Explainable Augmented Intelligence and Deep Transfer Learning for Pediatric Pulmonary Health Evaluation

Biomedical Instrumentation is one of the fastest health emerging innovative technologies with proven contribution towards interdisciplinary medicine, it helps physicians to diagnose complex medical problems and provide treatment to patients precisely and safely. With this technological trend, explainable artificial intelligence, biomedical image processing and augmented intelligence can provide a tool that can help pediatricians, pulmonology and otolaryngology physicians, epidemiologists and pediatric practitioners to interpretably and reliably diagnose chronic and acute respiratory disorders in children, adolescents and infants. Unfortunately, the reliability of digital image processing for pulmonary disease diagnosis often depends on availability of large chest X-ray image datasets. This work presents a reliable interpretable deep transfer learning approach for pediatric pulmonary health evaluation regardless of the scarcity and limited annotated pediatric chest X-ray Image dataset sizes. This approach leverages a combination of computer vision tools and techniques to reduce child morbidity and mortality through predictive and preventive medicine with reduced surveillance risks and affordability in low resource settings. With open datasets, the deep neural networks classified the generated augmented images into 4 classes namely;Normal, Covid-19, Tuberculosis and Pneumonia at an accuracy of 97%, 97%, 70%, and 73% respectively with recall of 100% for Pneumonia and overall accuracy of 79% at only 10 epochs for both regular and transferred learning. © 2022 IEEE.

Innovating and adapting in pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic: ATS pediatric assembly web committee consensus statement for initial COVID-19 virtual response.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been an unprecedented and continuously evolving healthcare crisis. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread rapidly and initially little was known about the virus or the clinical course for infected children. In the United States of America, the medical response has been regionalized, based on variation in community transmission of the virus and localized outbreaks. Pediatric pulmonary and sleep divisions evolved in response to administrative and clinical challenges. As the workforce transitioned to working remotely, video conferencing technology and multicenter collaborative efforts were implemented to create clinical protocols. The COVID-19 pandemic challenges the framework of current medical practice but also highlights the dynamic and cooperative nature of pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine. Our response to this pandemic has laid the groundwork for future challenges.

Approach to childhood asthma in the era of COVID-19: The official statement endorsed by the Saudi Pediatric Pulmonology Association (SPPA).

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that infect humans, which may result in mild symptoms similar to those of the common cold. COVID-19 is most recent subtype similar or even worse than the two previous pandemic strains which were the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The first cases of COVID-19 emerged in December 2019. Since then, the virus causing the disease has infected more than four million people around the globe and led to hundreds of thousands deaths. We think addressing the management of asthma in the era of this pandemic is important for several reasons: high prevalence of asthma in Saudi Arabia, further, majorities were uncontrolled disease. The statement will provide special instructions and answers to common questions of physicians dealing with asthmatic children during this pandemic.

Brief report: International perspectives on the pediatric COVID-19 experience.

The 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is endangering human health worldwide; scarcity of published pediatric cases and current literature and the absence of evidence-based guidelines necessitate international sharing of experience and personal communication. On 31 March 2020 the International Committee of the American Thoracic Society Pediatrics Assembly recorded an online podcast, during which pediatric pulmonologists worldwide shared their experience on the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in children. The aim was to share personal experience in organizing pediatric care in different health care settings globally, protecting health care workers, and isolation practices. This manuscript summarizes the common themes of the podcast which centered around three main topics: more benign clinical disease and progression in pediatric cases compared to adults, a strong need for strategies to protect health care workers, and social or economic disparities as a barrier to successful pandemic control.