Fine Tuning CNN for COVID-19 Patterns Detection From Chest Radiographs

The COVID-19 pandemic has crumbled health systems all over the world. Quick and accurate detection of coronavirus infection plays an important role in timely referral of physicians and control transmission of the disease. RT-PCR is the most widely test used for identification of COVID-19 patients, but it takes long to deliver the report. Researchers around the world are looking for alternative machine learning techniques including deep learning to assist the medical experts for early COVID-19 disease diagnosis from medical imaging such as chest films. This study proposes an enhanced convolutional neural network (EConvNet) model for the presence and absence of coronavirus disease from chest radiographs to contain this pandemic. The model is accurate compared to the traditional machine learning algorithms (RF, SVM, etc.). The suggested CNN model is approximately as accurate as the classifiers based on transfer learning (such as InceptionV3, VGG16, and Densenet121). Despite being simple in terms of number of parameters learnt, it takes less training time and demands less memory.

Trends of folate, vitamin B12 , and homocysteine levels in different trimesters of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of folate and vitamin B12 levels on pregnancy progression and outcomes. METHODS: The present study is a prospective follow up study of 100 pregnant women. Biochemical investigations (plasma homocysteine, folate, and vitamin B12 levels) were performed on all pregnant women in first, second, and third trimesters. Nonparametric tests were used to compare the differences in median levels and odds ratio analysis for the assessment of the risk between the selected biomarkers and adverse pregnancy progression and outcomes. RESULTS: The pregnant women at their first antenatal care visit were found to be predominantly folate replete (97%) and vitamin B12 deficient (60%). Hyperhomocysteinemia in first and second trimesters was found to pose more than 3-fold increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes (P = .006 and .0002, respectively). Low birth weight (LBW) was found to be the most common adverse pregnancy outcome (52%), and was significantly associated with vitamin B12 deficiency in the first and second trimesters (82%, P < .0001; 71.4%, P = .04, respectively). CONCLUSION: The vitamin B12 deficiency is more common among Indian pregnant women as compared to folate deficiency. Hyperhomocysteinemia is an independent risk factor for pregnancy complications. Vitamin B12 deficiency in first and second trimesters is associated with LBW babies.