ABSTRACT
Objectives: Considering the risk of aerosolization during the COVID-19 pandemic associated with transesophageal echocardiography (TEE), we evaluated the diagnostic performance of cardiac computed tomography (CCT) before pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) in comparison to semi-invasive TEE in excluding left atrial (LA)/LA appendage (LAA) thrombus, limiting the need for TEE to only patients with possible thrombus on CCT. Material(s) and Method(s): We included a total of 145 consecutive patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) (age 52.4 +/- 10.3 years;63% males;89 paroxysmal AF) referred for radiofrequency ablation in National Cardiovascular Center Harapan Kita, Jakarta, Indonesia. All patients underwent preprocedural single-phase 128-slice multidetector CT and subsequent TEE as the reference standard with a mean time interval of 6.5 +/- 5.3 days between the two procedures. Result(s): CCT identified 30 patients (20.7%) with a filling defect in the LA/LAA, 8 of which were confirmed by TEE as thrombi (22 false positives and 8 true positives), whereas 9 true thrombi (6.2%) were detected by TEE (1 false negative by CCT). The sensitivity and specificity of CCT were 88.9% and 83.8%, respectively, with a positive predictive value of 26.8% and a negative predictive value of 99.1%. The overall accuracy was 84.1%. Conclusion(s): Apart from being a planned preparation modality before PVI, CCT is sufficient and could be used as an initial step to exclude the presence of LA/LAA thrombus, limiting the invasive TEE only for confirmation of the thrombus if detected by CCT.
ABSTRACT
This is a pedagogical paper on estimating the number of people that can be infected by one infectious person during an epidemic outbreak, known as the reproduction number. Knowing the number is crucial for developing policy responses. There are generally two types of such a number, i.e., basic and effective (or instantaneous). While basic reproduction number is the average expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible, effective reproduction number is the number of cases generated in the current state of a population. In this paper, we exploit the deterministic susceptibleinfected-removed (SIR) model to estimate them through three different numerical approximations. We apply the methods to the pandemic COVID-19 in Italy to provide insights into the spread of the disease in the country. We see that the effect of the national lockdown in slowing down the disease exponential growth appearedabout two weeks after the implementation date. We also discuss available improvements to the simple (and naive) methods that have been made by researchers in the field. Authors of this paper are members of the SimCOVID-(Simulasi dan Pemodelan COVID-19 Indonesia) collaboration.
ABSTRACT
Fitness and keeping a balanced lifestyle are an important aspect in our daily lives. Being healthy will allow us to conduct our daily activities in a more productive manner. However, it is sidelined by the fact the people now a days are mostly busy with their work and other things, added the fact of the lack of motivation to conduct the physical activities, lead to people not having a balanced life. For that reason, the aim of the developed application is to provide users with an immersive and interactive jogging application which will help in motivating the user into wanting to conduct fitness activities. The interactivity is provided by implementing Geofencing technique, which is by generating a parameter around certain coordinates which when entered by a device will create certain events such as sending notification or directing to a different page. While the immersiveness aspect is implemented using Augmented Reality, which is where a 3D model is anchored into a certain plane which can be seen by using the mobile phones rear camera. The Rapid Development Life Cycle (RDLC) have been chosen as the methodology for the development of the application because it allows developer to iteratively change the system requirements during the development and presentation phase. Functionality testing have been conducted to the developed application. © 2020, World Academy of Research in Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.