Meta-analysis of identified genomic regions and candidate genes underlying salinity tolerance in rice (Oryza sativa L.).

Rice output has grown globally, yet abiotic factors are still a key cause for worry. Salinity stress seems to have the more impact on crop production out of all abiotic stresses. Currently one of the most significant challenges in paddy breeding for salinity tolerance with the help of QTLs, is to determine the QTLs having the best chance of improving salinity tolerance with the least amount of background noise from the tolerant parent. Minimizing the size of the QTL confidence interval (CI) is essential in order to primarily include the genes responsible for salinity stress tolerance. By considering that, a genome-wide meta-QTL analysis on 768 QTLs from 35 rice populations published from 2001 to 2022 was conducted to identify consensus regions and the candidate genes underlying those regions responsible for the salinity tolerance, as it reduces the confidence interval (CI) to many folds from the initial QTL studies. In the present investigation, a total of 65 MQTLs were extracted with an average CI reduced from 17.35 to 1.66 cM including the smallest of 0.01 cM. Identification of the MQTLs for individual traits and then classifying the target traits into correlated morphological, physiological and biochemical aspects, resulted in more efficient interpretation of the salinity tolerance, identifying the candidate genes and to understand the salinity tolerance mechanism as a whole. The results of this study have a huge potential to improve the rice genotypes for salinity tolerance with the help of MAS and MABC.

Multifaceted Neuroprotective Role of Punicalagin: A Review.

Millions of people worldwide are currently afflicted with neurologic conditions like a seizure, depression, stress, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease. However, the precise etiopathology of these diseases is still unknown. Substantial studies are being conducted to discover more treatments against these disorders because many patients do not experience the therapeutic benefits that would be expected from using existing pharmaceutical strategies. Herbal medicines which have been used in traditional medicine for millennia to treat various neurological problems are also being investigated and scientifically assessed. Punicalagin is a known polyphenol that has significant antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-proliferative, and anti-cancer properties. Around the world, traditional use of herbal drugs is gaining wider acceptance as a part of complementary and alternative medicine. The scientific community should pay attention to these many neuroprotective pharmacodynamic activities of Punicalagin to create effective pharmacotherapeutic plans, as evidenced by mounting data in pre-clinical research investigations. The current review describes the recent studies on the pharmacological effects of Punicalagin in a variety of neurological illnesses and paves the way for further study in this field.

Development, standardization, and contextualization of qualitative tools for possible use in the assessment and valuation of snakebite envenomation.

Background: Snakebite envenoming, a neglected tropical disease (NTD), is an important public health problem that is responsible for more than 1 lakh deaths annually across the world. However, the majority of the data in this regard is from health institutions and data from community settings are scarce. The aim of the current study was to develop valid and reliable qualitative tools for assessing the burden of snakebites and the health-seeking behavior of the community. The tools developed thus will serve in creating a community connection and thereby strengthen primary care teams engaged in managing snakebites at the primary care level. Methods: A four-step design was used; (a) review of the available literature on the burden of disease, tools used to assess the burden, and the guidelines on snakebite (b) development, laying out, and contextualization of questions/items for the tools (c) pilot testing and establishment of validity. Results: A focus group discussion guide, key informant interview schedule for health professionals, community leaders, and traditional faith healers were matured for the implementation. Conclusion: A reliable and valid qualitative tool was developed to discern the speculations related to snakebites and its management in rural field settings.

Intranasal Administration of Dolutegravir-Loaded Nanoemulsion-Based In Situ Gel for Enhanced Bioavailability and Direct Brain Targeting.

Dolutegravir's therapeutic effectiveness in the management of neuroAIDS is mainly limited by its failure to cross the blood-brain barrier. However, lipid-based nanovesicles such as nanoemulsions have demonstrated their potential for the brain targeting of various drugs by intranasal delivery. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop a Dolutegravir-loaded nanoemulsion-based in situ gel and evaluate its prospective for brain targeting by intranasal delivery. Dolutegravir-loaded nanoemulsions were prepared using dill oil, Tween® 80, and Transcutol® P. Optimization of the nanoemulsion particle size and drug release was carried out using a simplex lattice design. Formulations (F1-F7 and B1-B6) were assessed for various pharmaceutical characteristics. Ex vivo permeation and ciliotoxicity studies of selected in situ gels (B1) were conducted using sheep nasal mucosa. Drug targeting to the brain was assessed in vivo in rats following the nasal delivery of B1. The composition of oil, surfactant, and cosurfactant significantly (p < 0.05) influenced the dependent variables (particle size and % of drug release in 8 h). Formulation B1 exhibits pharmaceutical characteristics that are ideal for intranasal delivery. The mucosal steady-state flux noticed with BI was significantly greater (p < 0.005) than for the control gel. A histopathology of nasal mucosa treated with BI showed no signs of toxicity or cellular damage. Intranasal administration of B1 resulted in greater Cmax (~six-fold, p < 0.0001) and AUC0-α (~five-fold, p < 0.0001), and decreased Tmax (1 h) values in the brain, compared to intravenous administration. Meantime, the drug level in the plasma was relatively low, suggesting less systemic exposure to Dolutegravir through intranasal delivery. In summary, the promising data observed here signifies the prospective of B1 to enhance the brain targeting of Dolutegravir by intranasal delivery and it could be used as a feasible and practicable strategy for the management of neuroAIDS.

Defensive Medicine in the Context of the Indian Health System.

Defensive medicine; although a recent concept, is slowly beginning to cement its place in the Indian health system. An interaction of multiple factors has paved way for this form of practice. Need for certainty of the diagnosis, lack of hierarchy in medical care, exponential growth of micro/super specializations and private/corporate health institutions, incentive-based practice, increasing incidences of violence against health personnel, rising trend of defamation suites against doctors, bad publicity by media, and interference by elected representatives have jeopardized the situation. This has led to decline in practice of clinical medicine, increased burden of investigations, especially in already compromised public facilities, and high out-of-pocket health expenditure. As much as ethical medical practice, standard patient management protocols, strict protection of interest of medical practitioners by law, responsible role of media and elected representatives are the need of the hour; we need to find ways to accept and incorporate defensive medicine into the modern medicine. Different stakeholders are required to come together and take substantial steps to understand the phenomenon and preserve the art and science of practicing medicine in its true form.

Periapical dental X-ray image classification using deep neural networks.

This paper studies the problem of detection of dental diseases. Dental problems affect the vast majority of the world's population. Caries, RCT (Root Canal Treatment), Abscess, Bone Loss, and missing teeth are some of the most common dental conditions that affect people of all ages all over the world. Delayed or incorrect diagnosis may result in mistreatment, affecting not only an individual's oral health but also his or her overall health, thereby making it an important research area in medicine and engineering. We propose a pipelined Deep Neural Network (DNN) approach to detect healthy and non-healthy periapical dental X-ray images. Even a minor enhancement or improvement in existing techniques can go a long way in providing significant health benefits in the medical field. This paper has made a successful attempt to contribute a different type of pipelined approach using AlexNet in this regard. The approach is trained on a large dataset of 16,000 dental X-ray images, correctly identifying healthy and non-healthy X-ray images. We use an optimized Convolutional Neural Networks and three state-of-the-art DNN models, namely Res-Net-18, ResNet-34, and AlexNet for disease classification. In our study, the AlexNet model outperforms the other models with an accuracy of 0.852. The precision, recall and F1 scores of AlexNet also surpass the other models with a score of 0.850 across all metrics. The area under ROC curve also signifies that both the false-positive rate and false-negative rate are low. We conclude that even with a big data set and raw X-ray pictures, the AlexNet model generalizes effectively to previously unseen data and can aid in the diagnosis of a variety of dental diseases.

Current Debates on Etiopathogenesis and Treatment Strategies for Vitiligo.

Vitiligo is an acquired, chronic, and progressive depigmentation or hypopigmentation characterized by the destruction of melanocytes and the occurrence of white patches or macules in the skin, mucosal surface of eyes, and ears. Melanocytes are the melanin pigment-producing cells of the skin which are destroyed in pathological conditions called vitiligo. Approximately 0.5 - 2.0% of the population is suffering from vitiligo, and a higher prevalence rate of up to 8.8% has been reported in India. It is caused by various pathogenic factors like genetic predisposition, hyperimmune activation, increased oxidative stress, and alteration in neuropeptides level. Genetic research has revealed a multi- genetic inheritance that exhibits an overlap with other autoimmune disorders. However, melanocytes specific genes are also affected (such as DDR1, XBP1, NLRP1, PTPN22, COMT, FOXP3, ACE, APE, GSTP1, TLR, SOD, and CTLA-4). A number of therapeutic options are employed for the treatment of vitiligo. The topical corticosteroids and immunomodulators are currently in practice for the management of vitiligo. Phototherapies alone and in combinations with other approaches are used in those patients who do not respond to the topical treatment. The main focus of this review is on the etiopathological factors, pharmacological management (phototherapy, topical, systemic, and surgical therapy), and herbal drugs used to treat vitiligo.

Redemptive Resource Sharing and Allocation Scheme for Internet of Things-Assisted Smart Healthcare Systems.

Internet of Things assisted healthcare services grants reliable clinical diagnosis and analysis by exploiting heterogeneous communication and infrastructure elements. Communication is enabled through point-to-point or cluster-to-point between the users and the diagnosis center. In this process, the complication is the resource sharing and diagnosis swiftness invalidating multiple resources. IoT's open and ubiquitous nature results in proactive resource sharing, resulting in delayed transmissions. This manuscript introduces the Redemptive Resource Sharing and Allocation (R2SA) scheme to address this issue. The available health data is accumulated on a first-come-first-serve basis, and the transmitting infrastructure is selected. In this process, the data-to-capacity of the available infrastructure is identified for non-redemptive resource allocation. The extremity of the capacity and unavailability of the resource is then analyzed for parallel processing and allocation. Therefore, the data accumulation and exchange rely on concurrent sharing and resource allocation processes, deferring a better accumulation ratio. The concurrent redemptive selection and sharing reduces transmission delay, improves resource allocation, and reduces transmission complexity. The entire process is managed for transfer learning, data-to-capacity validation, and concurrent recommendation. The first validation knowledge base remains the same/shared for different data accumulation and sharing intervals.

Understanding cartoon emotion using integrated deep neural network on large dataset.

Emotion is an instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. It varies over time, since it is a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. Since emotions vary over time, it is important to understand and analyze them appropriately. Existing works have mostly focused well on recognizing basic emotions from human faces. However, the emotion recognition from cartoon images has not been extensively covered. Therefore, in this paper, we present an integrated Deep Neural Network (DNN) approach that deals with recognizing emotions from cartoon images. Since state-of-works do not have large amount of data, we collected a dataset of size 8 K from two cartoon characters: 'Tom' & 'Jerry' with four different emotions, namely happy, sad, angry, and surprise. The proposed integrated DNN approach, trained on a large dataset consisting of animations for both the characters (Tom and Jerry), correctly identifies the character, segments their face masks, and recognizes the consequent emotions with an accuracy score of 0.96. The approach utilizes Mask R-CNN for character detection and state-of-the-art deep learning models, namely ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, and VGG 16 for emotion classification. In our study, to classify emotions, VGG 16 outperforms others with an accuracy of 96% and F1 score of 0.85. The proposed integrated DNN outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Role of Three-dimensional Printing in Neurosurgery: An Institutional Experience.

BACKGROUND: Recent advancements in three-dimensional (3D) printing technology in the field of neurosurgery have given a newer modality of management for patients. In this article, we intend to share our institutional experience regarding the use of 3D printing in three modalities, namely, cranioplasty using customized 3D-printed molds of polymethylmethacrylate, 3D-printed model-assisted management of craniovertebral (CV) junction abnormalities, and 3D model-assisted management of brain tumors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 55 patients were included in our study between March 2017 and December 2019 at S. M. S Medical College, Jaipur, India. 3D-printed models were prepared for cranioplasty in 30 cases, CV junction anomalies in 18 cases, and brain tumors in 7 cases. Preoperative and postoperative data were analyzed as per the diagnosis. RESULTS: In cranioplasty, cranial contour and approximation of the margins were excellent and esthetic appearance improved in all patients. In CV junction anomalies, neck pain and myelopathy were improved in all patients, as analyzed using the visual analog scale and the Japanese Orthopedic Association Scale score, respectively. Our questionnaire survey revealed that 3D models for brain tumors were useful in understanding space interval and depth intraoperatively with added advantage of patient education. CONCLUSION: Rapid prototyping 3D-printing technologies provide a practical and anatomically accurate means to produce patient-specific and disease-specific models. These models allow for surgical planning, training, simulation, and devices for the assessment and treatment of neurosurgical disease. Expansion of this technology in neurosurgery will serve practitioners, trainees, and patients.

An assessment of compliance with the provisions of Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003: Is Shimla a smoke-free city?

Background: . Tobacco consumption in any form is a major contributor to non-communicable diseases, and it is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide. Secondhand smoke is also harmful. To halt the smoking epidemic and protect people from second-hand smoke, the Government of India enacted the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) in 2003. Methods: . We ascertained compliance with the provisions of COTPA 2003 at 183 public places and 41 transport facilities of Shimla city from August 2017 to July 2018. Results: . Only 48% of public places had good compliance with the provisions of COTPA 2003. On average, a public place was found to be compliant with 7 of 10 key indicators of Section 4. Educational institutes and government offices had a higher rate of compliance compared to other places. Active smoking and signages signalling ban on smoking were observed in 17% and 95.6% of public places, respectively. Smoking aids (e.g. ashtrays) were observed at <10% of places. A designated smoking area was not seen at any public place. Conclusion: . Overall compliance of the Act was low with less than half the places having satisfactory compliance with Section 4. There is a need to raise awareness about the negative effects of smoking on health and environment and ensure strict adherence to the provisions of COTPA 2003.

Creation of a Smoke-free Environment for Children: An Assessment of Compliance to COTPA 2003 Legislation in an Urban Area.

OBJECTIVE: To ascertain the compliance to Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) 2003 which ensures the protection of children from the adverse health effects of second hand smoke. METHODS: This cross-sectional study assessed the compliance of 32 educational institutions and 157 points of sale of Shimla city. RESULTS: About 88% of the educational institutions and mere 7.6% points of sale were found having good compliance to the key indicators. No point of sale was found within the premises of educational institutions; however, 26% were found selling tobacco products within 100 metres radius of an educational institution. 7.6% points of sale were found selling a tobacco product to children. CONCLUSIONS: Despite having the status of a smoke-free city, lapses were observed in compliance to the Act. Strict adherence to the provisions of the Act would ultimately lead to a smoke-free environment for our children.