Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) occurred in Wuhan and rapidly spread around the world. Assessing the impact of COVID-19 is the first and foremost concern. The inflection point (IP) and the corresponding cumulative number of infected cases (CNICs) are the two viewpoints that should be jointly considered to differentiate the impact of struggling to fight against COVID-19 (SACOVID). The CNIC data were downloaded from the GitHub website on 23 November 2020. The item response theory model (IRT) was proposed to draw the ogive curve for every province/metropolitan city/area in China. The ipcase-index was determined by multiplying the IP days with the corresponding CNICs. The IRT model was parameterized, and the IP days were determined using the absolute advantage coefficient (AAC). The difference in SACOVID was compared using a forest plot. In the observation study, the top three regions hit severely by COVID-19 were Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Hubei, with IPcase indices of 1744, 723, and 698, respectively, and the top three areas with the most aberrant patterns were Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tianjin, with IP days of 5, 51, and 119, respectively. The difference in IP days was determined (χ2 = 5065666, df = 32, p < 0.001) among areas in China. The IRT model with the AAC is recommended to determine the IP days during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hypoglycemia is a common metabolic disorder that occurs in the neonatal period. Early identification of neonates at risk of developing hypoglycemia can optimize therapeutic strategies in neonatal care. This study aims to develop a machine learning model and implement a predictive application to assist clinicians in accurately predicting the risk of neonatal hypoglycemia within four hours after birth. Our retrospective study analyzed data from neonates born ≥35 weeks gestational age and admitted to the well-baby nursery between 1 January 2011 and 31 August 2021. We collected electronic medical records of 2687 neonates from a tertiary medical center in Southern Taiwan. Using 12 clinically relevant features, we evaluated nine machine learning approaches to build the predictive models. We selected the models with the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for integration into our hospital information system (HIS). The top three AUC values for the early neonatal hypoglycemia prediction models were 0.739 for Stacking, 0.732 for Random Forest and 0.732 for Voting. Random Forest is considered the best model because it has a relatively high AUC and shows no significant overfitting (accuracy of 0.658, sensitivity of 0.682, specificity of 0.649, F1 score of 0.517 and precision of 0.417). The best model was incorporated in the web-based application integrated into the hospital information system. Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) values indicated mode of delivery, gestational age, multiparity, respiratory distress, and birth weight < 2500 gm as the top five predictors of neonatal hypoglycemia. The implementation of our machine learning model provides an effective tool that assists clinicians in accurately identifying at-risk neonates for early neonatal hypoglycemia, thereby allowing timely interventions and treatments.