Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccination for Children: Position Statement of Indian Academy of Pediatrics Advisory Committee on Vaccination and Immunization Practices.

Justification: Data generated after the first wave has revealed that some children with coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) can become seriously ill. Multi-inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and long COVID cause significant morbidity in children. Prolonged school closures and quarantine have played havoc with the psychosocial health of children.

Breastfeeding and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccination: Position Statement of Indian Academy of Pediatrics Advisory Committee on Vaccination and Immunization Practices.

Justification: In India, till recently, breastfeeding women have been excluded from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccination program, rendering a significant population of the country, including frontline workers, ineligible to derive the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Objective: The objective of this recommendation is production of an evidence-based document to guide the pediatricians to give advice to breastfeeding mothers regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in lactating women.

Process: Formulation of key question was done under the chairmanship of president of the IAP.

Immunization During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Recommendations From Indian Academy of Pediatrics Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunization Practices.

During the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, immunization practices of all age groups, especially routine childhood vaccines, have been interrupted. Immunization is considered an essential health activity, which needs to be resumed as early as possible. This pandemic has created several unique issues related to routine immunization of individual children at clinics, which needs to be addressed.

Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunization Practices (ACVIP): Recommended Immunization Schedule (2020-21) and Update on Immunization for Children Aged 0 Through 18 Years.

Justification: In view of new developments in vaccinology and the availability of new vaccines, there is a need to revise/review the existing immunization recommendations.

Process: Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunization Practices (ACVIP) of Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) had a physical meeting in March, 2020 followed by online meetings (September-October, 2020), to discuss the updates and new recommendations. Opinion of each member was sought on the various recommendations and updates, following which an evidence-based consensus was reached.

Validation of Automated Screening for Referable Diabetic Retinopathy With an Autonomous Diagnostic Artificial Intelligence System in a Spanish Population.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the diagnostic performance of an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) system for the diagnosis of referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR) to manual grading by Spanish ophthalmologists.

Methods: Subjects with type 1 and 2 diabetes participated in a diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening program in 2011 to 2012 in Valencia (Spain), and two images per eye were collected according to their standard protocol. Mydriatic drops were used in all patients.

Optimal surface segmentation with convex priors in irregularly sampled space.

Optimal surface segmentation is a state-of-the-art method used for segmentation of multiple globally optimal surfaces in volumetric datasets. The method is widely used in numerous medical image segmentation applications. However, nodes in the graph based optimal surface segmentation method typically encode uniformly distributed orthogonal voxels of the volume.

Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunization Practices (ACVIP) Recommended Immunization Schedule (2018-19) and Update on Immunization for Children Aged 0 Through 18 Years.

Justification: There is a need to revise/review recommendations regarding existing vaccines in view of current developments in vaccinology.

Process: Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunization Practices (ACVIP) of Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) reviewed the new evidence, had two meetings, and representatives of few vaccine manufacturers also presented their data. The recommendations were finalized unanimously.

Multiple surface segmentation using convolution neural nets: application to retinal layer segmentation in OCT images.

Automated segmentation of object boundaries or surfaces is crucial for quantitative image analysis in numerous biomedical applications. For example, retinal surfaces in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images play a vital role in the diagnosis and management of retinal diseases. Recently, graph based surface segmentation and contour modeling have been developed and optimized for various surface segmentation tasks.

Optimal multi-object segmentation with novel gradient vector flow based shape priors.

Shape priors have been widely utilized in medical image segmentation to improve segmentation accuracy and robustness. A major way to encode such a prior shape model is to use a mesh representation, which is prone to causing self-intersection or mesh folding. Those problems require complex and expensive algorithms to mitigate.

A rapid 3D fat-water decomposition method using globally optimal surface estimation (R-GOOSE).

Purpose: To improve the graph model of our previous work GOOSE for fat-water decomposition with higher computational efficiency and quantitative accuracy.

Methods: A modification of the GOOSE fat water decomposition algorithm is introduced while the global convergence guarantees of GOOSE are still inherited to minimize fat-water swaps and phase wraps. In this paper, two non-equidistant graph optimization frameworks are proposed as a single-step framework termed as rapid GOOSE (R-GOOSE), and a multi-step framework termed as multi-scale R-GOOSE (mR-GOOSE).

Gravitational self-force correction to the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit of a Kerr black hole.

For a self-gravitating particle of mass μ in orbit around a Kerr black hole of mass M ≫ μ, we compute the O(μ/M) shift in the frequency of the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit due to the conservative piece of the gravitational self-force acting on the particle. Our treatment is based on a Hamiltonian formulation of the dynamics in terms of geodesic motion in a certain locally defined effective smooth spacetime. We recover the same result using the so-called first law of binary black-hole mechanics.

Observables of a test mass along an inclined orbit in a post-Newtonian-approximated Kerr spacetime including the linear and quadratic spin terms.

The orbital motion is derived for a nonspinning test mass in the relativistic, gravitational field of a rotationally deformed body not restricted to the equatorial plane or spherical orbit. The gravitational field of the central body is represented by the Kerr metric, expanded to second post-Newtonian order including the linear and quadratic spin terms. The orbital period, the intrinsic periastron advance, and the precession of the orbital plane are derived with the aid of novel canonical variables and action-based methods.