ABSTRACT
The new coronavirus disease (2019) has spread quickly as an acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) among millions of individuals worldwide. Furthermore, the number of COVID-19 checking obtainable in hospitals is very limited as compared to the rising number of infections every day. As an outcome, an automatic detection system must be implemented as a quick diagnostic tool for preventing or reducing the spread of COVID-19 among humans. The present paper aims to propose an automated system by means of a hybrid Deep Learning ("convolutional neural network "(CNN)) and "support vector machine (SVM) " approach for identifying COVID-19 pneumonia-infected patients on the basis of chest computed tomography (746 CT images of "COVID-19" and "non-COVID-19"). The proposed system is composed of three phases. The first, pre-processing phase begins with converting CT images into greyscale level CT images of equal size (256×256). The "contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization" technology is adopted to enhance the intensity levels, and demonstrate the feature of lung tissue. It is also necessary to normalize the division of the image elements by 255 to make the values between 0 and 1, as this will speed up the processing process. The second phase, the CNN (SimpNet model), was applied as a deep feature extraction technique to identify CT samples. The SVM classifier and SoftMax function are employed in the third phase to classify COVID-19 pneumonia-infected patients. Specificity, Sensitivity, "F-score ", Accuracy, and "area under curve" are used as criteria to estimate the efficiency of the classification. The results showed a high accuracy rate of COVID-19 classification which reached (98%) and (99.1%) for CNN-SoftMax and CNN-SVM classifier, respectively in the tested dataset (225 CT images). © The Author 2022. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that allows others to share and adapt the material for any purpose (even commercially), in any medium with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
ABSTRACT
Background: As of 26 June 2020, the global number of infections caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), had reached 11 million, with more than 500 thousand associated deaths1. Limited clinical information about COVID-19 on solid organ transplant (SOT) are available so far. We herein report our preliminary experience with COVID-19 in SOT recipients in the first few weeks of the outbreak in Qatar. Method: All SOT recipients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 up to 23 May 2020 were included. Baseline characteristics, antivirals and immunosuppressive management, complications, and outcomes were retrospectively extracted from the electronic health system. Categorical data are summarized as frequency and percentages, while continuous variables are presented as medians and ranges. Results: Twenty-four SOT patients with COVID-19 were included in this report (kidney: 16, liver: 6, heart: 1, and combined liver and kidney: 1). The median age was 57 years (range 24–72). Thanks to proactive screening, five (21%) asymptomatic cases were diagnosed (Table S1). Among the other 19 symptomatic patients, fever (15/19) and cough (13/19) were the most frequent presenting symptoms (Table S1). All patients were hospitalized;5 (21%) required invasive mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit (ICU) (Table S2). Eleven (46%) patients developed acute kidney injury as a complication, including 3 in association with drug-drug interactions involving investigational COVID-19 therapies (Table S2). Maintenance of immunosuppressive therapy was changed in 18 (75%) patients, but systemic corticosteroids were not withdrawn in any. After a median follow up of 43 days (26–89), 18 (75%) patients had been discharged home, 3 (12.3%) were still hospitalized, 2 (8.3%) were still in ICU, and 1 (4.2%) had died (Table S2). Conclusion: Although higher mortality rates were observed in other reports,2,3 our results suggest that asymptomatic COVID-19 is possible in SOT recipients and that overall outcomes are not consistently worse than other immunocompetent patients. The results require validation in larger cohorts.