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The new COVID-19 variants of concern are causing more infections and spreading much faster than their predecessors. Recent cases show that even vaccinated people are highly affected by these new variants. The proactive nucleotide sequence prediction of possible new variants of COVID-19 and developing better healthcare plans to address their spread require a unified framework for variant classification and early prediction. This paper attempts to answer the following research questions: can a convolutional neural network with self-attention by extracting discriminative features from nucleotide sequences be used to classify COVID-19 variants? Second, is it possible to employ uncertainty calculation in the predicted probability distribution to predict new variants? Finally, can synthetic approaches such as variational autoencoder-decoder networks be employed to generate a synthetic new variant from random noise? Experimental results show that the generated sequence is significantly similar to the original coronavirus and its variants, proving that our neural network can learn the mutation patterns from the old variants. Moreover, to our knowledge, we are the first to collect data for all COVID-19 variants for computational analysis. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated for classification, new variant prediction, and new variant generation tasks and achieves better performance for all tasks. Our code, data, and trained models are available on GitHub (https://github.com/Aminullah6264/COVID19 , accessed on 16 September 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consideration of infectious diseases from a mathematical point of view can reveal possible options for epidemic control and fighting the spread of infection. However, predicting and modeling the spread of a new, previously unexplored virus is still difficult. The present paper examines the possibility of using a new approach to predicting the statistical indicators of the epidemic of a new type of virus based on the example of COVID-19. The important result of the study is the description of the principle of dynamic balance of epidemiological processes, which has not been previously used by other researchers for epidemic modeling. The new approach is also based on solving the problem of predicting the future dynamics of precisely random values of model parameters, which is used for defining the future values of the total number of: cases (C); recovered and dead (R); and active cases (I). Intelligent heuristic algorithms are proposed for calculating the future trajectories of stochastic parameters, which are called the percentage increase in the total number of confirmed cases of the disease and the dynamic characteristics of epidemiological processes. Examples are given of the application of the proposed approach for making forecasts of the considered indicators of the COVID-19 epidemic, in Russia and European countries, during the first wave of the epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early illness detection enables medical professionals to deliver the best care and increases the likelihood of a full recovery. In this work, we show that computer-aided design (CAD) systems are capable of using chest X-ray (CXR) medical imaging modalities for the identification of respiratory system disorders. At present, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most well-known illness. We propose a system based on explainable artificial intelligence to detect COVID-19 from CXR images by using several cutting-edge convolutional neural network (CNN) models, as well as the Vision of Transformer (ViT) models. The proposed system also visualizes the infected areas of the CXR images. This gives doctors and other medical professionals a second option for supporting their decision. The proposed system uses some preprocessing of the images, which includes the segmentation of the region of interest using a UNet model and rotation augmentation. CNN employs pixel arrays, while ViT divides the image into visual tokens; therefore, one of the objectives is to compare their performance in COVID-19 detection. In the experiments, a publicly available dataset (COVID-QU-Ex) is used. The experimental results show that the performances of the CNN-based models and the ViT-based models are comparable. The best accuracy was 99.82%, obtained by the EfficientNetB7 (CNN-based) model, followed by the SegFormer (ViT-based). In addition, the segmentation and augmentation enhanced the performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning is a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence that uses artificial neural networks, a machine learning technique, to extract patterns and make predictions from large datasets. In recent years, it has achieved rapid development and is widely used in numerous disciplines with fruitful results. Learning valuable information from complex, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous biomedical data is a key challenge in transforming healthcare. In this review, we provide an overview of emerging deep-learning techniques, COVID-19 research involving deep learning, and concrete examples of deep-learning methods in COVID-19 diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment management. Deep learning can process medical imaging data, laboratory test results, and other relevant data to diagnose diseases and judge disease progression and prognosis, and even recommend treatment plans and drug-use strategies to accelerate drug development and improve drug quality. Furthermore, it can help governments develop proper prevention and control measures. We also assess the current limitations and challenges of deep learning in therapy precision for COVID-19, including the lack of phenotypically abundant data and the need for more interpretable deep-learning models. Finally, we discuss how current barriers can be overcome to enable future clinical applications of deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes and develops a secured edge-assisted deep learning (DL)-based automatic COVID-19 detection framework that utilizes the cloud and edge computing assistance as a service with a 5G network and blockchain technologies. The development of artificial intelligence methods through services at the edge plays a significant role in serving many applications in different domains. Recently, some DL approaches have been proposed to successfully detect COVID-19 by analyzing chest X-ray (CXR) images in the cloud and edge computing environments. However, the existing DL methods leverage only local and small training datasets. To overcome these limitations, we employed the edges to perform three tasks. The first task was to collect data from different hospitals and send them to a global cloud to train a DL model on massive datasets. The second task was to integrate all the trained models on the cloud to detect COVID-19 cases automatically. The third task was to retrain the trained model on specific COVID-19 data locally at hospitals to improve and generalize the trained model. A feature-level fusion and reduction were adopted for model performance enhancement. Experimental results on a public CXR dataset demonstrated an improvement against recent related work, achieving the quality-of-service requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pandemics and infectious diseases are overcome by vaccination, which serves as a preventative measure. Nevertheless, vaccines also raise public concerns; public apprehension and doubts challenge the acceptance of new vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines received a similarly hostile reaction from the public. In addition, misinformation from social media, contradictory comments from medical experts, and reports of worse reactions led to negative COVID-19 vaccine perceptions. Many researchers analyzed people's varying sentiments regarding the COVID-19 vaccine using artificial intelligence (AI) approaches. This study is the first attempt to review the role of AI approaches in COVID-19 vaccination-related sentiment analysis. For this purpose, insights from publications are gathered that analyze the (a) approaches used to develop sentiment analysis tools, (b) major sources of data, (c) available data sources, and (d) the public perception of COVID-19 vaccine. Analysis suggests that public perception-related COVID-19 tweets are predominantly analyzed using TextBlob. Moreover, to a large extent, researchers have employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for topic modeling of Twitter data. Another pertinent discovery made in our study is the variation in people's sentiments regarding the COVID-19 vaccine across different regions. We anticipate that our systematic review will serve as an all-in-one source for the research community in determining the right technique and data source for their requirements. Our findings also provide insight into the research community to assist them in their future work in the current domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]