the patients were followed-up for one week to evaluate the platelet response and to monitor the adverse events (AEs). Over the duration of 12 weeks, platelet response of > 50 × 109/L was achieved in 85.3% patients treated with ENZ110 and in 75.0% patients treated with Nplate in per protocol population. In intent-to-treat population, 83.8% patients with ENZ110 and 76.9% patients with Nplate achieved a platelet response of > 50 × 109/L. In the ENZ110 group, 111 AEs were recorded in 66.7% patients, while 18 AEs were reported in 61.5% patients in the Nplate group. The study demonstrated non-inferiority with comparable efficacy and safety between biosimilar romiplostim and innovator romiplostim in patients with chronic ITP. Trial registration number and date of registration: CTRI/2019/04/018614. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]