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This paper extends our previous method for COVID-19 diagnosis, proposing an enhanced solution for detecting COVID-19 from computed tomography (CT) images using a lean transfer learning-based model. To decrease model misclassifications, two key steps of image processing were employed. Firstly, the uppermost and lowermost slices were removed, preserving sixty percent of each patient's slices. Secondly, all slices underwent manual cropping to emphasize the lung areas. Subsequently, resized CT scans (224 × 224) were input into an Xception transfer learning model with a modified output. Both Xception's architecture and pretrained weights were leveraged in the method. A big and rigorously annotated database of CT images was used to verify the method. The number of patients/subjects in the dataset is more than 5000, and the number and shape of the slices in each CT scan varies greatly. Verification was made both on the validation partition and on the test partition of unseen images. Results on the COV19-CT database showcased not only improvement from our previous solution and the baseline but also comparable performance to the highest-achieving methods on the same dataset. Further validation studies could explore the scalability and adaptability of the developed methodologies across diverse healthcare settings and patient populations. Additionally, investigating the integration of advanced image processing techniques, such as automated region of interest detection and segmentation algorithms, could enhance the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease that has caused thousands of deaths and infected millions worldwide. Thus, various technologies that allow for the fast detection of COVID-19 infections with high accuracy can offer healthcare professionals much-needed help. This study is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art pretrained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays (CXRs). The dataset used in the experiments consists of 1200 CXR images from individuals with COVID-19, 1345 CXR images from individuals with viral pneumonia, and 1341 CXR images from healthy individuals. In this paper, the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and precise identification of COVID-19 from CXR images has been explored based on different pretrained deep learning algorithms and fine-tuned to maximise detection accuracy to identify the best algorithms. The results showed that deep learning with X-ray imaging is useful in collecting critical biological markers associated with COVID-19 infections. VGG16 and MobileNet obtained the highest accuracy of 98.28%. However, VGG16 outperformed all other models in COVID-19 detection with an accuracy, F1 score, precision, specificity, and sensitivity of 98.72%, 97.59%, 96.43%, 98.70%, and 98.78%, respectively. The outstanding performance of these pretrained models can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. However, a larger dataset of COVID-19 X-ray images is required for a more accurate and reliable identification of COVID-19 infections when using deep transfer learning. This would be extremely beneficial in this pandemic when the disease burden and the need for preventive measures are in conflict with the currently available resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease that has caused thousands of deaths and infected millions worldwide. Thus, various technologies that allow for the fast detection of COVID-19 infections with high accuracy can offer healthcare professionals much-needed help. This study is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art pretrained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays (CXRs). The dataset used in the experiments consists of 1200 CXR images from individuals with COVID-19, 1345 CXR images from individuals with viral pneumonia, and 1341 CXR images from healthy individuals. In this paper, the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and precise identification of COVID-19 from CXR images has been explored based on different pretrained deep learning algorithms and fine-tuned to maximise detection accuracy to identify the best algorithms. The results showed that deep learning with X-ray imaging is useful in collecting critical biological markers associated with COVID-19 infections. VGG16 and MobileNet obtained the highest accuracy of 98.28%. However, VGG16 outperformed all other models in COVID-19 detection with an accuracy, F1 score, precision, specificity, and sensitivity of 98.72%, 97.59%, 96.43%, 98.70%, and 98.78%, respectively. The outstanding performance of these pretrained models can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. However, a larger dataset of COVID-19 X-ray images is required for a more accurate and reliable identification of COVID-19 infections when using deep transfer learning. This would be extremely beneficial in this pandemic when the disease burden and the need for preventive measures are in conflict with the currently available resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone age assessment (BAA) is an essential topic in the clinical practice of evaluating the biological maturity of children. Because the manual method is time-consuming and prone to observer variability, it is attractive to develop computer-aided and automated methods for BAA. In this paper, we present a fully automatic BAA method. To eliminate noise in a raw X-ray image, we start with using U-Net to precisely segment hand mask image from a raw X-ray image. Even though U-Net can perform the segmentation with high precision, it needs a bigger annotated dataset. To alleviate the annotation burden, we propose to use deep active learning (AL) to select unlabeled data samples with sufficient information intentionally. These samples are given to Oracle for annotation. After that, they are then used for subsequential training. In the beginning, only 300 data are manually annotated and then the improved U-Net within the AL framework can robustly segment all the 12611 images in RSNA dataset. The AL segmentation model achieved a Dice score at 0.95 in the annotated testing set. To optimize the learning process, we employ six off-the-shell deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with pretrained weights on ImageNet. We use them to extract features of preprocessed hand images with a transfer learning technique. In the end, a variety of ensemble regression algorithms are applied to perform BAA. Besides, we choose a specific CNN to extract features and explain why we select that CNN. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieved discrepancy between manual and predicted bone age of about 6.96 and 7.35 months for male and female cohorts, respectively, on the RSNA dataset. These accuracies are comparable to state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]