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Background: Bipolar hemiarthroplasty (BHA) is commonly used to treat fracture neck of femur (NOF) in the elderly, despite the fact that the appropriate treatment of fracture NOF is still controversial. In this prospective study, the functional outcomes of NOF fracture after surgery in the elderly, who underwent BHA with a fully coated hydroxyapatite stem with a collar (CORAIL Stem). Materials and Methods: Forty-three consecutive elderly patients with NOF fracture underwent BHA through the lateral Hardinge approach. They were followed up after surgery for 1 year. Two patients expired and one was lost to follow-up and were not included in the study. Postoperative follow-up was done every 4–20 weeks and thereafter at intervals of 3–12 months. Harris hip score (HHS) was recorded at each follow-up visit and complications were noted. Results: Forty patients with a mean age of 77 (62–93) years were followed up after surgery for 1 year. Two patients (4.7%) expired and one (2.3%) was lost to follow-up and were not included in the study. HHS of our cohort of patients averaged 86 (72–99), which falls in the category of a good outcome (80–90). A mild negative correlation (correlation index − 0.2) of age and HHS was observed but was not significant (P = 0.56). Significantly more female patients suffered from NOF fracture (male - 13 [32.5%]: female - 27 [67.5%]; P = 0.03). The left side was injured more often than the right (left 23 [57.5%], right 17 [42.5%]; P = 0.34). Thirty-three patients (83.5%) had one or more comorbid conditions. The mean HHS of female and male patients was 86.41 and 85.39, respectively. This difference was not significant (P = 0.33). There was no difference in outcome, whether an injury occurred to the dominant or nondominant extremity. Complications occurred in seven (17.5%) patients. Conclusions: In the first follow-up year, a good functional outcome with a low complication (17.5%) and mortality rate (4.7%) was observed. Twenty-seven patients (62%) were absolutely pain-free. There were no dislocations, revisions, or additional surgeries in any patients. Most patients returned to their preinjury activity level. To conclude, the procedure is safe and rewarding in the elderly.

Background: Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring provides additional information about how changes in BP may correlate with daily activities and sleep patterns. Recommendations from the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology strongly suggest confirming a diagnosis of hypertension with continuous BP monitoring. Non-invasive and non-intrusive detection of haemodynamic parameters is emerging as a norm, based on self-monitoring wearable medical devices. Researchers have carried out several studies using non-invasive and continuous BP measurements as an alternative to conventional cuff-based measurements. In this work, we proposed a novel method for cuffless estimation of BP using impedance cardiography (ICG). Methods: We conducted a single-centre, cross-sectional study of 104 subjects (of whom 30 were categorized as controls and the remaining 74 as the disease group) at the Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata. The disease group consisted of patients with confirmed coronary artery disease, while the individuals in the control group were deemed to be healthy. All subjects underwent electrocardiogram recording by on-duty doctors in order to determine their health status. A custom-made device based on the principle of impedance plethysmography was designed to record impedance changes due to subjects’ peripheral blood flow. The device was used to record ICG signals. In this study, we developed a novel auto-adaptive algorithm based on ICG signals for non-invasive, cuffless, continuous monitoring of BP and heart rate. Separate mathematical models were developed for all the estimated parameters (BP and heart rate) for both the study groups (control and disease). The developed models were auto-adaptive and did not require subject-specific calibration. Performance indicators including, r2, error percentage, standard deviation, and mean difference were used to quantify the performance of the models. Results: The ICG signal recorded by the device was used to extract features and compute the augmentation index. The calculated augmentation index values showed strong correlations with systolic BP (r=0.99, P

Egocentric vision data captures the first person perspective of a visual stimulus and helps study the gaze behavior in more natural contexts. In this work, we propose a new dataset collected in a free viewing style with an end-to-end data processing pipeline. A group of 25 participants provided their gaze information wearing Tobii Pro Glasses 2 set up at a museum. The gaze stream is post-processed for handling missing or incoherent information. The corresponding video stream is clipped into 20 videos corresponding to 20 museum exhibits and compensated for user’s unwanted head movements. Based on the velocity of directional shifts of the eye, the I-VT algorithm classifies the eye movements into either fixations or saccades. Representative scanpaths are built by generalizing multiple viewers’ gazing styles for all exhibits. Therefore, it is a dataset with both the individual gazing styles of many viewers and the generic trend followed by all of them towards a museum exhibit. The application of our dataset is demonstrated for characterizing the inherent gaze dynamics using state trajectory estimator based on ancestor sampling (STEAS) model in solving gaze data classification and retrieval problems. This dataset can also be used for addressing problems like segmentation, summarization using both conventional machine and deep learning approaches.

This work introduces a new broadband Class B/J power amplifier (PA) design methodology by considering the input-output waveform shaping due to nonlinear CGS-VGS profile in gallium nitride (GaN) radio frequency (RF) devices. A comprehensive time domain modeling of drain voltage and drain current as a function of input nonlinearity is presented to predict continuous Class B/J PA performance. The proposed theory shows that continuous-mode operation can no longer maintain constant PA performance with varying fundamental and second harmonic impedances as predicted by the ideal class-J theory. This paper demonstrates that continuous-mode class B/J operation with input-output waveform shaping yields a new design space with two distinct regions: one advantageous region with capacitive second harmonic load terminations in which PA performance can be enhanced significantly; and another within an inductive second harmonic load area where the performance is degraded compared to that of a classical class B/J PA. For practical validation, source pull measurements and load pull analyses are presented and a broadband Class B/J PA is designed with the proposed second harmonic load and source termination. Source/Load-pull measurements/simulations confirm the theoretical predictions in terms of performance variation across the design space. A high efficiency design space is then identified for broadband PA design. The PA protype demonstrates drain efficiency of (60-73) % with output power above 40 dBm and corrected adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) better than −55 dBc with digital predistortion (DPD) using 10 MHz LTE signal across (2.2-3.4) GHz.

Background and Objective:: Predicting the treatment response of a patient undergoing treatment for NSCLC (non-small cell lung cancer) is useful in the estimation of effectiveness of the treatment protocol. To assess the prognostic value of radiomic features extracted from CBCT (cone-beam computed tomography) images of NSCLC patients, an efficient classification model is developed. The study aims to predict the early response (predicting the response at the third week of the radiation therapy) of the patients using the first-week and third-week data, of the acquired CBCT images. Methods:: This retrospective study includes 99 NSCLC patients having undergone conventionally fractionated radiation therapy (RT) over six weeks. The radiomic features are computed using the Python pyradiomics package. Initially 107 radiomic features were chosen. A triage-based learning paradigm is implemented, wherein the machine decides upon the difficulty of a sample. If the machine recognizes an instance to be hard to classify, then it is left for human expert assistance, otherwise, a feed-forward neural network is trained which classifies a patient’s response to treatment. Results:: The proposed model achieves accuracy 0.75±0.03, precision 0.79±0.03, sensitivity 0.82±0.05, f-score 0.80±0.03 and specificity 0.61±0.08 to predict the patient’s early response. Using, ensemble learning technique an accuracy of 0.79±0.03, precision 0.91±0.06, sensitivity 0.80±0.08, f-score 0.84±0.03 and specificity 0.82±0.13 is achieved. Conclusion:: The experimental results revealed that the accuracy of proposed model is better than the state-of-the-art technique. The results show that CBCT radiomic features can prognosticate the tumor response for NSCLC patients.

Objectives: According to WHO, almost 15% pregnant women face the risk of developing complications during their gestational period. Although, the UN-mandated Millennium Development goal has prompted India to move towards achieving lower Maternal Mortality Ratio, almost 44,000 women die annually from high-risk pregnancy. Methods: The study delves into investigation with respect to the conditions of anemia, gestational diabetes mellitus and preeclampsia, which are most common and critical in such cases of high-risk pregnancy. The score-based questionnaire is used as a study instrument to assess the perception of ASHA workers towards these particular conditions. Data was recorded for all 90 ASHA workers who interact on a regular basis with pregnant women. Results: Our study showed that ASHA workers had average perception in GDM and preeclampsia, and above average perception in the condition of anemia. Knowledge gaps were observed in the referral management and practices of healthcare workers towards severely anemic patients. The healthcare workers had inadequate knowledge in the condition of GDM, its risk factors, the screening tests and threshold values to identify diabetes. Healthcare workers were not highly acquainted with the measurement of blood pressure, its standard reading, repeated measurement techniques, follow up urine tests for high blood pressure inflicted patients. Conclusions: The results suggest ASHA workers have limited knowledge in high-risk pregnancy cases and there might be a need for better training among healthcare workers and almost 90% of them had responded positively to the necessity of a portable screening device. There was observed no significant difference in the mean perception scores amongst subjects with respect to their age, education level and experience in the profession.

Occlusion is one of the most challenging problems in many video processing applications such as surveillance, gait recognition, activity recognition and so on. Attempts have been made to develop algorithms for handling occlusion and evaluate their performance on various datasets. However, these studies are subjective in nature and the datasets are hardly characterised in terms of the level of occlusion, thereby precluding any form of quantitative comparison of performance. This shows a compelling need to design an explicit, unambiguous and quantitative model, which should be able to objectively represent occlusion in a video. This study proposes an occlusion model based on the position and pose uncertainties of the moving subjects in a video. The proposed occlusion model is able to characterise the level of occlusion present in a video. It is also employed to synthetically generate occlusion for walking sequences, thus providing a direction for controlled dataset generation against which human identification algorithms can be tested. Given an input video with a subject moving without any occlusion, a particle swarm optimisation‐based parameter estimation methodology is presented that generates the desired level of occlusion. The proposed approaches have been tested on the TUM‐IITKGP and PETS2010 datasets. Finally, as an application, the occlusion model has been used to generate an occluded gait datasets and the performances of different gait recognition algorithms have been compared under varying levels of occlusion.

Various colonic side-effects of herbal enema have been reported in literature ranging from mild abdominal discomfort to self-limiting haemorrhagic colitis. It rarely requires blood transfusion or subtotal colectomy. We report a 57-year-old male patient developing severe ileo-colitis with persistent massive rectal bleeding immediately after herbal enema administration for the treatment of chronic constipation and was resistant to conservative management. Patient was managed successfully with emergency total laparoscopic colectomy. Post-operative recovery of the patient was excellent.

Functional α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) do not assemble efficiently in cells transfected with α7 subunits unless the cells are also transfected with the chaperone protein RIC-3. Despite the presence of RIC-3, large amounts of these subunits remain improperly assembled. Thus, additional chaperone proteins are probably required for efficient assembly of α7 AChRs. Cholinergic ligands can act as pharmacological chaperones to promote assembly of mature AChRs and upregulate the amount of functional AChRs. In addition, we have found that the chemical chaperones 4-phenylbutyric acid (PBA) and valproic acid (VPA) greatly increase the amount of functional α7 AChRs produced in a cell line expressing both α7 and RIC-3. Increased α7 AChR expression allows assay of drug action using a membrane potential-sensitive fluorescent indicator. Both PBA and VPA also increase α7 expression in the SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cell line that endogenously expresses α7 AChRs. VPA increases expression of endogenous α7 AChRs in hippocampal neurons but PBA does not. RIC-3 is insufficient for optimal assembly of α7 AChRs, but provides assay conditions for detecting additional chaperones. Chemical chaperones are a useful pragmatic approach to express high levels of human α7 AChRs for drug selection and characterization and possibly to increase α7 expression in vivo.

Near-field properties of the emission of broad area semiconductor diode lasers under extremely high pumping of up to ∼50 times the threshold are investigated. A transition from a gain to thermally-induced index guiding is shown under operation with single pulses of 300 ns duration. At highest output powers, catastrophic optical damage is observed which is studied in conjunction with the evolution of time-averaged filamentary near-field properties. Dynamics of the process is resolved on a picosecond time scale.