COVID-19 vaccination uptake in people with epilepsy in wales.

PURPOSE: People with epilepsy (PWE) are at increased risk of severe COVID-19. Assessing COVID-19 vaccine uptake is therefore important. We compared COVID-19 vaccination uptake for PWE in Wales with a matched control cohort. METHODS: We performed a retrospective, population, cohort study using linked, anonymised, Welsh electronic health records within the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank (Welsh population=3.1 million).We identified PWE in Wales between 1st March 2020 and 31st December 2021 and created a control cohort using exact 5:1 matching (sex, age and socioeconomic status). We recorded 1st, 2nd and booster COVID-19 vaccinations. RESULTS: There were 25,404 adults with epilepsy (127,020 controls). 23,454 (92.3%) had a first vaccination, 22,826 (89.9%) a second, and 17,797 (70.1%) a booster. Comparative figures for controls were: 112,334 (87.8%), 109,057 (85.2%) and 79,980 (62.4%).PWE had higher vaccination rates in all age, sex and socioeconomic subgroups apart from booster uptake in older subgroups. Vaccination rates were higher in older subgroups, women and less deprived areas for both cohorts. People with intellectual disability and epilepsy had higher vaccination rates when compared with controls with intellectual disability. CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 vaccination uptake for PWE in Wales was higher than that for a matched control group.

A Comparative Study of COVID-19 CT Image Synthesis using GAN and CycleGAN

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been very successful in many applications of medical image synthesis, which hold great clinical value in diagnosis and analysis tasks, especially when data is scarce. This study compares the two most adopted generative modelling algorithms in recent medical image synthesis tasks, namely the traditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Cycle-consistency Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) for COVID-19 CT image synthesis. Experiments show that very plausible synthetic COVID-19 images with a clear vision of artificially generated ground glass opacity (GGO) can be generated with CycleGAN when trained using an identity loss constant at 0.5. Moreover, it is found that the synthesis of the synthetic GGO features is generalized across images with different chest and lung structures, which suggests that diverse patterns of GGO can be synthesized using a conventional Image-to- Image translation setting without additional auxiliary conditions or visual annotations. In addition, similar experiment setting achieves encouraging perceptual quality with a Fréchet Inception Distance score of 0.347, which outperforms GAN at 0.383 and CycleGAN at 0.380 with an identity loss constant of 0.005. The experiment outcomes postulate a negative correlation between the strength of the identity loss and the significance of the synthetic instances manifested on the generated images, which highlights an interesting research path to improve the quality of generated images without compromising the significance of synthetic instances upon the image translation. © 2022 IEEE.

An Adaptive Data Processing Framework for Cost-Effective COVID-19 and Pneumonia Detection

Medical imaging modalities have been showing great potentials for faster and efficient disease transmission control and containment. In the paper, we propose a cost-effective COVID-19 and pneumonia detection framework using CT scans acquired from several hospitals. To this end, we incorporate a novel data processing framework that utilizes 3D and 2D CT scans to diversify the trainable inputs in a resource-limited setting. Moreover, we empirically demonstrate the significance of several data processing schemes for our COVID-19 and pneumonia detection network. Experiment results show that our proposed pneumonia detection network is comparable to other pneumonia detection tasks integrated with imaging modalities, with 93% mean AUC and 85.22% mean accuracy scores on generalized datasets. Additionally, our proposed data processing framework can be easily adapted to other applications of CT modality, especially for cost-effective and resource-limited scenarios, such as breast cancer detection, pulmonary nodules diagnosis, etc. © 2021 IEEE

Development of a wellbeing care plan for staff: Implementation and evaluation within mental health inpatient services

NHS staff have been under increasing pressure since Covid-19. Workload remains a pressing concern (NHS England, 2020). This article describes the implementation and evaluation of a wellbeing care plan designed for staff as a means of supporting their wellbeing. © 2022, British Psychological Society. All rights reserved.

Adverse reactions and safety profile of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines among Asian military personnel

INTRODUCTION: The use of novel mRNA platforms for COVID-19 vaccines raised concern about vaccine safety, especially in Asian populations that made up less than 10% of study populations in the pivotal vaccine trials used for emergency use authorisation. Vaccine safety issues also remain a concern in assessing the clinical risks and benefits of vaccine boosters, particularly in specific age groups or segments of the population. This study describes a vaccination exercise involving Asian military personnel, and the adverse reactions and safety events observed. METHODS: Minor adverse reactions, hospitalisations and adverse events of special interest were monitored as part of the organisation's protocol for safety monitoring of COVID-19 vaccinations. All vaccine recipients were invited to complete an online adverse reaction questionnaire. Medical consults at the military's primary healthcare facilities were monitored for vaccine-related presentations. All hospitalisations involving vaccine recipients were analysed. Adverse reaction rates between doses, vaccines and age groups were compared. RESULTS: A total of 127,081 mRNA vaccine doses were administered to 64,661 individuals up to 24 July 2021. Common minor adverse reactions included fever/chills, body aches and injection site pain. These were more common after dose 2. Younger individuals experienced minor adverse reactions more frequently. Rare cases of anaphylaxis, Bell's palsy and myocarditis/pericarditis were observed. No deaths occurred. CONCLUSION: Minor adverse reactions were less common than reported in other studies, and rates of anaphylaxis, Bell's palsy and myocarditis/pericarditis were comparable. Our study supports the favourable safety profile of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which may help guide decisions about booster doses if required.