In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, research indicates that the COVID-19 disease susceptibility varies among individuals depending on their ABO blood groups. Researchers globally commenced investigating potential methods to stratify cases according to prognosis depending on several clinical parameters. Since there is evidence of a link between ABO blood groups and disease susceptibility, it could be argued that there is a link between blood groups and disease manifestation and progression. The current study investigates whether clinical manifestation, laboratory, and imaging findings vary among ABO blood groups of hospitalized confirmed COVID-19 patients. This retrospective cohort study was conducted between March 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021 in King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Demographic information, clinical information, laboratory findings, and imaging investigations were extracted from the data warehouse for all confirmed COVID-19 patients. A total of 285 admitted patients were included in the study. Of these, 81 (28.4%) were blood group A, 43 (15.1%) were blood group B, 11 (3.9%) were blood group AB, and 150 (52.6%) were blood group O. This was almost consistent with the distribution of blood groups among the Saudi Arabia community. The majority of the study participants (79.6% [n = 227]) were asymptomatic. The upper respiratory tract infection ( P = .014) and shortness of breath showed statistically significant differences between the ABO blood group ( P = .009). Moreover, the incidence of the symptoms was highly observed in blood group O followed by A then B except for pharyngeal exudate observed in blood group A. The one-way ANOVA test indicated that among the studied hematological parameters, glucose ( P = .004), absolute lymphocyte count ( P = .001), and IgA ( P = .036) showed statistically significant differences between the means of the ABO blood group. The differences in both X-ray and computed tomography scan findings were statistically nonsignificant among the ABO age group. Only 86 (30.3%) patients were admitted to an intensive care unit, and the majority of them were blood groups O 28.7% (n = 43) and A 37.0% (n = 30). However, the differences in complications’ outcomes were statistically nonsignificant among the ABO age group. ABO blood groups among hospitalized COVID-19 patients are not associated with clinical, hematological, radiological, and complications abnormality.

No abstract

No abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is among the most dangerous diabetic complications that can lead to lifelong blindness if left untreated. One of the essential difficulties in DR is early discovery, which is crucial for therapy progress. The accurate diagnosis of the DR stage is famously complicated and demands a skilled analysis by the expert being of fundus images. This paper detects DR and classifies its stage using retina images by applying conventional neural networks and transfer learning models. Three deep learning models were investigated: trained from scratch CNN and pre-trained InceptionV3 and Efficient-NetsB5. Experiment results show that the proposed CNN model outperformed the pre-trained models with a 9 to 25% relative improvement in F1-score compared to pre-trained InceptionV3 and EfficientNetsB5, respectively.

No abstract