Information Technology Efforts Against COVID-19: A Review of Open Source Projects

Abstract

10.30699/jambs.29.132.1 Currently, efforts have focused on dealing with the emerging coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) worldwide. Hopefully, information technology can be applied to meet the challenges related to the pandemic and biosurveillance. Free and opensource software (FOSS) model has emerged as an effective tool against these challenges. The main objective of this study was to determine and summarize the application of FOSS in published and released resources and materials against COVID-19. This review includes projects that were available through GitHub and SourceForge reliable web-based materials. All projects were identified between January 1 and April 10, 2020. Search terms in GitHub and SourceForge were based on clinical terminologies, such as COVID-19, COVID, Covid19, and Corona Virus. Inclusion or exclusion criteria were used to filter the results. Finally, a screening procedure was followed to achieve the most related records. We identified 46,426 records in GitHub and seven projects in SourceForge. The top 40 projects were included. The results show that a high percentage of FOSS projects against COVID-19 were related to visual dashboards. The open dataset and analytical methods made a significant contribution to this context. Previously learned lessons from FOSS have shown that the explained projects would play important roles in future epidemics by forking and joining in new projects, which formed around a specific problem.

3D printed chitosan/polycaprolactone scaffold for lung tissue engineering: hope to be useful for COVID-19 studies

“…Even when resolved, sepsis can damage the patient's lungs and other organs forever. 63 The recommended 3D printed CS/PCL scaffold inherits enough porosity to simulate lung structure. Fluids and oxygen could penetrate through the scaffold.…”

Educational use of free and open source software (FOSS): international development and its implications for higher education

“…Crowston et al has done a detailed literature review about the international development of FLOSS but it was almost 10 years ago and its focus was about the community-based development mode of FOSS (Crowston, et al , 2012). The most recent review in a related field was conducted by Moftian et al but it was mainly about the application of FOSS tools in the field of health informatics against the COVID-19 virus (Moftian, et al , 2021). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to have a quick overview of the latest development of FOSS from an international perspective by applying the data and information visualization tool “CiteSpace,” with the focus on the application and inspiration of the higher education sector.…”