Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland)
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Diagnostics (Basel) · Jul 2020
Complications in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis: Focus on Their Clinical and Radiological Features.
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fibrotic lung disease with uncertain origins and pathogenesis; it represents the most common interstitial lung disease (ILD), associated with a pathological pattern of usual interstitial pneumonitis (UIP). This disease has a poor prognosis, having the most lethal prognosis among ILDs. In fact, the progressive fibrosis related to IPF could lead to the development of complications, such as acute exacerbation, lung cancer, infections, pneumothorax and pulmonary hypertension. ⋯ The early identification of these complications is very important, and requires an integrated approach among specialists, in order to plane the correct treatment. In some cases, the degree of severity of patients having IPF complications may require a personalized approach, based on palliative care services. Therefore, in this paper, we have focused on clinical and radiological features of the complications that occurred in our IPF patients, providing a comprehensive and accurate pictorial essay for clinicians, radiologists and surgeons involved in their management.
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Diagnostics (Basel) · Jul 2020
COVID-19 Assessment with Bedside Lung Ultrasound in a Population of Intensive Care Patients Treated with Mechanical Ventilation and ECMO.
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for an accessible, point-of-care and accurate imaging modality for pulmonary assessment. COVID-19 pneumonia is mainly monitored with chest X-ray, however, lung ultrasound (LUS) is an emerging tool for pulmonary evaluation. In this study, patients with verified COVID-19 disease hospitalized at the intensive care unit and treated with ventilator and extracorporal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) were evaluated with LUS for pulmonary changes. ⋯ The study indicated that patients with a trend of lower LUS scores over time were capable of being weaned from ECMO. LUS score was associated to CRP (R = 0.34; p < 0.03) and compliance (R = 0.60; p < 0.0001), with the strongest correlation to compliance. LUS may be used as a primary imaging modality for pulmonary assessment reducing the use of chest X-ray in COVID-19 patients treated with ventilator and ECMO.
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Diagnostics (Basel) · Jun 2020
ReviewMolecular and Serological Tests for COVID-19 a Comparative Review of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Laboratory and Point-of-Care Diagnostics.
Validated and accurate laboratory testing for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a crucial part of the timely management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease, supporting the clinical decision-making process for infection control at the healthcare level and detecting asymptomatic cases. This would facilitate an appropriate treatment, a prompt isolation and consequently deceleration of the pandemic. ⋯ Due to the current pandemic situation, a development of point-of-care diagnostics (POCD) allows us to substantially accelerate taking clinical decisions and implement strategic planning at the national level of preventative measures. This review summarizes and compares the available POCD and those currently under development, including quantitative reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR), serology immunoassays (SIAs) and protein microarray method (PMM) designed for standard and rapid COVID-19 diagnosis.
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Diagnostics (Basel) · Jun 2020
Development of Stiffness Measurement Program Using Color Mapping in Shear Wave Elastography.
Shear wave elastography with ultrasound is a noninvasive method used for measuring stiffness in the human body. Shear wave elastography can be used for accurately and quantitatively measuring stiffness. However, its disadvantage is that the stiffness value can vary significantly because the region of interest (ROI) setting depends on the diagnostic operator. ⋯ Color map and color ratios were obtained and evaluated for major lower limb muscles (i.e., biceps femoris, medial gastrocnemius, rectus femoris, and tibialis anterior) at active voluntary contraction. According to the result, when the developed program was used, a small standard deviation compared to the conventional stiffness measurement method, such as kilopascal or meter per second unit using ROIs, was measured in all cases. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that the stiffness measurement method using our program is expected to improve reliability in shear wave elastography ultrasound imaging.
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Diagnostics (Basel) · May 2020
Weakly Labeled Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Study on COVID-19 Detection in Chest X-Rays.
The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a pandemic resulting in over 2.7 million infected individuals and over 190,000 deaths and growing. Assertions in the literature suggest that respiratory disorders due to COVID-19 commonly present with pneumonia-like symptoms which are radiologically confirmed as opacities. Radiology serves as an adjunct to the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test for confirmation and evaluating disease progression. ⋯ Weakly labeled data augmentation expands the learned feature space in an attempt to encompass variability in unseen test distributions, enhance inter-class discrimination, and reduce the generalization error. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that simple weakly labeled data augmentation (Acc: 0.5555 and Acc: 0.6536) is better than baseline non-augmented training (Acc: 0.2885 and Acc: 0.5028) in identifying COVID-19 manifestations as viral pneumonia. Interestingly, adding COVID-19 CXRs to simple weakly labeled augmented training data significantly improves the performance (Acc: 0.7095 and Acc: 0.8889), suggesting that COVID-19, though viral in origin, creates a uniquely different presentation in CXRs compared with other viral pneumonia manifestations.