A Comparative Analysis of South Korean and U.S. Firms: Ambidextrous Innovation, Supply Chain Resilience, and Market Performance

This research explores the similarities and differences between Korean and U.S. firms developing both supply chain resilience and market performance through organizational culture and ambidextrous innovation. Firm-level data were collected from firms in South Korea and America. PLS-SEM software was used for the analysis with a multigroup analysis employed to test differences. Organizational culture is a key component for building supply chain resilience and market performance through ambidextrous innovation;however, exploration innovation was not used the same by Korean and U.S. firms. Korean firms were better able to exploit exploration innovation to establish both supply chain resilience and market performance. Cross-cultural comparative studies of supply chain management amid COVID-19 supply chain disruptions remain rare;thus, this study fills a key gap in the supply chain management and marketing literature in the U.S. and Korea. This paper further highlights ambidextrous innovation in the context of supply chain resilience and market performance. © ENS Editions. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Characterization of extracellular vesicle and virus-like particles by single vesicle tetraspanin analysis

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nano-sized membranous particles secreted by cells. EVs have been classified into subpopulations according to their presumed biogenesis pathway, but their detailed biogenesis mechanisms still need to be fully elucidated. Enveloped viruses are another type of cell-derived nano-vesicles, and their biogenesis processes are much better known than that of EVs. Recently, studies on the similarity between enveloped viruses and EVs have been increasingly reported. The biogenesis of EVs could be better understood if these similarities are adequately investigated. In this study, we utilized a single vesicle imaging technique to visualize the protein expressions of individual nano-sized vesicles and analyzed expression patterns within single vesicles. Using this technique, we identified unique tetraspanin expression patterns in single EVs and that these patterns were closely related to their subcellular origins. The expression of CD9 or CD81 in EVs implied that they originated from the plasma membrane, and the expression of CD63 in EVs implied that they originated from endosomal organelles. We further analyzed the tetraspanin expressions of two different types of virus-like particles (VLPs) and demonstrated that the HIV-Gag-induced VLPs were more similar to EVs than SARS-CoV-2-NP/M/E-induced VLPs. In addition, HIV-Gag-GFP-expressing VLPs were highly colocalized with CD9, CD63, and CD81 signals, whereas SARS-CoV-NP-GFP-expressing VLPs were not. Based on these observations, we could assume that tetraspanin-expressing EVs might be produced through a similar process by which HIV is produced. © 2023

Short-Term Mindfulness Intervention on Adolescents' Negative Emotion under Global Pandemic

Objective: In this research, we tried to explore how short-term mindfulness (STM) intervention affects adoles-cents' anxiety, depression, and negative and positive emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design: 10 classes were divided into experiment groups (5 classes;n = 238) and control (5 classes;n = 244) randomly. Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) were used to measure par-ticipants' dependent variables. In the experiment group, we conducted STM practice interventions every morning in their first class from March to November 2020. No interventions were conducted in the control group. Methods: Paired-sample t-tests were used to identify if a significant difference exists between every time point of the experimental and control groups. Repeated ANOVA and Growth Mixture Model (GMM) were used to analyze the tendency of positive and negative emotions, anxiety, and depression in the experimental group. Results and Conclusions: (1) With the intervention of STM, there was a significant decrease in negative emotions and an increase in positive emotions in the experimental group, whereas there were non-significant differences in the control group. (2) To explore the heterogeneity trajectories of dependent variables, we built a GMM and found there were two latent growth classes in the trajectories. (3) The results of the models showed their trajectories were downward, which meant that the levels of anxiety, depression, and negative emotions of participants decreased during the STM training period. Nonetheless, the score of positive affect showed upward in three loops of intervention, which indicated that the level of the participants' positive affect increased through the STM inter-vention. (4) This research indicated that STM should be given increasing consideration to enhance mental health during the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19. © 2023, Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Oncology workload in a tertiary hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: Workload in oncology during a pandemic is expected to increase as manpower is shunted to other areas of need in combating the pandemic. This increased workload, coupled with the high care needs of cancer patients, can have negative effects on both healthcare providers and their patients. Method(s): This study aims to quantify the workload of medical oncologists compared to internal medicine physicians and general surgeons during the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the previous H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Result(s): Our data showed decrease in inpatient and outpatient workload across all three specialties, but the decrease was least in medical oncology (medical oncology -18.5% inpatient and -3.8% outpatient, internal medicine -5.7% inpatient and -24.4% outpatient, general surgery -17.6% inpatient, and -39.1% outpatient). The decrease in general surgery workload was statistically significant. The proportion of emergency department admissions to medical oncology increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the study compared the workload during COVID-19 with the prior H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and showed a more drastic decrease in patient numbers across all three specialties during COVID-19. Discussion(s): We conclude that inpatient and outpatient workload in medical oncology remains high despite an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The inpatient medical oncology workload is largely contributed by the stable number of emergency department admissions, as patients who require urgent care will present to a healthcare facility, pandemic or not. Healthcare systems should maintain manpower in medical oncology to manage this vulnerable group of patients in light of the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © The Author(s) 2022.

Antibiotic Prescription Trends of Patients with COVID-19: Analysis of National Health Insurance Data in Republic of Korea

Background. Although COVID-19 is a viral infection, it is known that antibiotics are often prescribed due to concerns about combined bacterial infection. Therefore, we aimed to analyze how many patients with COVID-19 received the antibiotic prescription as well as what kinds of factors contributed to it using the National Health Insurance database. Methods. We retrospectively reviewed claims data for adults 19 years of age and older hospitalized for COVID-19 from December 1, 2019 to December 31, 2020. According to severity classification of the National Institutes of Health guidelines, we calculated not only the proportion of patients receiving antibiotics but also days of treatment per 1000 patient days. In addition, we investigated the factors contributing to antibiotic use by linear regression analysis. Results. Of the 55,228 patients, 47% were male, 55% were older than 50 years of age, and most patients (89%) had no underlying diseases. The majority (84%, 46,576) were classified as having mild to moderate illness, with 11% (6,168) and 5% (2,484) having severe and critical, respectively. Antibiotics were prescribed in a total of 27% (15,081). While 74% of patients with severe illness and 88% of those with critical illness received antibiotic treatment, even 18% of mild to moderate cases were prescribed antibiotics. Fluoroquinolones were the most commonly prescribed antibiotics (8,348), followed by third generation cephalosporins (5,729) and beta-lactam/betalactamase inhibitors (3,822) as shown in Figure 1. Older age, severity of disease and underlying medical conditions contributed to overall prescription rates as well as days of antibiotic use significantly (Table 1). Conclusion. Although most of COVID-19 patients had mild to moderate illness, more than a quarter were prescribed antibiotics. Judicious use of broad-spectrum antibiotics is necessary for COVID-19 patients, considering the severity of disease and the risk of bacterial co-infection.

Proposed Integration for AICC-based Chatbot Improvement

Artificial intelligence is the foundation of the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and has been applied to variou sfields. Among them, there are many fields that use artificial intelligence-based chatbots, such as finance, medical care, etc. C hatbots are also used in call centers, where the turnover rate of call center counselors is traditionally 13 times higher than tha tof other industries. In addition, it is difficult to maintain stable counseling due to realistic difficulties such as time and invest ment costs even when professional counselors are continuously fostered in call centers. Therefore, practical measures are requir ed to stabilize the supply and demand of manpower in the call center industry and support continuous growth. In this study, we present a customized AICC operation service structure that can alleviate the difficulties of call center counselors, receive c ustomer requests, and provide answers in the most similar form to humans instead of counselors. Until now, chatbots functios were based on voice recognition ARS, TTS, and ERMS for a quick response to simple services and connection to counselors. In contrast, the contents presented in this study suggest a service structure that can respond to customers within 1.4 seconds a fter a phone call by combining STT, NLU, and TTS with an AICC-based counseling task automation environment. The establ ished system can secure work efficiency and strengthen expertise, and a plan is presented for a system structure that enables future customer communication in the non-contact era as COVID-19. © 2022, Ismail Saritas. All rights reserved.

Digital Literacy-Based User Experience Design for Medication-Allergy Patients Care

Digital literacy is not based solely on an understanding of technology, but is highly influenced by social and cultural context. This study focused on developing mobile applications for medication allergy care for respiratory-related patients in daily life, which is based on inclusiveness and digital literacy. With COVID-19, there are growing needs to share the role of primary care hospitals, with, for example GPs, and self-care symptom records applications, in order to supplement the saturated medical service of general hospitals. The mobile application of ‘medication-allergy record for respiratory-related patients’ which is developed in this study considers cultural digital literacy and provides the solutions to the local people’s needs. For these objectives this study has conducted field research and analyzed the influential factors and needs in digital interaction, by interviewing 120 outpatients of respiratory and allergic internal medicine department in general hospital in Cheongju. Based on this, the direction of the mobile application has developed new information architecture and relevant wire-frames. This study will contribute to the future direction of non-face communication in health-care service by suggesting a self-data-producing digital health care service by bridging the personal culture and user-centered technology. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

A Comparative Study of Korean and U.S. Firms amid COVID-19 Supply Chain Disruptions: The Role of Relational Capital for Improving Ambidextrous Innovation and Firm Performance

Purpose – Supply chain disruptions have plagued firms since the advent of COVID-19 lockdowns. As a re-sult, supply chains remain unstable and dynamic. To better understand supply chain management during pe-riods of disruption, this study compares the impact of relational capital on ambidextrous innovation and firm performance between Korean and U.S firms. Design/Methodology/Approach – This study includes a sample of 200 Korean firms and 227 U.S firms. PLS-SEM is the statistical tool utilized with MICOM multigroup analysis. Findings – Korean and U.S. firms were found to be different on three different pathways indicating that open innovation and investment in supplier relations improve supply chain disruption orientation, exploration inno-vation, and firm performance Research Implications – Relationship capital can significantly improve supply chain management, innova-tion, and firm performance. Exploitation innovation is better for enhancing supply chain management in the short-term amid interruptions. © 2022, International Academy of Global Business and Trade. All rights reserved.

A Transfer Learning Image Classification Method Using Self-Supervised Information

Research on intelligent diagnosis and treatment is a major frontier issue in the current era of medical big data. For the global health crisis COVID-19, the radiological imaging techniques CT can provide useful and important information thus widely preferred due to its merit and three-dimensional view of the lung. However, to classify the CT-slices to assist in diagnosis, due to the annotation by radiologists is a highly subjective task, tedious and time-consuming work often influenced by individual bias and clinical experiences. Moreover, the current image classification methods cannot work well on the massive real-Time totally unlabeled CT scans. To address these challenges, we proposed a transfer learning method using self-supervised information to classify the unlabeled CT images, using an auxiliary task of segmentation to improve classification efficiency. We classified the totally unlabeled CT scans from Huoshenshan Hospital into ordinary, severe and critical cases, and the accuracy rate reached 86%. The experimental results show that the use of small-sample semi-supervised transfer learning algorithm can be used in insufficient CT images. Our framework can improve the learning ability and achieve a higher performance. Extensive experiments on real CT volumes demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most current models and advances the state-of-The-Art performance. © 2022 IEEE.

Trans-Inf-Net: COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation Based on Transformer

For the global health crisis COVID-19, the radio-logical imaging techniques CT have demonstrated effectiveness in both current diagnosis and evaluation of disease evolution. However, the manual delineation of lung infections is tedious and time-consuming work, and infection annotation by radiologists is a highly subjective task, often influenced by individual bias and clinical experiences. To address these challenges, we proposed a transformer learning method (Trans-Inf-Net) to automatically identify infected regions from chest CT slices. In our Trans-Inf-Net, a parallel partial decoder is used to aggregate the high-level features and generate a global map. Then, the implicit reverse attention and explicit edge-Attention are utilized to model the boundaries and enhance the representations. Moreover, to alleviate the shortage of labeled data, we present a segmentation framework based on a randomly selected propagation strategy and transformer, which only requires a few labeled images and leverages primarily unlabeled data. We apply attention in conjunction with convolutional networks, while keeping their overall structure in place. a pure transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches can perform very well on image segmentation tasks. Our framework can improve the learning ability and achieve a higher performance. Extensive experiments on COVID-SemiSeg and real CT volumes demonstrate that the proposed Trans-Inf-Net outperforms most cutting-edge segmen-Tation models and advances the state-of-The-Art performance. © 2022 IEEE.

Threat Modeling Analysis on FireStormcx's Webcam System

Since the COVID 19 pandemic creates enormous casualties in the world, it rapidly changes the working environment. It significantly increased the virtual meeting among the team members at work. These require many pieces of equipment. Among the components, a webcam is becoming the most important piece of equipment in virtual meetings. Since the webcam becomes the important factor in the meeting, the attacks on the webcam are enormously increased. In many cases, when a group of hackers attacks a webcam, it creates critical privacy breaches. Therefore, to prevent these types of critical breaches, this paper closely conducts the Threat Modeling analysis based on DFD and STRIDE techniques on FireStormcx's webcam. Additionally, these types of Threat Modeling analysis result to create a recommended threat remediation plan.

Mindfulness Intervention on Adolescents’ Emotional Intelligence and Psychological Capital during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Since the outbreak of COVID-19 caused adults suffer from mental disorders, it would be an essential for psychologist to help individuals overcome mental disorders. Objective: This study aim to explore whether the intervention of mindfulness is an efficient method to enhance adolescents’ emotional intelligence (EI) and psychological capital (PC) to provide a theoretical basis and future directions for both targeted crisis intervention and psychological trauma recovery plans. Design: This research was designed as randomized controlled trial and total of 798 students were evaluated statistically. Methods: We used paired-sample t-tests and repeated measures ANOVA to compare every factor defined above by time and group. Then, we used Mplus to build LGCM to examine the trajectory of changes in EI and PC in the experimental group. Results and Conclusions: (1) The EI and PC scores had significantly different time points in the experimental group but not in the control group. (2) EI and PC tended to increase with intervention, and there were significant individual differences in the initial level and development speed. (3) Individuals’ EI could promote the growth of PC. This research indicated that mindfulness should be given increasing consideration to enhance mental health during the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19. © 2022, Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

[Progress in research of 2019-nCoV Omicron variant].

2019-nCoV Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant, which has brought new challenges to the prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemic, has the characteristics of stronger transmissibility and more rapid transmission and more significant immune evasion. It took only two months to become a predominant strain worldwide after its identification in South Africa in November 2021. Local epidemics caused by Omicron variant have been reported in several provinces in China. However, the epidemiological characteristics of highly mutated Omicron variant remain unclear. This article summarizes the progress in the research of functional mutations, transmissibility, virulence, immune evasion and cross-reactive immune responses of Omicron variant, to provide references for the effective prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemic caused by Omicron variant.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES OF CLINICIAN BURNOUT, STAFFING LIMITATIONS, AND ABERRANT PATIENT BEHAVIOR THROUGH PROACTIVE TELEHEALTH ASSESSMENTS

Introduction There is compelling evidence that telehealth is the solutional advancement to recent staffing limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (Doraiswamy et al. 2020). We sought to improve clinic flow, enable safe patient oversight, increase access to care, and reduce clinician burnout through personal tele-notification of patients. Methods We scheduled patients for routine follow-up in the Supportive Care Clinic (SCC) at University Cancer Institute. Each was called within 48 hours of their appointment to confirm or cancel and a brief clinical assessment. We recorded patients' responses and the results (arrival time or absent). If the patient deviated from their attendance at their appointment, a physicianled qualitative analysis of patient's chart was performed. Results We reduced absentee appointments from 17.4% to 12.6%, improving clinical efficiency by 38.3%. Post-Intervention, new patient access to the SCC was increased 106%(6/month to 12/month). We discovered 48/355 patients were deviating from the plan of care, which required further intervention. 19/48 of these had barriers to care preventing consistent follow-up. Conclusions Personal telecommunication reduces appointment non-attendance, increases clinic efficiency, and screens for patients deviating from plan of care and barriers to care. This telehealth system provides a unique avenue of proactive patient oversight, while reducing clinician workload and thereby burnout.

ASSOCIATION BETWEEN DEPRESSION DISORDER AND INCIDENTAL HYPERTENSION IN COVID 19 POSITIVE PATIENTS

Objective: Although the association between depression disorder and cardiovascular diseases has been well recognized. but an effect of depression for incident hypertension are scarce. Design and method: 300 men and 390 women aged over 40 without hypertension or cardiovascular diseases. Depressive disorder was assessed using Beck's depression inventory (BDI) ranged 0 to 63 and was considered if BDI score over 16. Hypertension was defined as SBP over 140 and/or DBP over 90 mmHg or the use of antihypertensive medication. We calculated incidence rates (IRs) per 100 person-year for incident hypertension were calculated and incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and its 95% CIs. Results: COVID 19 positive patients with depressive symptoms had a significantly higher incidence of hypertension in women compared to men with depressive symptoms. In the logistic regression analysis, the presence of depressive symptom was significantly associated with incident hypertension with COVID 19 positive independently of age, body mass index, education level, and current smoking and drinking status. Conclusions: COVID 19 positive patients with Depressive symptoms were highly associated with the incidence of hypertension among middle aged women.

Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Heat Island Intensity in the Daejeon Metropolitan City

The effect of decreased human activity on the urban heat island intensity (UHII) was analyzed using the observed temperature data of six sites (including one reference area) in Daejeon Metropolitan City from February to May of 2019 to 2021. Depending on the observation site, UHII decreased by approximately 20% in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2019 before COVID-19. The decrease in human activity increased UHII at night and decreased it during the daytime. Consequently, UHII diurnal amplitude increased by approximately 20% in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2019, irrespective of location. The decrease in UHII did not appear to be significantly correlated with natural factors such as wind speed and social distancing steps. In contrast, UHII was correlated with social distancing and significantly reduced air pollutants after COVID-19, with the most significant correlation observed for NO2.