Face mask detection and social distance monitoring system for COVID-19 pandemic.

Coronavirus triggers several respirational infections such as sneezing, coughing, and pneumonia, which transmit humans to humans through airborne droplets. According to the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the spread of COVID-19 can be mitigated by avoiding public interactions in proximity and following standard operating procedures (SOPs) including wearing a face mask and maintaining social distancing in schools, shopping malls, and crowded areas. However, enforcing the adaptation of these SOPs on a larger scale is still a challenging task. With the emergence of deep learning-based visual object detection networks, numerous methods have been proposed to perform face mask detection on public spots. However, these methods require a huge amount of data to ensure robustness in real-time applications. Also, to the best of our knowledge, there is no standard outdoor surveillance-based dataset available to ensure the efficacy of face mask detection and social distancing methods in public spots. To this end, we present a large-scale dataset comprising of 10,000 outdoor images categorized into a binary class labeling i.e., face mask, and non-face masked people to accelerate the development of automated face mask detection and social distance measurement on public spots. Alongside, we also present an end-to-end pipeline to perform real-time face mask detection and social distance measurement in an outdoor environment. Initially, existing state-of-the-art single and multi-stage object detection networks are fine-tuned on the proposed dataset to evaluate their performance in terms of accuracy and inference time. Based on better performance, YOLO-v3 architecture is further optimized by tuning its feature extraction and region proposal generation layers to improve the performance in real-time applications. Our results indicate that the presented pipeline performed better than the baseline version, showing an improvement of 5.3% in terms of accuracy.

Intertrochanteric Hip Fractures And Vitamin D Deficiency; A Significant Association.

BACKGROUND: Intertrochanteric fractures are a common cause of disability, morbidity and mortality in aged population across the globe. The same population is also vulnerable to ill effects of vitamin D deficiency and presence of multiple comorbidities. Very few studies have been done in our part of the world to find the association of vitamin D deficiency with type of intertrochanteric fractures. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted during July 2019 to June 2020 at tertiary care hospital in the megacity of Lahore, Pakistan. Demographic variables were recorded and anteroposterior and lateral views of plain radiographs were used to classify the fractures. History of chronic illness was taken and confirmed with available prescription. Vitamin D level was measured using standard laboratory techniques. Data was entered into IBM SPSS Statistics (version 25) software and analysed. RESULTS: Mean age for males was 65 years and for females 71 years. Boyd and Griffin type II fracture was most common injury (62%). 67% of our study population was suffering from some degree of vitamin D deficiency. Results have shown the significant association of vitamin D deficiency and severity of intertrochanteric fractures (p <0.05). There was no significant difference of degree of vitamin D deficiency and injury pattern among both genders. CONCLUSIONS: There is a strong association between degree of vitamin D deficiency and type of intertrochanteric fractures. Our study also highlighted the importance of mechanism of injury, age and presence of diabetes in association with these fractures.

Is spinal tuberculosis changing with changing time?

INTRODUCTION: Spinal tuberculosis is a chronic destructive disease with long-term morbidity. Patients are usually young especially from a poor socioeconomic background. Destruction of the intervertebral disk space and the adjacent vertebral bodies is the characteristic lesion. The dorsal spine is the most affected region with multi-level noncontiguous involvement being detected more frequently. Patients usually present with chronic back pain associated with spinal tenderness, paraplegia, spinal deformities, as well as with constitutional symptoms. Magnetic resonance imaging has proved to be more sensitive and specific for its diagnosis, but availability and affordability of this investigation remain a problem in developing countries. Anti-tuberculous drug therapy has revolutionized the treatment of this debilitating disease. Surgery is still required in selected cases especially with evolving neurological deficit, progressive deformity, intractable pain and lack of response to drug therapy. With early diagnosis and effective treatment, prognosis is generally good.Materials/Methods: After getting permission from the clinical governance department, We collected the retrospective data of 305 patients with diagnosed spinal tuberculosis, who underwent surgical intervention. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in incidence among males and females. Housewives were the most affected. Lower dorsal spinal was the commonest site involved but our study didn't confirm the incidence of multi-level disease process. Anterior decompression along with Cage fixation was most frequently performed procedure. CONCLUSION: Despite the availability of highly effective antituberculous drugs, advanced surgical procedure, the spinal tuberculosis still maintains its demographic profile. There has been no change in characteristics of spinal presentation of this chronic debilitating disease. Patients continue to suffer the same way as they were suffering decades ago.