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Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) is an advanced stage of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and can lead to permanent vision loss. Currently, it affects 26.7 million people globally and on account of such a huge number of DME cases and the limited number of ophthalmologists, it is desirable to automate the diagnosis process. Computer-assisted, deep learning based diagnosis could help in early detection, following which precision medication can help to mitigate the vision loss. In order to automate the screening of DME, we propose a novel DMENet Algorithm which is built on the pillars of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). DMENet analyses the preprocessed color fundus images and passes it through a two-stage pipeline. The first stage detects the presence or absence of DME whereas the second stage takes only the positive cases and grades the images based on severity. In both the stages, we use a novel Hierarchical Ensemble of CNNs (HE-CNN). This paper uses two of the popular publicly available datasets IDRiD and MESSIDOR for classification. Preprocessing on the images is performed using morphological opening and gaussian kernel. The dataset is augmented to solve the class imbalance problem for better performance of the proposed model. The proposed methodology achieved an average Accuracy of 96.12%, Sensitivity of 96.32%, Specificity of 95.84%, and F-1 score of 0.9609 on MESSIDOR and IDRiD datasets. These excellent results establish the validity of the proposed methodology for use in DME screening and solidifies the applicability of the HE-CNN classification technique in the domain of biomedical imaging.

Skin cancer is considered to be the most common human malignancy. Around 5 million new cases of skin cancer are recorded in the United States annually. Early identification and evaluation of skin lesions are of great clinical significance, but the disproportionate dermatologist-patient ratio poses a significant problem in most developing nations. Therefore a novel deep architecture, named as SkiNet, is proposed to provide faster screening solution and assistance to newly trained physicians in the process of clinical diagnosis of skin cancer. The main motive behind SkiNet’s design and development is to provide a white box solution, addressing a critical problem of trust and interpretability which is crucial for the wider adoption of Computer-aided diagnosis systems by medical practitioners. The proposed SkiNet is a two-stage pipeline wherein the lesion segmentation is followed by the lesion classification. Monte Carlo dropout and test time augmentation techniques have been employed in the proposed method to estimate epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. A novel segmentation model named Bayesian MultiResUNet is used to estimate the uncertainty on the predicted segmentation map. Saliency-based methods like XRAI, Grad-CAM and Guided Backprop are explored to provide post-hoc explanations of the deep learning models. The ISIC-2018 dataset is used to perform the experimentation and ablation studies. The results establish the robustness of the proposed model on the traditional benchmarks while addressing the black-box nature of such models to alleviate the skepticism of medical practitioners by incorporating transparency and confidence to the model’s prediction.

Thermal energy storage technology has evolved as one of the prominent methods of storing thermal energy when it is available and utilized as per the requirements. In recent years, thermal energy storage has found a variety of applications for thermal management, such as buildings, batteries, electronics, cold storage, textiles, and solar thermal systems. Phase Change Material (PCM) has taken the lead among all other thermal energy storage materials because of various merits such as high energy density, ease of use, low cost, low volume change, environmental friendliness, easy availability, and chemical stability. However, limitations such as poor thermal conductivity and leakage during phase transformation limit their applicability. In this study, Shape Stabilized Composite PCM (SSCPCM) was developed to overcome these drawbacks. Paraffin wax and soya wax were used as PCMs and multi-walled carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide were used as nano-additives. High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) is used as a supporting matrix. Leakage test suggest maximum loading of 40 wt% and 35 wt% of paraffin wax and soya wax in HDPE without any leakage at elevated temperature. The prepared SSCPCM shows substantially better thermal energy storage capacity along with improved thermal conductivity. A maximum rise of 260.8% in thermal conductivity was observed in paraffin wax supported by HDPE and loaded with 3 wt% of multi-walled carbon nanotube nanoparticles. The heating and cooling performance suggests an improvement in the heating and cooling rate by adding nano-additives. The prepared SSCPCM are also thermally stable at elevated temperatures up to 150 °C.

This paper proposes a wireless battery charger topology for electric vehicle (EV) application that can be installed in public charging infrastructure as well as in home premises. The proposed topology can maintain constant current as well as constant voltage at the battery terminal and simultaneously can maintain near unity power factor at the input side using power factor correction (PFC) operation and thus satisfy all the criteria of a standard EV charger. The heart of the wireless power transfer (WPT) scheme is a high-frequency (HF) inverter. In this work, a class EF2 inverter is used to generate HF AC in such a way that it can deliver power with variable loading condition while maintaining constant current (CC) or constant voltage (CV) according to the requirement of CC-CV charging profile. To supply power to this EF2 inverter, an AC-DC front-end converter (stage-1) is integrated with the charger. The stage-1 is operated as a constant voltage source to the EF2 inverter for CC mode and constant current source for CV mode operation. CC-CV at the battery end and PFC at the input end are achieved only by controlling the gate pulse of stage-1. The WPT coils are first simulated using Ansys Maxwell package, and the complete charger is simulated with PSIM simulation software. A scaled-down 200 W laboratory prototype of the proposed charger is developed and tested with a resistive load to validate the idea. The wireless power transfer is achieved for a maximum distance of 12 cm between the transmitting and receiving coil. Finally, the charger is tested to charge both 12 V and 24 V battery packs and the CC-CV charging profile is presented for the 24 V, 30 Ah battery pack.

Fossil fuels are the major source of energy in developing countries but problems like generation of greenhouse gases and financial burden on the economy due to import are the problems associated with it among others. The use of renewable energy sources like solar energy is increasing now a days but problems like fluctuation of energy in day and time dependent availability hindered its implementation at large scale. This problem can be overcome by the application of solar thermal battery that store the solar energy in various forms. In this paper, state-of the-art of energy storge and their issues and challenges of in form of sensible, latent and thermo-chemical system were presented. Later, experimental study of tailoring paraffin wax for storing the solar energy in form latent heat were presented. It is concluded that pure paraffin wax is not appropriate energy storage material in form latent heat because of low thermal conductivity. State of the art of enhancing the thermal conductivity of various phase change materials were also reported.

An urban heat island (UHI) refers to urban areas that experience higher temperatures due to heat absorption and retention by impervious surfaces compared to the surrounding rural areas. Urban wetlands are crucial in mitigating the UHI effect and improving climate resilience via their cooling effect. This study examines Colombo, Sri Lanka, the RAMSAR-accredited wetland city in South Asia, to assess the cooling effect of urban wetlands based on 2023 dry season data for effective sustainable management. We used Landsat 8 and 9 data to create Land Use/Cover (LUC), Land Surface Temperature (LST), and surface-reflectance-based maps using the Google Earth Engine (GEE). The Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (mNDWI), topographic wetness, elevation, slope, and impervious surface percentage were identified as the influencing variables. The results show that urban wetlands in Colombo face tremendous pressure due to rapid urban expansion. The cooling intensity positively correlates with wetland size. The threshold value of efficiency (TVoE) of urban wetlands in Colombo was 1.42 ha. Larger and more connected wetlands showed higher cooling effects. Vegetation- and water-based wetlands play an important role in <10 km urban areas, while more complex shape configuration wetlands provide better cooling effects in urban and peri-urban areas due to edge effects. Urban planners should prioritize protecting wetland areas and ensuring hydrological connectivity and interconnected wetland clusters to maximize the cooling effect and sustain ecosystem services in rapidly urbanizing coastal cities.

Interconnects are used in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) for connecting the fuel cell stacks. These interconnect are coated with spinel oxides to prevent the formation of a native scale oxide layer under high heat flux conditions. Generally, the SOFCs are subjected to thermal shock during their operation. At the interfaces of these coating, shear stresses and peeling stresses were induced due to a mismatch between the thermal expansion coefficient of coating and native scale thickness. These stresses peel off the coating layers which affect the interconnect performance. In this paper, the effect of varying native scale thickness at two different coating thicknesses on the shearing stress and peeling stress of the interconnects is analytically calculated along the two different interconnect thicknesses. The oxidation kinetics of spinel-coated SOFCs interconnects with the analytical equations relating native scale thickness with the time of SOFCs operation were reported. As per our analysis, we concluded that these stresses majorly depend on the thickness and the mechanical properties of the interconnects, native scale and a coating layer.

Introduction: Basic behavioral guidance (BBG) skills help in delivery of quality health care in pediatric dentistry. The complex nature of these skills, warrants analyzing actions performed. An appropriate scientific way to do this is by \"reflection.\" Hence, the present study was designed to introduce \"reflection of action\" as means for learning BBG skills by undergraduates in pediatric dentistry. Materials and Methods: Participants (dental undergraduate) performed oral prophylaxis (two visits) in pediatric patients (age 3-7 years) with application of BBG skills, under video recording. They were instructed regarding \"reflection on action.\" The learners then reviewed own videos and wrote reflections. Reflections were assessed on Boud's 4R framework and feedback was given by the faculty. Reflective writing was repeated for a second visit. Knowledge of the learners in using reflections for learning was assessed by retrospective pretest posttest questionnaire. Video recordings were scored for BBG skills. Acceptability of the intervention was addressed by satisfaction questionnaire. Results: There was a significant improvement in the knowledge of participants in using reflections for learning these skills. All participants were able to \"revisit\" (R1 level under Boud's 4R framework) patient encounter in their written reflections. Sixteen participants exhibited shift toward higher levels in the next visit. Video scores of learners also improved significantly over both visits. Students were satisfied with the content, delivery, and relevance of the new educational intervention. Conclusion: The strong need of improving BBG skills in pediatric dentistry was met by \"reflection on action.\" There was improvement in the knowledge of students in using reflections for learning and application of behavior guidance skills and was well accepted.

The complete mitochondrial genome of the freshwater fish species was obtained, using Illumina NovaSeq 6000 with 2 × 150 bp paired-end sequencing. The mitogenome of is 16,738 bp in length (GenBank accession no.: OQ834146), comprised of 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, two rRNA genes, and a control region, i.e. D-loop. The arrangement of genes was found to be identical to other Cypriniformes fish mitogenome, available in the NCBI database. The taxonomic status of as a valid species was debated by some researchers and it was considered a synonym of However, phylogenetic analysis in the present study supports the species validity of , as it showed a distinct node well separated from and supported by a high bootstrap value. Furtherly, the pairwise genetic divergence among studied species showed the divergence between and as 1.6% whereas the minimum divergence was found to be 0.13% with followed by (0.58%) and (0.63%). The complete mitogenome of will also be useful as a baseline reference genome for the reconstruction and annotation of the mitogenome of other species.

Pulp calcifications are a frequent finding on bitewing and periapical radiographs in older age-groups but their occurrence in the entire dentition in young subjects is unusual. We report such an unusual occurrence of generalized pulp calcification in a 13-year-old Indian female. Radiographic examination of the dentition revealed pulp calcifications in all permanent teeth, located mostly in the pulp chamber but with some in the root canals. The patient's dental, medical, and family history was noncontributory. Biochemical analysis of the removed pulp calcification from one of the teeth during endodontic treatment showed large amounts of calcium, phosphorus, and carbonate. However, metabolic evaluation of patient through liver and kidney function tests and other blood investigations did not reveal any metabolic disorder. The patient was also evaluated for any systemic, syndromic, or genetic involvement but this was also noncontributory. Therefore, we propose that this unusual case of generalized pulp calcification is of idiopathic origin. In this work, histopathological and biochemical evaluations of the pulp calcification was done to try and understand the initiation and progress of calcifications in pulpal tissue.