Pulmonary hypertension in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: current understanding, knowledge gaps and future directions.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Despite the advent of effective and mechanistically diverse treatments for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and their positive impacts on the functional capacities and outcomes for PAH patients, the much larger population of patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH) in chronic lung diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (PH-COPD) remain without effective therapies. RECENT FINDINGS: In this review, we will highlight advances in the understanding of PH-COPD pathobiology, the clinical impact comorbid PH has on COPD outcomes, and detail the spectrum of disease and clinical phenotypes that encompass the heterogenous disease manifestations of PH-COPD. Finally, we will examine recent studies exploring the effects of potential treatments for PH-COPD and highlight sub-populations and treatment options that warrant further study. SUMMARY: As the PAH population-base ages and comorbid diseases become more frequently diagnosed in PAH patients, the need to clearly delineate subpopulations for clinical applications of PH therapies and research becomes even more urgent. Through an improved understanding of the clinical phenotypes of PH-COPD and the overlap with certain subpopulations of PAH, a framework for future research and potential for therapeutic impact is highlighted.

Cosmetic iris implants - double edge sword.

Iris implants were originally described as an option to treat photophobia and glare associated with aniridia, coloboma, corectopia or any other causes of acquired or congenital iris defects. They are not designed to be used in healthy phakic eyes and not approved by regulatory bodies anywhere in the world for cosmesis. However, widespread publicity and the compulsive need for beautification has popularised the use of these implants illicitly. Implantation into phakic eyes causes mechanical irritation of angle structures leading to chronic inflammation, pigment dispersion, prolonged endothelial cell loss and compression of the trabecular meshwork. The consequences are dire, leading to presentation of such patients with serious complications involving the cornea, angle, and lens. Here we give an extensive review of available literature on cosmetic iris implants and also describe a case with bilateral cosmetic iris implants (New-ColorIris). The patient presented with corneal decompensation, glaucoma, and cataract in both eyes, seven years after the implantation and was successfully managed with explantation of the device followed by a DMEK Triple procedure.

Transfer learning based novel ensemble classifier for COVID-19 detection from chest CT-scans.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a deadly infection that affects the respiratory organs in humans as well as animals. By 2020, this disease turned out to be a pandemic affecting millions of individuals across the globe. Conducting rapid tests for a large number of suspects preventing the spread of the virus has become a challenge. In the recent past, several deep learning based approaches have been developed for automating the process of detecting COVID-19 infection from Lung Computerized Tomography (CT) scan images. However, most of them rely on a single model prediction for the final decision which may or may not be accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble approach that aggregates the strength of multiple deep neural network architectures before arriving at the final decision. We use various pre-trained models such as VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50, ResNet50V2, InceptionResNetV2, Xception, and MobileNet and fine-tune them using Lung CT Scan images. All these trained models are further used to create a strong ensemble classifier that makes the final prediction. Our experiments exhibit that the proposed ensemble approach is superior to existing ensemble approaches and set state-of-the-art results for detecting COVID-19 infection from lung CT scan images.