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Background Although unhealthy alcohol use is associated with increased morbidity and mortality among people with HIV (PWH), many are ambivalent about engaging in treatment and experience variable responses to treatment. We describe the rationale, aims, and study design for the Financial Incentives, Randomization, with Stepped Treatment (FIRST) Trial, a multi-site randomized controlled efficacy trial. Methods PWH in care recruited from clinics across the United States who reported unhealthy alcohol use, had a phosphatidylethanol (PEth) >20 ng/mL, and were not engaged in formal alcohol treatment were randomized to integrated contingency management with stepped care versus treatment as usual. The intervention involved two steps;Step 1: Contingency management (n = 5 sessions) with potential rewards based on 1) short-term abstinence;2) longer-term abstinence;and 3) completion of healthy activities to promote progress in addressing alcohol consumption or conditions potentially impacted by alcohol;Step 2: Addiction physician management (n = 6 sessions) plus motivational enhancement therapy (n = 4 sessions). Participants' treatment was stepped up at week 12 if they lacked evidence of longer-term abstinence. Primary outcome was abstinence at week 24. Secondary outcomes included alcohol consumption (assessed by TLFB and PEth) and the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) Index 2.0 scores;exploratory outcomes included progress in addressing medical conditions potentially impacted by alcohol. Protocol adaptations due to the COVID-19 pandemic are described. Conclusions The FIRST Trial is anticipated to yield insights on the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of integrated contingency management with stepped care to address unhealthy alcohol use among PWH. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03089320.
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The Public Health Commission of Hubei Province, China, at the end of 2019reported cases of severe and unknown pneumonia, marked by fever, malaise, dry cough, dyspnea, and respiratory failure, that occurred in the urban area of Wuhan, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The lung infection, SARS-CoV-2, also known as COVID-19, was caused by a brand-new coronavirus (coronavirus disease 2019). Since then, infections have increased exponentially, and the WHO labeled the outbreak a worldwide emergency at the beginning of March 2020. Infected and asymptomatic individuals who can spread the virus are the main sources of it. The transmission occurs mainly by airthrough the air through the droplets, however indirect transmission is also possible, such as through contact with infected surfaces. It becomes essential to identify viral carriers as soon as possible in order to stop the spread of the disease and reduce morbidity and mortality. Imaging examinations, which are among the specific tests used to make the definite diagnosis, are crucial in the patient's management when COVID-19 is suspected. Numerous papers that use machine learning techniques discuss the use of X-ray chest radiographs as a component that aids in diagnosis and permits disease follow-up. The goal of this work is to supply the scientific community with information on the most widely used Machine Learning algorithms applied to chest X-ray images. © 2022 IEEE.
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The impact of the COVID pandemic has resulted in many people cultivating a remote working culture and increasing building energy use. A reduction in the energy use of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is necessary for decreasing the energy use in buildings. The refrigerant charge of a heat pump greatly affects its energy use. However, refrigerant leakage causes a significant increase in the energy use of HVAC systems. The development of refrigerant charge fault detection models is, therefore, important to prevent unwarranted energy consumption and CO2 emissions in heat pumps. This paper examines refrigerant charge faults and their effect on a variable speed heat pump and the most accurate method between a multiple linear regression and multilayer perceptron model to use in detecting the refrigerant charge fault using the discharge temperature of the compressor, outdoor entering water temperature and compressor speed as inputs, and refrigerant charge as the output. The COP of the heat pump decreased when it was not operating at the optimum refrigerant charge, while an increase in compressor speed compensated for the degradation in the capacity during refrigerant leakage. Furthermore, the multilayer perception was found to have a higher prediction accuracy of the refrigerant charge fault with a mean square error of ± 3.7%, while the multiple linear regression model had a mean square error of ± 4.5%. The study also found that the multilayer perception model requires 7 neurons in the hidden layer to make viable predictions on any subsequent test sets fed into it under similar experimental conditions and parameters of the heat pump used in this study.
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Background: COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. The symptoms of COVID-19 vary from mild-to-moderate respiratory illnesses, and it sometimes requires urgent medication. Therefore, it is crucial to detect COVID-19 at an early stage through specific clinical tests, testing kits, and medical devices. However, these tests are not always available during the time of the pandemic. Therefore, this study developed an automatic, intelligent, rapid, and real-time diagnostic model for the early detection of COVID-19 based on its symptoms. Methods: The COVID-19 knowledge graph (KG) constructed based on literature from heterogeneous data is imported to understand the COVID-19 different relations. We added human disease ontology to the COVID-19 KG and applied a node-embedding graph algorithm called fast random projection to extract an extra feature from the COVID-19 dataset. Subsequently, experiments were conducted using two machine learning (ML) pipelines to predict COVID-19 infection from its symptoms. Additionally, automatic tuning of the model hyperparameters was adopted. Results: We compared two graph-based ML models, logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF) models. The proposed graph-based RF model achieved a small error rate = 0.0064 and the best scores on all performance metrics, including specificity = 98.71%, accuracy = 99.36%, precision = 99.65%, recall = 99.53%, and F1-score = 99.59%. Furthermore, the Matthews correlation coefficient achieved by the RF model was higher than that of the LR model. Comparative analysis with other ML algorithms and with studies from the literature showed that the proposed RF model exhibited the best detection accuracy. Conclusion: The graph-based RF model registered high performance in classifying the symptoms of COVID-19 infection, thereby indicating that the graph data science, in conjunction with ML techniques, helps improve performance and accelerate innovations © Copyright 2023 Alqaissi et al.
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COVID-19 is a serious infection that cause severe injuries and deaths worldwide. The COVID-19 virus can infect people of all ages, especially the elderly. Furthermore, elderly who have co-morbid conditions (e.g., chronic conditions) are at an increased risk of death. At the present time, no approach exists that can facilitate the characterization of patterns of COVID-19 death. In this study, an approach to identify patterns of COVID-19 death efficiently and systematically is applied by adapting the Apriori algorithm. Validation and evaluation of the proposed approach are based on a robust and reliable dataset collected from Health Affairs in the Makkah region of Saudi Arabia. The study results show that there are strong associations between hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease and death among COVID-19 deceased patients © 2023, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications.All Rights Reserved.
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At present, the Covid-19 epidemic is still spreading globally. Although the domestic epidemic has been well controlled, the prevention and control of the epidemic must not be taken lightly. Being able to count the number of people in public places in real time has played a vital role in the prevention and control of the epidemic. Deep learning networks usually cannot be directly deployed on embedded devices with low computing power due to the huge amount of parameters of convolutional neural networks. This article is based on the YOLOv5 object detection algorithm and Jetson Nano embedded platform with TensorRT and C++ accelerating, it can realize the function of counting the number of people in the classroom, on the elevator entrance, and other scenes. © 2022 SPIE.
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During an emergency, timely and effective distribution of emergency supplies is critical in rescue. In the context of Covid-19, given the difficulties in distributing supplies to communities due to super infectious viruses, unmanned vehicle distribution is studied by taking into account the priority and satisfaction of communities to improve distribution safety and effectiveness of supplies. Furthermore, the influence of distribution time on the overall efficiency is also taken into account, thus ultimately establishing an unmanned distribution model with the shortest distribution time while meeting community satisfaction. The improved whale algorithm is used to solve the dual-objective model and compared with the basic whale optimization algorithm. The results show that the improved whale algorithm demonstrates better convergence, searchability, and stability. The constructed model can scientifically distribute daily necessities to communities while considering their priority and satisfaction. © 2022 IEEE.
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In order to enhance the ability to diagnose and distinguish COVID-19 from ordinary pneumonia, and to assist medical staff in chest X-ray detection of pneumonia patients, this paper proposes a COVID-19 X-ray image detection algorithm based on deep learning network. First of all, a model of deep learning network is set up based on VGG - 16, and then, the network structure and parameter optimization is adjusted, which makes the network model can be applied to COVID - 19 x ray imaging detection task. In the end, through adjusting the image size of the original data set, the input data meets the requirements of the deep learning network. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively learn the characteristics of the COVID-19 X-ray image data set and accurately detect three states of COVID-19, common viral pneumonia and non-pneumonia, with a very high detection accuracy of 95.8%. © 2023 SPIE.
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Supervised machine learning (SML) provides us with tools to efficiently scrutinize large corpora of communication texts. Yet, setting up such a tool involves plenty of decisions starting with the data needed for training, the selection of an algorithm, and the details of model training. We aim at establishing a firm link between communication research tasks and the corresponding state-of-the-art in natural language processing research by systematically comparing the performance of different automatic text analysis approaches. We do this for a challenging task – stance detection of opinions on policy measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany voiced on Twitter. Our results add evidence that pre-trained language models such as BERT outperform feature-based and other neural network approaches. Yet, the gains one can achieve differ greatly depending on the specific merits of pre-training (i.e., use of different language models). Adding to the robustness of our conclusions, we run a generalizability check with a different use case in terms of language and topic. Additionally, we illustrate how the amount and quality of training data affect model performance pointing to potential compensation effects. Based on our results, we derive important practical recommendations for setting up such SML tools to study communication texts.
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The practice of outpatient medicine in the 21st century has become fast-paced and challenging. The busy practitioner learns to make accurate decisions regarding diagnoses and treatments, individualizing them based on the patients' particular characteristics and desires. Patients typically present with more than one issue, spanning from wanting information about a vaccine to having symptoms of an acute and serious infectious disease, while also needing care of their chronic conditions. In order to function in a timely manner, the provider needs a reliable resource to aid in making efficient decisions. This text is designed to fulfill this purpose. Now fully revised and expanded, Handbook of Outpatient Medicine, 2e provides a quick, portable, algorithm-based guide to diagnosis and management of common problems seen in adult patients. Written by experienced primary care practitioners, this text emphasizes efficient decision-making necessary in the fast-paced realm of the medical office. It covers general considerations such as the physical examination, care of special populations, and pain management and palliative care. It also focuses on common symptoms and disorders by system, including endocrine, respiratory, cardiac, orthopedic, neurologic, genitourinary, and gynecologic. For each disorder, symptoms, red flags, algorithms for differential diagnosis, related symptoms and findings, laboratory workup, treatment guidelines, and clinical pearls are discussed. One of the major updates in this edition is a chapter dedicated to COVID-19. This chapter focuses on COVID-19 diagnosis, care and sequelae, including what to do after discharge from the hospital. Since the global pandemic has affected medicine as a whole, many of the chapters also discuss COVID-19 as a differential diagnosis. Newer and higher quality photos have also been added in several chapters to help illustrate techniques more efficiently, including new imaging modalities for chest pain. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018, 2022.
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With the development of medical technology, the diagnosis of lung diseases relies more on the determination of medical images. With increasingly huge data, a powerful data processing model is urgently needed to provide favorable support for this field. The goal of this study is to develop a computer-assisted method to identify COVID-19 from X-ray pictures of the lungs at the very beginning of the disease. The architecture is implemented as a software system on a computer that can assist in the affordable and accurate early identification of cardiac illness. The performance of CNN architecture is best among all other classification algorithms to detect COVID-9 from Lung X-ray images. The datasets consist of COVID-19 established cases for 4 weeks which included the X-ray images of the chest. Then the distribution of the data was examined according to the statistical distribution. For this prediction, time series models are used for forecasting the pandemic situation. The performances of the methods were compared according to the MSE metric and it was seen that the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieved the optimal trend pattern.
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Objective: To develop and validate the content of two algorithms to guide frontline professionals in the prevention and treatment of pressure injuries in COVID-19 patients in prone position. Methods: Study conducted between September and November 2021. A literature review was performed in MEDLINE®, SciELO and Lilacs databases to build the algorithms. Articles published between 2011 and 2021 were searched. The validation of algorithms was performed by 59 health professionals (nurses, physical therapists and physicians) who worked on the frontline of COVID-19. The Delphi technique was used, and Content Validity Index and Cronbach's alpha coefficient were adopted for data analysis. Results: In the first evaluation cycle, the items of algorithms were considered as "partially adequate to totally adequate” by the judges, and the Content Validity Index ranged between 0.87 and 0.92. Cronbach's alpha coefficient ranged between 0.95 and 0.96, indicating excellent internal consistency of the evaluation questionnaire used by the judges. After implementing the adjustments suggested by judges, the algorithms were sent to a second evaluation cycle, in which all items were judged as "adequate” and "totally adequate”, resulting in a Content Validity Index of 1.0. Conclusion: Algorithms to guide healthcare professionals in the prevention and treatment of pressure injury in COVID-19 patients in prone position were evaluated by nurses, physical therapists and physicians working on the frontline of COVID-19. They achieved consensus on content in the second evaluation cycle. © 2023 Departamento de Enfermagem/Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo. All rights reserved.
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Rabies is an ancient disease. Two centuries since Pasteur, fundamental progress occurred in virology, vaccinology, and diagnostics—and an understanding of pathobiology and epizootiology of rabies in testament to One Health—before common terminological coinage. Prevention, control, selective elimination, and even the unthinkable—occasional treatment—of this zoonosis dawned by the twenty-first century. However, in contrast to smallpox and rinderpest, eradication is a wishful misnomer applied to rabies, particularly post-COVID-19 pandemic. Reasons are minion. Polyhostality encompasses bats and mesocarnivores, but other mammals represent a diverse spectrum of potential hosts. While rabies virus is the classical member of the genus, other species of lyssaviruses also cause the disease. Some reservoirs remain cryptic. Although global, this viral encephalitis is untreatable and often ignored. As with other neglected diseases, laboratory-based surveillance falls short of the notifiable ideal, especially in lower- and middle-income countries. Calculation of actual burden defaults to a flux within broad health economic models. Competing priorities, lack of defined, long-term international donors, and shrinking local champions challenge human prophylaxis and mass dog vaccination toward targets of 2030 for even canine rabies impacts. For prevention, all licensed vaccines are delivered to the individual, whether parenteral or oral–essentially ‘one and done'. Exploiting mammalian social behaviors, future ‘spreadable vaccines' might increase the proportion of immunized hosts per unit effort. However, the release of replication-competent, genetically modified organisms selectively engineered to spread intentionally throughout a population raises significant biological, ethical, and regulatory issues in need of broader, transdisciplinary discourse. How this rather curious idea will evolve toward actual unconventional prevention, control, or elimination in the near term remains debatable. In the interim, more precise terminology and realistic expectations serve as the norm for diverse, collective constituents to maintain progress in the field.
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Lung segmentation is a process of detection and identification of lung cancer and pneumonia with the help of image processing techniques. Deep learning algorithms can be incorporated to build the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for detecting or recognizing broad objects like acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, Lung cancer, Covid, and several other respiratory diseases. This paper presents pneumonia detection from lung segmentation using deep learning methods on chest radiography. Chest X-ray is the most useful technique among other existing techniques, due to its lesser cost. The main drawback of a chest x-ray is that it cannot detect all problems in the chest. Thus, implementing convolutional neural networks (CNN) to perform lung segmentation and to obtain correct results. The 'lost' regions of the lungs are reconstructed by an automatic segmentation method from raw images of chest X-ray. © 2022 IEEE.
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Simulating the behavior of a human heart, predicting tomorrow's weather, optimizing the aerodynamics of a sailboat, finding the ideal cooking time for a hamburger: to solve these problems, cardiologists, meteorologists, sportsmen, and engineers can count on math help. This book will lead you to the discovery of a magical world, made up of equations, in which a huge variety of important problems for our life can find useful answers. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.
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Covid-19 has shown us the importance of mathematical and statistical models to interpret reality, provide forecasts, and explore future scenarios. Algorithms, artificial neural networks, and machine learning help us discover the opportunities and pitfalls of a world governed by mathematics and artificial intelligence. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.
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COVID 19 is constantly changing properties because of its contagious as an urgent global challenge, and there are no vaccines or effective drugs. Smart model used to measure and prevent the spread of COVID 19 continues to provide health care services is an urgent need. Previous methods to identify severe symptoms of coronavirus in the early stages, but they have failed to predict the symptoms of coronavirus in an accurate way and also take more time. To overcome these issues the effective severe coronavirus symptoms techniques are proposed. Initially, Gradient Conventional Recursive Neural Classifier based classification and Linear Discriminant Genetic Algorithm used feature selection, mutation, and cross-analysis of features of coronary symptoms. These methods are used to select optimized features and selected features, and then classified by neural network. This Gradient Conventional Recursive Neural Classifier selects features based on the correlation between features that reduce irrelevant features involved in the identification process of coronary symptoms. Gradient Conventional Recursive Neural Classifier based on each function, helping to maximize the correlation between the prediction accuracy of coronavirus symptoms. For this reason, it has always been recommended in an effort to increase the accuracy and reliability of diagnostics to use machine learning to design different classification models. © 2023 IEEE.
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The epidemic caused by a new mutation of the coronavirus family called Covid-19 has created a global crisis involving all the world's countries. This disease has become a severe danger to everyone due to its unknown nature, high spread, and inability to detect the infected. In this regard, one of the important issues facing patients with Covid-19 is the prescription of Drugs according to the severity of the disease and considering the records of underlying diseases in people. In recent years, recommender systems have been developed significantly along with the advancement in information technology and artificial intelligence, which is one of its applications in various fields of medical sciences. Among them, we can refer to recommending systems for the prevention, control, and treatment of diseases. In this research, using the collaborative filtering approach as one of the types of recommender systems as well as the K-means clustering algorithm, a Drug recommendation system for patients with Covid-19 in the treatment stage of the disease is presented. The results of this research show that this recommender system has an acceptable performance based on the evaluation criteria of precision, recall, and F1-score compared to the opinions of experts in this field. © 2023 IEEE.
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Image classification and segmentation techniques are still very popular in the medical field (for healthcare), in which the medical image plays an important role in the detection and screening of diseases. Recently, the spread of new viral diseases, namely Covid-19, requires powerful computer models and rich resources (datasets) to fight this phenomenon. In this study, we propose to examine the CNN Deep Learning algorithm and two Transfer Learning models, namely RestNet50 and MobileNetV2 using the pretrained model of the ImageNet database, experimented on the new dataset (COVID-QU-Ex Dataset 2022) offered by the University of Qatar. These models are tested to classify radiography images into two classes (Covid19 and Normal). The results achieved by CNN (Acc =95.97%), ResNet50 (Acc =95.53%) and MobileNetV2 (Acc =97.32%) show that these algorithms are promising in order to combat this Covid-19 disease by detecting it through thoracic images (Chest X-ray type). © 2023 IEEE.
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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for distance learning has significantly increased in higher education institutions. This type of learning is usually supported by Web-based learning systems such as Massive Open Online Courses (Coursera, edX, etc.) and Learning Management Systems (Moodle, Blackboard-Learn, etc.). However, in this remote context, students often lack feedback and support from educational staff, especially when they face difficulties or challenges. For that reason, this work presents a Prediction-Intervention approach that (a) predicts students who present difficulties during an online learning course, based on two main learning indicators, namely engagement and performance rates, and (b) offers immediate support to students, tailored to the problem they are facing. To predict students' issues, our approach considers ten machine learning algorithms of different types (standalone, ensemble, and deep learning) which are compared to determine the best performing ones. It has been experimented with a dataset collected from the Blackboard-Learn platform utilized in an engineering school called ESIEE-IT in France during 2021-2022 academic year, showing thus quite promising results. © 2022 IEEE.