Hunting imaging biomarkers in pulmonary fibrosis: Benchmarks of the AIIB23 challenge (preprint)

Airway-related quantitative imaging biomarkers are crucial for examination, diagnosis, and prognosis in pulmonary diseases. However, the manual delineation of airway trees remains prohibitively time-consuming. While significant efforts have been made towards enhancing airway modelling, current public-available datasets concentrate on lung diseases with moderate morphological variations. The intricate honeycombing patterns present in the lung tissues of fibrotic lung disease patients exacerbate the challenges, often leading to various prediction errors. To address this issue, the 'Airway-Informed Quantitative CT Imaging Biomarker for Fibrotic Lung Disease 2023' (AIIB23) competition was organized in conjunction with the official 2023 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI). The airway structures were meticulously annotated by three experienced radiologists. Competitors were encouraged to develop automatic airway segmentation models with high robustness and generalization abilities, followed by exploring the most correlated QIB of mortality prediction. A training set of 120 high-resolution computerised tomography (HRCT) scans were publicly released with expert annotations and mortality status. The online validation set incorporated 52 HRCT scans from patients with fibrotic lung disease and the offline test set included 140 cases from fibrosis and COVID-19 patients. The results have shown that the capacity of extracting airway trees from patients with fibrotic lung disease could be enhanced by introducing voxel-wise weighted general union loss and continuity loss. In addition to the competitive image biomarkers for prognosis, a strong airway-derived biomarker (Hazard ratio>1.5, p<0.0001) was revealed for survival prognostication compared with existing clinical measurements, clinician assessment and AI-based biomarkers.

COVID-19 Full Lockdowns Expose Significant Air Quality Benefits Towards Electric Vehicles in China (preprint)

Electric vehicles (EVs) represent a major path for global decarbonization, improvement of air quality and promotion of renewable energy. To tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, China imposed full lockdowns and thorough travel restrictions. This event represents an unprecedented inadvertent geoengineering experiment in vehicle emissions, emulating transition to EVs. Here we novelly exploited observations of air quality during the full lockdown to constrain predictions of a comprehensive chemical transport model. Large traffic flux reductions were near-linearly linked to reductions of NO 2 and PM 2.5 (correlation = 0.491 ~ 0.626). Extrapolating to a full conversion to EV results in a large reduction of PM 2.5 (30 ~ 70%) in most of central and south eastern China. A smaller reduction of PM 2.5 (10 ~ 20%) in Beijing and Tianjin was achievable due to the presence of major industrial emission sources which cause haze at a regional scale. The potential reductions in NO 2 were 40 ~ 90% in most of the megacities. At this present crossroads of policy, our findings reveal timely evidence supporting the transition towards renewable energy.Funding: This study is supported by the Department of Science and Technology of China (No. 2016YFC0202702, 2018YFC0213506 and 2018YFC0213503), National Research Program for Key Issues in Air Pollution Control in China (No. DQGG0107) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21577126, 41561144004, 21625701). Pengfei Li is supported by Initiation Fund for Introducing Talents of Hebei Agricultural University (412201904) and Youth Top Fund of Universities in Hebei Province (BJ2020032). Conflict of Interest: Authors declare no competing interests.

A case of COVID - 19 with Imported Falciparum Malaria Infection is Reported (preprint)

Background During the COVID − 19 outbreak, limited medical resources in the short term and inadequate experience in dealing with major new public health events may lead to the neglect of some other infectious diseases, such as malaria, leading to the risk of the spread of infectious diseases.Therefore, it is particularly important to formulate classified guidance, take scientific prevention and control measures in a comprehensive manner, strengthen the screening of malaria patients and provide access to medical treatment during the outbreak.Methods Clinical records, laboratory results, and chest CT scans were retrospectively reviewed for a falciparum malaria infection patient with laboratory-confirmed COVID − 19 pneumonia .Results Patient's serum novel coronavirus antibody tested positive for IgG and weakly positive for IgM that were positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2],the blood samples were classified as plasmodium falciparum by RT-PCR.Conclusions The patient when workers infected with p. falciparum in Africa, malaria recurrence after back to China, after antimalarial treatment in tianmen city first people's hospital, after an outbreak in wuhan will be coronavirus, and symptoms of COVID − 19, but soon be cured patients, to explore the diagnosis and treatment of antimalarial drugs in COVID − 19 patients with the role, for further in-depth study of COVID − 19 treatment provides a good example.

Clinical characteristics analysis of 9 Cases COVID-19 patients receiving integrated Traditional Chinese and Western medicine: a retrospective study (preprint)

Background Recently, WHO has classified COVID-19 as a global pandemic disease, and it is still spreading rapidly around the world, but no specific medicine or vaccine for 2019-nCov has been developed so far. At present, the epidemic situation in China has been basically controlled. Methods Here we report 9 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the First People's Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, China. In addition to antiviral drug treatment and other supportive treatment, all of them received traditional Chinese medicine prescription according to the different conditions of each patient, and we collected the clinical data of the 9 patients and analyzed the outcome as a retrospective study. Results The curative effect is very significant, all the patients have been discharged from the hospital, and the shortest course of treatment is only 12 days. Conclusions Combined with the fact that other parts of China use Traditional Chinese Medicine, including Wuhan Cabin Hospital, we speculate that Chinese medicine plays an encouraging role in this process and may be an adjuvant therapy of COVID-19, which may bring some reference to the treatment of COVID-19 worldwide, in spite of the efficacy and definite conclusions still need further study.