• Barlow Charles posted an update 5 hours, 44 minutes ago

    Unlike well-established diseases that base clinical care on randomized trials, past experiences, and training, prognosis in COVID19 relies on a weaker foundation. Knowledge from other respiratory failure diseases may inform clinical decisions in this novel disease. The objective was to predict 48-hour invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) within 48h in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 using COVID-like diseases (CLD).

    This retrospective multicenter study trained machine learning (ML) models on patients hospitalized with CLD to predict IMV within 48h in COVID-19 patients. CLD patients were identified using diagnosis codes for bacterial pneumonia, viral pneumonia, influenza, unspecified pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), 2008-2019. A total of 16 cohorts were constructed, including any combinations of the four diseases plus an exploratory ARDS cohort, to determine the most appropriate cohort to use. Candidate predictors included demographic and clinical parameters that were previousl COVID-19 are often overlooked in clinical practice. Lessons learned from our approach may assist other research institutes seeking to build artificial intelligence technologies for novel or rare diseases with limited data for training and validation.The importance of automating the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) towards facilitating its early prediction has long been emphasized, hampered in part by lack of empirical support. Given the evident association of AD with age and the increasing aging population owing to the general well-being of individuals, there have been unprecedented estimated economic complications. Consequently, many recent studies have attempted to employ the language deficiency caused by cognitive decline in automating the diagnostic task via training machine learning (ML) algorithms with linguistic patterns and deficits. In this study, we aim to develop multiple heterogeneous stacked fusion models that harness the advantages of several base learning algorithms to improve the overall generalizability and robustness of AD diagnostic ML models, where we parallelly utilized two different written and spoken-based datasets to train our stacked fusion models. Further, we examined the effect of linking these two datasets to develop a hybrd performance and enhanced generalizability of such fusion models over single classifiers, this study suggests replacing the initial traditional screening test with such models that can be embedded into an online format for a fully automated remote diagnosis.Recognition of biomedical entities from literature is a challenging research focus, which is the foundation for extracting a large amount of biomedical knowledge existing in unstructured texts into structured formats. find more Using the sequence labeling framework to implement biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) is currently a conventional method. This method, however, often cannot take full advantage of the semantic information in the dataset, and the performance is not always satisfactory. In this work, instead of treating the BioNER task as a sequence labeling problem, we formulate it as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem. This formulation can introduce more prior knowledge utilizing well-designed queries, and no longer need decoding processes such as conditional random fields (CRF). We conduct experiments on six BioNER datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the BC4CHEMD, BC5CDR-Chem, BC5CDR-Disease, NCBI-Disease, BC2GM and JNLPBA datasets, achieving F1-scores of 92.92%, 94.19%, 87.83%, 90.04%, 85.48% and 78.93%, respectively.Understanding the molecular mechanism of COVID-19 pathogenesis helps in the rapid therapeutic target identification. Usually, viral protein targets host proteins in an organized fashion. The expression of any viral gene depends mostly on the host translational machinery. Recent studies report the great significance of codon usage biases in establishing host-viral protein-protein interactions (PPI). Exploring the codon usage patterns between a pair of co-evolved host and viral proteins may present novel insight into the host-viral protein interactomes during disease pathogenesis. Leveraging the similarity in codon usage patterns, we propose a computational scheme to recreate the host-viral protein-protein interaction network. We use host proteins from seventeen (17) essential signaling pathways for our current work towards understanding the possible targeting mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 proteins. We infer both negatively and positively interacting edges in the network. Further, extensive analysis is performed to understand the host PPI network topologically and the attacking behavior of the viral proteins. Our study reveals that viral proteins mostly utilize codons, rare in the targeted host proteins (negatively correlated interaction). Among them, non-structural proteins, NSP3 and structural protein, Spike (S), are the most influential proteins in interacting with multiple host proteins. While ranking the most affected pathways, MAPK pathways observe to be the worst affected during the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Several proteins participating in multiple pathways are highly central in host PPI and mostly targeted by multiple viral proteins. We observe many potential targets (host proteins) from the affected pathways associated with the various drug molecules, including Arsenic trioxide, Dexamethasone, Hydroxychloroquine, Ritonavir, and Interferon beta, which are either under clinical trial or in use during COVID-19.

    As the potential spread of COVID-19 sparked by imported cases from overseas will pose continuous challenges, it is essential to estimate the effects of control measures on reducing the importation risk of COVID-19. Our objective is to provide a framework of methodology for quantifying the combined effects of entry restrictions and travel quarantine on managing the importation risk of COVID-19 and other pandemics by leveraging different sets of parameters.

    Three major categories of control measures on controlling importation risk were parameterized and modelled by the framework 1) entry restrictions, 2) travel quarantine, and 3) domestic containment measures. Integrating the parameterized intensity of control measures, a modified SEIR model was developed to simulate the case importation and local epidemic under different scenarios of global epidemic dynamics. A web-based tool was also provided to enable interactive visualization of epidemic simulation.

    The simulated number of case importation and local spread modelled by the proposed framework of methods fitted well to the historical epidemic curve of China and Singapore.