Assessment of the Relationship between Design and Performance in Infectious Diseases Isolation Facility of Nigerian Hospitals

The high and continuous spread of infectious disease such as Corona virus (COVID-19) has affected public health globally. The preparedness of hospitals in the face of this situation is a problem in the Nigerian context, hospitals were faced with the problems of lack of viral containment spaces to isolate suspected cases and treat the infected patients. This research aims at assessing the relationship between design and performance in infectious disease isolation facility of Nigerian hospitals with a view to a framework for setting-up of infectious disease isolation facility in Nigerian hospitals. The research objectives are as follows: (1) To determine the relationship between design and performance of infectious diseases isolation centres in Nigerian hospitals, (2) To determine the perception of medical practitioners in the performance of infectious diseases isolation centre of Nigerian hospitals and (3) To develop a framework or a model for the setting-up of IDIC in Nigerian hospitals. The above objectives were achieved through the employment of quantitative research design approach. This method uses survey questionnaires, about 35 were distributed for the whole sample population, reliability test was conducted, the hypothesis was tested and found significant at P < 0.05 confidence interval. A correlation analysis was conducted. Simple statistical analysis was conducted to determine the mean and frequencies of the analysed data The result of quantitative analysis were presented in frequency tables and pie charts from SPSS v21 analysis output. The result shows that there is a positive relationship between design and performance i.e. the more accurate and satisfying the design is, the higher the result or outcome and performance from the end-users

ChatGPT and the rise of large language models: the new AI-driven infodemic threat in public health

: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gathered attention with the release of ChatGPT, a user-centered chatbot released by OpenAI. In this perspective article, we retrace the evolution of LLMs to understand the revolution brought by ChatGPT in the artificial intelligence (AI) field. The opportunities offered by LLMs in supporting scientific research are multiple and various models have already been tested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in this domain. The impact of ChatGPT has been huge for the general public and the research community, with many authors using the chatbot to write part of their articles and some papers even listing ChatGPT as an author. Alarming ethical and practical challenges emerge from the use of LLMs, particularly in the medical field for the potential impact on public health. Infodemic is a trending topic in public health and the ability of LLMs to rapidly produce vast amounts of text could leverage misinformation spread at an unprecedented scale, this could create an "AI-driven infodemic," a novel public health threat. Policies to contrast this phenomenon need to be rapidly elaborated, the inability to accurately detect artificial-intelligence-produced text is an unresolved issue

Hey Article, What Are You About? Question Answering for Information Systems Articles through Transformer Models for Long Sequences

Question Answering (QA) systems can significantly reduce manual effort of searching for relevant information. However, challenges arise from a lack of domain-specificity and the fact that QA systems usually retrieve answers from short text passages instead of long scientific articles. We aim to address these challenges by (1) exploring the use of transformer models for long sequence processing, (2) performing domain adaptation for the Information Systems (IS) discipline and (3) developing novel techniques by performing domain adaptation in multiple training phases. Our models were pre-trained on a corpus of 2 million sentences retrieved from 3,463 articles from the Senior Scholars' Basket and fine-tuned on SQuAD and a manually created set of 500 QA pairs from the IS field. In six experiments, we tested two transfer learning techniques for fine-tuning (TANDA and FANDO). The results show that fine-tuning with task-specific domain knowledge considerably increases the models' F1- and Exact Match-scores

Architecture and Infectious Diseases: Setting-up a Multipurpose Isolation Facility in Nigerian Hospitals

The high and continuous spread of infectious disease such as Corona virus (COVID-19) has affected public health globally. The preparedness of hospitals in the face of this situation is a problem in the Nigerian context, hospitals were faced with the problems of lack of viral containment spaces to isolate suspected cases and treat the infected patients. This research aims at exploring the design requirements and configurations of a multipurpose infectious disease isolation centre in Nigerian hospitals with a view to develop a framework for setting-up of infectious disease isolation facility in Nigerian hospitals. The research objectives are as follows: (1) To identify the functional spaces in isolation centres of Nigerian hospitals, (2) To determine the principles of configuration and design considerations in setting up of isolation centres in Nigerian hospitals and (3) To develop a framework or a model for the setting-up of IDIC in Nigerian hospitals. The above objectives were achieved through the employment of a qualitative research approach. An in-depth interview was conducted, the data was analysed using the thematic coding analysis. Results from qualitative analysis were reported in tables and narrative report, content analysis was also conducted. The result of the analysis reveals that an isolation centre should be zoned into four parts, namely: (1) Triage, (2) Green zone (safe zone), (3) Yellow zone (Semi-safe) and (4) Red zone (danger zone). The suspect bay should be in single rooms and that no more than one suspected patient should be in the same room. There is need for a molecular laboratory in the facility. There is need for negative pressure rooms for respiratory infections. The use of high efficiency particulate Air-condition (HEPA) is necessary for decontamination of indoor air before discharge. There is also a need for large open space to cater for watery diseases like cholera