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BackgroundMethodsResultsConclusionCone dystrophy is a heterogeneous hereditary retinal disorder with disease symptoms appearing in the late first or early second decades of life.A consanguineous Pakistani family with three affected individuals underwent detailed clinical and genetic investigation.The proband, a 63-years old male, showed severely reduced day vision, a visual acuity of counting fingers (CF), color vision deficiency, high myopia and photophobia. Fundus images showed bilateral peripapillary atrophy, bilateral dull foveal reflex, tilted disc, tessellated fundus, and hyperfluorescence at the peripheral superior temporal arcade and leak at an early stage. OCT macula and angiography findings suggested traction near the disc in the right eye and sub-retinal fluid at the fovea in the left eye. Retinal layers were normal toward the periphery but disorganized near the disc. Full visual field tests showed bilateral central scotoma, while single visual field tests indicated bilateral generalized depression of the visual field. The proband showed normal bilateral intraocular pressure, normal choroidal vessels, and unremarkable anterior segment. Exome sequencing identified a novel homozygous missense variant (POC1B:NM_172240.3:c.1391T>C;p.L464P) in the proband. Existing evidence supported pathogenicity of the identified variant in the family.In conclusion, we document a first-ever Pakistani family with POC1B-related cone dystrophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superelastic nickel–titanium (NiTi) archwires have become the preferred archwire for orthodontic alignment and the levelling stage due to their ability to exert a light force on teeth throughout a wide range of tooth movement. The magnitude and trend of the force exerted on the malposed tooth is influenced by the orthodontist's consideration of the size and geometry of the NiTi archwire during orthodontic therapy. In this work, a novel approach of a short-term ageing treatment was utilized to modify the magnitude and trend of the bending force of a commercial superelastic NiTi archwire. The bending behavior of the superelastic NiTi archwire was altered by subjecting it to different temperatures in an ageing treatment for 15 min. The bending behavior of the aged NiTi archwire was examined using a three-point and three-bracket setup. The commercial NiTi archwire's bending forces in both the three-point and three-bracket configurations were successfully altered by the 15 min ageing treatment. During unloading in the three-bracket arrangement, the NiTi archwires aged at 490 °C or 520 °C exhibited a lower magnitude and more consistent force compared to the NiTi archwires aged at 400 °C or 430 °C. Ageing the archwire for 15 min at 490 °C produced a suitable size of Ni4Ti3 precipitate, which makes the wire more flexible during bending and reduces the unloading force in the three-bracket bending configuration. The short-term aged NiTi archwire could be used to enhance the force delivery trend to the malposed tooth by lowering the amplitude of the force delivered and sustaining that force throughout the orthodontic treatment duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study is based on the structural analysis of radiators made of different materials to compare their effectiveness in the case of naturally aspirated and turbocharged diesel engines. For the analysis of the radiator structure, ABAQUS software was used. In the ABAQUS, static structural analysis was made to calculate the strength of the radiator. The said software is capable of calculating the strength of the radiator considering the boundary conditions (i.e., fixing at corners) as well as the loading conditions. It was observed that stresses generated while using an aluminium radiator were very high than those produced by steel radiators. According to the study, the following are the key findings for the steel and aluminium radiators. In the first case, while three corners were fixed, the steel radiator showed a deflection of 1.86 mm while aluminium exhibited 5.65 mm. However, in the second case in which the radiator had four fixed corners, the deflection of the steel radiator was 1.10 mm, while that of aluminium was 3.36 mm. Additionally, based on the deflections obtained from all investigations, it was found that radiators made of aluminium were more sensitive than those made of steel in both naturally aspirated and turbocharged applications. However, due to aluminium’s strong thermal conductivity, it is compatible with naturally aspirated engines in terms of thermal capacity. To combat turbocharged engine complications caused by high temperatures, such as thermal cracking, engine wear and tear, and so on, a steel-made radiator is more suitable than an aluminium radiator, hence mitigating the issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is working as a change agent in different areas of our routine life, Political awareness is one of them. With ever rising young population, social media offers this adventure in safety and privacy at our homes. Logging into Facebook looking at the newsfeed and sharing stuff has become our daily habit. Country like Pakistan where politics is the core area of discussion everybody takes interest in it. Pakistani youth has become the target public on social media by the political parties for their vested interests and propaganda. This quantitative research has been conducted to investigate the intensity of change in political attitude of youth using facebook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel method of active contours based on the formulation of partial differential equation (PDE) is proposed for image segmentation. The evolution equation incorporates a force term that pushes the contour towards object boundary, a regularisation term which takes into account the smoothness of the level set function and an edge term which helps to stop the contour at required boundaries. The proposed method integrates an image convolved by a variable kernel into an energy formulation, where the width of the kernel varies in each iteration. Therefore, it takes local region information when the width of the kernel is small while for the larger width of the kernel, the proposed method considers global region information across the regions. Due to the use of both local and global image information, the method easily detects objects in the complex background and also segments the objects where intensity changes within the object. Moreover, the proposed method totally eliminates the need of the contour initialisation by using constant initialisation scheme. Experimental results on real and medical images prove the robustness of the proposed method. Finally, the authors validate their method on PH2 database for skin lesion segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel two-stage image segmentation method using an edge scaled energy functional based on local and global information for intensity inhomogeneous image segmentation. In the first stage, we integrate global intensity term with a geodesic edge term, which produces a preliminary rough segmentation result. Thereafter, by taking final contour of the first stage as initial contour, we begin second stage segmentation process by integrating local intensity term with geodesic edge term to get final segmentation result. Due to the suitable initialization from the first stage, the second stage precisely achieves desirable segmentation result for inhomogeneous image segmentation. Two stage segmentation technique not only increases the accuracy but also eliminates the problem of initial contour existed in traditional local segmentation methods. The energy function of the proposed method uses both global and local terms incorporated with compacted geodesic edge term in an additive fashion which uses image gradient information to delineate obscured boundaries of objects inside an image. A Gaussian kernel is adapted for the regularization of the level set function and to avoid an expensive re-initialization. The experiments were carried out on synthetic and real images. Quantitative validations were performed on Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (BRATS) 2015 and PH2 skin lesion database. The visual and quantitative comparisons will demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet has given birth to new media technologies and social media. This study is planned to explore whether there is any relation between the usage of social media and vulnerability to be a victim of cybercrimes. The study will also investigate the current trends of cybercrimes, the extent of awareness about cybercrimes, attitudes about cybercrime reporting, perceptions about cybercrime laws and impact of cyber laws in Pakistan. Social media is now a personal medium for expression of personality and is extensively used tool for interpersonal communication, group as well as mass communication. People across the globe take keen interest in social networking for their routine communication as well as for information and entertainment. On the other hand certain people, groups or organizations are cleverly using this medium for their black and grey propaganda, cybercrimes and malpractices involving criminal procedures and targeted actions against individuals and organizations. Easy access to social media has empowered the criminal minds to use this medium to adopt new ways of fraudulent activities, thefts, harassments and terror. It is need of the time to measure if the social media users are aware of common cyber crimes and whether they are versed with the precautionary measures and if the report the crimes to law enforcing agencies or not. The study was aimed to investigate the level of awareness on cyber crimes in Pakistan as well as the public perception on cyber laws. The study further investigates the relationship between the amount of time spent on cyber media and vulnerability to fall a victim to the cybercrimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SMS have become an important source of infotainment besides being only a channel for communication. Youth especially is an active consumer of this communication technology. This study was planned to explore whether there is any relation between the exposure to the political communication and propaganda messages and attitudinal change in college students of graduate and undergraduate level. It was also aimed to investigate the perception of college students regarding change in political attitudes caused by exposure to political SMS texts. This study was designed to accomplish the objectives such as "to explore the relation between political SMS propaganda texts and the attitudinal change in the college students" and "to verify if SMS prove to be an effective tool of political communication, persuasion and propaganda". The study was carried out using a questionnaire to be filled by the respondents selected by randomization technique. Independent and dependent variables were defined adequately and demographic variables were also taken into consideration. On the basis of the results and findings, it is concluded that the exposure to SMS based political texts has the capability to change the political attitudes of young college students. Students are heavily relying on SMS based information and they believe in it as to be their personal medium of expression. This heavy reliance is leading to cause change in their political mindsets, conceptions and attitudes. Still it cannot be predicted that such campaigns can change the voting behavior too because of so many other social, economical and religious factors in Pakistan. So it is concluded that exposure of SMS based political information causes change in political attitudes of college students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generation of multivariate probability distributions follows several approaches. Within financial applications the emphasis has mostly been on two methodologies. The first is the elliptical methodology, where the leap from univariate to multivariate has taken place by constructing density functions that are functions of quadratic forms of the marginals. The second is the copula philosophy, where the dependency structure is treated entirely separately from marginals. In financial applications one often needs to work with combinations of marginals of various distributional types, and the copula philosophy is very attractive as it copes well with heterogeneous marginals. However, with some notable exceptions, the copula approach does not normally correspond to any natural or canonical multivariate structure arising from some underlying dynamic. This paper presents an approach to multivariate distribution theory that allows for heterogeneous marginals but without the limitations of the elliptical ansatz or the arbitrariness of the copula approach. The approach is to consider multivariate distributions as arising naturally from coupled stochastic differential equations (SDEs), and in this paper we consider a first step based on the equilibrium situation. The scope of this paper is where the marginals are one of the classic Pearson family of distributions, allowing for great diversity among the marginals. For simplicity we present details for the bivariate case. Using a recently developed quantile form of the Fokker-Planck equation it is first shown how the members of the Pearson family are associated with various types of one-dimensional SDE in a transparent manner. Then appropriate two-dimensional SDEs and the associated Fokker-Planck equations are considered. In the equilibrium limit these give solutions that are natural bivariate structures. Some examples with marginals drawn from Gaussian, Student and one-sided exponential are explored. Some possible generalizations are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Corrosive ingestion in children is very important and sensitive issue which result in lot of morbidity and mortality corrosive ingestion is mostly in form of acid or alkali chemical. 5000 to 15000 caustic ingestion cases are reported annually in United States. Majority of cases are accidental and can occur in any age of children but in new born it occur very rarely. Case Presentation: we are presenting a case of corrosive ingestion in 04 days old new born who was given a liquid bleed mixed with formula milk by mother considering the liquid bleed as water for the dilution of milk. Conclusion: We conclude that legislation should be done for authorizes sale of corrosive chemical and awareness campaign should be lounge through social, print and electronic media about hazards of corrosive ingestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study revolves around the portrayal of women in men's product TV advertisements and audience perception. The study was conducted to measure the audience perception on the female portrayal in men's product advertisements aired on television channels. The researchers applied mix method approach to analyze the advertisement contents and surveyed the audiences to measure their perception on the issue. The study concluded that both men and women with lower and higher education have a higher exposure to the televised advertisements of men's' products. Female models are extensively used in these advertisements. Voice over, costume and bodily are heavily exploited with the sex appeal and the audiences admitted that they get attracted to that. Female models have been shown in dependent roles on the men and are also exploited as a sex object. As perceived by the audiences, the female portrayal was un-appropriate while there was some degree of acceptance towards the dressing of female models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation of left and right ventricles plays a crucial role in quantitatively analyzing the global and regional information in the cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In MRI, the intensity inhomogeneity and weak or blurred object boundaries are the problems, which makes it difficult for the intensity-based segmentation methods to properly delineate the regions of interests (ROI). In this paper, a hybrid signed pressure force function (SPF) is proposed, which yields both local and global image fitted differences in an additive fashion. A characteristic term is also introduced in the SPF function to restrict the contour within the ROI. The overlapping dice index and Hausdorff-Distance metrics have been used over cardiac datasets for quantitative validation. Using 2009 LV MICCAI validation dataset, the proposed method yields DSC values of 0.95 and 0.97 for endocardial and epicardial contours, respectively. Using 2012 RV MICCAI dataset, for the endocardial region, the proposed method yields DSC values of 0.97 and 0.90 and HD values of 8.51 and 7.67 for ED and ES, respectively. For the epicardial region, it yields DSC values of 0.92 and 0.91 and HD values of 6.47 and 9.34 for ED and ES, respectively. Results show its robustness in the segmentation application of the cardiac MRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation accuracy is an important criterion for evaluating the performance of segmentation techniques used to extract objects of interest from images, such as the active contour model. However, segmentation accuracy can be affected by image artifacts such as intensity inhomogeneity, which makes it difficult to extract objects with inhomogeneous intensities. To address this issue, this paper proposes a hybrid region-based active contour model for the segmentation of inhomogeneous images. The proposed hybrid energy functional combines local and global intensity functions; an incorporated weight function is parameterized based on local image contrast. The inclusion of this weight function smoothens the contours at different intensity level boundaries, thereby yielding improved segmentation. The weight function suppresses false contour evolution and also regularizes object boundaries. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach achieves superior results over synthetic and real images. Based on a quantitative analysis over the mini-MIAS and PH2 databases, the superiority of the proposed model in terms of segmentation accuracy, as compared with the ground truths, was confirmed. Furthermore, when using the proposed model, the processing time for image segmentation is lower than those when using other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]