关键词： Lesions   COVID-19   Computed tomography   Image segmentation   Location awareness   Shape   Task analysis   Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19)   deep learning (DL)   lesion localization   lesion segmentation   multitask learning  

摘要： The localization and segmentation of the novel coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) lesions from computerized tomography (CT) scans are of great significance for developing an efficient computer-aided diagnosis system. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as one of the best choices for developing such a system. However, several challenges limit the efficiency of DL approaches, including data heterogeneity, considerable variety in the shape and size of the lesions, lesion imbalance, and scarce annotation. In this article, a novel multitask regression network for segmenting COVID-19 lesions is proposed to address these challenges. We name the framework MT-nCov-Net. We formulate lesion segmentation as a multitask shape regression problem that enables partaking the poor-, intermediate-, and high-quality features between various tasks. A multiscale feature learning (MFL) module is presented to capture the multiscale semantic information, which helps to efficiently learn small and large lesion features while reducing the semantic gap between different scale representations. In addition, a fine-grained lesion localization (FLL) module is introduced to detect infection lesions using an adaptive dual-attention mechanism. The generated location map and the fused multiscale representations are subsequently passed to the lesion regression (LR) module to segment the infection lesions. MT-nCov-Net enables learning complete lesion properties to accurately segment the COVID-19 lesion by regressing its shape. MT-nCov-Net is experimentally evaluated on two public multisource datasets, and the overall performance validates its superiority over the current cutting-edge approaches and demonstrates its effectiveness in tackling the problems facing the diagnosis of COVID-19.

关键词： adverse events   coronavirus 2019   multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults   COVID-19 vaccine  

摘要： The clinical spectrum of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) includes acute COVID-19, long covid and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children and adults (MISC/A). The rapid roll-out of COVID-19 vaccination has the potential to affect the clinical presentation of COVID-19 and case reports document rare occurrences of MIS-A after COVID-19 infection and recent vaccination with m-RNA vaccines. We describe 2 cases of MIS-A after COVID-19 infection and recent vaccination with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19.

关键词： 2019-nCoV   Transportation   Mobility   Renewable energy   Pandemic  

摘要： The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was extended to 213 countries globally by August 2021. The world has been threatened by rising infection rates and emerged as the catastrophic event in the field of health triggering the international emergency panic button. COVID-190s sudden arrival wreaked havoc on the world economic picture, particularly in the energy sector. A steep drop in oil prices, as well as an imbal-ance in energy, was the result of strict travel restrictions, fewer transportation options, and people's fears of a flu pandemic. However, confined mobility and a drop in energy demand coated the environment with a silver line and drowned the nation's economic opportunities. Industrial transport, and not to mention every conventional energy-related thing, is completely devastated, but renewables were immunized. Wind, solar, hydrothermal, hydrogen, biomass-based energy systems were on high gear yielding maxi-mum results in counterbalancing the demand-supply ***, the pandemic created an opportunity to showcase the importance of renewable energy and tackle the difficult emergency like now. In addition to this, the mindset of the investors was slowly fading away from conventional fuels and shifting towards renewable energy. However, it is too early to state the booming renewables at the moment, and no idea about its long-time survival. Thus, the present review gives a clear picture of the current status of fossils and renewables, the impact of a pandemic, energy investments, government policy standings, threats, and opportunities, and finally, the key takeaways avoiding energy scarcity in once a lifetime disaster situation.(c) 2022 International Association for Gondwana Research. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

关键词： SARS-COV2   Vaccines   Pandemic   Serum Institute of India  

摘要： Introduction Patients with cirrhosis have a higher risk of severe COVID-19 and mortality and are high-priority patients for vaccination. However, cirrhotics were excluded from the phase 2/3 vaccine trials. Hence, we aimed to assess the antibody response and safety of Covishield (ChAdOx1nCoV-19) among patients with cirrhosis. Methods Patients who attended the tele-hepatology services at our institute from March 2020 to June 2021 and diagnosed with cirrhosis as per their medical records were telephonically interviewed in July 2021 using a pre-specified questionnaire. Patients who had completed 2 doses of ChAdOx1-nCOV (with the 2(nd) dose administered at least 2 weeks back) and without history of documented COVID-19 infection (pre- or post-vaccination) were tested for antibodies against the spike protein. Seropositive patients were divided into high, moderate, and low antibody responses based on the signal/cut-off. Results We interviewed 784 patients with cirrhosis. At least 1 dose of ChAdOx1-nCOV was received by 231 patients among whom 134 (58%) had received 2 doses. Documented COVID-19 was reported in 3.9% patients who received at least 1 dose of ChAdOx1-nCOV including breakthrough infections in 3.7% patients vaccinated with 2 doses. Local and systemic adverse events were reported by 42% and 22.1% patients. None developed anaphylaxis, acute decompensation, acute-on-chronic liver failure, or other serious adverse events requiring hospitalization. Seroconversion was documented in 81 (92%) out of 88 patients. No difference was observed in level of antibody response between patients with compensated and decompensated cirrhosis (p = 0.12). Conclusion Our preliminary data suggest that ChAdOx1-nCOV is safe with high seroconversion rates in patients with cirrhosis.

关键词： SARS-CoV-2   2019-nCoV   COVID-19   Transcriptomics   Pathways   DGE (differentially expressed genes)   ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome)  

摘要： COVID-19 is a severe respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a novel human coronavirus. Patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 exhibit heterogeneous symptoms that pose pragmatic hurdles for implementing appropriate therapy and management of the COVID-19 patients and their post-COVID complications. Thus, understanding the impact of infection severity at the molecular level in the host is vital to understand the host response and accordingly it's precise management. In the current study, we performed a comparative transcriptomics analysis of publicly available seven asymptomatic and eight severe COVID-19 patients. Exploratory data analysis employing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed the distinct clusters of asymptomatic and severe pa-tients. Subsequently, the differential gene expression analysis using DESeq2 identified 1224 significantly upre-gulated genes (logFC & GE;1.5, p-adjusted value <0.05) and 268 significantly downregulated genes (logFC & LE;-1.5, p -adjusted value <0.05) in severe samples in comparison to asymptomatic samples. Eventually, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) revealed the upregulation of anti-viral and anti-inflammatory pathways, secondary infections, Iron homeostasis, anemia, cardiac-related, etc.;while, downregulation of lipid metabolism, adaptive immune response, translation, recurrent respiratory infections, heme-biosynthetic pathways, etc. Conclusively, these findings provide insight into the enhanced susceptibility of severe COVID-19 patients to other health comorbidities including non-viral pathogenic infections, atherosclerosis, autoinflammatory diseases, anemia, male infertility, etc. owing to the activation of biological processes, pathways and molecular functions associated with them. We anticipate this study will facilitate the researchers in finding efficient therapeutic targets and eventually the clinicians in management of COVID-19 patients and post-COVID-19 effects in them.