Data mining in road crash analysis: the context of developing countries.

The recent advancements in the field of data mining have made vast progress in extracting new information and hidden patterns from large datasets which are often overlooked by the traditional statistical approaches. These methods focus on searching for new and interesting hypothesis which were previously unobserved. Road safety researchers working with the crash data from developed world have seen encouraging success in obtaining new insight into crash mechanism through data mining. An attempt was made in this study to apply these advance methods and evaluate their performance in manifesting crash causes for Bangladesh. The study applies hierarchical clustering to identify hazardous clusters, random forest to find important variables explaining each of these clusters, and classification and regression trees to unveil their respective crash mechanisms for the road crash data of Bangladesh. The results identified several new interesting relationships and acknowledged issues related to quality of data.

Anatomical Outcome Following Indocyanine Green Assisted Internal Limiting Membrane Peeling for Stage 3 and 4 Macular Hole Surgery.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the anatomical success of stage 3 and 4 macular hole surgery after removal of internal limiting membrane (ILM) with the help of Indocyanine green (ICG). STUDY DESIGN: An experimental study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY: LRBTTertiary Care Eye Hospital, Karachi, October 2015 to August 2016. METHODOLOGY: Twenty patients with stage 3 and 4 macular hole (confirmed by spectral domain optical coherence tomography) underwent standard 3 ports pars plana vitrectomy. Staining of ILM was performed with the help of 0.5% ICG to aid in visualization. ILM was removed by using intraocular forceps in circular fashion. Finally, gas fluid exchange with internal tamponade of SF6 20% was performed. Postoperative face down posture was maintained for seven days. Patients were followed-up for 8 months and assessment of macular hole closure was done using SD-OCT. RESULTS: After a follow-up of 8 months, macular hole was closed in 17 eyes (85%) and vision had improved in 6 patients. Postoperative complications included cataract, hyphema and vitreous hemorrhage. CONCLUSION: Surgery for stage 3 and 4 macular hole with ILM peeling has high anatomical success rate. Final visual acuity is dependent on preoperative macular hole stage and visual acuity at presentation.