The Role of Imported Cases and Favorable Meteorological Conditions in the Onset of Dengue Epidemics

Dengue/dengue hemorrhagic fever is the world's most widely spread mosquito-borne arboviral disease and threatens more than two-thirds of the world's population. Cases are mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical areas in accordance with vector habitats for Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus. However, the role of imported cases and favorable meteorological conditions has not yet been quantitatively assessed. This study verified the correlation between the occurrence of indigenous dengue and imported cases in the context of weather variables (temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, etc.) for different time lags in southern Taiwan. Our findings imply that imported cases have a role in igniting indigenous outbreaks, in non-endemics areas, when favorable weather conditions are present. This relationship becomes insignificant in the late phase of local dengue epidemics. Therefore, early detection and case management of imported cases through timely surveillance and rapid laboratory-diagnosis may avert large scale epidemics of dengue/dengue hemorrhagic fever. An early-warning surveillance system integrating meteorological data will be an invaluable tool for successful prevention and control of dengue, particularly in non-endemic countries

eLearning Course Design in Higher Education to Maximize Students’ Performance

This paper presents an investigation on the impact that e- tivities can have on students’ performance. The context of the study is an e-Learnig higher education institution, with 4 years of data collected from various courses on First and Master cycle Degrees in Industrial Engineering and Computer and Automation Engineering; before and after the integration of e-tivity. A cloud service has been developed to get the data about students’ performances in terms of examinations participations, rate of success and marks. Two academic years before the introduction of the e-tivities have been compared with the 2 academic years after, for each course under investigation. The results show that the e-tivities provided a slight increase of students’ performances in terms of percentage of success. However, the study revealed also a slight decrease of the average mark obtained in the same sessions. The findings suggest that the e-tivities could provide the basic knowledge to pass an exam, but not enough to provide a full comprehension of the subject matter. Further investigation will be done to confirm those findings

Prioritization of Influence Factors for Selecting E–Learning Systems

International Conference on Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, INFUS 2020 -- 21 July 2020 through 23 July 2020 -- -- 242349COVID-19 pandemic affects not only daily life activities but also traditional education systems. Based on the current developments, to stick by their academic calendars, most of the educational institutions continue their classes via online channels. Since the selection of the most appropriate e–learning platform depends on multi–criteria, the evaluation of this selection process can be dealt with decision support systems. In this study, cognitive mapping extended with intuitionistic fuzzy sets is introduced for prioritizing the e–learning platform selection factors under fuzzy environment based on the multi–expert judgments. Based on the results, infrastructure and ease of use are determined as the most effective factors. For further studies, a sensitivity analysis based on the initial vector determination can be studied to check its effect on the outputs. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.2-s2.0-8508874504

The association between polypronucleate zygote formation with certain motion characteristics of sperm and IVF outcome

Purpose To determine the efficiency of sperm motion characteristics as predictors for normal (2PN) and polypronulceate (PPN) zygotes in IVF. Methods A retrospective cohort analysis for a total of 230 couples undergoing IVF treatment in a single infertility center. Results Subsequent to semen analysis and hemizona assay, unexpected fertilization failure would appear to have occurred only extremely rarely (1/236, 0.4%). The rate of PPN, however, did arise and appeared to be related to certain sperm motion characteristics, such as lateral head displacement and concentration of progressive motile sperm. Interestingly, the patients featuring a high PPN rate (> 20% ) was associated with a greater pregnancy rate than those featuring a low PPN rate (< 20%). Conclusions The sperm motion characteristics examined herein could be utilized to predict the rate of PPN in IVF. In order to enhance the rate of 2PN and maintain the relative high rate of clinical pregnancy, an efficient method needs further investigation and development