Nessrine Zoghlami

This study investigates the impact of immunological and clinical factors on COVID-19 outcomes among unvaccinated individuals. A cohort of 42 unvaccinated patients admitted to an intensive care unit was analyzed, focusing on age, comorbidities, inflammatory cytokines (IL-6, TNF-α), and anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike protein antibody levels (IgG) to assess their influence on hospital stay duration, recovery time, complications, and mortality rates. The findings revealed that advanced age, cardiovascular disease, and elevated pro-inflammatory cytokines significantly heightened the risks of severe complications and mortality. Conversely, low IgG levels correlated with prolonged hospital stays and slower recovery. Multivariate analysis identified high IL-6 and TNF-α levels as strong predictors of adverse outcomes. This research emphasizes the need for the early monitoring of cytokines and targeted management strategies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, especially among high-risk unvaccinated populations.

Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is the most important clinical parameter of cardiovascular function. The accuracy in estimating this parameter is highly dependent upon the precise segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) structure at the end diastole and systole phases. Therefore, it is crucial to develop robust algorithms for the precise segmentation of the heart structure during different phases. Methodology: In this work, an improved 3D UNet model is introduced to segment the myocardium and LV, while excluding papillary muscles, as per the recommendation of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. For the practical testing of the proposed framework, a total of 8,400 cardiac MRI images were collected and analysed from the military hospital in Tunis (HMPIT), as well as the popular ACDC public dataset. As performance metrics, we used the Dice coefficient and the F1 score for validation/testing of the LV and the myocardium segmentation. Results: The data was split into 70%, 10%, and 20% for training, validation, and testing, respectively. It is worth noting that the proposed segmentation model was tested across three axis views: basal, medio basal and apical at two different cardiac phases: end diastole and end systole instances. The experimental results showed a Dice index of 0.965 and 0.945, and an F1 score of 0.801 and 0.799, at the end diastolic and systolic phases, respectively. Additionally, clinical evaluation outcomes revealed a significant difference in the LVEF and other clinical parameters when the papillary muscles were included or excluded.