Effect of neural mobilisation in Bell's palsy: A randomised controlled trial.

Background: Neural mobilisation technique is effective in spinal nerve rehabilitation. However, no study has reported the effect of facial nerve mobilisation in acute Bell's palsy. Objectives: The objective of our study was to evaluate the effect of facial neural mobilisation over conventional therapy in improving facial symmetry in patients with acute Bell's palsy. Methods: A randomised controlled trial was conducted in the physical therapy department for 62 patients with acute Bell's palsy. The intervention included 10 days of drug therapy including 3 weeks of conventional therapy to the experimental and the control group. However, the experimental group received additional nerve mobilisation technique aimed at mobilising the facial nerve at the origin of external auditory meatus. All participants were assessed at baseline and after three weeks using the Sunnybrook facial grading system (SBS) and Kinovea Movement Analysis Software (KMAS). Results: For primary outcome, analysis of covariance with baseline data as covariate showed a significant difference between groups for the post-test mean scores of SBS after 3 weeks (between-group difference, 9.2 [95% CI, 5.1-13.3], p=0.001. Importantly, the effect size calculated by partial η2 for neural mobilisation was 0.258 (small effect size). For secondary outcomes, independent sample t-test showed a significant difference between groups for the scores on KMAS after 3 weeks for zygomatic muscle (between-group difference, -27.2 [95% CI, -31 to -22.6], p=0.001), frontalis muscle -16.7 [95% CI, -9.9 to -23.4], p=0.001, and orbicularis oris muscle -15.0 [95% CI, -11.1 to -18.8], p=0.001. Conclusion: Facial neural mobilisation is likely to be an effective adjunctive intervention in addition to conventional therapy in improving facial symmetry in acute Bell's palsy.

Deep Transfer Learning Based Unified Framework for COVID19 Classification and Infection Detection from Chest X-Ray Images.

The presentation of the COVID19 has endangered several million lives worldwide causing thousands of deaths every day. Evolution of COVID19 as a pandemic calls for automated solutions for initial screening and treatment management. In addition to the thermal scanning mechanisms, findings from chest X-ray imaging examinations are reliable predictors in COVID19 detection, long-term monitoring and severity evaluation. This paper presents a novel deep transfer learning based framework for COVID19 detection and segmentation of infections from chest X-ray images. It is realized as a two-stage cascaded framework with classifier and segmentation subnetwork models. The classifier is modeled as a fine-tuned residual SqueezeNet network, and the segmentation network is implemented as a fine-tuned SegNet semantic segmentation network. The segmentation task is enhanced with a bioinspired Gaussian Mixture Model-based super pixel segmentation. This framework is trained and tested with two public datasets for binary and multiclass classifications and infection segmentation. It achieves accuracies of 99.69% and 99.48% for binary and three class classifications, and a mean accuracy of 83.437% for segmentation. Experimental results and comparative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this unified model and signify potential extensions for biomarker definition and severity quantization.

Information theoretic perspective on genome clustering.

Shannon's information theoretic perspective of communication helps one to understand the storage and processing of information in one-dimensional sequences. An information theoretic analysis of 937 available completely sequenced prokaryotic genomes and 238 eukaryotic chromosomes is presented. Information content (Id) values were used to cluster these chromosomes. Chargaff's second parity rule i.e compositional self-complementarity, an empirical fact is observed in all the genomes, except for the proteobacteria Candidatus Hodgkinia cicadicola. High information content, arising out of biased base composition in all the 14 chromosomes of Plasmodium falciparum is found among two other genomes of prokaryotes viz. Buchnera aphidicola str. Cc (Cinara cedri) and Candidatus Carsonella ruddii PV. Despite size and compositional variations, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes do not deviate significantly from an equiprobable and random situation. Eukaryotic chromosomes of an organism tend to have similar informational restraints as seen when a simple distance based method is used to cluster them. In eukaryotes, in certain cases, Id values are also similar for the two arms (p and q arm) of the chromosomes. The results of this current study confirm that the information content can provide insights into the clustering of genomes and the evolution of messaging strategies of the genomes. An efficient and robust Perl CGI standalone tool is created based on this information theory algorithm for the analysis of the whole genomes and is made available at https://github.com/AlagurajVeluchamy/InformationTheory.

In-vitro assessment of first-line antifungal drugs against Aspergillus spp. caused human keratomycoses.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Aspergillus keratitis are in the increasing trend and reported as the second most common cause of mycotic keratitis in developing countries. The present study was designed to isolate, identify Aspergillus spp. from the keratits/corneal ulcer patients attending a tertiary care eye hospital, Coimbatore, South India and to assess the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) against ten clinically used first-line antifungal drugs. METHODS: A total of seventy-three Aspergillus strains isolated from corneal scrapings were included and assessed for a period of one year. All isolates were identified up to the species level by morphological observations. Antifungal drug susceptibilities were determined against a standard panel of antifungal agents. CONCLUSIONS: Five different species of aspergilli, A. flavus (n=53), A. fumigatus (n=14), A. terreus (n=9), A. tamarii (n=6) and A. niger (n=3) were identified based on morphological features. Minimum inhibitory concentration analyses indicated that, voriconazole, natamycin, itraconazole, clotrimazole, econazole followed by ketoconazole shall be the order of choices for the effective treatment for Aspergillus keratitis.

Knowledge, Attitude, and Barriers to Telerehabilitation-Based Physical Therapy Practice in Saudi Arabia.

(1) Telerehabilitation (TR) is a part of telemedicine involved in providing rehabilitation services to people in remote locations. TR in physical therapy in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is still in its infancy and its implementation may pose different challenges in the physical therapy settings. The purpose of this nation-wide survey is to explore physiotherapists (PTs) knowledge, attitudes, and barriers towards implementation of TR in physical therapy settings; (2) Methods: A 14 item questionnaire was developed and mailed to PTs working in hospitals and rehabilitation centers across 13 provinces in Saudi Arabia; (3) Results: 347 PTs responded. Results are as follows: 58.8% (n = 204) of PTs reported that they had sufficient knowledge about TR. About31.7% (n = 110) of PTs reported that their hospital and rehabilitation center had installed TR, yet only 19.9% (n = 69) utilized the TR facility. Image-based TR was more frequently used (n = 33) as compared to sensor-based TR (n = 29) and virtual reality TR (n = 10).The main barriers were technical issues and cost related to implement TR in physical therapy settings; and (4) Conclusions: There is a relatively high number of PTs with self-reported knowledge about TR, however facilities and usage were limited. The main barriers were technical issues, staff skills, and the high cost involved in the introduction of TR in the PT-based health care settings.

Comment on: The association between the timing of energy intake and the risk of overweight and obesity among Saudi female university students.

[No Abstract Available].