ABSTRACT
Motivated by the quest for decreased healthcare costs and further fueled by the COVID pandemic, wearable devices have gained major attention in recent years. Yet, their secure usage and patients' privacy continue to be concerning. To address these issues, the paper presents SWeeT, a novel lightweight protocol for allowing flexible and secure access to the collected data by multiple caregivers while sustaining the patient's privacy. Particularly, SWeeT deploys Physically Unclonabale Functions (PUFs) to generate encryption keys to safeguard the patients' data during transmission. The computation overhead is significantly reduced by applying very simple encryption operations while enabling frequent change of the keys to sustain robustness. SWeeT is shown to counter impersonation, Sybil, man-in-the-middle, and forgery attacks. SweeT is validated through experiments using implementation on an Artix7 FPGA and through formal security analysis. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Background: There are scarce data on disease characteristics and severity of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) among Iraqi patients with rheumatic diseases (RDs). In this study, we aimed to report the disease characteristics and variables associated with COVID-19 outcome among patients with RDs. Methods: Between October 2020 and April 2021, rheumatic diseases (RDs) patients with COVID-19 were registered from different centres in Iraq. The patient's demographics, rheumatological history, COVID-19 symptoms, severity, and management, if any, their disease progress and outcome have been assessed. Binary logistic regression analysis was performed to determine predictors of disease severity. Results: 253 patients were included in the study, and most were females. The commonest rheumatic disease was rheumatoid arthritis (RA), followed by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and ankylosing spondylitis (AS) (95, 52 and 20 patients respectively). It has been found that 50.6% of patients had mild COVID-19, and 49.4% had moderate disease;18% of patients required oxygen support, no patient was treated in hospital, and there was no reported death. Patients with moderate COVID-19 had significantly higher age than mild type (p= 0.022);with more BMI (p=0.03), more in the number of comorbidities (p<0.001), more steroids users (p=0.012), higher steroid dose (P=0.034), had longer steroid duration, longer duration of conventional disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (cDMARDs) (p=0.018), and biologic Diseasemodifying Antirheumatic Drug (bDMARDs) in months (p=0.025). Increasing body mass index (BMI), duration of biological DMARDs use, and an increasing number of comorbidities were significant independent factors that increase the risk of having more severe COVID-19, (p<0.05). Conclusion: COVID-19 infection rheumatic patients tend to have mild-moderate disease course;BMI, duration of biological DMARDs use, and many comorbidities were significant independent factors that increase the risk of having more severe COVID-19,(p<0.05). © 2022, University of Defence, Faculty of Military Health Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Background: Health care workers (HCWs) are crucial to maintaining healthcare services during COVID-19 pandemic. One of the greatest risks to healthcare system is the potentially high rate of infections due to COVID-19 among HCWs. Objective: To summarize the epidemiologic characteristics, clinical features, radiologic findings, laboratory data, and outcomes of health care workers diagnosed with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Sohag University Hospitals. Patients and methods: A retrospective study included 101 HCWs who were proved to have COVID-19. HCWs with COVID-19 were categorized to asymptomatic cases, mild cases which included patients with mild clinical symptoms and normal lung computed tomography (CT), and moderate cases which included patients with mild or moderate clinical features and abnormal lung CT. Results: 89.11% of infected HCWs had no definite history of contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19. A considerable percent of the patients presented with non-respiratory symptoms such as GIT, and neurological symptoms. Patients who had a moderate respiratory illness were significantly older than those who had a mild respiratory illness and were more likely to have diabetes. Home isolation was recommended in most cases (n=73). Several cases (n=24) preferred isolation in university undergraduate houses, and 4 patients were treated at isolation hospital, 2 of them needed oxygen therapy. Conclusion: COVID-19 in HCWs exhibited a wide spectrum of disease severity. Symptom-based screening for COVID-19 in HCWs may underestimate the affected number as there is a considerable percent of asymptomatic cases. For HCWs’ safety, the use of protective personal equipment and adherence to proper hand-hygiene practice are important protective tools during this pandemic. Also, there is a growing need for educational and training programs for all levels of HCWs. © 2021, Ain Shams University Faculty of Medicine. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to influence every aspect of human life across the globe. It was reported that vascular angiogenesis of COVID-19 was elevated in patients with equally severe influenza virus infection. In this issue of AJNMMI, Farolfi et al. reported that there was lung uptake not related to prostate cancer in almost all COVID-19 patients who performed Ga-68-PSMA-11 PET/CT scans and most of the lung uptake lesions were matched with typical CT patterns of COVID-19. With the advantages of having various tracers for whole-body imaging, PET provides opportunities to study the mechanism of COVID-19 from different aspects and obtain patterns of extra-pulmonary lesions in COVID-19, which helps explore more effective treatments for the patients. This case series opened the door to many future studies. Furthermore, such a multi-national/multi-institutional collaboration in the pandemic truly encouraged us that science is indeed without borders.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Coronavirus has caused more than a million deaths as of October 2020. Hospitals consider tracheostomy after the patient is virus negative, usually after 3 weeks. Prevalence and timing of tracheostomy and its impact on survival among COVID patients are unknown. Methods: A retrospective, single-center study of all patients with COVID-19 ARDS who underwent tracheostomy was conducted. Patients with age <18 and patients treated with ECMO were excluded. Duration of ventilation before tracheostomy was recorded. Clinical variables, outcome variables, and confounding variables were recorded and compared between patients with tracheostomy and without tracheostomy. The aim was to determine prevalence and timing of tracheostomy and its impact on clinical outcomes. Results: We found that tracheostomies were performed only in 21 out of 196 patients (10.8%). Tracheostomies were performed after 3 weeks on average (22.1 ± 7.5 days). Survival was significantly higher in patients who underwent tracheostomy (85.7 vs. 42.5%, p = 0.001). LOSICU was longer for tracheostomy patients than patients without tracheostomy (median [IQR]: 35 [23-47] vs. 15 [9-21], p = 0.001). Patients who underwent tracheostomy had a higher proportion of treatment with continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) (52 vs. 30%, p = 0.04), more COVID-19 swab testing (6.5 [4.5-8.5] vs. 5 [3-7], p = 0.002), more days on mechanical ventilation (34.5 [24-45] vs. 11 [5.5-16.5], p = 0.001), and more length of stay in the hospital (54 [38-70] vs. 20 [10.5-29.5], p = 0.001). All other factors were not statistically different between the 2 groups. Approximately 29% of patients had possible false-negative testing as their swab became positive after being negative. Conclusion: Tracheostomy was performed only in 10% of our patients with COVID-19 ARDS. Time to tracheostomy was after 3 weeks on average. Survival was better in patients with tracheostomy, but tracheostomized patients stayed longer in the ICU and hospital and utilized more days of mechanical ventilation and CRRT.
ABSTRACT
The spread of Coronavirus has forced populations around the globe to adopt strict measures such as lockdown, home quarantine, and home office. Moreover, in the current development of network communications, people can exploit internet and intranet features in many systems that need to be faster, more efficient, and available on time. Furthermore, with the benefits of using internet-of-things (IoT), through which things are generated, gained, discovered, and proposed without interference, the user could receive the last status without exertion and direct contact (i.e., in a contactless manner). These specifications can be used in a transaction system. This paper proposes an electronic transaction system (ETS) as a replacement for the current paper transaction used in most organizations’ environments. The progress includes the signing privilege, access right for each position, delivery reports, transaction tracking, and transaction storage safety. Transactions will be stored in an encrypted way at the database to keep them safe from illegal changes. For that, a secure electronic transaction is created with digital signature services. The negligence can be identified in the workflow by tracking the operations and receiving exceptional cases’ alerts. Finally, this paper compared the proposed system against state-of-the-art systems. © 2021 University of Baghdad-College of Science. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In March 2020, Saudi Arabia reported that the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread to its territory, originating from China. In this study, a new simulation model estimates and forecasts the number of infected subjects with COVID-19 in the upcoming weeks, based on different parameters, in two major cities in Saudi Arabia, namely Riyadh (the capital) and Jeddah, the second largest city. Unlike most of the recent simulators, our simulator attempts to focus on real data related to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, this paper investigates the parameters that can help to understand and predict the behavior of the biological curve, particularly, in Saudi Arabia. The proposed forecasting model considers several parameters, such as the infection rate, the virus lifetime, the number of infected people, the number of uninfected people, the recovery rate, the death rate, the recovery period, the period of simulation (in days), and the social distancing. The study investigates different scenarios using random test data and real data, where the results show the importance of two parameters on the pandemic spread;the infection rate and the walking distance. Therefore, this work can be used to raise the awareness of public and officials to the seriousness of the current pandemic.