The use of VR surgical simulation to reach specific target criteria significantly improved the OR performance of residents during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. This validation of transfer of training skills from VR to OR sets the stage for more sophisticated uses of VR in assessment, training, error reduction, and certification of surgeons.

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Cough analysis is an important area in the clinical diagnosis of various respiratory illnesses. Cough is the body's inundate mechanism to clear the throat and lungs of foreign material. It presents a great opportunity for the initial assessment of potential patients infected by COVID-19 which is a new virus. With symptoms like other respiratory illnesses, dry cough, fever and fatigue, it is challenging to classify probable Covid infection with no Covid data available yet. However, we propose a CNN based audio classifier [1] using the open cough dataset. The dataset is labeled manually into cough categories with final labeling into Covid and Non-Covid classes. The two approaches proposed in this paper are based on mfcc features and spectrogram images as input to CNN network. MFCC approach produced 70.58% test accuracy with 81% sensitivity and is better than the spectrogram-based approach.

Medicated oils prepared using process as mentioned in Ayurveda are used for external and internal administrations to treat various disorders. Taila pak vidhi provides detailed description of such processes. Medicated oils are prepared by prolonged cooking of sesame oil with pasty mass of herbs and decoction of herbs in presence of large quantity of water. We report preliminary findings of physicochemical and chromatographic profiles of changes brought out by such processes and the role of each component. Changes observed when the processes were altered to deviate from those prescribed in Ayurveda are also reported.