Epidemiology of cutaneous leishmaniasis in children of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

Objectives: In Pakistan, cutaneous leishmaniasis is an emerging tropical disease and a very high number (>70%) of children are afflicted by this marring infection. This study aimed to scrutinise the prevalence, spatial distribution and socio-demographic and behavioural risk factors associated with cutaneous leishmaniasis in children aged <5-15  years in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Methods: A total of 1, 559 clinically confirmed records of children diagnosed with cutaneous leishmaniasis (January-December) from 2020 and 2022 were obtained from selected district hospitals.

A new Gaussian curvature of the image surface based variational model for haze or fog removal.

Outdoor images are usually affected by haze which limits the visibility and reduces the contrast of the images. Removal of haze from real-world images is always a challenging task. Recently, many mathematical models have been proposed for the effective removal of haze from real-world images.

Power mean based image segmentation in the presence of noise.

In image segmentation and in general in image processing, noise and outliers distort contained information posing in this way a great challenge for accurate image segmentation results. To ensure a correct image segmentation in presence of noise and outliers, it is necessary to identify the outliers and isolate them during a denoising pre-processing or impose suitable constraints into a segmentation framework. In this paper, we impose suitable removing outliers constraints supported by a well-designed theory in a variational framework for accurate image segmentation.

Multi-scale-average-filter-assisted level set segmentation model with local region restoration achievements.

Segmentation of noisy images having light in the background it is a challenging task for the existing segmentation approaches and methods. In this paper, we suggest a novel variational method for joint restoration and segmentation of noisy images which are having intensity and inhomogeneity in the existence of high contrast light in the background. The proposed model combines statistical local region information of circular regions centered at each pixel with a multi-phase segmentation technique enabling inhomogeneous image restoration.

Novel Missense Variant Identified in Two Consanguineous Pakistani Families With Developmental Delay, Epilepsy, Intellectual Disability, and Aggressive Behavior.

We report the genetic analysis of two consanguineous pedigrees of Pakistani ancestry in which two siblings in each family exhibited developmental delay, epilepsy, intellectual disability and aggressive behavior. Whole-genome sequencing was performed in Family 1, and we identified ~80,000 variants located in regions of homozygosity. Of these, 615 variants had a minor allele frequency ≤ 0.

Characterization of sand fly breeding sites in district Malakand, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and evaluation of risk factors for cutaneous leishmaniasis in the region.

Present study was carried to determine the sand fly species composition, breeding sites ecology, seasonal abundance, and spatial distribution in district Malakand, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. In addition, risk factors associated with cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) were also evaluated. Survey of indoor and outdoor habitats was carried out using sticky traps in 31 villages of Dargai and Batkhela tehsils of Malakand.

Image Segmentation for Intensity Inhomogeneity in Presence of High Noise.

Automated segmentation of fine objects details in a given image is becoming of crucial interest in different imaging fields. In this paper, we propose a new variational level-set model for both global and interactive\selective segmentation tasks, which can deal with intensity inhomogeneity and the presence of noise. The proposed method maintains the same performance on clean and noisy vector-valued images.

Evaluation of five discriminating indexes to distinguish Beta-Thalassemia Trait from Iron Deficiency Anaemia.

Objective: To assess the reliability of different red blood cell indices-based formulae in the indexes formula in differential diagnosis of beta thalassemia trait and iron deficiency anaemia.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted between January and October 2015 in Dera Ismail Khan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Patients of beta thalassemia trait and iron deficiency anaemia were registered irrespective of age and gender.

Sn doping induced enhancement in the activity of ZnO nanostructures against antibiotic resistant S. aureus bacteria.

Highly ionic metal oxide nanostructures are attractive, not only for their physiochemical properties but also for antibacterial activity. Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures are known to have inhibitory activity against many pathogens but very little is known about doping effects on it. The antibacterial activity of undoped ZnO and tin (Sn) doped ZnO nanostructures synthesized by a simple, versatile, and wet chemical technique have been investigated against Escherichia coli, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterial strains.

On two multigrid algorithms for modeling variational multiphase image segmentation.

In this paper, we present two related multigrid algorithms for multiphase image segmentation. Algorithm I solves the model by Vese-Chan. We first generalize our recently developed multigrid method to this multiphase segmentation model (MG1); we also give a local Fourier analysis for the local smoother which leads to a new and more effective smoother.