Informatics Publishing Limited

Debasis Ghosh ¹, Mrinal Mandal ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Geography, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia-723 104, West Bengal, IN

Abstract

A study on the status of health care facility across all the Blocks of Birbhum district, West Bengal was made based on secondary data collected from District Statistical Handbook, Birbhum, 2012. We have taken five basic indicators, namely, Health Care Institution Population Ratio (HCIPR), Doctor Bed Ratio (DBR), Bed Population Ratio (BPR), Doctor Health Care Institution Ratio (DHCIR) and Bed Health Care Institution Ratio (BHCIR). We compute Health Care Facility Index (HCFI) to investigate the health care delivery system of the district. The study confirms that the status of health care facility (HCF) of Birbhum district is not in a good position except in Suri-I block. The centralization of health care facility is observed in the district.

Keywords

Health Care Institution, Health Care Facility Index, Birbhum District, West Bengal.

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Debasis Ghosh ¹, Mrinal Mandal ², Monali Banerjee ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Geography, University of Calcutta, West Bengal, IN
2 Department of Geography, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, IN

Abstract

Fluoride contamination in drinking water is a burning environmental issue of the World today. The people of nearly 29 countries are affected with 'fluorosis' due to intake of fluoride-rich water including India. In West Bengal, excess fluoride in groundwater has been found in seven districts. Those are Purulia, Birbhum, Bardhaman, Bankura, Malda, South Dinajpur and North Dinajpur. Fluorine is a common element that does not occur in the elemental state in nature because of its high reactivity. It exists in the form of fluorides in a number of minerals. High fluoride is derived from fluoride rich minerals, such as, apatite, fluorite, hornblende and biotite which are present in the country rocks dominated by granite gneisses and hornblende-biotite gneiss. It is observed that the sub-surface geo-hydrological environment of Purulia is contaminated with fluoride. Intensive and prolonged semi-arid climate, long term withdrawal of groundwater for irrigation, alkaline nature of sub-surface circulating water, long residence time of water in fractured aquifers and geological structure are the favourable conditions for fluoride enrichment (2%-10%) in the Purulia region. Geological set up of Purulia plays a major role for availability of ground water as well as the quality of water. In Raghunathpur-I, Purulia II and Arsha Blocks of Purulia district, fluoride concentration is higher than permissible limit in ground water. Water samples were collected from 25 different tube wells under Purulia Block-II and Raghunathpur-II in Purulia district. Sampling bottles were labelled, tightly packed, transported to the laboratory and stored at 4°C for chemical analysis, such as, total dissolved solid (TDS), total hardness (TH), total alkalinity (TA), Calcium (Ca²+), Magnesium (Mg²+), total Iron (Fe) fluoride (F^-). Data were also collected from Natural Resources Data Management System (NRDMS) department of West Bengal. The present work peeps into the negative effect of fluoride on the human health of fluoride affected Blocks of the study area.

Keywords

Country Rocks, Geological Structure, Genesis, Contamination, Fluoride.

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Mrinal Mandal ¹, Debasis Ghosh ², Biswajit Ghosh ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Geography, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, IN
2 Department of Geography, University of Calcutta, West Bengal, IN
3 Department of Geography, Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Purulia, West Bengal, IN

Abstract

Indiscriminate and unscientific sand mining has become a serious environmental threat to the river systems and its surrounding environment. The rapid rate of urbanization has increased the demand for sand, which is supplied from river bed through sand mining. Sand mining from river bed results in channel degradation and erosion, change in local gradient, head cutting, increased turbidity, bank erosion and sedimentation of riffle areas and ruins its flow regimes and total sedimentary environment. In lower reaches of Ajay river, unscientific sand mining is a serious issue from Illambajar (Birbhum) to Mongalkot (Burdwan) fluvial environment of Ajay river basin, which is highly affected by in-stream sand mining. Natural morphological characteristics of Ajay river are changed and damaged due to over mining of sand. Excessive in-stream sand mining is a threat to Illambajar bridge and Nutanhut bridge. River embankments are also affected by river bed mining. Sand mining also affects the adjoining groundwater system. In Mongalkot and Ketugram Blocks (Burdwan), ground water level becomes lower than the past. Sand mining also generates extra vehicle traffic, which negatively impairs the environment and pollution level continuously gets higher. Total station survey was carried out to detect the changes in river bed. Topographical sheets and satellite images were geocoded to extract past status of river health and tried to correlate with the present situation. GPS (Handheld-Germin etrexH-20) was used as necessary tool in the present study. The main objective of the present study is to evaluate the impact of sand mining on riparian environment.

Keywords

Sand Mining, Sedimentation, Head Cutting, Embankments, Organism.

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Tao Xu ¹, Irene Cheng ², Richard Long ³, Mrinal Mandal ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, CA
2 Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, CA
3 Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, CA

Abstract

Despite the technological advances in medical diagnosis, accurate detection of infectious tuberculosis (TB) still poses challenges due to complex image features and thus infectious TB continues to be a public health problem of global proportions. Currently, the detection of TB is mainly conducted visually by radiologists examining chest radiographs (CXRs). To reduce the backlog of CXR examination and provide more precise quantitative assessment, computer-aided detection (CAD) systems for potential lung lesions have been increasingly adopted and commercialized for clinical practice. CADs work as supporting tools to alert radiologists on suspected features that could have easily been neglected. In this paper, an effective CAD system aimed for acinar shadow regions detection in CXRs is proposed. This system exploits textural and photometric features analysis techniques which include local binary pattern (LBP), grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) to analyze target regions in CXRs. Classification of acinar shadows using Adaboost is then deployed to verify the performance of a combination of these techniques. Comparative study in different image databases shows that the proposed CAD system delivers consistent high accuracy in detecting acinar shadows.

Keywords

Textural and Photometric Classification, Computer-Aided Detection (CAD), Tuberculosis (TB).

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Yue Li ¹, Huiquan Wang ¹, Nizam Ahmed ², Mrinal Mandal ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, CA
2 Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, CA

Abstract

Corpus Callosum (CC) is an important white-matter structure in the human brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive medical imaging technique that provides high resolution images for the structures. Segmentation is an important step in medical image analysis. This paper proposes a fully automated technique for segmentation of CC on the midsagittal slice of T1-weighted brain MR images. The proposed technique consists of three modules. First it clusters all homogenous regions in the image with an adaptive mean shift (AMS) technique. The automatic CC contour initialization (ACI) is achieved using the region analysis, template matching and location analysis, thus identify the CC region. Finally, the boundary of recognized CC region is used as the initial contour in the Geometric Active Contour (GAC) model, and is evolved to obtain the final segmentation result of CC. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AMS-ACI technique is able to provide accurate initial CC contour, and the proposed AMS-ACI-GAC technique overcomes the problem of user-guided initialization in existing GAC techniques, and provides a reliable and accurate performance in CC segmentation.

Keywords

Adaptive Mean Shift Clustering, Automated Segmentation, Corpus Callosum, Geometric Active Contour, Template Matching.

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