Publications by authors named "Ashok M"

The objective of this investigation was to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer by combining two significant datasets: the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Database and the DDSM Curated Breast Imaging Subset (CBIS-DDSM). The Wisconsin Breast Cancer Database provides a detailed examination of the characteristics of cell nuclei, including radius, texture, and concavity, for 569 patients, of which 212 had malignant tumors. In addition, the CBIS-DDSM dataset-a revised variant of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM)-offers a standardized collection of 2,620 scanned film mammography studies, including cases that are normal, benign, or malignant and that include verified pathology data.

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Extramedullary hematopoiesis (EMH) is the formation of blood cells outside the bone marrow, typically occurring in response to chronic anemia or bone marrow dysfunction. While EMH is most commonly observed in the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes, its occurrence in the kidney is exceedingly rare. In this case report, we are presenting a case of a 49-year-old male diagnosed with polycythemia vera who had an incidental right renal mass, which was histo-pathologically proven as extramedullary hematopoiesis in the right kidney mimicking lymphoma.

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Background: India aims to eliminate rubella and congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) by 2023. We conducted serosurveys among pregnant women to monitor the trend of rubella immunity and estimate the CRS burden in India following a nationwide measles and rubella vaccination campaign.

Methods: We surveyed pregnant women at 13 sentinel sites across India from Aug to Oct 2022 to estimate seroprevalence of rubella IgG antibodies.

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We report a case of a 22-year-old female with pedal edema, hypokalemia, and hypertension. On suspicion of hyperaldosteronism, further workup was pursued, which only revealed a low serum adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and an inappropriately normal cortisol level after a 1-mg dexamethasone suppression test, suggestive of primary hypercortisolism. CT of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis revealed a left adrenal mass.

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Rhabdomyolysis is characterised by muscle breakdown and the release of myoglobin. It is a potentially serious condition that can lead to acute kidney injury (AKI). Factors, such as ischemia, trauma, muscle compression and drug toxicity, can trigger muscle breakdown.

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In view of the increased number of detected dengue cases in Bengaluru, a request for situation analysis was received from local health authorities in the selected area. The study included epidemiological and entomological assessments to understand the same. The immature forms collected were allowed to emerge, pooled, and processed for vector incrimination.

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Background: Antidepressants are used to treat acute depression in patients with bipolar I disorder, but their effect as maintenance treatment after the remission of depression has not been well studied.

Methods: We conducted a multisite, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of maintenance of treatment with adjunctive escitalopram or bupropion XL as compared with discontinuation of antidepressant therapy in patients with bipolar I disorder who had recently had remission of a depressive episode. Patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to continue treatment with antidepressants for 52 weeks after remission or to switch to placebo at 8 weeks.

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Unlabelled: There has been a recent outbreak of monkeypox in the United States, mostly among men who have sex with men (MSM). It seems to be a self-limiting disease but can be potentially serious in immunocompromised patients. Monkeypox infection is transmitted mainly through skin-to-skin contact and possibly seminal and vaginal fluids.

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Background: In India, facility-based surveillance for congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) was initiated in 2016 to estimate the burden and monitor the progress made in rubella control. We analyzed the surveillance data for 2016-2021 from 14 sentinel sites to describe the epidemiology of CRS.

Method: We analyzed the surveillance data to describe the distribution of suspected and laboratory confirmed CRS patients by time, place and person characteristics.

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This restrospective chart review examined dental emergencies among patients waitlisted for the operating room at an outpatient community dental clinic in a large academic medical center. Dental records of ASA I or II patients, who had dental restorations and/or extractions in the operating room between July 2015 to May 2019 were reviewed. Length of time the patient was waitlisted and number of emergency dental treatments (, therapeutic pulpotomy or a dental extraction due to acute dental pain or infection) completed in the outpatient dental clinic during the wait period were collected.

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Two-dimensional (2D) materials are promising candidates for future electronics due to their excellent electrical and photonic properties. Although promising results on the wafer-scale synthesis (≤150 mm diameter) of monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS) have already been reported, the high-quality synthesis of 2D materials on wafers of 200 mm or larger, which are typically used in commercial silicon foundries, remains difficult. The back-end-of-line (BEOL) integration of directly grown 2D materials on silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits is also unavailable due to the high thermal budget required, which far exceeds the limits of silicon BEOL integration (<400 °C).

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Outbreaks of HFMD in children aged <5 years have been reported worldwide and the major causative agents are Coxsackievirus (CV) A16, enterovirus (EV)-A71 and recently CVA6. In India, HFMD is a disease that is not commonly reported. The purpose of the study was to identify the enterovirus type(s) associated with large outbreak of Hand, foot, and mouth disease during COVID-19 pandemic in 2022.

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The objective of this article is to automatically segment organs at risk (OARs) for thoracic radiology in computed tomography (CT) scan images. The OARs in the thoracic anatomical region during the radiotherapy treatment are mainly the neighbouring organs such as the esophagus, heart, trachea, and aorta. The dataset of 40 patients was used in the proposed work by splitting it into three parts: training, validation, and test sets.

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A paper-based chemiresistive sensor consisting of a single-walled carbon nanotubes network with electrodeposited gold nanoparticles (AuNPs-SWCNTs) was developed for the sensitive detection of As(III). A new sensing strategy was also proposed combined with a paper-based device for As(III) chemiresistive detection based on the electrochemical doping of As(0) on the AuNPs-SWCNTs channel. The proposed paper-based chemiresistive sensor was manufactured by wax printing and vacuum deposition using a water-based SWCNTs ink.

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In the past 2 decades, the demand for information on health economics research to guide health care decision making has substantially increased. Studies have provided evidence that eliminating or reducing tobacco use; eating a healthy diet, including fruit and vegetables; being physically active; reducing alcohol consumption; avoiding ultraviolet radiation; and minimizing exposure to environmental and occupational carcinogenic agents should substantially reduce cancer incidence in the population. The benefits of these primary prevention measures in reducing cancer incidence are not instantaneous.

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Although automated pathology classification using deep learning (DL) has proved to be predictively efficient, DL methods are found to be data and compute cost intensive. In this work, we aim to reduce DL training costs by pre-training a ResNet feature extractor using SimCLR contrastive loss for latent encoding of OCT images. We propose a novel active learning framework that identifies a minimal sub-sampled dataset containing the most uncertain OCT image samples using label propagation on the SimCLR latent encodings.

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Background: Human-centered design (HCD) is increasingly being used as a complementary approach to traditional global health methods due to its ability to bring new ideas to entrenched problems, integrate multiple stakeholder perspectives, and bring in a strong human lens among other advantages. To reap these benefits, public health and design practitioners in global health programs can learn from the early experiences of integrating HCD to advance these efforts.

Objective: This article distills lessons gathered from 3 programs leveraging HCD to advance global health programming: (1) the "V" program which used an HCD approach to reframe the once-a-day HIV prevention pill from a potentially stigmatizing medicine into empowering self-care; (2) the Adolescents 360 program which integrated HCD to create a service for adolescent girls to access contraception in Ethiopia and to scale this offering nationwide; and (3) Reimagining TA which used HCD to help shift perceptions around traditional technical assistance models to one of co-creation, defining a new approach for non-financial support for health systems strengthening.

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Blue Shield of California's Community Health Advocate Program was created to support whole person-health needs by helping individuals of all socio-economic statuses navigate and access community resources, social services, and medical systems. Blue Shield's Health Reimagined team is partnering with medical providers, community resources centers, and community partners to provide intensive person-centered and technology-enabled care to patients, ensuring social needs are met while promoting health equity. A key aspect of the Health Reimagined initiative embeds Community Health Advocates (CHAs) within physician practices serving patients using a payor-agnostic approach, by which Blue Shield aims to increase access to social services and community resources, improve health outcomes, reduce medical costs, and improve overall patient experience.

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Breast cancer is a commonly occurring disease in women all over the world. Mammogram is an efficient technique used for screening and identification of abnormalities over the breast region. Earlier identification of breast cancer enhances the prognosis of patients and is mainly based on the experience of the radiologist in interpretation of mammogram with quality of image.

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Aims And Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the mean overjet in school-going Libyan children and to examine the relationship between increased overjet and permanent incisor's trauma.

Materials And Methods: This study is a part of a cross-sectional investigation of aspects of dental health of 2015 school going Libyan children aged between 6 and 16 years old of both genders from both rural and urban areas. Overjet was measured as the horizontal distance in millimetres between the upper and lower incisors.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A study involving 10 labs in India assessed pooled testing by creating 5-sample and 10-sample pools from 100 swabs, with consistency measured against individual tests.
  • * Findings showed high accuracy for the 5-sample pools (100% at certain thresholds) but lower for 10-sample pools, indicating that testing strategy can significantly impact diagnostic reliability.
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Context: Although spinal anesthesia (also known as subarachnoid block [SAB]) is used widely for inguinal hernia repair, the paravertebral block (PVB) that produces unilateral, segmental analgesia is used with a high success rate in inguinal hernia repair.

Aims: The aim of the study was to compare SAB and PVB in inguinal hernia repair, in terms of the duration of postoperative analgesia and adverse events.

Settings And Design: This was a prospective, randomized, controlled double-blind study.

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