Procalcitonin, but not D-dimer, is an Inapplicable Biomarker for Severe COVID-19

Pro-calcitonin and D-dimer are among predictive biomarkers for the severity and mortality of COVID-19. The application of these parameters in the clinical setting of Indonesian hospitals is less documented. This study aims to evaluate the association between procalcitonin and D-dimer with COVID-19. This research is part of a retrospective study evaluating 249 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Bandung, Indonesia. Patients who were positive for procalcitonin or D-dimer were selected. Clinical data of age, sex, comorbid condition, peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO2), and death were assessed. There were 39 and 28 patients tested for procalcitonin and D-dimer respectively. The level of procalcitonin was not associate with the severity of COVID-19 (p=0.442), death (p=0.506), comorbid condition (p=0.601) or the use of the antibiotics. However, the level of D-dimer in patients with severe COVID-19 was significantly higher than those with non-severe COVID-19 (p=0.0468). Our study shows that procalcitonin levels are not associated with COVID-19. However, D-dimer is associated with the severity of COVID-19. Keywords: COVID-19, D-dimer, procalcitonin, severit

Managing gestational diabetes: the role of patient counselling

Background: Unmanaged gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) increases the risk of neonatal and fetal complications and the risk of congenital malformations. Apart from the medications used, non-pharmacological agents such as diet modification, exercise, and patient education can improve the quality of life in GDM patients. The present study was aimed to evaluate the role of patient counselling in the management of GDM in patents.Methods: Unmanaged gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) increases the risk of neonatal and fetal complications and the risk of congenital malformations. Apart from the medications used, non-pharmacological agents such as diet modification, exercise, and patient education can improve the quality of life in GDM patients. The present study was aimed to evaluate the role of patient counseling in the management of GDM in patents.Results: The result showed that there is a slight increase in the QOL of test population with GDM. i.e., there is no significant progression in the disease condition. The result showed that each domain, physical, psychological, social and environmental conditions were improved a lot when compared with the control group.Conclusions: Results suggests a positive impact of patient counseling on the management of GDM in patients

Escherichia coli growth modeling using neural network

The assessment of water microbial quality is normally performed by verification ofEscherichia coli where the growth is in nonlinearity. NARX is computational tools that haveextensive utilization in solving nonlinear time series problems. It is well known as one of thetechnique that has the ability to predict with efficient and good performance. Using NARX, ahighly accurate model was developed to predict the growth of Escherichia coli (E. coli) basedon pH water parameter. The multiparameter portable sensor and spectrophotometer data wereused to build and train the neural network. The selection of neural network structure for pHand optical density modelling was optimized and also the training and validation wereanalyzed. The result exhibited that NARX modelling was able to predict the growth of E. colibased on pH water parameter with overall regression is 0.99956.Keywords: neural network; NARX; prediction; Escherichia coli; pH; optical density

Agarwood oil quality classifier using machine learning

Agarwood oil is known as one of the most expensive and precious oils being traded. It is widely used in traditional ceremonies and religious prayers. Its quality plays an important role on the market price that it can be traded. This paper proposes on a proper classification method of the agarwood oil quality using machine learning model k-nearest neighbour (k-NN). The chemical compounds of the agarwood oil from high and low quality are used to train and build the k-NN classifier model. Correlation reduce the dimension of the data before it is being fed into the model. The results show a very high accuracy (100%) model trained and can be used to classify the agarwood oil quality accurately. Keywords: agarwood oil; k-nearest neighbours; quality; machine learning

The opportunity of magnetic induction tomography modality in breast cancer detection

The needs for non-invasive technique in breast cancer detection could enhance and preserve the future of medical field in Malaysia as well as countries around the world. Breast cancer has become the main concern nowadays not only for women but for man as well. In overall, the risk of women getting breast cancer is higher than man due to the denser tissue of breast in women compare to man. Beside the unawareness for the disease, the reason which contributes to this increasing number of breast cancer reported is also due to the limitations arising from modalities such as MRI, Mammography, ultrasound and other modalities. An alternative to current technologies should be improved for early detection and treatment which causes no physical harm to patients if possible. Thus, non-invasive and better technology in detecting breast cancer is very much needed in the current market. This paper will be discussing the insights of Magnetic Induction Tomography techniques in breast cancer detection

FPGA technology in process tomography

The aims of this paper are to provide a review of the process tomography applications employing field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and to understand current FPGA related researches, in order to seek for the possibility to applied FPGA technology in an ultrasonic process tomography system. FPGA allows users to implement complete systems on a programmable chip, meanwhile, five main benefits of applying the FPGA technology are performance, time to market, cost, reliability, and long-term maintenance. These advantages definitely could help in the revolution of process tomography, especially for ultrasonic process tomography and electrical process tomography. Future work is focused on the ultrasonic process tomography for chemical process column investigation using FPGA for the aspects of low cost, high speed and reconstructed image quality

Design and development of radio tomographic imaging system

Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is an emerging imaging technique that utilizes the shadowing losses on links between multiple pairs of wireless nodes within the monitoring area to estimate the attenuation of physical objects. In recent years, RTI has gained huge interest from the researchers in device-free localization (DFL) field due to its ability in generating an image to localize a target within the monitoring area. From the literature studies, researchers are primarily focused on the study of characterizing RSSI attenuation for different purposes such as human presence detection, privacy-preserving localization, indoor and outdoor localization. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no research conducted in studies the effects of phantoms with different dimensions towards the changes in received signal strength indicator (RSSI) value. Therefore, this paper presents a design and development of the RTI system to study and characterize the behaviour of radio waves propagation when phantoms with different dimensions are present within the monitoring area. An overview of the proposed RTI system, the arrangement of sensor arrays and a few factors that should take into consideration when using the RF sensors such as ground effects, near field and far-field region of an antenna have been discussed in this paper. Also, the details of the experimental design have been explained. Based on the results obtained from the experiments, the RSSI value decreases gradually as the dimension of phantoms with water medium increases. This is because when the diameter of a phantom with water medium increased, the water content inside the phantom also increased. Also, water is a high-attenuating medium and its dielectric constant is 80. Therefore, when the diameter of a phantom with water medium increased, the energy of the EM waves is absorbed and scattered more. This caused the attenuation of EM waves increased and resulted in lower RSSI value

REstrictive versus StandarD FlUid Management in Mechanically Ventilated ChildrEn Admitted to PICU: study protocol for a pilot randomised controlled trial (REDUCE-1)

IntroductionIntravenous fluid therapy is the most common intervention in critically ill children. There is an increasing body of evidence questioning the safety of high-volume intravenous fluid administration in these patients. To date, the optimal fluid management strategy remains unclear. We aimed to test the feasibility of a pragmatic randomised controlled trial comparing a restrictive with a standard (liberal) fluid management strategy in critically ill children.Methods and analysisMulticentre, binational pilot, randomised, controlled, open-label, pragmatic trial. Patients <18 years admitted to paediatric intensive care unit and mechanically ventilated at the time of screening are eligible. Patients with tumour lysis syndrome, diabetic ketoacidosis or postorgan transplant are excluded. Interventions: 1:1 random assignment of 154 individual patients into two groups—restrictive versus standard, liberal, fluid strategy—stratified by primary diagnosis (cardiac/non-cardiac). The intervention consists of a restrictive fluid bundle, including lower maintenance fluid allowance, limiting fluid boluses, reducing volumes of drug delivery and initiating diuretics or peritoneal dialysis earlier. The intervention is applied for 48 hours postrandomisation or until discharge (whichever is earlier). Endpoints: The number of patients recruited per month and proportion of recruited to eligible patients are feasibility endpoints. New-onset acute kidney injury and the incidence of clinically relevant central venous thrombosis are safety endpoints. Fluid balance at 48 hours after randomisation is the efficacy endpoint. Survival free of paediatric intensive care censored at 28 days is the clinical endpoint.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval was gained from the Children’s Health Queensland Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC/21/QCHQ/77514, date: 1 September 2021), and University of Zurich (2021-02447, date: 17 March 2023). The trial is registered with the Australia New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12621001311842). Open-access publication in high impact peer-reviewed journals will be sought. Modern information dissemination strategies will also be used including social media to disseminate the outcomes of the study.Trial registration numberACTRN12621001311842.Protocol version/dateV5/23 May 2023