Prenatal identification of CHD murmur using four segment phonocardiographic signal analysis

Congenital heart defects (CHD) are one of the utmost birth defects present in the neonatal after birth and a big challenge for the researchers to identify the structural abnormality during the antepartum period. An algorithm is presented here to identify the presence of CHD through foetal phonocardiographic (fPCG) signals. The recorded fPCG is decomposed using Daubechies4 wavelet with sub-level threshold to remove the noise in the signal. The Shannon energy is used to identify the different peaks of signals and then S1 and S2 according to the intervals between adjacent peaks. The signal is segmented into four important parts: S1, S1S2, S2 and S2S1. The FFT is used to identify the frequency component present in four segments which in turn indicates the presence of pathological murmur that may turn into CHD. The algorithm is tested on 25 samples with accuracy rate 88% in identifying the presence of a murmur.     

Antigenic variability of foot-and-mouth disease virus serotype O during serial cytolytic passage

Virus Genes - The emergence and disappearance of antigenic variants of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) during a field outbreak occurs periodically due to the volatile nature of its genome. In...     

Ampullary Carcinoma in a Patient with Agenesis of the Dorsal Pancreas: A Case Report

The most common congenital anomaly of the pancreas is pancreatic divisum (Tadokoro et al. in Anat Res Int 2011:1–7, 2011). Agenesis of the dorsal pancreas is extremely rare (Schnedl et al. in World J Gastroenterol 15(3):376–377, 2009). We are reporting a case of agenesis of dorsal pancreas presented with ampullary carcinoma.     

Electrophysiologic and electroanatomic changes in the human atrium associated with age

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to characterize the pattern of atrial remodeling seen with human aging. BACKGROUND: Atrial fibrillation (AF) occurs in 3% to 4% of the population over 65 years of age. It is associated with thromboembolic complications, worsening heart failure, and increased mortality, yet the electrical and structural remodeling that occurs with human aging remains unknown. METHODS: Thirteen patients (66.4 +/- 1.7 years) > or =60 years (group A), 13 patients (50 +/- 2.1 years) age 31 to 59 years (group B), and 15 patients (24.7 +/- 1.0 years) < or =30 years (group C) underwent conventional electrophysiologic studies and electroanatomic mapping. We measured atrial refractoriness (ERP) at the distal coronary sinus (CS); low and high lateral right atrium (LRA) and the high septal right atrium at 600, 500, and 400 ms; maximum corrected sinus node recovery time (CSNRT); P-wave duration (PWD); conduction time (CT) along the CS and LRA; and discrete double potentials (DP) along the crista. RESULTS: Aging was associated with an increase in atrial ERP, prolonged CT along the CS, increased PWD and CSNRT. There was no significant change in dispersion of refractoriness or rate adaptation. Electroanatomic mapping revealed diffuse areas of low voltage with regional conduction slowing. Both techniques demonstrated a greater number of DPs and fractionated signals along the crista terminalis with aging. CONCLUSIONS: Aging is associated with regional conduction slowing, anatomically determined conduction delay at the crista, and structural changes that include areas of low voltage. In addition, impairment of sinus node function and an increase in atrial ERP occurred with aging. This electrical and structural remodeling may explain the increased propensity to AF with aging.     

Factors affecting the choice of health care utilisation between private and public services among the elderly population in India

India is experiencing rapid population ageing in recent years. One of the most concomitant issues is the choice of health care services among the elderly, leading to its impact on the magnitude of health expenditure. Applying Andersen's Health Behavioural Model, this study identifies the predictors of the choice of inpatient health care services among the Indian elderly between private and public services. It also examines the nature of interregional disparity in the choice of health care services. Using NSSO data, the results suggest that the elderly belonging to upper caste and having higher levels of education, higher incomes, larger family size, and needing surgery are likely to choose private health care, while those experiencing higher economic dependence, chronic diseases, and higher duration of hospitalisation tend to prefer public inpatient services. The magnitude and significance of these factors, however, vary across regions. The findings of the study provide an understanding of the preferences of the India's geriatric population over hospital services, which may help policymakers better understand their health care needs.     

Megaprimer-mediated capsid swapping for the construction of custom-engineered chimeric foot-and-mouth disease virus

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious, economically important disease of transboundary importance. Regular vaccination with chemically inactivated FMD vaccine is the major means of controlling the disease in endemic countries like India. However, the selection of appropriate candidate vaccine strain and its adaptation in cell culture to yield high titer of virus is a cumbersome process. An attractive approach to circumvent this tedious process is to replace the capsid coding sequence of an infectious full-genome length cDNA clone of a good vaccine strain with those of appropriate field strain, to produce custom-made chimeric FMD virus (FMDV). Nevertheless, the construction of chimeric virus can be difficult if the necessary endonuclease restriction sites are unavailable or unsuitable for swapping of the capsid sequence. Here we described an efficient method based on megaprimer-mediated capsid swapping for the construction of chimeric FMDV cDNA clones. Using FMDV vaccine strain A IND 40/2000 infectious clone (pA^40/2000) as a donor plasmid, we exchanged the capsid sequence of pA^40/2000 with that of the viruses belonging to serotypes O (n = 5), A (n = 2), and Asia 1 (n = 2), and subsequently generated infectious FMDV from their respective chimeric cDNA clones. The chimeric viruses exhibited comparable infection kinetics, plaque phenotypes, antigenic profiles, and virion stability to the parental viruses. The results from this study suggest that megaprimer-based reverse genetics technology is useful for engineering chimeric vaccine strains for use in the control and prevention of FMD in endemic countries.