Quality of tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis by manual observation varies depending on the quality of the smear and skill of the pathologist. To overcome this problem, a method for diagnosis of TB from ZN-stained sputum smear images is presented in this paper. Hue color component based approach is proposed to segment the bacilli by adaptive choice of the hue range. The bacilli are declared to be valid or invalid depending on the presence of beaded structure inside them. The beaded structure is segmented by thresholding the saturation component of the bacilli pixels. Clumps of bacilli and other artifacts are removed by thresholding the area, thread length and thread width parameters of the bacilli. Results presented for several images taken from different patients show that the scheme detects the presence of TB accurately.
Text to image transformation for input to neural networks requires intermediate steps. This paper attempts to present a new approach to pixel normalization so as to convert textual data into image, suitable as input for neural networks. This method can be further improved by its Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementation to provide significant speedup in computational time.
Hematological abnormalities are frequent among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients and may be directly attributable to the virus or may be caused by opportunistic infections, neoplasms or drugs that cause bone marrow suppression or hemolysis. Pure red cell aplasia (PRCA) is an uncommon hematological disorder that causes anemia. We report a 37-year-old male with HIV infection who developed PRCA 6 weeks after commencing Zidovudine and recovered following cessation of the drug. This is the first case of Zidovudine-induced PRCA reported from the Indian subcontinent.
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