Optimum location of DG units considering operation conditions

The optimal sizing and placement of Distributed Generation units (DG) are becoming very attractive to researchers these days. In this paper a two stage approach has been used for allocation and sizing of DGs in distribution system with time varying load model. The strategic placement of DGs can help in reducing energy losses and improving voltage profile. The proposed work discusses time varying loads that can be useful for selecting the location and optimizing DG operation. The method has the potential to be used for integrating the available DGs by identifying the best locations in a power system. The proposed method has been demonstrated on 9-bus test system

Gray area; a novel strategy to confront COVID-19 in emergency departments

Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, affects almost every aspect of human life. To confront this crisis, a separate ward called gray area was designed for emergency departments (EDs) and applied at the provincial level in East-Azerbaijan, Iran. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of this project, increase the serviceability and segregation of the location of infected patients, and show how feasible and fruitful it can be. Methods: This study is an analytical study. The statistical data collection from 39 hospitals was performed between 20 March to 21 September 2020. Descriptive Statistics as well as correlation coefficients were calculated using the 26th version of IBM SPSS. Results: Among 77489 COVID-19 patients admitted to the EDs, approximately 0.38% of patients died in EDs. 22.63% of EDs area was allocated to COVID-19 patients and 70.46% of ED nurses, worked in the gray area. There was no significant correlation between area, number of patients, number of nurses, number of shifts of nurses, number of nurses for each patient, number of nurse shifts for each patient, and area for each patient with mortality rate and rates of disposition in 6 and 12 hours. Conclusion: Gray area is an appropriate strategy to confront COVID-19 in EDs and if more studies approve these results, this strategy can be used to confront this pandemic and future similar conditions in resource-limited countries

An Entropy-Based Architecture for Detection of Sepsis in Newborn Cry Diagnostic Systems

The acoustic characteristics of cries are an exhibition of an infant’s health condition and these characteristics have been acknowledged as indicators for various pathologies. This study focused on the detection of infants suffering from sepsis by developing a simplified design using acoustic features and conventional classifiers. The features for the proposed framework were Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Spectral Entropy Cepstral Coefficients (SENCC) and Spectral Centroid Cepstral Coefficients (SCCC), which were classified through K-nearest Neighborhood (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification methods. The performance of the different combinations of the feature sets was also evaluated based on several measures such as accuracy, F1-score and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization (BHPO) was employed to tailor the classifiers uniquely to fit each experiment. The proposed methodology was tested on two datasets of expiratory cries (EXP) and voiced inspiratory cries (INSV). The highest accuracy and F-score were 89.99% and 89.70%, respectively. This framework also implemented a novel feature selection method based on Fuzzy Entropy (FE) as a final experiment. By employing FE, the number of features was reduced by more than 40%, whereas the evaluation measures were not hindered for the EXP dataset and were even enhanced for the INSV dataset. Therefore, it was deduced through these experiments that an entropy-based framework is successful for identifying sepsis in neonates and has the advantage of achieving high performance with conventional machine learning (ML) approaches, which makes it a reliable means for the early diagnosis of sepsis in deprived areas of the world

Newborn Cry-Based Diagnostic System to Distinguish between Sepsis and Respiratory Distress Syndrome Using Combined Acoustic Features

Crying is the only means of communication for a newborn baby with its surrounding environment, but it also provides significant information about the newborn’s health, emotions, and needs. The cries of newborn babies have long been known as a biomarker for the diagnosis of pathologies. However, to the best of our knowledge, exploring the discrimination of two pathology groups by means of cry signals is unprecedented. Therefore, this study aimed to identify septic newborns with Neonatal Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS) by employing the Machine Learning (ML) methods of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Furthermore, the cry signal was analyzed from the following two different perspectives: 1) the musical perspective by studying the spectral feature set of Harmonic Ratio (HR), and 2) the speech processing perspective using the short-term feature set of Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCCs). In order to assess the role of employing features from both short-term and spectral modalities in distinguishing the two pathology groups, they were fused in one feature set named the combined features. The hyperparameters (HPs) of the implemented ML approaches were fine-tuned to fit each experiment. Finally, by normalizing and fusing the features originating from the two modalities, the overall performance of the proposed design was improved across all evaluation measures, achieving accuracies of 92.49% and 95.3% by the MLP and SVM classifiers, respectively. The MLP classifier was outperformed in terms of all evaluation measures presented in this study, except for the Area Under Curve of Receiver Operator Characteristics (AUC-ROC), which signifies the ability of the proposed design in class separation. The achieved results highlighted the role of combining features from different levels and modalities for a more powerful analysis of the cry signals, as well as including a neural network (NN)-based classifier. Consequently, attaining a 95.3% accuracy for the separation of two entangled pathology groups of RDS and sepsis elucidated the promising potential for further studies with larger datasets and more pathology groups