Use of Voluntary Cough Sounds and Deep Learning for Pulmonary Disease Screening in Low-Resource Areas

In low-resource areas, pulmonary diseases are often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed due to a lack of trained clinical staff and diagnostic lab equipment (e.g. spirometry, DLCO). In these settings, traditional methods of pulmonary disease screening often include a lengthy questionnaire (>30 questions) and stethoscope auscultation. Unfortunately, such tools are not appropriate for general practitioner (GP) doctors or community health workers who have little time or experience diagnosing pulmonary disease. We propose a computer-based deep learning algorithm that could enable rapid screening of the most common pulmonary diseases (COPD, Asthma, and respiratory infection (COVID-19)) using voluntary cough sounds alone. Using a dataset of 348 cough recordings, raw cough recordings were segmented into individual coughs and converted to Mel Spectrogram images. We trained two types of models for comparison, binary and multi-class, using transfer learning with VGG19. The resulting Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves and the Area Under Curve (AUC) accuracy for each model was calculated to evaluate performance. Binary AUC accuracies were 0.73, 0.70, 0.87, and 0.70 for healthy, asthma, COPD, and COVID-19 respectively, while multi-class AUC accuracies were 0.78, 0.67, 0.95, 0.70. This demonstrates good potential for creating a simple low-cost screening tool that is fast to administer. Future versions of the model will use ongoing data collection to expand to more diseases including tuberculosis and pneumonia. © 2022 IEEE.

What's new in trauma 2020.

Throughout the past 2020, the pandemic COVID-19 has caused a big global shock, meanwhile it brought a great impact on the public health network. Trauma emergency system faced a giant challenge and how to manage trauma under the pandemic of COVID-19 was widely discussed. However, the trauma treatment of special population (geriatric patients and patients taking anticoagulant drugs) has received inadequate attention. Due to the high mortality following severe traumatic hemorrhage, hemostasis and trauma-induced coagulopathy are the important concerns in trauma treatment. Sepsis is another topic should not be ignored when we talking about trauma. COVID-19 itself is a special kind of sepsis, and it may even be called as serious systemic infection syndrome. Sepsis has been become a serious problem waiting to be solved urgently no matter in the fields of trauma, or in intensive care and infection, etc. This article reviewed the research progress in areas including trauma emergency care, trauma bleeding and coagulation, geriatric trauma and basic research of trauma within 2020.

Sub10 μm macroporous aramid substrates with a hierarchically structured interface for organic solvent nanofiltration

Compared with traditional methods for elaborately tailoring the active layer of thin-film composite (TFC) membranes, this study focused on building novel substrates for potential applications in developing organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) membranes. One kind of “three-parts” hierarchically structured interface with nanospheres and macro surface pores was successfully prepared via Michael addition and Schiff's base (M&S) reactions between N-(2-aminoethyl)-3-aminopropyl triethoxysilane (NAE-A) and glycerite (a natural polyphenol) in the aramid substrate. The thickness was reduced to sub10 μm with the aid of the high-speed spin coating process coupling nonsolvent-induced phase separation (HSSC-co-NIPS) method. The composition characterization results demonstrated the introduction of glycerite, and the reactions occurred in/on the substrate. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images clearly showed that the sub10 μm substrate contained a “three-level” hierarchically structured interface that included: (1) a “stalk-like” structure;(2) glycerite-NAE-A silane (GNAS) nanospheres;and (3) the substrate surface. These phenomena also resulted in better surface hydrophilicity. All types of organic solvents, including harsh solvents, such as tetrahydrofuran (THF) and N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), had stable permeability within the substrate, as did apolar n-hexane and isopar™ G. Therefore, the as-prepared TFC OSN membrane, which had an extremely short polymerization time, retained broad-spectrum solvent stability and had the highest solvent permeance in acetonitrile (24.5 ± 0.4 L m−2 h−1·bar−1). In addition, the resultant TFC membrane almost completely rejected the popular macrolide antibiotic azithromycin (AZM, 748.98 g mol−1) in ethanol, which is used to treat COVID-19.

Annual review of Chinese Journal of Traumatology 2020.

The year 2020 is an extremely unusual year. The world lost more than one million lives due to the attack of COVID-19. Economic production has been greatly reduced, and daily activities are largely restricted. Luckily the work of Chinese Journal of Traumatology (CJTEE) has not been adversely affected. 2020 is a harvest year for the journal, which (1) was included in the high-quality academic journals by China Association for Science and Technology; (2) cover of each issue is newly designed; (3) submission increased by about 60% with more countries and regions covered; (4) usage in the ScienceDirect database exceeded a million; (5) the CiteScore rises to more than 2.0 the first time. This study reviewed the articles published in the year 2020 by CJTEE.

From H1N1 to 2019-nCoV, what do we learn?

The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging across the world. Everyday thousands of infected people lost their lives. What is worse, there is no specific medicine and we do not know when the end of the pandemic will come. The nearest global pandemic is the 1918 influenza, which caused about 50 million deaths and partly terminate the World War Ⅰ. We believe that no matter the virus H1N1 for the 1918 influenza or 2019-nCoV for COVID-19, they are essentially the same and the final cause of death is sepsis. The definition and diagnostic/management criteria of sepsis have been modified several times but the mortality rate has not been improved until date. Over decades, researchers focus either on the immunosuppression or on the excessive inflammatory response following trauma or body exposure to harmful stimuli. But the immune response is very complex with various regulating factors involved in, such as neurotransmitter, endocrine hormone, etc. Sepsis is not a kind of disease, instead a misbalance of the body following infection, trauma or other harmful stimulation. Therefore we should re-think sepsis comprehensively with the concept of systemic biology, i.e. inflammationomics.