Screening of hepatitis B and C viral infection, recognition of risk factors, and immunization of patients against hepatitis B virus: a module developed for effective hepatitis control.

Introduction: The continually increasing incidence of hepatitis, a worldwide health issue, in Pakistan, has highlighted the need to investigate the epidemiology factors and implement preventive measures accordingly. The purpose of this study was to scrutinize the prevalent and significantly associated risk factors of hepatitis in students and employees, screening them for hepatitis B and C virus and vaccinating them against HBV to make IUB hepatitis free. Methodology: A total of 12,912 participants including students (n = 10,948) and employees (n = 1964) were screened for HBV and HCV via immunochromatographic test. Hepatitis- positive participants' blood samples were further tested and viral load was estimated by quantitative PCR. All the hepatitis-negative participants were vaccinated against HBV. The demographic and risk factors-related data were collected using the questionnaire. Statistical analysis (Chi-square test and bivariate regression analysis) was performed using SPSS software to explore any association between risk factors and hepatitis. Results: Results indicated that 662/12912 participants (students = 478/10,948, employees = 184/1,964) tested positive for hepatitis. Among them, HCV was observed to be more prevalent than HBV among the study participants, employees, and students, and viral count was low in both HBV and HCV-infected participants. However, men were more affected than women. The studied risk factors represented higher frequency among hepatitis-positive participants relative to the hepatitis-negative participants. The Chi-square test revealed that students' gender, history of hepatitis in the family and relatives, dental treatment, sharing cosmetics and shaving blades were significant (p > 0.005) risk factors of hepatitis while in the employees group surgery and age were significant. Moreover, the reused of syringes was found to be associated with hepatitis in both groups. The bivariate analysis helped to identify various new risk factors which were independently, either positively or negatively, associated with hepatitis. Discussion: Our study enabled us to recognize different risk factors of hepatitis among the target population. The information thus generated can be usefully applied in planning hepatitis awareness, targeted screening, and effective control programs for other target populations. In general, this module can be further utilized for any other disease.

Heterogeneous Visible-Thermal and Visible-Infrared Face Recognition Using Cross-Modality Discriminator Network and Unit-Class Loss.

Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) aims to match face images across different imaging domains such as visible-to-infrared and visible-to-thermal. Recently, the increasing utility of nonvisible imaging has increased the application prospects of HFR in areas such as biometrics, security, and surveillance. HFR is a challenging variate of face recognition due to the differences between different imaging domains. While the current research has proposed image preprocessing, feature extraction, or common subspace projection for HFR, the optimization of these multi-stage methods is a challenging task as each step needs to be optimized separately and the performance error accumulates over each stage. In this paper, we propose a unified end-to-end Cross-Modality Discriminator Network (CMDN) for HFR. The proposed network uses a Deep Relational Discriminator module to learn deep feature relations for cross-domain face matching. Simultaneously, the CMDN is used to extract modality-independent embedding vectors for face images. The CMDN parameters are optimized using a novel Unit-Class Loss that shows higher stability and accuracy over other popular metric-learning loss functions. The experimental results on five popular HFR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvement over the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Protracted hypocalcemia following post-thyroidectomy lumbar rhabdomyolysis secondary to evolving hypoparathyroidism.

Rhabdomyolysis is characterized by skeletal muscle breakdown. It is a potential cause of serious electrolyte and metabolic disturbances, acute kidney insufficiency, and death. Recently, rhabdomyolysis has been increasingly recognized following certain surgical procedures. We discuss the case of a morbidly obese 51-year-old woman who developed postoperative rhabdomyolysis of the lumbar muscles following a prolonged thyroidectomy for a large goiter. We discuss how her morbid obesity, the supine surgical position, the duration of surgery (including prolonged exposure to anesthetic agents), and postoperative immobility contributed to the development of rhabdomyolysis. Immediately after surgery, the patient developed hypocalcemia, which was likely due to rhabdomyolysis since her serum parathyroid hormone level was normal. Later, however, persistent hypocalcemia despite resolution of the rhabdomyolysis raised a suspicion of iatrogenic hypoparathyroidism, which was confirmed by a suppressed parathyroid hormone level several days after surgery. In post-thyroidectomy patients with risk factors for rhabdomyolysis, maintaining a high degree of clinical suspicion and measuring serum creatine kinase and parathyroid hormone levels can allow for an accurate interpretation of hypocalcemia.