Gaurav Sharma

Bio: Gaurav Sharma is an academic researcher from Shenzhen University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Medicine & Photocatalysis. The author has an hindex of 82, co-authored 1244 publications receiving 31482 citations. Previous affiliations of Gaurav Sharma include Northeastern University & D. E. Shaw & Co..

Scaling up quality care for mothers and newborns around the time of birth: an overview of methods and analyses of intervention-specific bottlenecks and solutions.

Abstract: The Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP) and Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality targets cannot be achieved without high quality, equitable coverage of interventions at and around the time of birth. This paper provides an overview of the methodology and findings of a nine paper series of in-depth analyses which focus on the specific challenges to scaling up high-impact interventions and improving quality of care for mothers and newborns around the time of birth, including babies born small and sick. The bottleneck analysis tool was applied in 12 countries in Africa and Asia as part of the ENAP process. Country workshops engaged technical experts to complete a tool designed to synthesise "bottlenecks" hindering the scale up of maternal-newborn intervention packages across seven health system building blocks. We used quantitative and qualitative methods and literature review to analyse the data and present priority actions relevant to different health system building blocks for skilled birth attendance, emergency obstetric care, antenatal corticosteroids (ACS), basic newborn care, kangaroo mother care (KMC), treatment of neonatal infections and inpatient care of small and sick newborns. The 12 countries included in our analysis account for the majority of global maternal (48%) and newborn (58%) deaths and stillbirths (57%). Our findings confirm previously published results that the interventions with the most perceived bottlenecks are facility-based where rapid emergency care is needed, notably inpatient care of small and sick newborns, ACS, treatment of neonatal infections and KMC. Health systems building blocks with the highest rated bottlenecks varied for different interventions. Attention needs to be paid to the context specific bottlenecks for each intervention to scale up quality care. Crosscutting findings on health information gaps inform two final papers on a roadmap for improvement of coverage data for newborns and indicate the need for leadership for effective audit systems. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal targets for ending preventable mortality and provision of universal health coverage will require large-scale approaches to improving quality of care. These analyses inform the development of systematic, targeted approaches to strengthening of health systems, with a focus on overcoming specific bottlenecks for the highest impact interventions.

Starting aspirin therapy after operation. Effects on early graft patency. Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Study Group.

Abstract: BACKGROUNDAlthough aspirin therapy started before operation improves vein graft patency after coronary artery bypass grafting, it also causes bleeding. The objective of this prospective, centrally directed, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was to compare the effects of aspirin therapy started before operation with aspirin started 6 hours after operation on early (7-10-day) graft patency.METHODS AND RESULTSPatients were randomized to receive either aspirin 325 mg or placebo the night before surgery; after operation, all patients received aspirin 325 mg daily, with the first dose administered through the nasogastric tube 6 hours after operation. Angiography was performed in 72% of the analyzed patients an average of 8 days after operation, and the primary end point was saphenous vein graft patency in 351 patients. Internal mammary artery graft patency was also assessed in 246 patients because many individuals received both internal mammary artery and vein grafts. In the patients given preo...

HazeRD: An outdoor scene dataset and benchmark for single image dehazing

Abstract: In this paper, a new dataset, HazeRD, is proposed for benchmarking dehazing algorithms under more realistic haze conditions. HazeRD contains fifteen real outdoor scenes, for each of which five different weather conditions are simulated. As opposed to prior datasets that made use of synthetically generated images or indoor images with unrealistic parameters for haze simulation, our outdoor dataset allows for more realistic simulation of haze with parameters that are physically realistic and justified by scattering theory. All images are of high resolution, typically six to eight megapixels. We test the performance of several state-of-the-art dehazing techniques on HazeRD. The results exhibit a significant difference among algorithms across the different datasets, reiterating the need for more realistic datasets such as ours and for more careful benchmarking of the methods.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

SPAdes, a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing ( 7th Annual SFAF Meeting, 2012)

Abstract: The lion's share of bacteria in various environments cannot be cloned in the laboratory and thus cannot be sequenced using existing technologies. A major goal of single-cell genomics is to complement gene-centric metagenomic data with whole-genome assemblies of uncultivated organisms. Assembly of single-cell data is challenging because of highly non-uniform read coverage as well as elevated levels of sequencing errors and chimeric reads. We describe SPAdes, a new assembler for both single-cell and standard (multicell) assembly, and demonstrate that it improves on the recently released E+V-SC assembler (specialized for single-cell data) and on popular assemblers Velvet and SoapDeNovo (for multicell data). SPAdes generates single-cell assemblies, providing information about genomes of uncultivatable bacteria that vastly exceeds what may be obtained via traditional metagenomics studies. SPAdes is available online ( http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades ). It is distributed as open source software.