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Purpose: To determine relationship between head circumference, gestational age and birth weight with stage of Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP). Study Design: Descriptive observational. Place and Duration of Study: Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Karachi from January 2022 to June 2022. Methods: Infants born at or before 32 weeks of gestation, birth weight of less than or equal to 1500 grams at birth were enrolled. Their head circumference, gestational age and birth weight was measured. Fundoscopy was done to find out ROP. Staging of ROP was recorded four weeks after birth. The severity of ROP was correlated with head circumference, gestational age and birth weight. Results: Of the 82 infants with ROP, 44 (54%) were male and 38 (46%) were female. Mean gestational age was 30 ±1.4 weeks (range 27 - 32 weeks),mean birth weight was 1275 ± 155gram (range 800 - 1500), and mean Fronto Occipital Circumference (FOC) was 29±1.6 cm (range 25 - 32 cm). Degree (stage) of ROP was as follows; 14 (17.1%) infants had stage 1 disease, 24 (29.3%) had stage 2 disease, 28 (34.1%) had stage 3 disease, 13 (15.9%) had stage 4 disease and 3 (3.7%) had stage 5 disease. There was statistically significant association of gestational age, birth weight and head circumference (FOC) with the degree of ROP (P<0.001). Conclusion: Head circumference, gestational age and birth weight had a significant association with degree of ROP (P<0.001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Postoperative inflammation is very common following phacoemulsification. We conducted this study to compare the effectiveness of intra-cameral dexamethasone injection with traditional topical steroids following phacoemulsification. Study Design: Quasi experimental Place and Duration of Study: Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, JPMC, Karachi from February 2022 to July 2022. Methods: A total of 60 patients were divided into two equal groups of 30 each. One group was treated with prophylactic intra-cameral dexamethasone at the end of phacoemulsification and the other group was given Balanced Salt Solution in its place. Both the groups were examined at post-operative day 1 and 7 for following parameters; best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), intra-ocular pressures (IOP), anterior chamber cells and flare. Results: The dexamethasone group showed statistically significant improvement in anterior chamber cells and flare as compared to the placebo group at postoperative day 1 and 7 (p-value of 0.042 and 0.029 respectively for cells; p-value of 0.038 and 0.002 respectively for flare). However BCVA and IOP showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups at postoperative day 1 and 7 (p-value 0.67 and 0.46 respectively for BCVA and 0.22 and 0.08 respectively for IOP). Conclusion: Intra-cameral dexamethasone is an effective way to control postoperative inflammation following phacoemulsification with reduced anterior chamber cells and flare. However, its effects on BCVA and IOP were comparable to topical steroids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bilingual translation, attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are used to achieve synchrony between input and output sequences and the notion of alignment. NMT model has obtained state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs. However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for Urdu-to-English machine translation. We conducted extensive Urdu-to-English translation experiments using Long short-term memory (LSTM)/Bidirectional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN)/Statistical recurrent unit (SRU)/Gated recurrent unit (GRU)/Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer. Experimental results show that Bi-RNN and LSTM with attention mechanism trained iteratively, with a scalable data set, make precise predictions on unseen data. The trained models yielded competitive results by achieving 62.6% and 61% accuracy and 49.67 and 47.14 BLEU scores, respectively. From a qualitative perspective, the translation of the test sets was examined manually, and it was observed that trained models tend to produce repetitive output more frequently. The attention score produced by Bi-RNN and LSTM produced clear alignment, while GRU showed incorrect translation for words, poor alignment and lack of a clear structure. Therefore, we considered refining the attention-based models by defining an additional attention-based dropout layer. Attention dropout fixes alignment errors and minimizes translation errors at the word level. After empirical demonstration and comparison with their counterparts, we found improvement in the quality of the resulting translation system and a decrease in the perplexity and over-translation score. The ability of the proposed model was evaluated using Arabic-English and Persian-English datasets as well. We empirically concluded that adding an attention-based dropout layer helps improve GRU, SRU, and Transformer translation and is considerably more efficient in translation quality and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous Saccharomyces (S.) cerevisiae was cultured under submerged fermentation conditions and ß-glucans were extracted by enzymatic method. The extracted ß-glucans were characterized by FT-IR and their spectra presented peaks at a wavelength of 1021 cm-1. Safety and mutagenicity testing of ß-glucans showed them non-mutagenic and non-toxic up to a concentration of 200 mg/mL. For immunotherapeutic effects against Salmonella (Sal.) typhimurium infection, broiler chicks (n=120) were randomly divided into 4 equal groups viz. A (negative control), B (positive control challenged with Sal. typhimurium; 1.0× 1010 cfu), C (ß-glucans at the dose rate of 50 mg/kg feed + Sal. typhimurium challenge), and D (ß-glucans at the dose rate of 100 mg/kg feed + Sal. typhimurium challenge). Results revealed protective effects of ß-glucans against Sal. typhimurium infection as depicted by mild clinical signs along with minimal/no gross and histopathological lesions. Immunological responses were also higher (P<0.05) in ß-glucans administered birds. ß-glucans also modulated intestinal morphology with improved villi-height and crypt-depth ratio. In conclusion, ß-glucans isolated from indigenous S. cerevisiae conferred protective effects against salmonellosis and therefore can be used successfully in broilers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 16 year old female, was referred by the neuro-physician for the evaluation and management of decrease visual acuity in the left eye and papilledema, she was diagnosed Benign Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. She was under treatment for 4 years for papilledema. Visual acuity was 6/6 in the right eye and 1/60 in the left eye. Slit lamp examination was normal. Fundoscopy showed lumpy appearances of the optic nerve heads with vessels and macula normal, in both eyes. Her B scan ultrasonography and Computerized Tomography scan were carried out that revealed buried optic disc drusen a cause of pseudo-papilledema. On General examination she had typical Cushingoid features that she developed due to excess steroid therapy she was prescribed.This casehighlights the importance of identifying buried optic disc drusen, being misdiagnosed and treated as true papilledema secondary to Benign Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of silicone oil (SO) tamponade and its removal on central macular thickness (CMT) and average macular thickness (AMT). Study Design: Quasi experimental study. Place & Duration of Study: Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, Karachi, from June 2021 to April 2022. Methods: A total of 27 patients with 27 eyes with rhegmatogenous retinal detachment were included. Pars Plana Vitrectomy (PPV) with SO tamponade was performed. Removal of silicon oil (ROSO) was performedafter six months. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) was done before PPV, one month after PPV and one month after ROSO. The Central macular thickness (CMT) and Average macular thickness (AMT) were measured and compared between operated and control eyes. Results: The mean CMT and AMT before surgery was 230 ± 60.5 μm and 253.3 ± 40.3 μm respectively. The mean CMT one month after PPV with SO was 281 ± 62.8 μm and 232 ± 62.2 μm in the operated eyes and control eyes (p = 0.053). Mean AMT one month after PPV with SO was 294 ± 98.7 μm and 253 ± 37.0 μm in operated and control eyes (p = 0.182). Mean CMT one month after SO removal was 222 ± 81.5 μm in operated eyes and 230 ± 59.2 μm in control eyes (p = 0.056). Mean AMT one month after SO removal was 263 ± 45.0 μm in operated eyes and 254 ± 21.4 μm in the control eyes (p = 0.087). Conclusion: There was no statistically significant difference in the CMT and AMT before and after silicone oil tamponade and its removal, in patients with Rhegmatogenous Retinal Detachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monkeypox a zoonotic disease has been on the rise since 1970, when it was first reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Similar to smallpox, this virus had been an endemic for Africa for years. However, its first outbreak happened in 2003 when more than 70 cases were reported in the United States of America. Following that in 2022 this virus has spread to 68 rd new countries throughout the world and has been declared as a Global Health Emergency by WHO on 23 of July 2022. Monkeypox is transmitted by close interactions, exchange of bodily fluids and respiratory droplets. WHO declared that more than 90% of cases have been found among men who were involved in Men-to-Men sexual intercourse. This article covers all aspects of this virus after thoroughly researching several peer-reviewed articles, reports and taking findings from the WHO. Though monkeypox is spreading quite fast its fatality rate is between 3-6% resulting in few deaths. With focus on resuming the Vaccinia Vaccine drive and developing an anti-viral agent Tecovirimat SIGA, the chances of combating this virus seem high, if all countries collaborate with WHO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To compare the choroidal thickness in eyes of diabetic patients with eyes of age matched controls using optical coherence tomography in a tertiary care hospital. Methods: This Cross sectional study was conducted at the Department of Ophthalmology, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre Karachi, for six months from13thJanuary 2020 to13thJuly 2020. The study group comprised of 44 patients with 88 eyes. Patients who fulfill the inclusion criteria that is age ranging from 35 to 80years, either gender, known case of diabetes mellitus and having any type of diabetic retinopathy (HbA1c >7), non-diabetic healthy individuals (HbA1c <7) and those giving informed consent were included in the study. However, patients having active ocular infections, history of myocardial infarction, stroke, uveitis, any ocular surgery, lasers, intravitreal injections, poor fundus view and not giving consent were excluded. A pre-designed proforma was filled. A baseline ocular examination was performed and choroidal thickness was assessed from retinal pigment epithelium to choroid sclera junction in diabetic and healthy participants of the study group using high resolution Swept source OCT (DRI-OCT-2 Triton; Topcon). Results: The average age of the patients was 39.41±15.95 years. According to our study mean central subfoveal choroidal thickness in diabetic eyes was 268.5 ± 66.22 (95% CI 240 - 297) and in non-diabetic healthy participants it was 339.3 ± 71.49 (95% CI 308 - 369) with a p-value of 0.001. However, average choroidal thickness was 261.8 ± 61.93 (95% CI 235 - 288) and 336.0 ± 74.35 (95% CI 304 - 367) in diabetic and non-diabetic healthy population with a p-value of 0.001. Choroidal thickness comparison between gender in diabetic and non-diabetic population also showed similar trend. Conclusion: In this study, mean central choroidal thickness as well as average choroidal thickness was significantly reduced in eyes having diabetic retinopathy as compared to participants with non-diabetic healthy eyes. These findings indicate that changes in choroid may be a probable route in the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess patient and observer reported scar quality after Basal cell carcinoma surgery of face using the Patient and Observer Scar Assessment Scale (POSAS). Study Design: Quasi experimental study. Place and Duration of Study: Dermatology Department, Tertiary Care Hospitals at Multan and Karachi and Plastic Surgery Department, Tertiary Care Hospital Multan, from Apr to Sep 2020. Methodology: Patients with basal cell carcinoma that full filled inclusion and exclusion criteria were enrolled by consecutive sampling technique at Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Department after informed consent. Surgical excision was followed by reconstruction of defect either by direct closure or by rotation or advancement flap. Surgical scar was assessed independently at 8 weeks by POSAS. Data was analyzed with SPSS-23. Results: A total of 27 patients were enrolled in study. There were 11 (37.9%) males and 16 (59.25%) females between ages of 45-70 years. Basal cell carcinoma was located on cheek in 15 (55.5%), nose in 9 (33.3%), temple 2 (7.4%) and forehead 1 (3.7%) cases. Direct closure was performed in 6 (22.2%), rotation flaps in 10 (40.7%), and advancement flaps in 11 (40.7%) cases. Mean score of observer opinion about surgical scar between different surgical techniques was not statistically significant (p=0.191). However, mean score of patient opinion of scar between different surgical techniques was statistically significant (p=0.032). Conclusion: POSAS is a valid tool for scar evaluation by patient and observer-reported scar qualities after Basal cell carcinoma surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 spread worldwide after its outbreak in December 2019. This review paper aims to educate the readers regarding SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic and detection tools and the issues experienced by researchers. We identify onthe-horizon point-of-care diagnostic tests and inspire scholars to develop their innovations past conception. It will also effectively avoid potential pandemics to establish plug-and-play diagnostic information to handle the SARS infection. The authors agree that arbitrary-access, interconnected systems with flexible functionality accessible at the point-of-care, would enable fast and precise diagnosis and tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]