Lung Infection Segmentation for COVID-19 Pneumonia Based on a Cascade Convolutional Network from CT Images.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global, national, and local public health concern which has caused a significant outbreak in all countries and regions for both males and females around the world. Automated detection of lung infections and their boundaries from medical images offers a great potential to augment the patient treatment healthcare strategies for tackling COVID-19 and its impacts. Detecting this disease from lung CT scan images is perhaps one of the fastest ways to diagnose patients. However, finding the presence of infected tissues and segment them from CT slices faces numerous challenges, including similar adjacent tissues, vague boundary, and erratic infections. To eliminate these obstacles, we propose a two-route convolutional neural network (CNN) by extracting global and local features for detecting and classifying COVID-19 infection from CT images. Each pixel from the image is classified into the normal and infected tissues. For improving the classification accuracy, we used two different strategies including fuzzy c-means clustering and local directional pattern (LDN) encoding methods to represent the input image differently. This allows us to find more complex pattern from the image. To overcome the overfitting problems due to small samples, an augmentation approach is utilized. The results demonstrated that the proposed framework achieved precision 96%, recall 97%, F score, average surface distance (ASD) of 2.8 ± 0.3 mm, and volume overlap error (VOE) of 5.6 ± 1.2%.

Theory-Based Failure Modes and Effect Analysis for Medication Errors.

Medication Errors (MEs) are still significant challenges, especially in nonautomated health systems. Qualitative studies are mostly used to identify the parameters involved in MEs. Failing to provide accurate information in expert-based decisions can provoke unrealistic results and inappropriate corrective actions eventually. However, mostly, some levels of uncertainty accompany the decisions in real practice. This study tries to present a hybrid decision-making approach to assigning different weights to risk factors and considering the uncertainty in the ranking process in the Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) technique. Initially, significant MEs are identified by three groups of qualified experts (doctors, nurses, and pharmacists). Afterward, for assigning weights to the risk factors, Z-number couples with the Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method, named Z-SWARA, to add reliability concept in the decision-making process. Finally, the identified MEs are ranked through the developed Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method, namely, Z-WASPAS. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, the ranking results compare with typical methods, such as fuzzy-WASPAS and FMEA. The findings of the present study highlight improper medication administration as the main failure mode, which can result in a fatality or patient injury. Moreover, the utilization of multiple-criteria decision-making methods in combination with Z-number can be a useful tool in the healthcare management field since it can address the problems by considering reliability and uncertainty simultaneously.