A Novel Approach for the Early Detection of Medical Resource Demand Surges During Health Care Emergencies: Infodemiology Study of Tweets.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted gaps in the current handling of medical resource demand surges and the need for prioritizing scarce medical resources to mitigate the risk of health care facilities becoming overwhelmed. OBJECTIVE: During a health care emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the public often uses social media to express negative sentiment (eg, urgency, fear, and frustration) as a real-time response to the evolving crisis. The sentiment expressed in COVID-19 posts may provide valuable real-time information about the relative severity of medical resource demand in different regions of a country. In this study, Twitter (subsequently rebranded as X) sentiment analysis was used to investigate whether an increase in negative sentiment COVID-19 tweets corresponded to a greater demand for hospital intensive care unit (ICU) beds in specific regions of the United States, Brazil, and India. METHODS: Tweets were collected from a publicly available data set containing COVID-19 tweets with sentiment labels and geolocation information posted between February 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021. Regional medical resource shortage data were gathered from publicly available data sets reporting a time series of ICU bed demand across each country. Negative sentiment tweets were analyzed using the Granger causality test and convergent cross-mapping (CCM) analysis to assess the utility of the time series of negative sentiment tweets in forecasting ICU bed shortages. RESULTS: For the United States (30,742,934 negative sentiment tweets), the results of the Granger causality test (for whether negative sentiment COVID-19 tweets forecast ICU bed shortage, assuming a stochastic system) were significant (P<.05) for 14 (28%) of the 50 states that passed the augmented Dickey-Fuller test at lag 2, and the results of the CCM analysis (for whether negative sentiment COVID-19 tweets forecast ICU bed shortage, assuming a dynamic system) were significant (P<.05) for 46 (92%) of the 50 states. For Brazil (3,004,039 negative sentiment tweets), the results of the Granger causality test were significant (P<.05) for 6 (22%) of the 27 federative units, and the results of the CCM analysis were significant (P<.05) for 26 (96%) of the 27 federative units. For India (4,199,151 negative sentiment tweets), the results of the Granger causality test were significant (P<.05) for 6 (23%) of the 26 included regions (25 states and the national capital region of Delhi), and the results of the CCM analysis were significant (P<.05) for 26 (100%) of the 26 included regions. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a novel approach for identifying the regions of high hospital bed demand during a health care emergency scenario by analyzing Twitter sentiment data. Leveraging analyses that take advantage of natural language processing-driven tweet extraction systems has the potential to be an effective method for the early detection of medical resource demand surges.

Persistent Right Venous Valve: Insights From Multimodality Imaging.

Anatomic variants in the right atrium are under-recognized and under-reported phenomena in cardiac imaging. In the fetus, right atrium serves as a conduit for oxygenated blood to be delivered to the left heart bypassing the right ventricle and the nonfunctional lungs. The anatomy in the fetal right atrium is designed for such purposeful circulation. The right and left venous valves are prominent structures in the fetal heart that direct inferior vena caval flow towards the foramen ovale. These anatomic structures typically regress and the foramen ovale closes after birth. However, the venous valves can persist leading to a range of anatomic, physiological, and pathological consequences in the adult. We describe various presentations of persistent venous valves, focusing on the right venous valve in this illustrated multimodality imaging article.