Acute hepatitis of unknown origin in children. What is the cause?

The World Health Organization has issued a report on 228 cases of acute hepatitis of unknown cause in children between 1 month and 16 years, 10% of them required liver transplantation and 4 died (3 in Indonesia), another 50 cases are under investigation. The adenovirus type 41 is one of the causative agents of acute gastroenteritis in children, characterized by diarrhea, vomiting and fever, often accompanied by respiratory symptoms. Cases of hepatitis in immunocompromised children have been documented;however, there is no available evidence to indicate that adenovirus type 41 can cause hepatitis in healthy children. Although adenovirus is currently hypothesized as the underlying cause, it does not fully explain the severity of the clinical picture. Given this new situation, we have more questions than answers, the reported cases had no apparent risk factors, most had not received the COVID-19 vaccine. Several hypotheses are being evaluated and it seems that the infectious cause is more solid. The possible role of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection in children reported with acute hepatitis is analyzed.Copyright © 2022 Comunicaciones Cientificas Mexicanas S.A. de C.V.. All rights reserved.

Health Geography of COVID-19: An Exploratory Analysis of the Pandemic during its First Phase in the Compact Cities of Barcelona and Madrid, Spain

COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life around the globe. To understand the spread of disease it is essential to record location and place, space and population. This chapter is based in history and the epidemiologist literature reporting the relevant variables. The objective is to determine which variable affects contagion in compact cities such as Barcelona and Madrid. Are both cities affected by the same variables? Are there differences between the cities? Why? The set of variables involves the socioeconomic conditions of the population, aging populations and neighborhood conditions. The Global and Local Moran's I tools for spatial autocorrelation are used as well as spatial autoregressive models (SAR). Population movements within compact territories might produce a distortion in research results if not accounted for. In the planning strategy, inequalities, society and health treated as a system might improve the foundations for living conditions and health. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Quality control strategy of remote heart rate monitoring devices in a health center in Peru

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a broad term used to refer to heart diseases and blood vessels. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of deaths from heart diseases between the years 2000-2019 has ranged between 2 million and almost 9 million people. After analyzing the need to implement and validate a monitoring system for the PUCP health center, we chose the FL10 device. This device has passed the design specifications under the following standards: IEC 60601-1:2005, IEC 60601-1-2:2014 and ISO 60601-2-47:2012, therefore it meets the safety, sensitivity and efficacy parameters but its design does not favor maintenance and periodic quality evaluations with commercial measurement equipment. An adapter was made by implementing digital manufacturing by 3D design using Inventor professional 2021 software with the educational license granted by the university. The electrical safety test showed that the leakage current value of all the electrodes was 0.3 uA which is less than the standard (0.1 mA) and the efficacy test showed that all measurements were acceptable. In the case of reproducibility and repeatability tests, the measurements were acceptable as well;in the value of 180 bpm, we observe an attenuation (179 bpm), however it is within the margin of error of 1 bpm. In summary, the FL 10 device is electrical safety and efficient in a health center in Peru. © 2022 IEEE.

Ventilator Pressure Prediction Using a Regularized Regression Model

The mechanical ventilation is one of the most frequent methods used in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) to improve the breathing of patients. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of mechanical ventilators has been crucial. In this work, we propose to build a Lasso regression model based on lung simulators for predicting the airway pressure in the respiratory circuit of ventilators while breathing. We model the whole breathing process in two separate states. After that, we analyze the feature importance in the regression model to better understand the ventilator pressure prediction. We anticipate this model would help improving the patient’s health and overcoming the cost barrier of new methods for mechanical ventilators. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

THE ROLE OF D-SUMMABLE INFORMATION DIMENSION IN DIFFERENTIATING COVID-19 DISEASE

The current COVID-19 pandemic mainly affects the upper respiratory tract. People with COVID-19 report a wide range of symptoms, some of which are similar to those of common flu, such as sore throat and rhinorrhea. Additionally, COVID-19 shares many clinical symptoms with severe pneumonia, including fever, fatigue, dry cough, and respiratory distress. Several diagnostic strategies, such as the real-time polymerase chain reaction technique and computed tomography imaging, which are more costly than chest radiography, are employed as diagnostic tools. The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of the d-summable information dimension of X-ray images in differentiating several lesions and lung illnesses better than both fractal and information dimensions. The statistical analysis shows that the d-summable information dimension model better describes the information obtained from the X-ray images. Therefore, it is a more precise measure of complexity than the information and box-counting dimension. The results also show that the X-ray images of COVID-19 pneumonia reveal greater damage than those of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and various lung lesions, where the damage is minor or much focused. Because the d-summable information dimension increases as the image complexity decreases, it could pave the way to formulate a new measure to quantify the lung damage and assist the clinical diagnosis based on the area under the d-summable information model. In addition, the physical meaning of the nu parameter in the d-summable information dimension is given.

Linear Parametric Identification for a Servomechanism in a Mechanical Ventilator System

Covid-19 has caused a health and economic crisis worldwide. Unfortunately, the lack of medical equipment, such as ventilators, represent a significant obstacle for the medical community to treat patients suffering from this virus, therefore we decided to create an algorithm that can correctly estimate linear parameters for an auxiliary mechanical ventilation system with the purpose of helping developers to filter respiratory leaks from a signal. This work was developed in the facilities of Universidad Anahuac Queretaro, the system's signal was emulated in MATLAB. To ensure the lowest percentage of error possible, proposed values were chosen based on their proximity to the original matrix which was calculated with the values of the torque, angular velocity, and angular position. After several tests, an accuracy of 98% was achieved with the A matrix values, this allowed us to correctly estimate linear parameters.