Microfluidics for nano-drug delivery systems: from fundamentals to industrialization

In recent years, owing to the miniaturization of the fluidic environment, microfluidic technology offers unique opportunities for the implementation of nano drug delivery systems (NDDSs) production processes. Compared with traditional methods, microfluidics improves the controllability and uniformity of NDDSs. The fast mixing and laminar flow properties achieved in the microchannels can tune the physicochemical properties of NDDSs, including particle size, distribution and morphology, resulting in narrow particle size distribution and high drug-loading capacity. The success of lipid nanoparticles encapsulated mRNA vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 by microfluidics also confirmed its feasibility for scaling up the preparation of NDDSs via parallelization or numbering-up. In this review, we provide a comprehensive summary of microfluidics-based NDDSs, including the fundamentals of microfluidics, microfluidic synthesis of NDDSs, and their industrialization. The challenges of microfluidics-based NDDSs in the current status and the prospects for future development are also discussed. We believe that this review will provide good guidance for microfluidics-based NDDSs.Copyright © 2023 Chinese Pharmaceutical Association and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

One case of novel coronavirus pneumonia complicated with acute appendicitis in children.

Emergent laparoscopic appendectomy was performed for a boy of occult novel coronavirus pneumonia with a presenting symptom of acute appendicitis at Wuhan Children's Hospital. Postoperative lung computed tomography (CT) indicated a round dense shadow with slightly ground-glass-like margins in the dorsal segment of right lower lung. Pharyngeal swab nucleic acid test was positive for 2019-nCoV and thus a definite diagnosis of COVID-19 was made. Prior to the onset, he had close contacts with his grandmother with a definite diagnosis of COVID -19. It proved that intra-family transmission was an important transmission route for pediatric 2019-nCoV infection. In this case, the respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 were not obvious during an early stage. The major symptoms were nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. For individuals coming from the epidemic area, with a history of exposure and developing acute surgical conditions, preoperative pulmonary CT scan is necessary for screening COVID-19.Copyright © 2020 by the Chinese Medical Association.

Exploring the Impact of the Quality of Social Media Early Adopters on Vaccine Adoption

As social media such as Twitter has become an important medium for disseminating information, it is essential to understand how the information diffusion on social media influences public adoption of vaccines. Based on the innovation diffusion theory, we construct a user and information quality indicator system for early adopters of COVID-19 vaccination by identifying their creation of user-generated content on social media. Machine learning approaches and text analysis methods are used to perform topic clustering and sentiment analysis on vaccination-related tweets on Twitter. Based on each country's vaccination data in January 2021, the study examines the relationship between the quality of social media early adopters, and the quality of the information they publish with vaccine adoption by using the OSL regression model. The empirical results show that the total number of tests, the number of new COVID-19 cases, and the human development index have a significantly positive influence on vaccine adoption. Neutral emotions and offensive language of early adopters on social media have a significantly negative relationship with vaccine adoption. These interesting findings can help governments and public health officials understand early adopters' perceptions of vaccines and play an important role in targeted policy interventions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

An RFID-Based Battery-Less Vibration Monitoring System for Electrical Appliances

This paper presents a vibration monitoring system for electrical appliances. This system is based on RFID sensors and edge processing technologies. For long-term monitoring, two different operation modes referred to as standby and active modes are introduced. The difference between the two modes is radio wave radiation times. The standby mode is useful to reduce energy consumption and temperature increase of an RFID reader, and amount of data uploaded to a network. This mode also detects a beginning of a vibration event caused by the motor of an electrical appliance. The standby mode subsequently triggers the active mode. The active mode accurately monitors the vibration event and keeps the measured data only for the active mode. Experiments for monitoring a refrigerator demonstrate that the proposed modes enable efficient vibration detections. This system can prevent unintended COVID-19 vaccine disposals caused by the problematic operation and management of refrigerators. © 2022 IEEE.

Analysis of the No-sign Adversarial Attack on the COVID Chest X-ray Classification

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemics have spread worldwide in recent years by its extreme contagiousness. The diagnosis of COVID-19 is crucial in the prevention, control, and treatment procedure. Deep learning-based image classification models have been proved to be valid for the pneumonia classification using chest X-ray images, helping physicians to diagnose and treat the disease more effectively. However, the vulnerability of deep neural networks was confirmed by researchers through the injection of tiny perturbations which is imperceptible to humans. These adversarial samples become a major threat to the medical safety system, especially in the disease detection field. In this regard, we made some experiments to attack chest X-ray images to investigate the efficiency of two types of attack methods with the sign and no-sign operators. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Basic Iterative Method (BIM), and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) were selected and transformed into no-sign attack methods to analyze their effectiveness on white-box and black-box testing. We theoretically and experimentally confirmed the alternative no-sign attack methods were more efficient. © 2022 IEEE.

Thermal and Electrical Performance of Negative Capacitance FinFET on GaAs

Along with the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale application of 5G, IoT has become more critical for our daily lives. GaAs is a promising semiconductor for field effect transistors in IoT applications. Due to the high electron mobility of GaAs, n-type FinFET based on GaAs is expected with a higher conductance and electron velocity than Silicon. FinFET based on GaAs has a lower subthreshold swing (SS) and higher Ion/Ioff than FinFET based on Silicon, particularly at high temperatures.Negative Capacitance FinFET(NC-FinFET) is an important emerging technology for low-power applications. To further enhance the performance of the GaAs FinFET, we incorporate Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 films in the gate to achieve Negative Capacitance (NC). The NC effect brings a higher Ion/Ioff and a negative coefficient to reduce the SS of the FinFET. Our simulation research proves the GaAs-NC-FinFET has the slightest SS variation in 300K-400K and maximum Ion/Ioff compared with other FinFETs. © 2022 IEEE.

How a Successful Implementation and Sustainable Growth of e-Commerce can be Achieved in Developing Countries;a Pathway Towards Green Economy

Apart from the goal of the digital world and other benefits of e-commerce, it becomes the need of time during this COVID-19 pandemic. Successful implementation and sustainable growth of e-commerce in developing countries is a challenge. The goal of the digital world without the implementation and sustainable growth of e-commerce in developing countries is incomplete. Based on UTAUT theory, we have developed an integrated model to study the developing countries' consumers' adoption intentions towards e-commerce. We collected a valid useable sample of 796 respondents from a developing country, applied the SEM-ANN two-step hybrid approach to testing the proposed hypothesis, and ranked the antecedents according to their importance. Results revealed that Trust in e-commerce, Perceived risk of using e-commerce, Ease of use in e-commerce, Curiosity about e-commerce, Facilitating Conditions, and Awareness of e-commerce benefits influence the adoption intentions of developing countries' consumers. Sensitivity analysis results revealed that Ease of use in e-commerce platforms and awareness of e-commerce benefits are the two most crucial factors behind the adoption intentions in developing countries. The study's findings help authorities adopt sustainable e-commerce, multinational companies effectively market their goods online, and academics better understand how inhabitants of developing nations perceive e-commerce.

Connected Despite Lockdown: The Role of Social Interactions and Social Media Use in Wellbeing

Humans are social beings, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world were periodically in lockdown and were required to try to physically distance themselves from others. The resultant limitation of face-to-face interactions presented a challenge to wellbeing. During periods of lockdown, people could, however, still connect to others via technology, but it is unknown whether such interactions offer benefits comparable to face-to-face interactions. In the present study, we examined how different ways of interacting with others impacted wellbeing during a period of lockdown in the United Kingdom. In a 30-day diary study conducted in April-June 2020, 110 adults reported the time they spent daily on face-to-face interactions and technology-mediated communication (video, phone, text) with different interaction partners. They also indicated the time they spent on active and passive social media use and their end-of-day wellbeing. Multilevel regressions indicated that more face-to-face interactions both within and outside of one???s household positively predicted wellbeing, while technology-mediated communication had less consistent positive effects. Additionally, more active and less passive social media use predicted better wellbeing. These results highlight the complexity of benefits of different kinds of social interactions during lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic and point to the importance of taking into account communication channels, interaction partners, and how people use social media when studying the effects of connecting to others.

Linking Employment and Death: Measuring the Structural Disparity in COVID-19 Deaths for Non-telework Essential Workers

The intensity of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a surprise to many people and functioned as an unexpected disturbance where individuals and businesses were slow to adapt their behavior. This event allows us to explore pre-pandemic structural differences in employment and estimate the public health impacts of these first few months of the pandemic. Novel datasets provided by the Connecticut Department of Health and the Massachusetts Department of Health enable us to link deaths to industry and occupation directly at the individual level. A significant number of working-aged people died from COVID-19, with black and Hispanic populations dying at much higher rates. Linking individual deaths with employment, we find that nearly half of these deaths come from people working non-telework essential jobs. Black and Hispanic non-telework essential workers died at a rate 14-percentage points higher than white individuals employed in these same occupations. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2022.

Crew Fatigue Risk Analysis of Three Intercontinental Flights from China during the COVID-19 Epidemic Period

Fatigue leads to the decrease of the flight crew's alertness, which will seriously affect the flight safety. In order to avoid the risk of infection caused by the overnight stay abroad of the air crew during the Covid-19 epidemic, CAAC proposed an exemption method to release the flight time restriction of regulation by increasing the number of flight crew and setting up an independent rest area on international flights. Based on the alertness energy theory, this paper simulates the crew alertness of three international scheduled flights of China Southern Airlines, including Guangzhou - Amsterdam, Guangzhou - Los Angeles, and Guangzhou - Sydney, to compare the difference of crew alertness between '3 sets of flight crew, without overnight rest' in accordance with exemption condition, and '2 sets of flight crew, with overnight rest' in accordance with regulation condition. The simulation results show that for the Guangzhou - Amsterdam and Guangzhou - Los Angeles flights, the cockpit alertness under the exemption condition is similar to that under the regulation condition, and the fatigue risk is acceptable;for the 'Guangzhou-Sydney' flight, because the return flight under the exemption condition is always in the negative range of human rhythm, the alertness is lower than that under the regulation condition. © 2021 IEEE.

NEGATIVE IMPACT OF COVID-19 LOCKDOWN ON PAPILLOEDEMA AND IDIOPATHIC INTRACRANIAL HYPERTENSION

Background Enforced national lockdown due to COVID-19 limited access to medical services. We evaluated the impact on those presenting with papilloedema, and those with a preexisting diagnosis of idiopathic intracranial hypertension. Design A single United Kingdom centre prospective cohort study between May 15, 2020 (start of emergency clinics after first 8 week national lockdown) and July 31, 2020. Demographics, diagnosis and outcomes were documented. Results The study recorded 130 individual patients, 123 with a diagnosis of idiopathic intracranial hyper-tension. 92% were female and mean age was 32.5 years. Emergency cerebrospinal fluid diversion surgery was required in 13% (17/130), a 4.7-fold (367%) increase compared to the same period in 2019. Weight increased in 58% (mean 6.2kg SD 4.6) and corresponded to a significant increase in papilloedema (Optical Coherence Tomography retinal nerve fibre layer 15mm SD 57.3, p=0.014). Elevated anxiety levels (hospital anxiety and depression scale >7) occurred in 64%. Conclusions There was a 367% increase in emergency shunting to save vision in idiopathic intracranial hypertension following national lockdown. Worsening of papilloedema, weight gain, and detrimental effects on mental health were recorded. Countermeasures should be implemented to minimise harm in this rare disease during future service restrictions and lockdowns.

Understanding the Role of Sustainable-Oriented and Process Innovation With Lean Practices in Achieving Sustainability Paradigm: A Chinese Perspective

The organizational development following the philosophy of sustainability is becoming the prerequisite for companies, which urges and emphasizes them to incorporate social, economic, and environmental aspects into their manufacturing and operations. Despite plethora of researches exploring lean practices as the solution for improving productivity, it is limited to the operational aspects only, thus ignoring the other aspects of sustainability. Moreover, there is a dearth of studies that explored the combined effect of sustainable innovation, process innovation, and lean practices on the three aspects of sustainability. The current study is an attempt and contribution in the existing literature through the sample of 431 respondents from ISO 14001 certified Chinese organizations during COVID-19 pandemic conditions. The estimations were performed through the Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modeling. The results revealed a positive association among the proposed hypothesis of aforementioned studied phenomena. In addition, the current study explores the role of sustainable innovation as a mediator between lean and three dimensions of the sustainability, which is reportedly found to be a partial mediator as both direct and indirect effects are found to be statistically significant. Through the findings of the current study, the managers and decision makers can comprehend the potential of the possible benefits which can be reaped by incorporating both lean and sustainability within their operations. Copyright © 2022 Liu, Ding, Wen, Gao, Wang and Sun.

[Impact of a positive coronavirus diagnostic test on the radiotherapy patient journey at Gustave-Roussy institute]. / Impact d'un test de diagnostic du coronavirus positif sur le parcours du patient en radiothérapie à l'institut Gustave-Roussy.

PURPOSE: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic continues to spread exponentially around the world. Cancer patients have a higher risk of commorbidity than the rest of the population. Radiotherapy departments are actively involved in the management of these patients, whether they have COVID or not, and it is recognized that the time taken to take charge and the continuity of treatment have a prognostic impact. The main objective was to assess the impact of the coronavirus on the treatment times of patients undergoing radiotherapy. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This retrospective study was conducted in the radiotherapy department of Gustave-Roussy institute (France) during the period from March 3, 2020 to January 12, 2021. Organizational changes, patient care times between the day of the scan and the last radiotherapy session as well as the time taken to take charge of patients between the first session and the last radiotherapy session has been studied. RESULTS: A total of 1183 patients were included, among which 60 had COVID-19. Patients were divided into four categories. Treatment times of patients who did not have COVID-19 and those of patients who did were not statistically significantly different. CONCLUSION: The organization of the radiotherapy department at the Gustave-Roussy institute is based on several points: carrying out preventive screening tests, protecting staff and patients and reorganizing the patient circuit. Thanks to the performance of diagnostic tests and the implementation of a specific workflow for patients with COVID, we ensure the continuity of patient treatment in complete safety without impacting treatment times.

Digital barriers and individual coping behaviors in distance education during COVID-19

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have played a pivotal role in facilitating knowledge acquisition and enabling distance education. Yet, knowledge about digital divide in distance education remains limited. This study examines digital barriers that underserved students face in distance education and their coping behaviors during the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Informed by distance education and digital divide literature, this study uses qualitative research method to analyze survey data collected from 206 college students in a four-year public university in the United States. Results revealed five major digital barriers and showed that the distribution of these digital barriers varied by student demographic background and socioeconomic status. Further analysis of respondents’ narratives revealed three coping behaviors, including improvising, building technical assets, and building social assets. Practical implications are provided to educators and policymakers to invest in ICT and implement equity-minded teaching practices to enhance digital inclusion. Copyright © 2022, IGI Global.

An Empirical Assessment of Global COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications

This is the artifact accompanying the paper "An Empirical Assessment of Global COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications", accepted by ICSE 2021. The artifact presents the first automated security and privacy assessment tool that tests contact tracing apps for security weaknesses, malware, embedded trackers and private information leakage. COVIDGUARDIAN outperforms 4 state-of-the-practice industrial and open-source tools. Note that, Although the tool is tailored to focus on contact tracing apps, it can also be adapted to other types of apps with respect to the NLP PII learning context, e.g., by changing the source & sink list or updating the sensitive PII keywords.

Impact of COVID-19 on ongoing oncological and hematological treatment strategy

Background: Outcomes and risk factors associated with COVID-19 worsening among cancer patients have previously been reported. However, the actual impact of SARs-Co-V2 infection on the cancer treatment strategy remains unknown. Here, we report the Gustave Roussy (GR) experience, one year after the onset of the pandemic focusing on the impact of COVID-19 in patients with ongoing management of oncohematological disease. Methods: All patients positively tested for SARS-CoV-2 and managed at GR between Mar 14th 2020 and Feb 15th 2021 (data cut-off) have been included. Patients underlying oncohematological disease and COVID19 characteristics have been collected. Cancer and COVID-19 management and outcomes have been assessed. Primary endpoint was the overall impact of COVID-19 on oncological and hematological treatment strategy assessed at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months. Results: At the time of the analysis, 423 patients (median age: 62 years) were found positive for SARS-CoV-2 and managed at GR with a median follow up of 5.6 months (0-13 months). Among them, 284 (67%) were admitted due to COVID-19. Clinical deterioration occurred in 87 patients (21%), 43 patients (10%) were transferred in intensive care unit and 123 (29%) patients died, among which 47 (11%) died from COVID-19. Overall, 329 (78%) patients were on active treatment for underlying oncohematological disease at time of COVID diagnosis. Impact of COVID-19 on cancer treatment strategy in those patients is presented in the Table. The majority (N=268, 81%) had no change in oncological strategy. For those who experienced a delay, median delay in treatment was 21 days (N=99, [1-77]), 30 days (N=15, [15-56]), 7 days (N=8,[3-35]) for systemic treatment, surgery and radiotherapy respectively. [Formula presented] Conclusions: COVID-19 outbreak is associated with a significant mortality in patients with cancer. However, for patients who did not die from COVID-19, we provide the first report supporting that ongoing treatment was maintained or could be resumed in the majority of cases in a timely manner. Legal entity responsible for the study: Gustave Roussy. Funding: Has not received any funding. Disclosure: All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.

An Empirical Assessment of Global COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has made manual contact tracing difficult. Thus, various public health authorities have experimented with automatic contact tracing using mobile applications (or "apps"). These apps, however, have raised security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose an automated security and privacy assessment tool-COVIDGUARDIAN-which combines identification and analysis of Personal Identification Information (PII), static program analysis and data flow analysis, to determine security and privacy weaknesses. Furthermore, in light of our findings, we undertake a user study to investigate concerns regarding contact tracing apps. We hope that COVIDGUARDIAN, and the issues raised through responsible disdosure to vendors, can contribute to the safe deployment of mobile contact tracing. As part of this, we offer concrete guidelines, and highlight gaps between user requirements and app performance.

Digital divide and digital barriers in distance education during covid-19

Digital divide exists between the underserved student population and their peers, yet our knowledge about digital barriers and digital divide in distance education remains limited. In this study, we examine digital divide and digital barriers in distance education in the context of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) by addressing two questions: (1) What digital barriers are emerging in distance education during COVID-19? (2) Do underserved students experience digital barriers differently from their peers? Informed by distance education and digital divide literature, this study uses qualitative research method to analyze survey data collected from 206 college students in a four-year public university in the United States. Results revealed five major digital barriers and showed that the distribution of these digital barriers varied by demographic background and socioeconomic status of the students. Practical implications are provided to educators and policymakers to implement equity-minded teaching practices and enhance digital inclusion of the underserved student population in distance education. © 2021 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

A Novel Framework with Weighted Heterogeneous Educational Network Embedding for Personalized Freshmen Recommendation Under the Impact of COVID-19 Storm

The global explosion of COVID-19 has brought unprecedented challenges to traditional higher education, especially for freshmen who have no major;they cannot determine what their real talents are. Thus, it is difficult for them to make correct choices based on their skills. Generally, existing methods mainly mine isomorphic information, ignoring relationships among heterogeneous information. Therefore, this paper proposes a new framework to give freshmen appropriate recommendations by mining heterogeneous educational information. This framework is composed of five stages: after data preprocessing, a weighted heterogeneous educational network (WHEN) is constructed according to heterogeneous information in student historical data. Then, the WHEN is projected into different subnets, on which metapaths are defined. Next, a WHEN-based embedding method is proposed, which helps mine the weighted heterogeneous information on multiple extended metapaths. Finally, with the information mined, a matrix factorization algorithm is used to recommend learning resources and majors for freshmen. A large number of experimental results show that the proposed framework can achieve better results than other baseline methods. This indicates that the proposed method is effective and can provide great help to freshmen during the COVID-19 storm. CCBY