Bull's eye sign - A diagnostic clinch in COVID-19 pneumonia.

Although typical imaging findings of COVID-19 pneumonia has been described it may be difficult at times to distinguish it from other viral pneumonias. In the following case series, we describe a typical sign i.e. Bull's-eye sign in COVID-19 pneumonia. As this sign is not associated with any known pulmonary disease, so its presence may help radiologists to differentiate COVID-19 pneumonia from its mimics.

Lymphadenopathy subsequent to Covishield (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) Corona virus vaccine: ultrasound findings and clinical implications.

Introduction: Post anti-COVID-19 vaccine lymphadenopathies have been recently described in literature, from different parts of the world. Although there have been studies on lymphadenopathy following mRNA vaccines, there is a paucity of studies on lymphadenopathy following inactivated viral vaccines, such as Covishield. Aim: In this study, we explored lymphadenopathy subsequent to Covishield vaccine in terms of its various ultrasound parameters in the Indian population. Methods: This hospital-based longitudinal study was conducted among 50 adult beneficiaries of Covishield vaccine. Sociodemographic details and relevant clinical history were recorded using a semi-structured performa. Detailed ultrasound (USG) examination of the bilateral axillae was done on the day of vaccination and after 6-12 days post vaccination. Vaccine beneficiaries were evaluated for the presence of any vaccine-associated lymphadenopathy and described the presence, number, size, morphology, cortical thickness, and presence or absence of echogenic hilum. Results: Out of total (63) lymph nodes evaluated sonologically, majority (80.9%) of lymph nodes showed the features of benign lymphadenopathy. However, 12.6% (8/63) lymph nodes showed diffusely thickened cortex with preserved central echogenic hilum, 4.76% (3/63) lymph nodes showed eccentric cortical thickness with preserved hilar pattern, while only one lymph node showed diffuse cortical thickening with loss of central echogenic hilum. Conclusion: With an increase in vaccination coverage, clinicians are likely to confront increasing cases of vaccine-associated axillary lymphadenopathy. Therefore, they should exercise care, that contemporary anti-COVID-19 vaccination can present an aetiology of axillary lymph nodes with suspicious USG features.

Determination of Alteration in Micromeritic Properties of a Solid Dispersion: Brunauer-Emmett-Teller Based Adsorption and Other Structured Approaches.

The present study is focused on the use of solid dispersion technology to triumph over the solubility-related problems of bexarotene which is currently used for treating various types of cancer and has shown potential inhibitory action on COVID-19 main protease and human ACE2 receptors. It is based on comparison of green locust bean gum and synthetic poloxamer as polymers using extensive mechanistic methods to explore the mechanism behind solubility enhancement and to find suitable concentration of drug to polymer ratio to prepare porous 3rd generation solid dispersion. The prepared solid dispersions were characterized using different studies like X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and particle size analysis in order to determine the exact changes occurred in the product which are responsible for enhancing solubility profiles of an insoluble drug. The results showed different profiles for particle size, solubility, dissolution rate, porosity, BET, and Langmuir specific surface area of prepared solid dispersions by using different polymers. In addition to the comparison of polymers, the BET analysis deeply explored the changes occurred in all dispersions when the concentration of polymer was increased. The optimized solid dispersion prepared with MLBG using lyophilization technique showed reduced particle size of 745.7±4.4 nm, utmost solubility of 63.97%, pore size of 211.597 Å, BET and Langmuir specific surface area of 5.6413 m2/g and 8.2757 m2/g, respectively.

CADxReport: Chest x-ray report generation using co-attention mechanism and reinforcement learning.

BACKGROUND: Automated generation of radiological reports for different imaging modalities is essentially required to smoothen the clinical workflow and alleviate radiologists' workload. It involves the careful amalgamation of image processing techniques for medical image interpretation and language generation techniques for report generation. This paper presents CADxReport, a coattention and reinforcement learning based technique for generating clinically accurate reports from chest x-ray (CXR) images. METHOD: CADxReport, uses VGG19 network pre-trained over ImageNet dataset and a multi-label classifier for extracting visual and semantic features from CXR images, respectively. The co-attention mechanism with both the features is used to generate a context vector, which is then passed to HLSTM for radiological report generation. The model is trained using reinforcement learning to maximize CIDEr rewards. OpenI dataset, having 7, 470 CXRs along with 3, 955 associated structured radiological reports, is used for training and testing. RESULTS: Our proposed model is able to generate clinically accurate reports from CXR images. The quantitative evaluations confirm satisfactory results by achieving the following performance scores: BLEU-1 = 0.577, BLEU-2 = 0.478, BLEU-3 = 0.403, BLEU-4 = 0.346, ROUGE = 0.618 and CIDEr = 0.380. CONCLUSIONS: The evaluation using BLEU, ROUGE, and CIDEr score metrics indicates that the proposed model generates sufficiently accurate CXR reports and outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods for the given task.

Effect of restrictions imposed due to COVID-19 pandemic on the antenatal care and pregnancy outcomes: a prospective observational study from rural North India.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the difficulties faced by the pregnant women in seeking appropriate antenatal care due to the restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic; assess the difficulties encountered during delivery and postpartum period; the suitability of the teleconsultation services offered; effect of COVID-19 infection on pregnancy outcomes and the effect of restrictions on the nutrition profile of the pregnant women. DESIGN: Prospective observational study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: We included 1374 pregnant women from the rural areas of three districts of Punjab, India registered at government health centres before the implementation of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic on 24 March 2020. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was the difficulties faced by the women during their pregnancies due to restrictions imposed during the lockdown. The secondary outcomes included the effect of COVID-19 infections on pregnancy outcomes, satisfaction from the telemedicine services and restrictions on the nutrition profile of the pregnant women. RESULTS: One-third of the women (38.4%) considered their last pregnancy unplanned. Women faced difficulties due to the restrictions in getting adequate nutrition (76.5%), accessing transportation facilities (35.4%), consultations from doctors (22.4%) or getting an ultrasonography scan (48.7%). One-fifth (21.9%) of women could not access safe abortion services. Only 3.6% of respondents ever took any teleconsultation services offered by the government. Most of them felt unsatisfied compared with routine visits (77.5%). COVID-19-infected women were primarily asymptomatic (76.1%), but there was a high incidence of preterm birth (42.8%). Frontline workers could visit 64.3% of the women in the postpartum period despite restrictions. CONCLUSIONS: Lockdown compromised the antenatal care in our study area while the frontline workers attempted to minimise the inconvenience. Telemedicine services did not prove to be of many benefits to pregnant women and should only work as a supplement to the existing protocols of antenatal care.

High-resolution chest computed tomography findings of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) - A retrospective single center study of 152 patients.

INTRODUCTION: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has engulfed the world, within a short span of time crippling many health systems. The disease in its ever-evolving course is exhibiting a myriad of symptoms and imaging manifestations. This retrospective study was conducted to generate evidence from the chest computed tomography (CT) findings of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia to aid in the diagnosis and disease management. METHODS: This retrospective study included all patients with reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction confirmed COVID-19 disease who underwent chest CT between 1st June to 31st December 2020 at a tertiary care institute of North India. Anonymized data of 152 COVID-19 positive patients was used for the evaluation of the clinical profile and imaging findings. RESULTS: The common presenting clinical symptoms were fever, cough, myalgia and sore throat. The most frequent CT imaging feature consisted of ground-glass opacities (GGOs), consolidation and crazy paving distributed bilaterally, peripherally in subpleural location with a predilection for the posterior parts of lungs. Reverse halo sign was observed in 12 patients and halo sign in 3 patients. Dilated pulmonary vessels with mild bronchiolectasis were observed in the involved lung parenchyma. Less common findings included pleural effusion, mediastinal lymphadenopathy, and pericardial effusion. The mean CT severity score gradually increased with increasing age. CONCLUSION: The predominant imaging finding of COVID-19 pneumonia was peripheral GGO's distributed bilaterally in peripheral subpleural region and having predilection for the posterior parts of the lungs which gradually evolve into organizing pneumonia patterns. Although COVID-19 shares imaging findings with other viral pneumonias, however in the context of the current pandemic, we must keep COVID-19 a differential diagnosis, in all patients with fever and respiratory symptoms.

Cavernous sinus thrombosis with central retinal artey occlusion in COVID-19: A case report and review of literature.

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is showing a wide spectrum of ocular manifestations. They are creeping from vision sparing to irreversible visual loss as a result of its thromboembolic events. Hypercoagulability associated with COVID-19 is also called "sepsis-induced coagulopathy" and may predispose to thromboembolic phenomenon that decides the morbidity and mortality of this pandemic. A 37-year-old man presented with no perception of light in the left eye with optic atrophy and macular pucker on fundus examination. Visual evoked potential showed extinguished P 100 wave. His past medical history revealed severe pneumonia secondary to severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV 2) infection about 3 months back.