Fault diagnosis and health management of bearings in rotating equipment based on vibration analysis – a review

There is an ever-increasing need to optimise bearing lifetime and maintenance cost through detecting faults at earlier stages. This can be achieved through improving diagnosis and prognosis of bearing faults to better determine bearing remaining useful life (RUL). Until now there has been limited research into the prognosis of bearing life in rotating machines. Towards the development of improved approaches to prognosis of bearing faults a review of fault diagnosis and health management systems research is presented. Traditional time and frequency domain extraction techniques together with machine learning algorithms, both traditional and deep learning, are considered as novel approaches for the development of new prognosis techniques. Different approaches make use of the advantages of each technique while overcoming the disadvantages towards the development of intelligent systems to determine the RUL of bearings. The review shows that while there are numerous approaches to diagnosis and prognosis, they are suitable for certain cases or are domain specific and cannot be generalised

Impact of clinical pharmacist intervention on clinical outcomes in the critical care unit, Taif City, Saudi Arabia: a retrospective study

(1) Objectives: Clinical pharmacists are now playing a significant role in hospitals aiming to reduce medication errors, adverse drug reactions, and healthcare costs. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to assess the interventions provided by a clinical pharmacist in the intensive care unit at the King Faisal Hospital in Taif city. (2) Methods: For this single-center retrospective study, patients were included from December 2021 to May 2022. In the present study, all the interventions of clinical pharmacists made over six months were included. The Intensive care unit (ICU) ward was covered by three clinical pharmacists, and the interventions made were categorized into four groups: (1) interventions related to indications; (2) interventions regarding safety; (3) interventions regarding dosing, and (4) miscellaneous. Descriptive statistics was applied to evaluate the results in the form of frequencies and percentages. Analysis was performed using the statistical package SPSS 20.0. (3) Results: Overall, a total of 404 interventions were recommended for 165 patients during the six- month period of study. Among them, 370 interventions (91.5%) were accepted by physicians. Among all the interventions, the majority were suggested regarding ‘indication’ (45.7%), including the addition of drugs, drugs with no indications, and duplication. The acceptance rate of clinical pharmacist intervention was 98.5%. (4) Conclusions: This retrospective study shows that clinical pharmacists played a critical role in optimizing drug therapy which could subsequently help to prevent drug-related issues and lower drug costs. More research is needed to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis

SARS-CoV-2 vaccination modelling for safe surgery to save lives: data from an international prospective cohort study

Background: Preoperative SARS-CoV-2 vaccination could support safer elective surgery. Vaccine numbers are limited so this study aimed to inform their prioritization by modelling. Methods: The primary outcome was the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one COVID-19-related death in 1 year. NNVs were based on postoperative SARS-CoV-2 rates and mortality in an international cohort study (surgical patients), and community SARS-CoV-2 incidence and case fatality data (general population). NNV estimates were stratified by age (18-49, 50-69, 70 or more years) and type of surgery. Best- and worst-case scenarios were used to describe uncertainty. Results: NNVs were more favourable in surgical patients than the general population. The most favourable NNVs were in patients aged 70 years or more needing cancer surgery (351; best case 196, worst case 816) or non-cancer surgery (733; best case 407, worst case 1664). Both exceeded the NNV in the general population (1840; best case 1196, worst case 3066). NNVs for surgical patients remained favourable at a range of SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates in sensitivity analysis modelling. Globally, prioritizing preoperative vaccination of patients needing elective surgery ahead of the general population could prevent an additional 58 687 (best case 115 007, worst case 20 177) COVID-19-related deaths in 1 year. Conclusion: As global roll out of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination proceeds, patients needing elective surgery should be prioritized ahead of the general population