Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma complicated with human coronavirus HKU1 pneumonia: A case report and literature review.

Objective: To analyze the clinical manifestations, diagnostic methods and treatment process of the patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma complicated with human coronavirus(HCoV)-HKU1 pneumonia and improve the clinical medical staff's awareness of the disease, and to reduce the occurrence of clinical adverse events. Method(s): The clinical data of a patient with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma complicated with HCoV-HKU1 pneumonia with hot flashes and night sweats, dry cough and dry throat as the main clinical features who were hospitalized in the hospital in January 2021 were analyzed, and the relevant literatures were reviewed and the clinical manifestations and diagnosis of HCoV-HKU1 were analyzed. Result(s): The female patient was admitted to the hospital due to diagnosed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma for more than 2 months. The physical examination results showed Karnofsky score was 90 points;there was no palpable enlargement of systemic superfical lymph nodes;mild tenderness in the right lower abdomen, no rebound tenderness, and slightly thicker breath sounds in both lungs were found, and a few moist rales were heard in both lower lungs. The chest CT results showed diffuse exudative foci in both lungs, and the number of white blood cells in the urine analysis was 158 muL-1;next generation sequencing technique(NGS) was used the detect the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, and HCoV-HKU1 pneumonia was diagnosed. At admission, the patient had symptoms such as dull pain in the right lower abdomen, nighttime cough, and night sweats;antiviral treatment with oseltamivir was ineffective. After treatment with Compound Sulfamethoxazole Tablets and Lianhua Qingwen Granules, the respiratory symptoms of the patient disappeared. The re-examination chest CT results showed the exudation was absorbed. Conclusion(s): The clinical symptoms of the patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma complicated with HCoV-HKU1 pneumonia are non-specific. When the diffuse shadow changes in the lungs are found in clinic, and the new coronavirus nucleic acid test is negative, attention should still be paid to the possibility of other HCoV infections. The NGS can efficiently screen the infectious pathogens, which is beneficial to guide the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary infectious diseases more accurately.Copyright © 2023 Jilin University Press. All rights reserved.

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Combined with Inactivated Vaccination and Oral Medicine in China

Objectives: Various interventions were used to control the COVID-19 pandemic and protect population health, including vaccination, medication and nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). This study aims to examine the cost-effectiveness of different combinations of NPIs (including social distancing, mask wearing, tracing-testing-isolation, mass testing, and lockdown), oral medicine (Paxlovid), and vaccination (including two-dose and three-dose vaccination) under the Delta and Omicron pandemic in China. Method(s): We constructed a Markov model using a SIRI structure with a one-week cycle length over one-year time horizon to estimate the cost-effectiveness of different combinations in China from societal perspective. Effectiveness of interventions, disease transition probabilities and costs were from published data, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) gained and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER) and net monetary benefits were calculated for one-year time horizon. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were performed to test the robustness of the model. Scenario analysis was developed to examine different situations under the Omicron pandemic. Result(s): Under the Delta pandemic, implementing the combination of social distancing, mask wearing, mass testing and three-dose vaccination was the optimal strategy, with cost at $11165635.33 and utility of 94309.94 QALYs, and had 60% probability of being cost-effective compared with other strategies. Three-dose vaccination combinations were better than two-dose combinations. Under the Omicron pandemic, antigen testing was better than nucleic testing by avoiding cross infections;second, adding Paxlovid or lockdown to the combined intervention strategies could increase limited health outcomes at huge cost and thus were not cost-effective;last, encouraging patients to stay at home can save societal costs compared with concentrated quarantine at hospitals. Conclusion(s): Three-dose vaccination and self-quarantine of asymptomatic and mild cases can save total costs. Under the Omicron pandemic outbreak, antigen testing is a better way to control the pandemic, and adding Paxlovid or lockdown to intervention combinations is not cost-effective.Copyright © 2023

Learning 3D Face Representation with Vision Transformer for Masked Face Recognition

Masked face recognition, a non-contact biometric technology, has attracted much attention and developed rapidly during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The existing work trains the masked face recognition model based on a large number of 2D masked face images. However, in practical application scenarios, it is difficult to obtain a large number of masked face images in a short period of time. Therefore, combined with 3D face recognition technology, this paper proposes a masked face recognition model trained with non-masked face images. In this paper, we locate and segment the complete face region and the face region not occluded by masks from the face point clouds. The geometric features of the 3D face surface, namely depth, azimuth, and elevation, are extracted from the above two regions to generate training data. The proposed masked face recognition model based on vision Transformer divides the complete faces and part of the faces into sequence images, and then captures the relationship between the image slices to compensate for the impact caused by the lack of face information, thereby improving the recognition performance. Comparative experiments with the state-of-the-art masked face recognition work are carried out on four databases. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the proposed model is improved by 9.86% on Bosphorus database, 16.77% on CASIA-3D FaceV1 database, 2.32% on StirlingESRC database, and 34.81% on Ajmal main database, respectively, which verifies the effectiveness and stability of the proposed model. © 2022 IEEE.

[Progress in epidemiological research of 2019-nCoV infection and COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy].

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory infectious disease caused by 2019-nCoV. Due to the physiological change in pregnancy, pregnant women are susceptible to COVID-19 and are at increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes, especially in the context of spread of novel variants. At present, less evidences have been obtained from randomized controlled trials on the effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccine use in pregnant women, and the recommendations of COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women vary with countries, posing challenge to the prevention and control of COVID-19 in pregnant women. This paper summarizes the progress in major research of 2019-nCoV infection in pregnancy conducted both at home and abroad, describes the harm of COVID-19 in pregnancy to pregnant women, fetuses and infants and introduces the effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy revealed by real world studies in order to provide reference for the related research and development of COVID-19 prevention and control strategies in pregnant women.

Masked Face Recognition with 3D Facial Geometric Attributes

During the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for contactless biometrics technology has promoted the development of masked face recognition. Training a masked face recognition model needs to address two crucial issues: a lack of large-scale realistic masked face datasets and the difficulty of obtaining robust face representations due to the huge difference between complete faces and masked faces. To tackle with the first issue, this paper proposes to train a 3D masked face recognition network with non-masked face images. For the second issue, this paper utilizes the geometric features of 3D face, namely depth, azimuth, and elevation, to represent the face. The inherent advantages of 3D face enhance the stability and practicability of 3D masked face recognition network. In addition, a facial geometry extractor is proposed to highlight discriminative facial geometric features so that the 3D masked face recognition network can take full advantage of the depth, azimuth and elevation information in distinguishing face identities. The experimental results on four public 3D face datasets show that the proposed 3D masked face recognition network improves the accuracy of the masked face recognition, which verifies the feasibility of training the masked face recognition model with non-masked face images. © 2022 ACM.

Correlation between dynamic changes of chest ct findings and therapeutic response of covid-19: A multicenter experience in shanghai, china

Background: The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global public health emergency. Computed tomography (CT) offers valuable clues to the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, little is known about the correlation between dynamic changes of CT scores and therapeutic response in the course of COVID-19. Objectives: To describe the temporal changes of CT findings and characterize the time window of disease progression on the follow-up CT scans of patients with COVID-19. Patients and Methods: In this historical cohort study performed in Shanghai, China, the follow-up chest CT images of 91 patients with COVID-19 with different therapeutic responses were reviewed in multiple centers, with an emphasis on characterizing the changing trend of CT scores for lung lesions at 13-15 days after the symptom onset and thereafter. The CT score curve patterns were categorized into type 1 (characterized by an increase to the peak level, followed by a decrease), type 2 (characterized by a steady change without an obvious peak), and type 3 (characterized by a progressive increase). Results: The CT scores of the progression group (n = 9) with a longer time to the peak were significantly higher than those of the non-progression group (n = 82) on the first day and days 13-15 (P < 0.05), except for the median CT scores before days 13-15. The CT curve type 1 and type 2 were commonly observed in the non-progression group (63.4% and 36.6%, respectively), while type 3 was more common in the progression group (88.9%). Conclusion: Most patients with COVID-19 show favorable responses to clinical treatments in Shanghai. Thirteen to fifteen days after the symptom onset can be considered as a turning point for the therapeutic response. The CT curve type 3 usually represents a poor response. The CT scores of patients with different therapeutic responses may overlap before days 13-15. The changing trend of longitudinal CT scores may contribute to the prediction of disease progression.

Establishment and validation of competitive ELISA for detecting blocking activity of monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2 RBD

Objective: To establish and verify a competitive ELISA method for the detection of blocking activity of monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2 RBD, and to compare the results by correlation analysis with that of live virus neutralization activity measured by the plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT). Methods: Using RBD-Fc as coating antigen, ACE2-His and anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD monoclonal antibodies were added to competitively bind to RBD. Anti-6×his antibody labeled with horseradish peroxidase was used as the secondary antibody. The competitive ELISA method detecting the ability of McAb to block the binding of RBD to ACE2 was established. The specificity, relative accuracy, precision, linearity and range of the method were verified. Seven monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 RBD were detected by this method. The results were compared with PRNT method, and correlation analysis was performed. Results: The blocking activity of the relevant anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD monoclonal antibody on RBD and ACE2 protein can be effectively detected using the established competitive ELISA method. The blocking ability of McAb was dose-dependent and conformed to the four-parameter equation. The samples with theoretical titers of 64%, 80%, 100%, 125% and 156% were determined for 10 times, and the relative bias was within ±20%. The logarithm (abscissa) of theoretical potency value was used for linear regression to the logarithm (ordinate) of the corresponding titer determination value. The regression equation was y=1.156x-0.021 3, in which the slope was between 0.8 and 1.25, meaning good relative accuracy. The geometric coefficient of variation (GCV%) of the relative titers of each titer level were 2.6%, 5.2%, 3.6%, 3.4% and 10.2%, respectively, all of which were less than 20% with good precision. The correlation coefficient of linear regression equation was 0.985, meeting the requirements. The relative accuracy, intermediate precision and linearity of the method all met the requirements of the titer level range was 64%~156%. The detection results of the blocking activity of the 7 RBD monoclonal antibodies showed good correlation with the results of the live virus neutralization activity measured by the PRNT method. Conclusion: A competitive ELISA method for the detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD monoclonal antibody has been successfully established. The method has satisfied specificity, accuracy, precision and linearity. The results had a good correlation with that by PRNT method. It can be used to indirectly evaluate the neutralizing activity of related SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies against the live viruses.

[Suggestions on reforming and improving the prevention and treatment system for major epidemic diseases in China].

Based on systematic review of the role of clinical treatment, disease control and scientific research, and combining with the problems exposed by the COVID-19 epidemic, suggestions were proposed to reform and improve the prevention and treatment system for major epidemics diseases in China. In clinical treatment, it is necessary to enhance clinical staff's awareness of law-based reporting, capabilities of syndromic surveillance, the use of infectious diseases reporting systems, and to improve national or local monitoring platforms for emerging infectious diseases detection. In terms of disease control, it is important to provide authorities to disease control departments through laws and regulations, improve the quantity and quality of related human resources, and strengthen the applied research and technical readiness targeted infections disease prevention, control and emergency preparedness. As for scientific research in major epidemic response, it is essential to strengthen research projects guided by national requests, build research institutions that can "make a final decision" , establish national and regional key laboratories, and strengthen strategic technical reserve for emergency disease control and treatment.