Materials and ion transport property characterization in Solid Polymer Electrolyte (SPE) membranes: (1
−
x) PEO: x KIO
3, where x
=
0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50
wt.%, have been studied. SPE films have been ...prepared following two casting techniques: a novel hot-press (extrusion) and the traditional solution cast. Hot-press technique is a completely dry/solvent free/rapid/inexpensive procedure as compared to solution cast method and has recently been receiving wider acceptability to cast membranes of ion conducting polymeric electrolytes.
‘Log
σ
−
x’ study revealed
σ-maxima at salt concentration x
=
30
wt.% for SPE film prepared by both the methods. However, hot-pressed SPE film: 70 PEO: 30 KIO
3 exhibited relatively higher room temperature conductivity (
σ
∼
4.40
×
10
−
7
S
cm
−
1
) than that of the solution casted film. This has been referred to as Optimum Conducting Composition (OCC) SPE film. Materials characterization in OCC SPE film has been done by XRD, FTIR and DSC techniques. These studies confirmed the complexation of salt in the polymeric host. Some basic ionic parameters viz. conductivity (
σ), ionic mobility (μ), mobile ion concentration (n), ionic transference number (t
ion) have been determined using different experimental procedures to understand the ion transport behaviour in OCC SPE material. The temperature dependent conductivity measurement has also been carried out and the activation energy (E
a) has been computed from the linear least square fitting of ‘log
σ
−
1
/
T’ Arrhenius plot.
Recent years have seen a steep increase in penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) based generators and storage devices; collectively referred as distributed energy resources (DERs). The ...traditional reliability indices used by utilities such as loss of load expectation, loss of energy expectation and loss of load probability are suitable for systems with conventional generators. However, they fail to acknowledge stochastic behaviour of RES based generators and energy limited capabilities of storage appropriately. In this study, new probabilistic reliability indices for investigating impact of penetration of DERs on system reliability have been proposed. In order to provide effective assessment, a reliability index referred as expectation of failure in grid connected mode (EFG) and three reliability indices viz. expectation of complete success in islanded mode, expectation of partial failure in islanded mode, expectation of complete failure in islanded mode have been proposed in grid connected mode and islanded mode, respectively. The mathematical formulation for proposed indices has been developed in probabilistic framework. The formulation has been implemented on a 33-bus distribution feeder. Different penetration levels have been investigated to provide adequate justification for proposed indices. Parametric analyses with storage integration have also been carried out. The proposed reliability metrics will assist system planners to choose optimum penetration level with greater efficacy.
In recent years, various Pre-Viz methods have come to be used in motion picture production. In this study, we focused on the difference between the final image and the video Pre-Vis such as ...scenarios, storyboards and 3D Pre-Vis. We measured the EEG of audience who are watching various Pre-Viz and completed version. Then, we analyzed the transition of the degree of concentration which is calculated by Mindset.
Neurosurgery Awareness Month (August) was initiated by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons with the aim of bringing neurological conditions to the forefront and educating the public ...about these conditions. Digital media is an important tool for disseminating information and connecting with influencers, general public, and other stakeholders. Hence, it is crucial to understand the impact of awareness campaigns such as Neurosurgery Awareness Month to optimize resource allocation, quantify the efficiency and reach of these initiatives, and identify areas for improvement.
The purpose of our study was to examine the digital impact of Neurosurgery Awareness Month globally and identify areas for further improvement.
We used 4 social media (Twitter) assessment tools (Sprout Social, SocioViz, Sentiment Viz, and Symplur) and Google Trends to extract data using various search queries. Using regression analysis, trends were studied in the total number of tweets posted in August between 2014 and 2022. Two search queries were used in this analysis: one specifically targeting tweets related to Neurosurgery Awareness Month and the other isolating all neurosurgery-related posts. Total impressions and top influencers for #neurosurgery were calculated using Symplur's machine learning algorithm. To study the context of the tweets, we used SocioViz to isolate the top 100 popular hashtags, keywords, and collaborations between influencers. Network analysis was performed to illustrate the interactions and connections within the digital media environment using ForceAtlas2 model. Sentiment analysis was done to study the underlying emotion of the tweets. Google Trends was used to study the global search interest by studying relative search volume data.
A total of 10,007 users were identified as tweeting about neurosurgery during Neurosurgery Awareness Month using the "#neurosurgery" hashtag. These tweets generated over 29.14 million impressions globally. Of the top 10 most influential users, 5 were faculty neurosurgeons at US university hospitals. Other influential users included notable organizations and journals in the field of neurosurgery. The network analysis of the top 100 influencers showed a collaboration rate of 81%. However, only 1.6% of the total neurosurgery tweets were advocating about neurosurgery awareness during Neurosurgery Awareness Month, and only 13 tweets were posted by verified users using the #neurosurgeryawarenessmonth hashtag. The sentiment analysis revealed that the majority of the tweets about Neurosurgery Awareness Month were pleasant with subdued emotion.
The global digital impact of Neurosurgery Awareness Month is nascent, and support from other international organizations and neurosurgical influencers is needed to yield a significant digital reach. Increasing collaboration and involvement from underrepresented communities may help to increase the global reach. By better understanding the digital impact of Neurosurgery Awareness Month, future health care awareness campaigns can be optimized to increase global awareness of neurosurgery and the challenges facing the field.
Diabetic Maculopathy, the major cause of vision loss, occurs due to uncontrolled diabetes. This affects the retinal layers of the eye causing bleeding of vessels, which results in Diabetic Macular ...Edema (DME), macular detachment etc., Basically three structural changes are involved in DME viz., Cystoid Macular Edema (CME), Serous Macular Detachment (SMD) and Intra Retinal Fluid (IRF). These changes may also coexist with each other such as CME with SMD or CME with IRF etc. In this work, the retinal images acquired through Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SDOCT) imaging modality, which would provide high level of precision and resolution of the retinal layers are utilized. An automated algorithm to detect and differentiate seven types of DME based on deep learning is implemented using transfer learning on three Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), ResNet 50, VGGNet and AlexNet. In detection of DME, ResNet 50 performs excellently well, when compared with Alexnet and VGGNet, because of its depth and skip connection features. The average values of the statistical parameters such as accuracy (0.993), F1 score (0.975), Mathews Correlation Coefficient(MCC)(0.972) of ResNet are high when compared to that of AlexNet and VGGNet
Impairment of cognitive functions following neurotoxic exposure is collectively termed cognitive toxicity. This oration is based on a series of studies carried out over last 12 years on cognitive ...toxicity of two groups of substances, viz. organophosphate (OP) pesticides and sedative psychotropic drugs. OP pesticide poisoning is a major clinical and public health problem in South Asia. OPs act as cholinesterase inhibitors, and bring about acute neurological deficits following exposure. Using neurophysiological and neuropsychological techniques, we assess long-term neurocognitive deficits of OPs, a less known yet important adverse effect of OP exposure. The findings hitherto indicate both acute large-dose poisoning and subclinical occupational exposure are associated with long-term cognitive impairment. In the same way the pesticide use and misuse are common in agricultural communities, use and misuse of sedative psychotropic medications are common in urbanised societies. Sedative drugs, even in therapeutic doses impair driving and underlying cognitive functions, and increase the risk of traffic accidents. When taken in overdose, these drugs have cognitively impairing effects that last beyond clinical recovery from acute poisoning. These patients are more prone to traffic crashes at least up to 4 weeks following exposure, and the cognitive recovery over this period mirrors the crash risk at different post-overdose time points. The above findings raise a number of clinical and medico legal implications in post-discharge management of patients with sedative drug overdose. As the agricultural communities transform into urban industrialised societies in Sri Lanka, the pattern of poisoning changes from agrochemicals into pharmaceuticals, particularly psychotropic dugs. The two lines of research discussed above highlight how this changing social fabric poses new challenges for the neurophysiologists, neurologists and psychiatrists who study cognition and apply their findings in clinical settings. Our latest work in generating age-, sex- and education-adjusted norms for cognitive tests for Sri Lankans, would set the foundation in interpreting the cognitive test results of clinical populations.
The present study was conducted during 2016-17 in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura states of the North-Eastern Himalayan (NEH) region to analyze the extent of ...institutional support, viz. information, credit and market access in the tribal dominated districts. Findings of the study reveal that 87.80% respondents owned/use mobile phone, whereas extension contact was found to be very poor in the study area as a whole. Awareness and usage of formal information sources reveal that about one fourth (24%) were aware of IndianCouncil of Agricultural Research (ICAR) centres, whereas only 17.6% respondents were aware of Krishi Vigyan Kendra and Agricultural University/line department. Access to these institutions was found to be poor owing to poor connectivity and remoteness of the area. About 43% respondents had no access to institutional credit, whereas informal sources of rural credit account for about 21.8% of the loan volume to tribal households and kins/relatives(41.4%) were the largest source of informal credit. Marketing and associated infrastructure were identified as major determinants of their livelihood diversification.
Speckle noise is an undesirable phenomenon that exhibits granular pattern which reduces the diagnostic capability of clinical ultrasound (US) images. In this study, a new speckle denoising method ...based on modelling of detail band shearlet coefficients of log-transformed US images is presented. In each detail shearlet subband, coefficients corresponding to signal and speckle noise are modelled as normal inverse Gaussian and Gaussian priors, respectively. These coefficients, based on image local statistics are segmented into different regions of heterogeneity viz. homogeneous, heterogeneous and strongly heterogeneous regions, respectively, so as to control over smoothing of denoised images. Then, using the prior distributions maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation is performed over all regions of detail bands except those regions that represent strongly heterogeneous coefficients. For better performance, an adaptive weight function is also used in the MAP expression which reduces the loss of feature information. Experimentation is done on noise-free synthetic kidney and foetus US images and a set of 60 real US images. The results are presented for objective and subjective quality assessment of the proposed method and five other methods for speckle denoising. The potential of the proposed method in comparison to other methods can easily be ascertained from the obtained denoising results.
Like Mapping Inequality, Renewing Inequality provides several avenues for exploring the historical processes at work: by indicating, through circle diameter, the number of families displaced (shaded ...in color depending on whether the majority are families of color or white families); providing project boundaries and type, poverty and racial data, and the number of families displaced by year; and offering specifics about project type, duration, displacement, and funding. At the city level, readers are presented with a visual overview of urban renewal through a listing of project names, the type of project (residential, open land, disaster areas, etc.), and a diverging bar chart of white families and families of color displaced as a result of each project. ...overlaid on the maps are interstate highway systems, which appear on the map only if construction was completed in the selected year. Since they deal with housing and urban development, using them together charts an overarching history of urban change between 1930 and 1970. Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Andrew R. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
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