Search

In the digital world, biometrics is used for authentication or recognition to examine and confirm a person's distinguishing physical or behavioral attributes. There are many authentication systems available today that use iris, fingerprint, and face features for identification and verification. Face recognition-based systems are the most popular since they don't always need the user's assistance, are more automated, and are simple to use. Face recognition paves the way for an innovative way to perceive a human face. Face recognition and identification have been used in access control systems, which have become widely used in security frameworks during the past few years. With the help of biometrics, a facial recognition system can extract facial details from a picture or video. The data is compared to a database of recognized faces to identify a match. Personal identity can be confirmed through facial recognition. This review paper offers a comparison of various facial recognition methods.

Data biases are a known impediment to the development of trustworthy machine learning models and their application to many biomedical problems. When biased data is suspected, the assumption that the labeled data is representative of the population must be relaxed and methods that exploit a typically representative unlabeled data must be developed. To mitigate the adverse effects of unrepresentative data, we consider a binary semi-supervised setting and focus on identifying whether the labeled data is biased and to what extent. We assume that the class-conditional distributions were generated by a family of component distributions represented at different proportions in labeled and unlabeled data. We also assume that the training data can be transformed to and subsequently modeled by a nested mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions. We then develop a multi-sample expectation-maximization algorithm that learns all individual and shared parameters of the model from the combined data. Using these parameters, we develop a statistical test for the presence of the general form of bias in labeled data and estimate the level of this bias by computing the distance between corresponding class-conditional distributions in labeled and unlabeled data. We first study the new methods on synthetic data to understand their behavior and then apply them to real-world biomedical data to provide evidence that the bias estimation procedure is both possible and effective.

The accurate interpretation of genetic variants is essential for clinical actionability. However, a majority of variants remain of uncertain significance. Multiplexed assays of variant effects (MAVEs), can help provide functional evidence for variants of uncertain significance (VUS) at the scale of entire genes. Although the systematic prioritization of genes for such assays has been of great interest from the clinical perspective, existing strategies have rarely emphasized this motivation. Here, we propose three objectives for quantifying the importance of genes each satisfying a specific clinical goal: (1) Movability scores to prioritize genes with the most VUS moving to non-VUS categories, (2) Correction scores to prioritize genes with the most pathogenic and/or benign variants that could be reclassified, and (3) Uncertainty scores to prioritize genes with VUS for which variant pathogenicity predictors used in clinical classification exhibit the greatest uncertainty. We demonstrate that existing approaches are sub-optimal when considering these explicit clinical objectives. We also propose a combined weighted score that optimizes the three objectives simultaneously and finds optimal weights to improve over existing approaches. Our strategy generally results in better performance than existing knowledge-driven and data-driven strategies and yields gene sets that are clinically relevant. Our work has implications for systematic efforts that aim to iterate between predictor development, experimentation and translation to the clinic.

Racial and ethnic disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes (APOs) have been well-documented in the United States, but the extent to which the disparities are present in high-risk subgroups have not been studied. To address this problem, we first applied association rule mining to the clinical data derived from the prospective nuMoM2b study cohort to identify subgroups at increased risk of developing four APOs (gestational diabetes, hypertension acquired during pregnancy, preeclampsia, and preterm birth). We then quantified racial/ethnic disparities within the cohort as well as within high-risk subgroups to assess potential effects of risk-reduction strategies. We identify significant differences in distributions of major risk factors across racial/ethnic groups and find surprising heterogeneity in APO prevalence across these populations, both in the cohort and in its high-risk subgroups. Our results suggest that risk-reducing strategies that simultaneously reduce disparities may require targeting of high-risk subgroups with considerations for the population context.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of COVID-19 lockdown on the lifestyle of children aged 5 to 14 years. Methods: A random sample of 315 patients attending the outpatient department of the institute between the age group of 5 to 14 years were included. A self-administered bilingual questionnaire containing close-ended questions was distributed to the parents/caregivers prior to the initial consultation and written informed consent was taken. The questionnaire included the patients’ demographic information and questions about lifestyle, dietary habits, physical activity, enthusiasm, irritability and weight gain in children during the covid-19 lockdown to which respondents were asked to tick the appropriate option according to them. Results: Out of 315 children, 148 children were female and 167 were male. The overall mean age of the children was recorded 8.85 years with a std. deviation of 2.602. The majority (66.7%) of respondents noticed the change in their child’s lifestyle-related behaviour during lockdown. A statistically significant association was found between changes in snacking habits between meals and weight gain of the children (p-value=0.002), changesbetween the participation in physical activities and weight gain of the children (p-value

Motivation Accurate estimation of false discovery rate (FDR) of spectral identification is a central problem in mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Over the past two decades, target-decoy approaches (TDAs) and decoy-free approaches (DFAs) have been widely used to estimate FDR. TDAs use a database of decoy species to faithfully model score distributions of incorrect peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs). DFAs, on the other hand, fit two-component mixture models to learn the parameters of correct and incorrect PSM score distributions. While conceptually straightforward, both approaches lead to problems in practice, particularly in experiments that push instrumentation to the limit and generate low fragmentation-efficiency and low signal-to-noise-ratio spectra. Results We introduce a new decoy-free framework for FDR estimation that generalizes present DFAs while exploiting more search data in a manner similar to TDAs. Our approach relies on multi-component mixtures, in which score distributions corresponding to the correct PSMs, best incorrect PSMs and second-best incorrect PSMs are modeled by the skew normal family. We derive EM algorithms to estimate parameters of these distributions from the scores of best and second-best PSMs associated with each experimental spectrum. We evaluate our models on multiple proteomics datasets and a HeLa cell digest case study consisting of more than a million spectra in total. We provide evidence of improved performance over existing DFAs and improved stability and speed over TDAs without any performance degradation. We propose that the new strategy has the potential to extend beyond peptide identification and reduce the need for TDA on all analytical platforms. Availabilityand implementation https://github.com/shawn-peng/FDR-estimation. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The sun’s magnetic field drives the 11-year solar cycle, and predicting its strength has practical importance for many space weather applications. Previous studies have shown that analysing the solar activity of the two hemispheres separately instead of the full sun can provide more detailed information on the activity evolution. However, the existing Hemispheric Sunspot Number data series (1945 onwards) was too short for meaningful solar cycle predictions. Based on a newly created hemispheric sunspot number catalogue for the time range 1874-2020 (Veronig et al. 2021, http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/652/A56) that is compatible with the International Sunspot Number from World Data Centre SILSO, we investigate the evolution of the solar cycle for the two hemispheres and develop a novel method for predicting the solar cycle amplitude. We demonstrate a steady relationship between the maximal growth rate of activity in the ascending phase of a cycle and its subsequent amplitude and form a 3rd order regression for the predictions. Testing this method for cycles 12-24, we show that the forecast made by the sum of the maximal growth rate from the North and South Hemispheric Sunspot number is more accurate than the same forecast from the Total Sunspot Number: The rms error of predictions is smaller by 27%, the correlation coefficient r is higher by 11% on average reaching values in the range r = 0.8-0.9 depending of the smoothing window of the monthly mean data. These findings demonstrate that empirical solar cycle prediction methods can be enhanced by investigating the solar cycle dynamics in terms of the hemispheric sunspot numbers, which is a strong argument supporting regular monitoring, recording, and analysing solar activity separately for the two hemispheres.

BACKGROUND: The Nottingham Clavicle Score (NCS) has been recently described for functional outcome assessment after injuries to clavicle and the Acromioclavicular joint. However; validity and responsiveness are context specific psychometric terms and the NCS has not been previously described in surgically treated clavicle shaft fractures. Aim of the present study was to investigate validity and responsiveness of the NCS in clavicle fractures treated with titanium flexible nailing. METHODS: This prospective study was undertaken on consecutively operated clavicle shaft fractures treated with titanium elastic nail from November 2013 to August 2016. Functional assessment using NCS was done at two and six months postoperatively. Construct validity was also evaluated by formulating the null hypothesis that there would be no difference in NCS at six months after open and closed reduction and in 15B1 and 15B2 fracture sub-types. The above two hypotheses were formulated based on previous studies that used Constant score and DASH score. Pre-specified hypothesis and results in accordance with the hypotheses suggest satisfactory construct validity. Responsiveness was evaluated using standardized response mean (SRM) and Effect size (ES). ES and SRM values ≥0.80 suggest satisfactory responsiveness. The proportion of patients having the least possible score of 0 points (floor effect) and the highest possible score of 100 points (ceiling effect) was evaluated at two and six months postoperatively. Floor and ceiling effect of

We give sufficient identifiability conditions for estimating mixing proportions in two-component mixtures of skew normal distributions with one known component. We consider the univariate case as well as two multivariate extensions: a multivariate skew normal distribution (MSN) by Azzalini and Dalla Valle (1996) and the canonical fundamental skew normal distribution (CFUSN) by Arellano-Valle and Genton (2005). The characteristic function of the CFUSN distribution is additionally derived.

Forecasting the solar cycle amplitude is important for a better understanding of the solar dynamo as well as for many space weather applications. We demonstrated a steady relationship between the maximal growth rate of sunspot activity in the ascending phase of a cycle and the subsequent cycle amplitude on the basis of four data sets of solar activity indices: total sunspot numbers, hemispheric sunspot numbers from the new catalogue from 1874 onwards, total sunspot areas, and hemispheric sunspot areas. For all the data sets, a linear regression based on the maximal growth rate precursor shows a significant correlation. Validation of predictions for cycles 1-24 shows high correlations between the true and predicted cycle amplitudes reaching r = 0.93 for the total sunspot numbers. The lead time of the predictions varies from 2 to 49 months, with a mean value of 21 months. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the sum of maximal growth rate indicators determined separately for the north and the south hemispheric sunspot numbers provides more accurate predictions than that using total sunspot numbers. The advantages reach 27% and 11% on average in terms of rms and correlation coefficient, respectively. The superior performance is also confirmed with hemispheric sunspot areas with respect to total sunspot areas. The maximal growth rate of sunspot activity in the ascending phase of a solar cycle serves as a reliable precursor of the subsequent cycle amplitude. Furthermore, our findings provide a strong foundation for supporting regular monitoring, recording, and predictions of solar activity with hemispheric sunspot data, which capture the asymmetric behaviour of the solar activity and solar magnetic field and enhance solar cycle prediction methods., 11 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomy & Astrophysics

The 11-Year solar cycle is driven by the sun's magnetic field. The sunspot number is the most-common long term index of solar activity and prediction of its amplitude can help to understand the physics of the solar dynamo and the effects of space weather. Previous studies have shown that analysing the solar activity of the two hemispheres separately instead of the full suncan provide more detailed information on the activity evolution. However, the existing Hemispheric Sunspot Number data series (1945 onwards) is too short for the purpose of solar cycle predictions. Based on a newly created hemispheric sunspot number catalogue for the time range 1874-2020 (Veronig et al. 2021) that is compatible with the International Sunspot Number from World Data Center SILSO, we investigate the evolution of the solar cycle for the two hemispheres, and demonstrate that empirical solar cycle prediction methods can be enhanced by investigating the solar cycle dynamics in terms of the hemispheric sunspot numbers. We develop a method for predictingthe solar cycle amplitude based on the peak growth rate in the ascending phase of the cycle using the Hemispheric Sunspot numbers for cycles 12-24. We show that using this technique, the sum of the predictions (North+South) of the two hemisphere give better estimates of the cycle amplitude than the Total Sunspot Numbers. In addition, we estimate the cycle peaks with 1st order and 3rd order regressions and find that the hemispheric sunspot numbers provide better estimates of cycle peak than total sunspot numbers for both the cases with the obtained correlations lying in the range r =0.8 to 0.9 depending on the applied smoothing window

Background Pulpotomy is the treatment for cariously exposed vital primary molars. UsingfFormocresol as a pulpotomy agent is been in controversy, which has triggered the search for better alternatives. The product like 'Myristica fragrans (MF)-Nutmeg gel, Terminalia chebula (TC)-Myrobolan gel is gaining popularity as herbal pulpotomy agents. Aim To evaluate and compare clinical and radiographical success of herbal gels Myristica fragrans (MF)-Nutmeg, and Terminalia chebula (TC)-Myrobolan as pulpotomy medicaments in primary teeth. Materials and methods Twenty participants (n = 20), each with at least two primary molars requiring pulpotomy, were selected and divided into two test groups. In 10 children Terminalia chebula gel was placed in one side and Formocresol on another side. Rest 10 children were treated with Myristica fragrans gel on one side and another side with formocresol. The treated teeth selected for clinical and radiographic evaluation were monitored periodically for 3, 6 and 12 months. Results With the follow-up of 12 months there was no significant difference in efficacy of all three pulpotomy medicaments, i.e. Nutmeg, Myrobolan, and Formocresol, respectively was found. Conclusion Herbal gels have a promising role in dentistry having the proper knowledge, and their effects on teeth would prove them as a successful dental therapeutic agent. How to cite this article Mali S, Singla S, Sharma A, Gautam A, Niranjan B, Jain S. Efficacy of Myristica fragrans and Terminalia chebula as Pulpotomy Agents in Primary Teeth: A Clinical Study. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent, 2018;11(6):505-509.

Background: Tuberculosis is an infectious disease cause by the mycobacterium tuberculosis which typically involve lung but can affect other site called extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB). In EPTB lymph node tuberculosis is most common and most severe is tuberculous meningitis. Cartridge based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) have high sensitivity and perform both respiratory and non-respiratory specimen. The aim of this retrospective study is to find out the proportion of extra pulmonary tuberculosis in hospitalized patient and determine the association of CBNAAT in diagnosis EPTB and Rifampicin resistance.Methods: This is the retrospective observational study done at Civil Hospital Ahmedabad in between October 2017 to October 2019 among the admitted patient age 1 month to 12 year diagnosed cases of EPTB according to RNTCP guidelines. Data collection done by medical records as indoor case sheets and investigation data from laboratory department.Results: Incidence of EPTB among the hospitalized children is 1.95% and among total tuberculosis patient is 42.48%. Among 191 suspected EPTB cases 59 confirmed indicate sensitivity of 37.3% and no false positive cases indicate 100% positive predictive value. Sensitivity of CBNAAT was highest in gastric aspirate followed by CSF in present study.Conclusions: Tuberculosis is more common in male child less than 5-year-old with frequent risk factor is rural residential area, lower socioeconomic class and contact with active cases. In my study is CNS tuberculosis is most common. In my study mortality is higher among 1-to-5-year age group with co morbid condition are SAM and septicemia.

We create a continuous series of daily and monthly hemispheric sunspot numbers (HSNs) from 1874 to 2020, which will be continuously expanded in the future with the HSNs provided by SILSO. Based on the available daily measurements of hemispheric sunspot areas from 1874 to 2016 from Greenwich Royal Observatory and NOAA, we derive the relative fractions of the northern and southern activity. These fractions are applied to the international sunspot number (ISN) to derive the HSNs. This method and obtained data are validated against published HSNs for the period 1945--2020. We provide a continuous data series and catalogue of daily, monthly mean, and 13-month smoothed monthly mean HSNs for the time range 1874--2020 that are consistent with the newly calibrated ISN. Validation of the reconstructed HSNs against the direct data available since 1945 reveals a high level of consistency, with a correlation of r=0.94 (0.97) for the daily (monthly) data. The cumulative hemispheric asymmetries for cycles 12-24 give a mean value of 16%, with no obvious pattern in north-south predominance over the cycle evolution. The strongest asymmetry occurs for cycle no. 19, in which the northern hemisphere shows a cumulated predominance of 42%. The phase shift between the peaks of solar activity in the two hemispheres may be up to 28 months, with a mean absolute value of 16.4 months. The phase shifts reveal an overall asymmetry of the northern hemisphere reaching its cycle maximum earlier (in 10 out of 13 cases). Relating the ISN and HSN peak growth rates during the cycle rise phase with the cycle amplitude reveals higher correlations when considering the two hemispheres individually, with r = 0.9. Our findings demonstrate that empirical solar cycle prediction methods can be improved by investigating the solar cycle dynamics in terms of the hemispheric sunspot numbers., Comment: Accepted by Astron. Astrophys. 12 pages

Background Pulpotomy is the treatment for cariously exposed vital primary molars. UsingfFormocresol as a pulpotomy agent is been in controversy, which has triggered the search for better alternatives. The product like ‘Myristica fragrans (MF)–Nutmeg gel, Terminalia chebula (TC)–Myrobolan gel is gaining popularity as herbal pulpotomy agents. Aim To evaluate and compare clinical and radiographical success of herbal gels Myristica fragrans (MF)–Nutmeg, and Terminalia chebula (TC)–Myrobolan as pulpotomy medicaments in primary teeth. Materials and methods Twenty participants (n = 20), each with at least two primary molars requiring pulpotomy, were selected and divided into two test groups. In 10 children Terminalia chebula gel was placed in one side and Formocresol on another side. Rest 10 children were treated with Myristica fragrans gel on one side and another side with formocresol. The treated teeth selected for clinical and radiographic evaluation were monitored periodically for 3, 6 and 12 months. Results With the follow-up of 12 months there was no significant difference in efficacy of all three pulpotomy medicaments, i.e. Nutmeg, Myrobolan, and Formocresol, respectively was found Conclusion Herbal gels have a promising role in dentistry having the proper knowledge, and their effects on teeth would prove them as a successful dental therapeutic agent. How to cite this article Mali S, Singla S, Sharma A, Gautam A, Niranjan B, Jain S. Efficacy of Myristica fragrans and Terminalia chebula as Pulpotomy Agents in Primary Teeth: A Clinical Study. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent, 2018;11(6):505-509

Intraosseous ganglion cyst is a rare bone tumor and the lesion could often be missed. The diagnosis could be delayed so proper radiologic investigation and index of suspicion is necessary .Differential diagnoses of painful cystic radiolucent carpal lesion are osteoid osteoma, osteoblastoma and intraosseous ganglion. Curettage of the scaphoid lesion and filling of void with bone graft provides good functional outcomes. The cyst contains mucoid viscous material without epithelial or synovial lining. We present a case of 30 years old male with intraosseous ganglion cyst of scaphoid which was treated with curettage and bone grafting. Rarely ganglion cyst is found in small bones of hand and should be considered as differential diagnosis of chronic radial wrist pain.

Recent studies have experimentally shown that autoencoder based formulations for collaborative filtering can outperform other approaches. However, prior studies in this area, were either based on only ratings information; and at most accounted for either user or item metadata but not both. The metadata was appended to the ratings and just passed on as inputs. This is the most that can be done in the standard neural network based autoencoder formulation. However, collaborative filtering is a highly under-determined problem, therefore being able to utilize maximum information will naturally boost results. Previous autoencoder based formulations either had to leave out user metadata or item metadata. This is the first work, that proposes to modify the autoencoder to account for both user and item metadata. Results using explicit metadata (e.g. age, gender, occupation for users and genre for movies) and implicit metadata (neighborhood information) on our proposed formulation improves upon the state-of -the-art techniques considerably.

Hoffa’s fracture is coronal oriented fracture of distal femur with the fracture line extending through the femoral condyles. Hoffa’s fracture is rarely associated with ipsilateral femur and tibia fractures. Proper clinical examination and radiographic evaluation is necessary to diagnose associated injuries around the knee joint with Hoffa’s fracture. Closed reduction of dislocated patella in emergency room and field triage should be avoided to prevent patellar tendon incarcenation, patellar tendon rupture and osteochondral damage. We report a rare case of Hoffa’s fracture with irreducible patellar dislocation and tibial intercondylar eminence fracture following road traffic accident.