The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge influence on human lives all around the world. The virus spread quickly and impacted millions of individuals, resulting in a large number of hospitalizations and fatalities. The pandemic has also impacted economics, education, and social connections, among other aspects of life. Coronavirus-generated Computed Tomography (CT) scans have Regions of Interest (ROIs). The use of a modified U-Net model structure to categorize the region of interest at the pixel level is a promising strategy that may increase the accuracy of detecting COVID-19-associated anomalies in CT images. The suggested method seeks to detect and isolate ROIs in CT scans that show the existence of ground-glass opacity, which is frequent in COVID-19 patients. This can assist healthcare practitioners in identifying and monitoring illness development, as well as making treatment decisions. Scale U-Net is a strong U-Net design modification that can increase the performance of semantic segmentation tasks. Our model, Normalized-UNet, uses batch normalization after each convolutional layer to decrease the internal covariate shift, which dramatically improves the network's learning efficiency.
Background: Age progression is regarded as a critical risk factor in morbidity and mortality because of a weakened immune system. Although various studies have dealt with electrolyte imbalance in COVID-19 patients, the outcomes of these studies were partially understood. Objective: The current study aims to determine some biochemical parameters in old Iraqi COVID-19 patients and highlight the outcomes according to the aging role in the development of COVID-19 by suggesting new mechanisms. Materials and methods: forty COVID-19 patients were enrolled in the current study and divided into two groups: Gm includes (20) men, and Gf includes (20) women. The parameters (Na+, K+, Cl-, LDH, and Hb ) were determined in sera of patients and c
... Show MoreCOVID-19 is a unique viral infectious illness that causes a variety of symptoms and health hazards, particularly to the respiratory system and has been declared a worldwide pandemic. The disease is characterized by a cytokine release in severe conditions. Interleukin-6 (IL-6), a proinflammatory cytokine, mediates an important immunomodulatory process. Also, vitamin D was identified to have a role in the innate immunity of individuals. Our study was designed to find the role of IL-6 and vitamin D in COVID-19 patients, as well as, to see whether there is a link between vitamin D deficiency and cytokine syndrome development. The study included 90 COVID-19 patients and 30 control people from Baghdad, Iraq. The age of the participants was non-s
... Show MoreThe objective of this study was to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare providers (HCPs) at personal and professional levels.
This was a cross-sectional descriptive study. It was conducted using an electronic format survey through Qualtrics Survey Software in English. The target participants were HCPs working in any healthcare setting across Iraq. The survey was distributed via two professional Facebook groups between 7 April and 7 May 2020. The survey items were adopted with modifications from three previous studies of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Avia
Thrombosis is a common clinical feature associated with morbidity and mortality in coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) patients. Cytokine storm in COVID-19 increases patients' systemic inflammation, which can cause multiple health consequences. In this work, we aimed to indicate the effect of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination on the modulation of monocyte chemoattractant protein-3 (MCP-3), matrix metalloproteinase 1 (MMP-1), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) levels, and other systemic inflammatory biomarkers that associates with COVID-19 severity in patients who suffers from thrombosis consequences. For this purpose, ninety people were collected from Ibn Al-Nafees Hospital and divided into three groups each of which contained 30 people, 15
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