Handwritten character recognition is a crucial task because of its abundant applications. The recognition task of Bangla handwritten characters is especially challenging because of the cursive nature of Bangla characters and the presence of compound characters with more than one way of writing. In this paper, a classification model based on the ensembling of several Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), namely, BanglaNet is proposed to classify Bangla basic characters, compound characters, numerals, and modifiers. Three different models based on the idea of state-of-the-art CNN models like Inception, ResNet, and DenseNet are trained with both augmented and non-augmented inputs. Finally, all these models are averaged or ensembled to get the finishing model. Rigorous experimentation on three benchmark Bangla handwritten characters datasets, namely, CMATERdb, BanglaLekha-Isolated, and Ekush has exhibited significant recognition accuracies compared to some recent CNN-based researches. The top-1 recognition accuracies obtained are 98.40%, 97.65%, 97.32%, and the top-3 accuracies are 99.79%, 99.74%, and 99.56% for CMATERdb, BanglaLekha-Isolated and Ekush datasets respectively.

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Purpose of Review COVID-19 pandemic has been the major threat to the global public health for a year (last of 2019–till date); and unfortunately, there is still as no specific antiviral agent which can be effectively used against this disease curation. Present review focused on the application of the convalescent plasma (CP) therapy as a quick remediation of the disease severity. Recent Findings While several drugs have been repurposed based on a number of completed clinical trials together with a huge ongoing effort to develop appropriate vaccine against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the therapeutic approach of the CP therapy appears to be one of the effective methods to rescue the severely affected COVID-19 patients. Such a therapy based on passive immunity evolved from the SARS-CoV-2-infected patients who have fully recovered from COVID-19; and hence these individuals are quite likely to possess high titers of the SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing immunoglobulins (antibodies). However, there are some risks such therapy, and its effectivity also appeared doubtful in some cases. Thus, the current review discussed the issues raised by the administration of such plasma into the SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals. Summary Application of CP therapy has been conducted since long time; and for the mitigation of COVID-19 severity, such pharmaceutical strategy is also being employed in spite of several risks which actually can be monitored as well as optimized in order to combat the SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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