Rescuing emergency cases of COVID-19 patients: An intelligent real-time MSC transfusion framework based on multicriteria decision-making methods.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have shown promising ability to treat critical cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by regenerating lung cells and reducing immune system overreaction. However, two main challenges need to be addressed first before MSCs can be efficiently transfused to the most critical cases of COVID-19. First is the selection of suitable MSC sources that can meet the standards of stem cell criteria. Second is differentiating COVID-19 patients into different emergency levels automatically and prioritising them in each emergency level. This study presents an efficient real-time MSC transfusion framework based on multicriteria decision-making(MCDM) methods. In the methodology, the testing phase represents the ability to adhere to plastic surfaces, the upregulation and downregulation of specific surface protein markers and finally the ability to differentiate into different kinds of cells. In the development phase, firstly, two scenarios of an augmented dataset based on the medical perspective are generated to produce 80 patients with different emergency levels. Secondly, an automated triage algorithm based on a formal medical guideline is proposed for real-time monitoring of COVID-19 patients with different emergency levels (i.e. mild, moderate, severe and critical) considering the improvement and deterioration procedures from one level to another. Thirdly, a unique decision matrix for each triage level (except mild) is constructed on the basis of the intersection between the evaluation criteria of each emergency level and list of COVID-19 patients. Thereafter, MCDM methods (i.e. analytic hierarchy process [AHP] and