scholarly journals Pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosis, differentiation and disease management: A review of radiomics applications

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 251-259
Author(s):  
Tamarisk Du Plessis ◽  
William Ian Duncombe Rae ◽  
Mike Michael Sathekge

Abstract Pulmonary tuberculosis is a worldwide epidemic that can only be fought effectively with early and accurate diagnosis and proper disease management. The means of diagnosis and disease management should be easily accessible, cost effective and be readily available in the high tuberculosis burdened countries where it is most needed. Fortunately, the fast development of computer science in recent years has ensured that medical images can accurately be quantified. Radiomics is one such tool that can be used to quantify medical images. This review article focuses on the literature currently available on the application of radiomics explicitly for the purpose of diagnosis, differentiation from other pulmonary diseases and disease management of pulmonary tuberculosis. Despite using a formal search strategy, only five articles could be found on the application of radiomics to pulmonary tuberculosis. In all five articles reviewed, radiomic feature extraction was successfully used to quantify digital medical images for the purpose of comparing, or differentiating, pulmonary tuberculosis from other pulmonary diseases. This demonstrates that the use of radiomics for the purpose of tuberculosis disease management and diagnosis remains a valuable data mining opportunity not yet realised.

Author(s):  
Sanjeev Kumar ◽  
Sangita Sahni ◽  
Bishun Deo Prasad

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is one of the world’s major legume crops and suffers substantial damage from wilt disease caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceri( Padwick) with yield loss over 60 per cent. It is an important soil borne plant pathogen and is difficult to manage by application of chemical pesticides. Moreover, the chemical control is costly and leads to residual effect. A plethora of reports indictes the efforts made to reduce environmental effects and rationalize the use of pesticides and manage the pathogen more effectively through Integration of Disease Management (IDM). Application of soil amendments and specific bio-control agents also incorporated in IDM which has potential to suppress soil-borne pathogens through manipulation of the physicochemical and microbiological environment. Therefore, IDM approach for controlling chickpea Fusarium wilt might be a cost effective and eco-friendly approach.


Author(s):  
Hari Prasanna Sahu ◽  
Rakesh Roshan Satapathy

The origins of indigenous technical/traditional knowledge are local, rural &community. It's utilised in forecasting of weather for better seed germination, soil, water, and soil fertility management, disease and insect pest control of plants & animals, and post-harvest management, among other things. India has a variety of indigenous agricultural practises which are still popular in organic agriculture in India's many states and are sustainable, environment friendly, profitable, and cost-effective. This review paper contains an overview of Indigenous Technical Knowledge in Plant Disease Management to help researchers in the future.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
P J Horner

It has recently been advocated that non-invasive testing with first-catch urine specimens using nucleic acid amplification techniques, to detect Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, should replace routine microscopy on asymptomatic men. Although it is assumed that this strategy will be cost effective, the available evidence suggests that this will result in fewer sexually transmitted infections being averted than continuing the current practice of screening for urethritis and testing for both microorganisms in asymptomatic men. This review article summarizes the available evidence and argues that research is urgently needed in order to properly evaluate the cost-effectiveness of detecting urethritis in asymptomatic men.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Rakel Arrazuria ◽  
Iraia Ladero ◽  
Elena Molina ◽  
Miguel Fuertes ◽  
Ramón Juste ◽  
...  

Paratuberculosis (PTB) is an enteric granulomatous disease caused by Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) that mainly affects ruminants. Current vaccines have shown to be cost–effective control reagents, although they are restricted due to cross-interference with bovine tuberculosis (bTB). Therefore, novel vaccination strategies are needed and this study is focused on evaluating alternative vaccination routes and their effect on the local immune response. The MAP oral challenge rabbit model was used to evaluate and compare an experimental inactivated MAP vaccine through oral (VOR) and intradermal (VID) routes. The VID group presented the highest proportion of animals with no visible lesions and the lowest proportion of animals with MAP positive tissues. Immunohistochemistry analysis revealed that the VID group presented a dominantly M1 polarized response indicating an ability to control MAP infection. In general, all vaccinated groups showed lower calprotectin levels compared to the non-vaccinated challenged group suggesting less active granulomatous lesions. The VID group showed some degree of skin test reactivity, whereas the same vaccine through oral administration was completely negative. These data show that PTB vaccination has an effect on macrophage polarization and that the route influences infection outcome and can also have an impact on bTB diagnosis. Future evaluation of new immunological products against mycobacterial diseases should consider assaying different vaccination routes.


Author(s):  
Karen Corral ◽  
David Schuff ◽  
Robert D. St. Louis ◽  
Ozgur Turetken

Inefficient and ineffective search is widely recognized as a problem for businesses. The shortcomings of keyword searches have been elaborated upon by many authors, and many enhancements to keyword searches have been proposed. To date, however, no one has provided a quantitative model or systematic process for evaluating the savings that accrue from enhanced search procedures. This paper presents a model for estimating the total cost to a company of relying on keyword searches versus a dimensional search approach. The model is based on the Zipf-Mandelbrot law in quantitative linguistics. Our analysis of the model shows that a surprisingly small number of searches are required to justify the cost associated with encoding the metadata necessary to support a dimensional search engine. The results imply that it is cost effective for almost any business organization to implement a dimensional search strategy.


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