Jyoti Prakash

Acute renal failure in falciparum malaria--increasing prevalence in some areas of India--a need for awareness.

Twenty-six cases (4.8%) from a total of 540 patients with acute renal failure (ARF) of diverse aetiology had ARF in association with falciparum malaria. Their ages ranged from 15 to 85 years (mean 31.2). Urinary sediment abnormalities and proteinuria (less than 1 g/24 h) were observed in 15 (57.7%) cases. The probable underlying factors leading to ARF were: volume depletion 17 (65.3%), intravascular haemolysis 8 (30.8%), hyperparasitaemia 8 (30.8%), cholestatic jaundice 6 (23%), and hypotension 5 (19.2%). Dialysis therapy was required in 15 patients (57.7%) as they had severe renal failure, and the remaining 11 patients improved with supportive measures. All patients received antimalarial therapy. The clinical course of ARF was consistent with acute tubular necrosis in 20 patients. Six cases were subjected to percutaneous renal biopsy. One patient showed histological features of necrotizing glomerulonephritis along with acute tubulointerstitial nephritis. The biopsies in the other five patients showed features of acute tubular necrosis in three, and acute interstitial oedema with patchy tubular necrosis in two. The mortality rate was 30.8%. Thus falciparum malaria, which has been an important cause of ARF in certain highly endemic zones of India, is showing an increasing prevalence in other parts such as Eastern Uttar Pradesh due to an imbalance between the increasing population and inadequate sanitary facilities, which further worsen during floods.

Detection of Broken Rotor Bars in Induction Motor Using Derivative Free Kalman Filters

This paper deals with design and implementation of Joint Unscented Kalman filter (JUKF) and Dual Unscented Kalman filter (DUKF) for the detection and monitoring of rotor bar faults in induction motor under simulation studies. A broken rotor bar essentially leads to an increase in rotor resistance of the induction motor. The methodology used is basically model based fault detection in which the problem is treated as one of detection and estimation of parameter variation. An extensive monte carlo simulation study has been carried out to assess the relative performance of the two filters under various operating conditions. The results of the simulation studies show that DUKF is more sensitive to rotor resistance variation over wide range of tuning parameters and gives better performance than JUKF in detecting and estimating the rotor resistance . However DUKF also shows high sensitivity towards load disturbances.

Kannada word sense disambiguation by finding the overlaps between the concepts

We propose three approaches for disambiguating the Kannada word based on an adaptation of dictionary-based Lesk’s word sense disambiguation technique. Instead of making use of the regular dictionary as the repository of glosses, we used Indo – WordNet lexical database as the source of senses. Here we adopt a current method of measuring semantic relatedness between the concepts of the Kannada words taken from Indo – WordNet. This measure is dependent on identifying and counting the number of common words present between the glosses of a pair of concepts in accordance with Indo – WordNet.