What decides: high mortality in paediatric acute renal failure?

Forty paediatric cases of A.R.F. (Acute Renal Failure) of various aetiology were included in the study. 60% of patients were less than 4 years of age with male predominance. 80% cases reported to us very late with oligoanuria of more than 24 hours (2-7 days). Diarrhoea, vomiting and fever were other dominant symptoms. Maximum cases were severely anaemic (87.5%) with mean Hb 7.73 +/- 1.9 gm%. 40% cases were of underweight while only one case (2.5%) was of over weight, inspite of volume excess in 40% cases. All 24 cases, who were estimated for serum albumin, found to have marked hypoalbuminemia. Mortality was found to be as high as 65% inspite of effective peritoneal dialysis in all cases. High mortality seems to be due to profound anuria of many days (because of marked delay in reaching the hospital), fever and malnutrition besides other factors as aetiology.     

Role of electron traps in the radiation hardness of thermallynitrided silicon dioxide

A number of samples of thermally nitrided SiO₂ with varying concentrations of electron traps were studied in an attempt to correlate the radiation-induced oxide charge with the number of electron traps. Also studied were the detrapping characteristics of irradiated devices. Etch-back experiments were performed to locate the centroid of the trapped charge. The results show that electron trapping does play a role in the improved radiation hardness of nitrided SiO₂, but is not the sole cause of it     

CO2 laser annealing of plasma-deposited high-Tcsuperconducting thick films

Recent advances in the fabrication of high-T _c superconducting thick films demand processing techniques which can eliminate film/substrate interdifiusion that occurs during subsequent post-annealing heat treatment after the film is deposited, thereby limiting the application of the thick films for devices. The present study evaluates laser annealing techniques for plasma-deposited Y-Ba-Cu-O thick films using a high-energy CO₂ laser (10.6m) in a continuous wave mode. The results are compared with those obtained by conventional furnace annealing techniques necessary for post-heat treatment of as-deposited superconducting thick films. The high-T _c superconducting phase is recovered by cationic diffusion during subsequent post-annealing heat treatment. Crystallographic phases and microstructural characterization have been performed using XRD, SEM, and EPMA analytical techniques. The significance of the technology lies in the elimination of film/substrate interdiffusion problems, thereby resulting in high-quality superconducting thick films. The technology will significantly reduce the post-annealing times usually required by conventional furnace annealing techniques.     

A Study of the Thallium- and Bismuth-based High-temperature Superconductors in the Framework of the Generalized BCS Equations

Presented here in the framework of the generalized BCS equations??which are based on multiple phonon exchanges for the formation of Cooper pairs (CPs)??is continuation of a study carried out earlier for MgB₂ Nb₃Sn and YBCO. Addressed now are the principal members of the Tl- and Bi-based high-T _c superconductors. For any of these, with the input of any two parameters from the set {critical temperature, two gaps}, and the Debye temperature, it is shown that one can calculate the remaining parameter. This is similar to what normal BCS equations achieve for a simple superconductor. Further, we show that these equations lead to upper bounds on the gap- and the T _c -values of a HTSC, beyond which one must invoke 2/3-phonon mechanism for the formation of CPs. Our considerations suggest the interesting possibility that senior members of the said families of cuprates may be three-gap SCs.     

Visual Speech Recognition Using Optical Flow and Hidden Markov Model

Wireless Personal Communications - The present work proposes audio-visual speech recognition with the use of Gammatone frequency cepstral coefficient (GFCC) and optical flow (OF) features with...     

Interstellar‐based topology control scheme for optimal clustering performance in WSN

Clustering is one of the essential operations in wireless sensor network (WSN) to ensure organized data aggregation followed by energy efficiency. However, obtaining optimal clustering performance is yet an unsolved problem in WSN. Review of existing approaches towards cluster optimization shows that effective balance between energy efficiency and topology control is still missing. Therefore, the proposed system presents a unique topology control mechanism using a novel concept of interstellar orientation toward optimizing the clustering performance in WSN. Adopting an analytical research methodology, the proposed system introduces two interstellar‐based topology control system, which targets the maximum saving of resource consumption of the cluster head. The simulated outcome of the study shows that the proposed topology control system offers significant energy conservation performance in comparison to the existing hierarchical clustering scheme in WSN.     

An Enhanced MPR OLSR Protocol for Efficient Node Selection Process in Cognitive Radio Based VANET

Wireless Personal Communications - A VANET is an excellent instance of a wireless sensor network. The mobile vehicles are the nodes and communication happens between the vehicular nodes. This...