Ultrasound examination is used for the assessment of abnormal findings on prenatal screening. Radial ray defect can be screened by using ultrasonography. Abnormal findings can be detected quickly by ...having the understanding of the etiology, pathophysiology and embryology. It is a rare congenital defect that may be isolated or associated with other anomalies including Fanconi’s syndrome and Holt-Oram syndrome. We report the case of a 28-year-old woman (G2P1L1) who presented for routine antenatal ultrasound at 25 weeks 0 days according to the last menstrual period. The patient did not have any level-II antenatal anomaly scan done. An ultrasound was performed, and the gestational age according to the ultrasound scan was 24 weeks and 3 days. In this paper, we present a brief review of embryology and critical practical points, and report a rare case of radial ray syndrome with associated ventricular septal defect.
•The basic reproduction number R0 for India was 2.08.•The Rt for India reduced to 1.16 on 22 April, about a month into the nation-wide lockdown.•A gradual lockdown relaxation farther after the first ...peak has passed is beneficial.•Testing and isolation prevent more secondary infections when social restrictions are relaxed.•Ramping up testing has many benefits and is much more economically feasible than extending lockdowns.
India imposed one of the world’s strictest population-wide lockdowns on March 25, 2020 for COVID-19. We estimated epidemiological parameters, evaluated the effect of control measures on the epidemic in India, and explored strategies to exit lockdown.
We obtained patient-level data to estimate the delay from onset to confirmation and the asymptomatic proportion. We estimated the basic and time-varying reproduction number (R0 and Rt) after adjusting for imported cases and delay to confirmation using incidence data from March 4 to April 25, 2020. Using a SEIR-QDPA model, we simulated lockdown relaxation scenarios and increased testing to evaluate lockdown exit strategies.
R0 for India was estimated to be 2·08, and the Rt decreased from 1·67 on March 30 to 1·16 on April 22. We observed that the delay from the date of lockdown relaxation to the start of the second wave increases as lockdown is extended farther after the first wave peak—this delay is longer if lockdown is relaxed gradually.
Aggressive measures such as lockdowns may be inherently enough to suppress an outbreak; however, other measures need to be scaled up as lockdowns are relaxed. Lower levels of social distancing when coupled with a testing ramp-up could achieve similar outbreak control as an aggressive social distancing regime where testing was not increased.
India has experienced the second largest outbreak of COVID-19 globally, yet there is a paucity of studies analysing contact tracing data in the region which can optimise public health interventions ...(PHI's).
We analysed contact tracing data from Karnataka, India between 9 March and 21 July 2020. We estimated metrics of transmission including the reproduction number (R), overdispersion (k), secondary attack rate (SAR), and serial interval. R and k were jointly estimated using a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. We studied determinants of risk of further transmission and risk of being symptomatic using Poisson regression models.
Up to 21 July 2020, we found 111 index cases that crossed the super-spreading threshold of ≥8 secondary cases. Among 956 confirmed traced cases, 8.7% of index cases had 14.4% of contacts but caused 80% of all secondary cases. Among 16715 contacts, overall SAR was 3.6% 95% CI, 3.4-3.9 and symptomatic cases were more infectious than asymptomatic cases (SAR 7.7% vs 2.0%; aRR 3.63 3.04-4.34). As compared to infectors aged 19-44 years, children were less infectious (aRR 0.21 0.07-0.66 for 0-5 years and 0.47 0.32-0.68 for 6-18 years). Infectors who were confirmed ≥4 days after symptom onset were associated with higher infectiousness (aRR 3.01 2.11-4.31). As compared to asymptomatic cases, symptomatic cases were 8.16 3.29-20.24 times more likely to cause symptomatic infection in their secondary cases. Serial interval had a mean of 5.4 4.4-6.4 days, and case fatality rate was 2.5% 2.4-2.7 which increased with age.
We found significant heterogeneity in the individual-level transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 which could not be explained by the degree of heterogeneity in the underlying number of contacts. To strengthen contact tracing in over-dispersed outbreaks, testing and tracing delays should be minimised and retrospective contact tracing should be implemented. Targeted measures to reduce potential superspreading events should be implemented. Interventions aimed at children might have a relatively small impact on reducing transmission owing to their low symptomaticity and infectivity. We propose that symptomatic cases could cause a snowballing effect on clinical severity and infectiousness across transmission generations; further studies are needed to confirm this finding.
Radiological investigations are essential for the diagnosis and classification of fungal rhinosinusitis; however, radiological findings might occasionally be misleading. Computed tomography (CT) scan ...and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) complement each other, facilitating clinicians to arrive at a diagnosis. Hence, even with the best radiological modalities, correlation between clinical and microbiological findings is crucial for the accurate diagnosis of fungal rhinosinusitis. In addition, the role of traditional methods such as KOH microscopy and culture should be accurately evaluated. To this end, we aimed to diagnose rhinosinusitis with a fungal etiology based on radiological findings and subsequently correlate these findings with those of microbiological techniques, namely culture and KOH microscopy. A total of 57 clinically suspected fungal rhinosinusitis cases were included in the study. Radiological investigations were performed using either CT or MRI. Tissues samples were processed and analyzed using KOH microscopy and culture. The results of the study suggest that using a single method for the diagnosis of fungal rhinosinusitis is inadequate. Rather, the diagnosis should be based on radiological as well as microbiological findings, especially for cases that are clinically ambiguous.
This work promotes the room temperature energy storage properties of the multiferroics. In this approach, impacts of PrFeO3 doping on PT-based solid solutions (Pb
1
−
x
Pr
x
Ti
1
−
x
Fe
x
O3,
x
= ...0.21, 0.22, 0.23, 0.24, 0.25 and 0.26) have been explored. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns were used to estimate the crystallographic parameters, confirming the single phase tetragonal structure. The ferroelectric Curie temperature (
T
c
FE
) is observed to drop from 410 K to below room temperature as the Pr concentration increases. The ferroelectric P-E loops were used to determine the energy storage values at room temperature. The sample
x
= 0.24 achieved the maximum value of energy storage density of 362.25 mJ/cm3 with the efficiency of 40.5%. The ferroelectric P-E loops were used to determine the energy storage values at room temperature. The validity of magnetoelectric coupling in all samples was confirmed by magneto-dielectric studies and found that the sample
x
= 0.24 shows the maximum response with the coupling coefficient (
γ
) = 15.54 g2/emu2.
Background: After SARS-CoV-2 set foot in India, the Government took a number of steps to limit the spread of the virus in the country. This included restricted testing, isolation, contact tracing and ...quarantine, and enforcement of a nation-wide lockdown starting 25 March 2020. The objectives of this study were to i) describe the age, gender distribution, and mortality among COVID-19 patients identified till 14 April 2020 and predict the range of contact rate; and ii) predict the number of COVID-19 infections after 40 days of lockdown.
Methods: We used a cross-sectional descriptive design for the first objective and a susceptible-infected-removed model for
in silico predictions. We collected data from government-controlled and crowdsourced websites.
Results: Studying age and gender parameters of 1161 Indian COVID-19 patients, the median age was 38 years (IQR, 27-52) with 20-39 year-old males being the most affected group. The number of affected patients were 854 (73.6%) men and 307 (26.4%) women. If the current contact rate continues (0.25-27), India may have 110460 to 220575 infected persons at the end of 40 days lockdown.
Conclusion: The disease is majorly affecting a younger age group in India. Interventions have been helpful in preventing the worst-case scenario in India but will be unable to prevent the spike in the number of cases.
Background: After SARS-CoV-2 set foot in India, the Government took a number of steps to limit the spread of the virus in the country. This included restricted testing, isolation, contact tracing and ...quarantine, and enforcement of a nation-wide lockdown starting 25 March 2020. The objectives of this study were to i) describe the age,gender distribution and mortality among COVID-19 patients identified till 14 April 2020 and predict the range of contact rate; and ii) predict the number of active COVID-19 patients after 40 days of lockdown.
Methods: We used a cross-sectional descriptive design for first objective and a susceptible-infected-removed model for
in silico predictions. We collected data from government-controlled and crowdsourced websites.
Results: Studying age and gender parameters of 1161 Indian COVID-19 patients, the median age was 38 years (IQR, 27-52) with 20-39 year-old males being the most affected group. The number of affected patients were 854 (73.6%) men and 307 (26.4%) women. If the current contact rate continues (0.25-27), India may have 110460 to 220575 infected persons at the end of 40 days lockdown.
Conclusion: The disease is majorly affecting a younger age group in India. Interventions have been helpful in preventing the worst-case scenario in India, but will be unable to prevent the spike in number of cases.
Point-of-care screening tools are essential to expedite patient care and decrease reliance on slow diagnostic tools (e.g., microbial cultures) to identify pathogens and their associated antibiotic ...resistance. Analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted from biological media has seen increased attention in recent years as a potential non-invasive diagnostic procedure. This work explores the use of solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) and ambient plasma ionization mass spectrometry (MS) to rapidly acquire VOC signatures of bacteria and fungi. The MS spectrum of each pathogen goes through a preprocessing and feature extraction pipeline. Various supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) classification algorithms are trained and evaluated on the extracted feature set. These are able to classify the type of pathogen as bacteria or fungi with high accuracy, while marked progress is also made in identifying specific strains of bacteria. This study presents a new approach for the identification of pathogens from VOC signatures collected using SPME and ambient ionization MS by training classifiers on just a few samples of data. This ambient plasma ionization and ML approach is robust, rapid, precise, and can potentially be used as a non-invasive clinical diagnostic tool for point-of-care applications.
The U-type hexaferrites (Ba1−3xLa2x)4Co2Fe36O60 (x = 0, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.25) have been synthesized by auto-combustion method. The work involves the study of structural, microstructural, ...dielectric, magnetic and magneto-dielectric properties of the prepared materials. The structural analysis has been done by X-ray diffraction technique along with Le Bail refinement which confirmed the pure hexagonal phase for all the samples. The microstructural analysis has been carried out by field-emission scanning electron microscopy. The vibrating sample magnetometer is used to measure the magnetic properties. The sample with a composition of x= 0.15 has shown the maximum magnetization of approximately 73.31 emu/g with the remnant magnetization of 38.89 emu/g and coercive field of 1.77 kOe at room temperature. Moreover, the same sample has delivered the maximum magneto-dielectric response of about 54.18% at 1.5-T field.
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