Research on the classification of CT images of COVID-19 by pre-training model based on self-attention mechanism

Nowadays, with the outbreak of COVID-19, the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 has gradually become the focus of social disease prevention, and most patients are also more concerned about the symptoms. COVID-19 has symptoms similar to the common cold, and it cannot be diagnosed based on the symptoms shown by the patient, so it is necessary to observe medical images of the lungs to finally determine whether they are COVID-19 positive. As the number of patients with symptoms similar to pneumonia increases, more and more medical images of the lungs need to be generated. At the same time, the number of physicians at this stage is far from meeting the needs of patients, resulting in patients unable to detect and understand their own conditions in time. In this regard, we have performed image augmentation, data cleaning, and designed a deep learning classification network based on the data set of COVID-19 lung medical images. accurate classification judgment. The network can achieve 95.76% classification accuracy for this task through a new fine-tuning method and hyperparameter tuning we designed, which has higher accuracy and less training time than the classic convolutional neural network model. © 2023 SPIE.

Application and mechanism of histamine receptor antagonists in treatment of coronavirus disease 2019: research progress.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic. It is urgent to find treatments to control the infection and improve symptoms. Homologous modeling and clinical analyses suggest that histamine receptor antagonists have broad prospects in the treatment of COVID-19. This article introduces the research progress of histamine H1 receptor antagonist combined with azithromycin, histamine H2 receptor antagonist famotidine alone or combined with aspirin, and histamine H1 and H2 receptor antagonists used in combination in the treatment of COVID-19. Finally, the possible mechanism of histamine receptor antagonists in the treatment of COVID-19 was introduced and the application prospect of histamine receptor antagonists in the treatment of COVID-19 was analyzed.Copyright © 2022, Second Military Medical University Press. All rights reserved.

Exploring the Innovation of Assessment in Higher Education Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Postgraduate Programs at Lingnan University, Hong Kong

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has brought tremendous challenges to higher education teaching and learning. Much attention has been put on online course construction and delivery to ensure the effectiveness of online learning. However, higher education assessment deserves more attention as it is also significantly impacted by the sudden switch from face-to-face to online. To examine how higher education institutions responded to the challenges in higher education assessment during the pandemic, this chapter conducted a case study of postgraduate programs at Lingnan University (LU) in Hong Kong to explore an appropriate assessment framework for online learning in a liberal arts education context. Through a quantitative approach, this study surveyed taught postgraduate students to explore the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the assessment approaches applied by LU faculty members in the online and hybrid-mode classes. This case study aims to provide insights for improving higher education assessment under the pandemic crisis. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Myocardium damage and electrocardiogram characteristics of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Zhuhai

Aim To explore the myocardial damage, abnormal electrocardiogram characteristics of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Zhuhai. Methods 84 patients with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (Omicron variant group) admitted to the Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University from January 13 to March 20, 2022 were included, and 88 patients with non SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (non-Omicron variant group) from January 17 to February 17, 2020 were included. A retrospective study was conducted to compare myocardial damage, abnormal electrocardiogram and clinical characteristics between the two groups. Results The mean age of patients in Omicron variant group was smaller than that in non-Omicron variant group [(36. 6±15. 6) years vs. (49. 8±14. 3) years, P<0. 01], and the proportion of patients with body temperature, systolic blood pressure and fever at admission was lower than that of non-Omicron variant group (P<0. 05). The neutrophil / lymphocyte ratio [(2. 93 (3. 03, 5. 81) vs. 7. 06 (2. 32, 11. 27), P<0. 001], interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels in Omicron variant group were significantly lower than those in non-Omicron variant group (P<0. 01). Cardiac troponin I (cTnI) was negative in Omicron variant group, and the concentrations of cTnI, creatine kinase-MB isozyme (CK-MB) and N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proB-NP) and the proportion of patients with elevated levels were significantly lower than those of non-Omicron variant group (P<0. 01). The incidence of abnormal electrocardiogram in Omicron variant group was also significantly lower than that in non-Omicron variant group (25. 0% vs. 42. 0%, P = 0. 001), sinus tachycardia, atrial premature beats and T wave changes were the main symptoms. Atrial premature beats, T wave changes, ST segment depression and bundle branch block were the main symptoms in non-Omicron variant group. Conclusions The patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Zhuhai may not have obvious myocardial damage because most of the patients have been vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccine. The incidence of abnormal electrocardiogram is also significantly lower than that of non-Omicron variant group, mainly sinus tachycardia, atrial premature beats and T wave changes. © 2022, Editorial Office of Chinese Journal of Arteriosclerosis. All rights reserved.

Research and Practice of 'Trinity' Construction of Emerging Engineering Big Data Course Teaching Quality Assurance System during the Epidemic

The pandemic of the COVID-19, has brought a great impact to the education and teaching, so the teaching can only be carried out online, in order to ensure the monitoring and management of teaching quality during teaching. This project import the latest information intelligent teaching system, multi-directional to ensure the monitoring and control of teaching quality, the deep integration of 'Rain Classroom' technology and teaching in this project, So that the interaction information between teachers and students can be recorded in real time during the online teaching, and organized, analyzed, stored also;Import the online teaching platform, collected the students records that finished homework during the epidemic;Import the online virtual experiment platform, online to finished the remote experimental operation of students. Thus, the trinity builds a three-dimensional teaching quality assurance system to escort high-quality big data course teaching during the epidemic. © 2023 IEEE.

Insisting with mask or demanding for more: Plights of the transmission of airborne diseases

Airborne transmission is worldwide popular topic with numerous discussion and researches since influenza pandemic could cost the global economy a lot. In this part of research, we mainly focus on the mechanisms of airborne transmission, together with some determinant factors that influence the spread of aerosols like temperature, humidity and particle size. Finally with several existed cases, insisting masks wearing, especially with three-layer masks wearing are necessary in nowadays for efficiently preventing the transmission of airborne diseases up to 90%. Other possible infection control measures like 2m social distancing are also needed as hygiene measures. © 2023 SPIE.

Topology and evolution of international trade network for fish and fish products

In this study, a complex network method was employed to quantify the changing role of countries in fish trade and the dynamic characteristics of fish globalization. Based on the United Nations Comtrade Database, the International Trade Network for Fish and Fish Products (ITN-Fish) was constructed as a series of weighted-directed networks for each year from 1990 to 2018. Almost all countries and territories worldwide have participated in the fish trade. In 2018, the network identified 229 fish traders. The share of developing countries in imports and exports has increased. Traders actively establish new trade relations, which improve network connectivity. However, these relations only account for a small part of the fish trade. The high connectivity allows risks to spread rapidly in the world through hubs such as the United States and China, which raises concerns about the robustness of these weak links in the Sino-US trade conflict and the outbreak of COVID-19. However, we have optimistic expectations on this issue. The dynamic of network topology property shows that the globalization of fish trade flourished between 1990 and 2018. Although, due to the financial crisis and its subsequent impact, the total amount of fish trade declined in 2009 and 2015, the network structure was not seriously affected, and the trend of topology property remained unchanged. Based on the construction of the international trade network, its node attribute, and its structural attribute, fish trade maintains the trend of globalization. Countries should actively adhere to trade globalization to promote the development of the fish trade.

Technology growth in the digital age: Evidence from China

Based on a broad definition of the digital economy, this study constructs a digital technology capital measure-ment framework and measures China's digital technology capital services from 2002 to 2018 to illustrate the growth of digital technology. In addition, the relationship between digital technology and economic growth is examined using the growth accounting method and econometric panel models from the perspective of the substitution and penetration effects of information and communication technologies. The measurement results show that China's digital technology capital services grew faster than non-digital ones from 2002 to 2018. In terms of the substitution effect, the contribution of traditional capital to economic growth is diminishing, whereas digital technology capital's contribution is expanding. Regarding the penetration effect, the contribution of digital technology capital to labor productivity is gradually overtaking that of traditional capital, with the impact varying by sector. These results may provide developing countries with a strategy to seek new devel-opment drivers and sustain economic growth in the post-pandemic era.

Stability Extension of Food Culture Space: A Case Study of Consumer Space Practice Before and After COVID-19 Epidemic in Wuhan Food Markets

In the post-epidemic era, the trend of digital transformation on consumer services has promoted the fresh industry model upgrade and changed the food market space, and then given rise to diversified life demands. As the significant frontier for the spread of COVID-19 in China, the Wuhan food market is a microcosm of the changes in China's urban space, which is worth pondering. This study interpreted consumers' perception and identity in the food market from the perspective of consumer behavior and explained the connotation development of urban consumer service spatially, taking Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China as the case. The results showed that COVID-19 affected consumers' perception and emotional attitudes toward space, through the direct action on those behaviors and wishes, and reconstructed the spatial identity of Wuhan food markets in the post-epidemic era. In this era, consumers' perception of the food market was being more multi-dimensional and optimistic. They showed less sensitivity to the authenticity of traditional farmers' markets, while more interest in new retail spaces featured with leisure and sociality, such as fresh supermarkets and hypermarkets. They also emphasized more group space identity of small-scale community-level markets. From the Chinese case to the global perspective, this study proposed that the development of urban consumer services in the post-epidemic era was diversified and changeable, while the authenticity and stability of local food culture provided a flexible and extended space for such changes. The results and conclusions of this study will help to identify the Chinese characteristics and trends of consumer behavior in the post-epidemic era and provide a reference for the quality of living and the planning of urban spatial development, and provide China's case for global economic and social recovery after this epidemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

DENGUE PROGNOSTIC BIOMARKERS PREDICT DENGUE HAEMORRHAGIC FEVER WITH HIGH SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY

Ninety-six million people are symptomatically infected with Dengue globally every year. Under the current standard-of-care, up to 20% of Dengue patients may be hospitalized, while only 500,000 develop Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever (DHF) and require hospitalization. This leads to unnecessary overwhelming of hospitals in tropical countries during large Dengue epidemics, especially when healthcare systems are grappling with large numbers of COVID-19 patients. Our research team set out to discover biomarkers to prognosticate Dengue patients, and augment the infectious disease clinician's decision-making process to hospitalize Dengue patients. Host biomarkers with concentrations significantly different between pooled serum samples of Dengue Fever (DF) patients and DHF patients were identified using protein array. The prognostication capabilities of selected biomarkers were then validated over 283 adult Dengue patients recruited from three Singapore tertiary hospitals, prior to the diagnosis of DHF. Three biomarkers (A2M, CMA1 and VEGFA) were identified that provide independent prognostication value from one another, and from clinical parameters commonly monitored in Dengue patients. The combination of all three biomarkers was able to identify from as early as Day 1 after the onset of fever, DF patients whose conditions will deteriorate into DHF. The biomarkers are robust and able to predict DHF well when trained on different AI/ML algorithms (logistic regression, support vector machine, decision tree, random forest, AdaBoost and gradient boosting). When stacked, prediction models based on the biomarkers were able to predict DHF with 97.3% sensitivity, 92.7% specificity, 66.7% PPV, 99.6% NPV and an AUC of 0.978. To the best of our knowledge, our panel of three biomarkers offers the highest accuracy in prognosticating Dengue to date. Further studies are required to validate the biomarkers in different geographical settings and pilot their implementation as part of the standard-of-care workflow for Dengue patients. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Infectious Diseases is the property of Elsevier B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Application and mechanism of histamine receptor antagonists in treatment of coronavirus disease 2019: research progress

[ ] The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic. It is urgent to find treatments to control the infection and improve symptoms. Homologous modeling and clinical analyses suggest that histamine receptor antagonists have broad prospects in the treatment of COVID-19. This article introduces the research progress of histamine H1 receptor antagonist combined with azithromycin, histamine H2 receptor antagonist famotidine alone or combined with aspirin, and histamine H1 and H2 receptor antagonists used in combination in the treatment of COVID-19. Finally, the possible mechanism of histamine receptor antagonists in the treatment of COVID-19 was introduced and the application prospect of histamine receptor antagonists in the treatment of COVID-19 was analyzed.Copyright © 2022, Second Military Medical University Press. All rights reserved.

Privacy-Preserving Fast Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement for IoT-Based E-Health Systems

Electronic healthcare (e-health) systems have received renewed interest, particularly in the current COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., lockdowns and changes in hospital policies due to the pandemic). However, ensuring security of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit remains challenging to achieve, particularly since data is collected and sent from less insecure devices (e.g., patients' wearable or home devices). While there have been a number of authentication schemes, such as those based on three-factor authentication, to provide authentication and privacy protection, a number of limitations associated with these schemes remain (e.g., (in)security or computationally expensive). In this study, we present a privacy-preserving three-factor authenticated key agreement scheme that is sufficiently lightweight for resource-constrained e-health systems. The proposed scheme enables both mutual authentication and session key negotiation in addition to privacy protection, with minimal computational cost. The security of the proposed scheme is demonstrated in the Real-or-Random model. Experiments using Raspberry Pi show that the proposed scheme achieves reduced computational cost (of up to 89.9% in comparison to three other related schemes).

Digital entrepreneurial intentions and actions in China during the COVID-19 pandemic with policy implications

Despite the rapid development of digital start-ups and market expansion in China, there have been challenges for developing digital business in recent years. Unique economic, institutional, and social factors, as well as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, influence the digital entrepreneurs and their businesses. Yet, the literature on the changing digital entrepreneurial behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic remains limited. The intentions and behaviours of these entrepreneurs in relation to their digital start-ups and the impact caused by exogenous changes require deeper investigation. By adopting an intention-based social cognitive perspective, this study examines the factors influencing digital entrepreneurs' intentions and actions in managing their start-ups. We also present a holistic framework with regard to the changing entrepreneurial behaviour and policy implications for the development of digital start-ups.

COVID-19 Detection via Fusion of Modulation Spectrum and Linear Prediction Speech Features

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has drastically impacted life around the globe. As life returns to pre-pandemic routines, COVID-19 testing has become a key component, assuring that travellers and citizens are free from the disease. Conventional tests can be expensive, time-consuming (results can take up to 48h), and require laboratory testing. Rapid antigen testing, in turn, can generate results within 15-30 minutes and can be done at home, but research shows they achieve very poor sensitivity rates. In this paper, we propose an alternative test based on speech signals recorded at home with a portable device. It has been well-documented that the virus affects many of the speech production systems (e.g., lungs, larynx, and articulators). As such, we propose the use of new modulation spectral features and linear prediction analysis to characterize these changes and design a two-stage COVID-19 prediction system by fusing the proposed features. Experiments with three COVID-19 speech datasets (CSS, DiCOVA2, and Cambridge subset) show that the two-stage feature fusion system outperforms the benchmark systems of CSS and Cambridge datasets while maintaining lower complexity compared to DL-based systems. Furthermore, the two-stage system demonstrates higher generalizability to unseen conditions in a cross-dataset testing evaluation scheme. The generalizability and interpretability of our proposed system demonstrate the potential for accessible, low-cost, at-home COVID-19 testing. IEEE

Antiviral agents for COVID-19.

In December 2019, the endemic of COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China. The disease is highly contagious and quickly spreads at home and abroad, causing great concern. However, there are no definite effective antiviral drugs in clinical use. Given the urgency of the COVID-19 outbreak, based on the diagnosis and treatment recommendation and relavant researches, this article describes the optional antiviral drugs such as remdesivir, oseltamivir, arbidol, lopinavir/ritonavir, ribavirin, and interferon-alpha to provide a reference for treatment of COVID-19.Copyright © 2020 by the Chinese Medical Association.

Dynamics and application of a generalized SIQR epidemic model with vaccination and treatment

In this paper, we propose and investigate the SIQR epidemic model with a generalized incidence rate function, a general treatment function and vaccination term. We firstly consider the existence and uniqueness of the global nonnegative solution to the deterministic model. Further, we show the locally asymptotic stability of the disease-free equilibrium and endemic equilibrium of the deterministic model, and obtain the basic reproduction number R0. Then we study the existence and uniqueness of the global positive solution to the stochastic model with any positive initial value. Meanwhile, we obtain sufficient conditions for the extinction of the disease in the stochastic epidemic model, and find that the large noise can make the disease die out exponentially. Finally, we make an empirical analysis by the COVID-19 data of Russia and Serbia. By the performance comparison of different models, it shows that the model with vaccination and treatment we proposed is better for the real situation, which is also verified by different estimation methods. Especially, that shows the recovery rate of the infected increases by 0.042 and the death rate of the recovered is 1.525 times that of normal human in Russia. Through statistical analysis, the short-term trend of epidemic transmission is predicted: under the condition of unchanged prevention and control policies, it may reach a stable endemic equilibrium state in Russia and the epidemic will eventually extinct in Serbia. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Membrane Glycoprotein on Host Pre-mRNA 3' Processing

Objective To investigate the effect of SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein on the processing of the 3' untranslated region (UTR) of the mRNA precursor (pre-mRNA) in host cells. Methods Based on the cell model of human lung epithelial cells A549, over-expression of the SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein was performed. The RNA-Seq high-throughput sequencing technique and bioinformatics methods was employed to analyze the systematic characterization of alternative polyadenylation (APA) events in host cells. Genes with significant APA events were uploaded to the Metascape database for functional enrichment analysis. In addition, alternative 3'UTR length of genes with APA events was verified by RT-qPCR. Then the target protein expression level was detected by Western blot. Results A total of 813 genes that were significant dynamic APA events in host cells that over-expressed SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein. These genes were enriched in cell biologicial processes such as the mitotic cell cycle and regulation of cellular response to stress. We further screened AKT1, which encodes a critical regulator involved in the above biological process, showing a 3'UTR lengthening in IGV software. RT-qPCR verified the trend of 3'UTR length changes of AKT1. Western blot showed the increased level of phosphorylated AKT1 protein in over-expressed group of M protein. Conclusion SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein potentially affects the 3' processing of host pre-mRNAs. AKT1, which is involved in a variety of viral biological processes, with 3'UTR lengthening, and its protein function was activated intracellularly. © 2022 Institute of Biophysics,Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.