Design of a bioreactor to study the role of red blood cells in the transport of nitric oxide in the microcirculation

Nitric oxide (NO) plays an important role in physiological functions like vasodilation, neurotransmission, and inhibition of platelet aggregation. The endothelium-derived NO diffuses into the vascular lumen where it interacts with flowing blood as well as the smooth muscles where it modulates vascular tone. However, uncertainty exists on how NO escapes the rapid scavenging by hemoglobin (Hb) and reaches smooth muscles. Several proposed hypotheses include 1) a reduced reaction rate of NO with Hb contained inside red blood cells (RBCs) and 2) NO preservation in the bound form of s-nitrosohemoglobin or nitrite. The mechanism and magnitude of reduction of NO reaction rate with Hb contained inside RBCs are not well established. In this study, an in vitro experimental system was designed to expose stirred RBC suspension to physiologically relevant NO flux. NO-RBC interactions were studied by measuring the reaction products, nitrite and total NOx, using chemiluminescence method. We studied the effect of increasing hematocrit from 5% to 45% on NO-RBC interaction under oxygenated condition. Results show that the system maintained a steady state in the bioreactor and could be easily modified to control NO delivery flux. An increase in product concentration was observed by increasing the hematocrit from 5% to 45%. The study is clinically important as the understanding of molecular interaction of NO with Hb in RBCs and mode of NO transport in microcirculation may provide therapeutic opportunities in the biomedical field in areas as diverse as sickle cell anemia, septic shock, hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction, and blood substitutes

Performance of agriculture insurance schemes in India

Risk and Uncertainty,

Systemic Therapy in Endometrial Cancer: Recent Advances.

Endometrial cancer is a chemosensitive disease. Studies have established a clear benefit of chemotherapy in advanced stages and trials are ongoing to define its role in early stages as well. As more molecular pathways are being elucidated there is increasing role for targeted agents and future looks quite promising. We did an extensive search both online and offline for all the relevant articles including chemotherapy and targeted therapy for endometrial cancer

Effects of Driver and Secondary Task Characteristics on Lane Change Test Performance

The main objective of this study was to examine the sensitivity of the Lane Change Test (LCT) as proposed by International Organization of Standardization by evaluating LCT performance between primary and dual‐task conditions in simulated driving conditions. The study involved four different secondary tasks that involved tracking, visual search, memory, and data entry, each under two different difficulty levels. The primary task involved a series of lane changes on a three‐lane straight roadway where the actual lane change trajectory was compared with a normative model of the trajectory. Thus, the lane change performance was measured by the mean deviation of the actual driving trajectory from the normative trajectory. Twenty‐four participants within three age groups (25–34, 35–45, and >55 years) and equally distributed between male and female took part in the study. Thus, the study also investigated the effect of age and gender on driving performance. The results showed that secondary tasks that require visual attention and psychomotor coordination deteriorated driving performance the most, whereas tasks that required memory scanning and utilization of the auditory modality least affected driving performance. The study also found differences in LCT performances with respect to three different age categories and gender. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100276/1/20342_ftp.pd

Development of textured defatted sunflower meal by extrusion using response surface methodology

Sunflower (PSH 569) was used to obtain textured defatted meal. Proximate analysis, water absorption index (WAI), water solubility index (WSI), fat absorption capacities (FAC), foaming capacity (FC), and bulk density (BD) were determined. The objective of the study was the optimization of extrusion conditions for production of textured defatted sunflower meal using response surface methodology (RSM) by evaluating functional properties. It was dried, grinded, and sieved to eliminate hull and fibre. Numerical optimization provided eight solutions with desirability value varying from 0.81 to 0.82. Range of predicted values of FAC (80.96–90.49), WHC (1.95–2.12), WSI (3.22–3.36), WAI (2.84–3.08), bulk density (0.31–0.36), and foaming capacity (14.39–16.30) were used for numerical optimization. Best extrusion conditions were 16.36% feed moisture, 300 r.p.m. screw speed, and 149.40 °C barrel temperature. Textured sunflower defatted meal was prepared using the above optimized conditions

Borderline Ovarian Malignancies : A Single Institute Retrospective Study.

Background: Borderline ovarian tumors are histologically characterized as epithelial tumors with a stratified growth pattern but without destructive stromal invasion. Little is known about the histological subtypes and outcome, role of fertility sparing surgery and role of postoperative therapy in advanced stage in Indian scenario. While there is ample data in the world literature about this disease, prognosis in Indian patients is largely unknown due to dearth of studies in our setting. Objective: To study the demographic profile, clinical features, imaging, treatment and outcome of borderline ovarian tumors. Methods: This is a retrospective study of eighty seven patients with pathologically proven diagnosis of borderline ovarian tumor, diagnosed and treated from January 2006 to October 2011 at our institution. Most patients underwent surgical staging which incuded total abdominal hysterectomy and bilateral salphingo-oophorectomy, infracolic omentectomy, bilateral pelvic and para aortic lymphadenectomy. Young patients who had not completed their family underwent fertility sparing surgery. Patients with invasive metastatic implants received adjuvant chemotherapy. The outcome of these patients was correlated with stage, type of peritoneal implant, type of surgical procedure and with histological subtype. Results: At a median follow-up of 48 months, 100 percent survival was noted. One patient with stage III disease had recurrence. Conclusions: Borderline ovarian tumors occur at a younger age compared to invasive tumors. In patients with early stage disease who wish to preserve fertility, hysterectomy and contralateral oophorectomy are not necessary. Serous tumors occur at a younger age. They can be associated with invasive peritoneal implants and raised CA125 values. Majority of the serous tumors are bilateral and smaller in size compared to mucinous and endometroid tumors. Raised CA125 values did not correlate with the stage of disease. These patients have an excellent prognosis even in Indian scenario where majority of patients present with big ovarian masses

Moisture dependent physical properties of maize (PMH-1)

Physical properties of maize were evaluated as a function of moisture content. The obtained data provide help in the designing of post-harvest handling machinery. In the moisture range of 10–18% wet basis (w.b.), the length of the rewetted grain increased from 10.01 to 10.65 mm, width increased from 8.57 to 8.70 mm, thickness ranged from 4.63 to 4.97 mm, geometric mean diameter (GMD) increased from 7.34 to 7.67 mm, sphericity increased from 0.72 to 0.73, thousand kernel weight (TKW) increased from 258.1 to 287.9 g, bulk density decreased from 591.6 to 554.2 kg m−3, true density increased from 1194.9 to 1267.2 kg m−3, porosity increased from 52.61 to 56.27%, hardness decreased from 293.75 to 228.04 N, initial cracking force decreased from 190.11 to 137.35 N and area ranges from 55.09 to 36.58 Nmm. In the same moisture range the angle of repose varied from 23.36 to 28.55 for grain. Lightness (L) of grain ranges from 62.82 to 59.26, a value (red-green axis) ranges from 13.97 to 8.96, b value (yellow-blue axis) ranges from 31.05 to 26.19 and hue angle (z%) decreased from 14.59 to 14.06 with increase in moisture content of grain from 10 to 18% w.b

Intrusion Detection and Anomaly Detection System Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Nowadays the security methods from password protected access up to firewalls which are used to secure the data as well as the networks from attackers. Several times these type of security methods are not enough to protect data. We can consider the use of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is the one way to secure the data on critical systems. Most of the research work is going on the effectiveness and exactness of the intrusion detection, but these attempts are for the detection of the intrusions at the operating system and network level only. It is unable to detect the unexpected behavior of systems due to Malicious transactions in databases. The method used for spotting any interferes on the information in the form of database known as database intrusion detection. It relies on enlisting the execution of a transaction. After that, if the recognized pattern is aside from those regular patterns actual is considered as an intrusion. But the identified problem with this process is that the accuracy algorithm which is used may not identify entire patterns. This type of challenges can affect in two ways. 1) Missing of the database with regular patterns. 2) The detection process neglects some new patterns. Therefore we proposed sequential data mining method by using new Modified Apriori Algorithm. The algorithm upturns the accurateness and rate of pattern detection by the process. The Apriori algorithm with modifications is used in the proposed model

Image Based Model for Document Search and Re-ranking

Traditional Web search engines do not use the images in the web pages to search relevant documents for a given query. Instead, they are typically operated by computing a measure of agreement between the keywords provided by the user and only the text portion of each web page. This project describes whether the image content appearing in a Web page can be used to enhance the semantic description of Web page and accordingly improve the performance of a keyword-based search engine. A Web-scalable system is presented in such a way that exploits a pure text-based search engine that finds an initial set of candidate documents as per given query. Then, by using visual information extracted from the images contained in the pages, the candidate set will be re-ranked. The computational efficiency of traditional text-based search engines will be maintained by the resulting system with only a small additional storage cost that will be needed to predetermine the visual information