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Given the pronounced impact COVID-19 continues to have on society—infecting 700 million reported individuals and causing 6.96 million deaths—many deep learning works have recently focused on the virus's diagnosis. However, assessing severity has remained an open and challenging problem due to a lack of large datasets, the large dimensionality of images for which to find weights, and the compute limitations of modern graphics processing units (GPUs). In this paper, a new, iterative application of transfer learning is demonstrated on the understudied field of 3D CT scans for COVID-19 severity analysis. This methodology allows for enhanced performance on the MosMed Dataset, which is a small and challenging dataset containing 1130 images of patients for five levels of COVID-19 severity (Zero, Mild, Moderate, Severe, and Critical). Specifically, given the large dimensionality of the input images, we create several custom shallow convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and iteratively refine and optimize them, paying attention to learning rates, layer types, normalization types, filter sizes, dropout values, and more. After a preliminary architecture design, the models are systematically trained on a simplified version of the dataset-building models for two-class, then three-class, then four-class, and finally five-class classification. The simplified problem structure allows the model to start learning preliminary features, which can then be further modified for more difficult classification tasks. Our final model CoSev boosts classification accuracies from below 60% at first to 81.57% with the optimizations, reaching similar performance to the state-of-the-art on the dataset, with much simpler setup procedures. In addition to COVID-19 severity diagnosis, the explored methodology can be applied to general image-based disease detection. Overall, this work highlights innovative methodologies that advance current computer vision practices for high-dimension, low-sample data as well as the practicality of data-driven machine learning and the importance of feature design for training, which can then be implemented for improvements in clinical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 analysis from medical imaging is an important task that has been intensively studied in the last years due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, medical imaging has often been used as a complementary or main tool to recognize the infected persons. On the other hand, medical imaging has the ability to provide more details about COVID-19 infection, including its severity and spread, which makes it possible to evaluate the infection and follow-up the patient's state. CT scans are the most informative tool for COVID-19 infection, where the evaluation of COVID-19 infection is usually performed through infection segmentation. However, segmentation is a tedious task that requires much effort and time from expert radiologists. To deal with this limitation, an efficient framework for estimating COVID-19 infection as a regression task is proposed. The goal of the Per-COVID-19 challenge is to test the efficiency of modern deep learning methods on COVID-19 infection percentage estimation (CIPE) from CT scans. Participants had to develop an efficient deep learning approach that can learn from noisy data. In addition, participants had to cope with many challenges, including those related to COVID-19 infection complexity and crossdataset scenarios. This paper provides an overview of the COVID-19 infection percentage estimation challenge (Per-COVID-19) held at MIA-COVID-2022. Details of the competition data, challenges, and evaluation metrics are presented. The best performing approaches and their results are described and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has evolved into a platform for the dissemination of information, including fake news. There is a lot of false information about the current situation of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, such as false information regarding vaccination. In this paper, we focus on sentiment analysis for Malaysian COVID-19-related news on social media such as Twitter. Tweets in Malaysia are often a combination of Malay, English, and Chinese with plenty of short forms, symbols, emojis, and emoticons within the maximum length of a tweet. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we built a multilingual COVID-19 Twitter dataset, comprising tweets written from 1 September 2021 to 12 December 2021. In particular, we collected 108,246 tweets, with over  67 %  in Malay language,  27 %  in English,  2 %  in Chinese, and  4 %  in other languages. We then manually annotated and assigned the sentiment of 11,568 tweets into three-class sentiments (positive, negative, and neutral) to develop a Malay-language sentiment analysis tool. For this purpose, we applied a data compression method using Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) on the texts and used two deep learning approaches, i.e., the Multilingual Bidirectional Encoder Representation for Transformer (M-BERT) and convolutional neural network (CNN). BPE tokenization is used to encode rare and unknown words into smaller meaningful subwords. With the CNN, we converted the labeled tweets into image files. Our experiments explored different BPE vocabulary sizes with our BPE-Text-to-Image-CNN and BPE-M-BERT models. The results show that the optimal vocabulary size for BPE is 12,000; any values beyond that would not contribute much to the F1-score. Overall, our results show that BPE-M-BERT slightly outperforms the CNN model, thereby showing that the pre-trained M-BERT network has the advantage for our multilingual dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus that has been affecting the global population by spreading rapidly and causing severe complications, which require prompt and elaborate emergency treatment. Automatic tools to diagnose COVID-19 could potentially be an important and useful aid. Radiologists and clinicians could potentially rely on interpretable AI technologies to address the diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19 patients. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for COVID-19 classification. The previous studies are methodically evaluated, and a summary of the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification approaches is presented. The reviewed papers have presented a variety of CNN models and architectures that were developed to provide an accurate and quick automatic tool to diagnose the COVID-19 virus based on presented CT scan or X-ray images. In this systematic review, we focused on the critical components of the deep learning approach, such as network architecture, model complexity, parameter optimization, explainability, and dataset/code availability. The literature search yielded a large number of studies over the past period of the virus spread, and we summarized their past efforts. State-of-the-art CNN architectures, with their strengths and weaknesses, are discussed with respect to diverse technical and clinical evaluation metrics to safely implement current AI studies in medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the World Health Organization statistics, as of 25 October 2022, there have been 625,248,843 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 65,622,281 deaths worldwide. The spread and severity of COVID-19 are alarming. The economy and life of countries worldwide have been greatly affected. The rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 directly affects the spread of the virus and the degree of harm. Currently, the classification of chest X-ray or CT images based on artificial intelligence is an important method for COVID-19 diagnosis. It can assist doctors in making judgments and reduce the misdiagnosis rate. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is very popular in computer vision applications, such as applied to biological image segmentation, traffic sign recognition, face recognition, and other fields. It is one of the most widely used machine learning methods. This paper mainly introduces the latest deep learning methods and techniques for diagnosing COVID-19 using chest X-ray or CT images based on the convolutional neural network. It reviews the technology of CNN at various stages, such as rectified linear units, batch normalization, data augmentation, dropout, and so on. Several well-performing network architectures are explained in detail, such as AlexNet, ResNet, DenseNet, VGG, GoogleNet, etc. We analyzed and discussed the existing CNN automatic COVID-19 diagnosis systems from sensitivity, accuracy, precision, specificity, and F1 score. The systems use chest X-ray or CT images as datasets. Overall, CNN has essential value in COVID-19 diagnosis. All of them have good performance in the existing experiments. If expanding the datasets, adding GPU acceleration and data preprocessing techniques, and expanding the types of medical images, the performance of CNN will be further improved. This paper wishes to make contributions to future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of COVID-19 disease in 2019, machine learning (ML) techniques, specifically deep learning networks (DNNs), played a key role in diagnosing the disease in the medical industry due to their superior performance. However, the computational cost of deep learning networks (DNNs) can be quite high, making it necessary to often outsource the training process to third-party providers, such as machine learning as a service (MLaaS). Therefore, careful consideration is required to achieve robustness in DNN-based systems against cyber-security attacks. In this paper, we propose a method called the dropout-bagging (DB-COVIDNet) algorithm, which works as a robust defense mechanism against poisoning backdoor attacks. In this model, the trigger-related features will be removed by the modified dropout algorithm, and then we will use the new voting method in the bagging algorithm to achieve the final results. We considered AC-COVIDNet as the main inducer of the bagging algorithm, which is an attention-guided contrastive convolutional neural network (CNN), and evaluated the performance of the proposed method with the malicious COVIDx dataset. The results demonstrated that DB-COVIDNet has strong robustness and can significantly reduce the effect of the backdoor attack. The proposed DB-COVIDNet nullifies backdoors before the attack has been activated, resulting in a tremendous reduction in the attack success rate from  99.5 %  to  3 %  with high accuracy on the clean data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges in accurately diagnosing the disease, as severe cases may present symptoms similar to pneumonia. Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is the conventional diagnostic technique; however, it has limitations in terms of time-consuming laboratory procedures and kit availability. Radiological chest images, such as X-rays and Computed Tomography (CT) scans, have been essential in aiding the diagnosis process. In this research paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to enhance the detection of COVID-19 and its variants from chest X-ray images. Building upon the existing research in SARS and COVID-19 identification using AI and machine learning techniques, our DL model aims to extract the most significant features from the X-ray scans of affected individuals. By employing an explanatory CNN-based technique, we achieved a promising accuracy of up to 97 % in detecting COVID-19 cases, which can assist physicians in effectively screening and identifying probable COVID-19 patients. This study highlights the potential of DL in medical imaging, specifically in detecting COVID-19 from radiological images. The improved accuracy of our model demonstrates its efficacy in aiding healthcare professionals and mitigating the spread of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, advances in deep learning (DL) techniques for video analysis have developed to solve the problem of real-time processing. Automated face recognition in the runtime environment has become necessary in video surveillance systems for urban security. This is a difficult task due to face occlusion, which makes it hard to capture effective features. Existing work focuses on improving performance while ignoring issues like a small dataset, high computational complexity, and a lack of lightweight and efficient feature descriptors. In this paper, face recognition (FR) using a Convolutional mixer (AFR-Conv) algorithm is developed to handle face occlusion problems. A novel AFR-Conv architecture is designed by assigning priority-based weight to the different face patches along with residual connections and an AdaBoost classifier for automatically recognizing human faces. The AFR-Conv also leverages the strengths of pre-trained CNNs by extracting features using ResNet-50, Inception-v3, and DenseNet-161. The AdaBoost classifier combines these features' weighted votes to predict labels for testing images. To develop this system, we use the data augmentation method to enhance the number of datasets using human face images. The AFR-Conv method is then used to extract robust features from images. Finally, to recognize human identity, an AdaBoost classifier is utilized. For the training and evaluation of the AFR-Conv model, a set of face images is collected from online data sources. The experimental results of the AFR-Conv approach are presented in terms of precision (PR), recall (RE), detection accuracy (DA), and F1-score metrics. Particularly, the proposed approach attains 95.5% PR, 97.6% RE, 97.5% DA, and 98.5% of F1-score on 8500 face images. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme outperforms advanced methods for face classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X-ray diagnostics are widely used to detect various diseases, such as bone fracture, pneumonia, or intracranial hemorrhage. This method is simple and accessible in most hospitals, but requires an expert who is sometimes unavailable. Today, some diagnoses are made with the help of deep learning algorithms based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but these algorithms show limitations. Recently, Capsule Networks (CapsNet) have been proposed to overcome these problems. In our work, CapsNet is used to detect whether a chest X-ray image has disease (COVID or pneumonia) or is healthy. An improved model called DRCaps is proposed, which combines the advantage of CapsNet and the dilation rate (dr) parameter to manage images with 226 × 226 resolution. We performed experiments with 16,669 chest images, in which our model achieved an accuracy of 90%. Furthermore, the model size is 11M with a reconstruction stage, which helps to avoid overfitting. Experiments show how the reconstruction stage works and how we can avoid the max-pooling operation for networks with a stride and dilation rate to downsampling the convolution layers. In this paper, DRCaps is superior to other comparable models in terms of accuracy, parameters, and image size handling. The main idea is to keep the model as simple as possible without using data augmentation or a complex preprocessing stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a control system for indoor safety measures using a Faster R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) architecture. The proposed system aims to ensure the safety of occupants in indoor environments by detecting and recognizing potential safety hazards in real time, such as capacity control, social distancing, or mask use. Using deep learning techniques, the system detects these situations to be controlled, notifying the person in charge of the company if any of these are violated. The proposed system was tested in a real teaching environment at Rey Juan Carlos University, using Raspberry Pi 4 as a hardware platform together with an Intel Neural Stick board and a pair of PiCamera RGB (Red Green Blue) cameras to capture images of the environment and a Faster R-CNN architecture to detect and classify objects within the images. To evaluate the performance of the system, a dataset of indoor images was collected and annotated for object detection and classification. The system was trained using this dataset, and its performance was evaluated based on precision, recall, and F1 score. The results show that the proposed system achieved a high level of accuracy in detecting and classifying potential safety hazards in indoor environments. The proposed system includes an efficiently implemented software infrastructure to be launched on a low-cost hardware platform, which is affordable for any company, regardless of size or revenue, and it has the potential to be integrated into existing safety systems in indoor environments such as hospitals, warehouses, and factories, to provide real-time monitoring and alerts for safety hazards. Future work will focus on enhancing the system's robustness and scalability to larger indoor environments with more complex safety hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic still has a significant impact on the worldwide population's health and well-being. Effective patient screening, including radiological examination employing chest radiography as one of the main screening modalities, is an important step in the battle against the disease. Indeed, the earliest studies on COVID-19 found that patients infected with COVID-19 present with characteristic anomalies in chest radiography. In this paper, we introduce COVID-ConvNet, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) design suitable for detecting COVID-19 symptoms from chest X-ray (CXR) scans. The proposed deep learning (DL) model was trained and evaluated using 21,165 CXR images from the COVID-19 Database, a publicly available dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our COVID-ConvNet model has a high prediction accuracy at 97.43% and outperforms recent related works by up to 5.9% in terms of prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of deep machine learning (DML) models in gaming and robotics has increased its trial in clinical and public healthcare solutions. In applying DML to healthcare problems, a special challenge of inadequate electrical energy and computing resources exists in regional and developing areas of the world. In this paper, we evaluate and report the computational and predictive performance design trade-offs for four candidate deep learning models that can be deployed for rapid malaria case finding. The goal is to maximise malaria detection accuracy while reducing computing resource and energy consumption. Based on our experimental results using a blood smear malaria test data set, the quantised versions of Basic Convolutional Neural Network (B-CNN) and MobileNetV2 have better malaria detection performance (up to 99% recall), lower memory usage (2MB 8-bit quantised model) and shorter inference time (33-95 microseconds on mobile phones) than VGG-19 fine-tuned and quantised models. Hence, we have implemented MobileNetV2 in our mobile application as it has even a lower memory requirement than B-CNN. This work will help to counter the negative effects of COVID-19 on the previous successes towards global malaria elimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting energy demand in adverse scenarios, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is critical to ensure the supply of electricity and the operation of essential services in metropolitan regions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model to predict the demand for the next day using the "IEEE DataPort Competition Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting: Post-COVID Paradigm" database. The best model uses hybrid deep neural network architecture (convolutional network–recurrent network) to extract spatial-temporal features from the input data. A preliminary analysis of the input data was performed, excluding anomalous variables. A sliding window was applied for importing the data into the network input. The input data was normalized, using a higher weight for the demand variable. The proposed model's performance was better than the models that stood out in the competition, with a mean absolute error of 2361.84 kW. The high similarity between the actual demand curve and the predicted demand curve evidences the efficiency of the application of deep networks compared with the classical methods applied by other authors. In the pandemic scenario, the applied technique proved to be the best strategy to predict demand for the next day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning (DL) methods have the potential to be used for detecting COVID-19 symptoms. However, the rationale for which DL method to use and which symptoms to detect has not yet been explored. In this paper, we present the first performance study which compares various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for the autonomous preliminary COVID-19 detection of cough and/or breathing symptoms. We compare and analyze residual networks (ResNets), visual geometry Groups (VGGs), Alex neural networks (AlexNet), densely connected networks (DenseNet), squeeze neural networks (SqueezeNet), and COVID-19 identification ResNet (CIdeR) architectures to investigate their classification performance. We uniquely train and validate both unimodal and multimodal CNN architectures using the EPFL and Cambridge datasets. Performance comparison across all modes and datasets showed that the VGG19 and DenseNet-201 achieved the highest unimodal and multimodal classification performance. VGG19 and DensNet-201 had high F1 scores (0.94 and 0.92) for unimodal cough classification on the Cambridge dataset, compared to the next highest F1 score for ResNet (0.79), with comparable F1 scores to ResNet for the larger EPFL cough dataset. They also had consistently high accuracy, recall, and precision. For multimodal detection, VGG19 and DenseNet-201 had the highest F1 scores (0.91) compared to the other CNN structures (≤0.90), with VGG19 also having the highest accuracy and recall. Our investigation provides the foundation needed to select the appropriate deep CNN method to utilize for non-contact early COVID-19 detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rapidly spreading epidemic, COVID-19 had a serious effect on millions and took many lives. Therefore, for individuals with COVID-19, early discovery is essential for halting the infection's progress. To quickly and accurately diagnose COVID-19, imaging modalities, including computed tomography (CT) scans and chest X-ray radiographs, are frequently employed. The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches further explored the creation of automated and precise COVID-19 detection systems. Scientists widely use deep learning techniques to identify coronavirus infection in lung imaging. In our paper, we developed a novel light CNN model architecture with watershed-based region-growing segmentation on Chest X-rays. Both CT scans and X-ray radiographs were employed along with 5-fold cross-validation. Compared to earlier state-of-the-art models, our model is lighter and outperformed the previous methods by achieving a mean accuracy of 98.8% on X-ray images and 98.6% on CT scans, predicting the rate of 0.99% and 0.97% for PPV (Positive predicted Value) and NPV (Negative predicted Value) rate of 0.98% and 0.99%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-trained machine learning models have recently been widely used to detect COVID-19 automatically from X-ray images. Although these models can selectively retrain their layers for the desired task, the output remains biased due to the massive number of pre-trained weights and parameters. This paper proposes a novel batch normalized convolutional neural network (BNCNN) model to identify COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images in binary and multi-class frameworks with a dual aim to extract salient features that improve model performance over pre-trained image analysis networks while reducing computational complexity. The BNCNN model has three phases: Data pre-processing to normalize and resize X-ray images, Feature extraction to generate feature maps, and Classification to predict labels based on the feature maps. Feature extraction uses four repetitions of a block comprising a convolution layer to learn suitable kernel weights for the features map, a batch normalization layer to solve the internal covariance shift of feature maps, and a max-pooling layer to find the highest-level patterns by increasing the convolution span. The classifier section uses two repetitions of a block comprising a dense layer to learn complex feature maps, a batch normalization layer to standardize internal feature maps, and a dropout layer to avoid overfitting while aiding the model generalization. Comparative analysis shows that when applied to an open-access dataset, the proposed BNCNN model performs better than four other comparative pre-trained models for three-way and two-way class datasets. Moreover, the BNCNN requires fewer parameters than the pre-trained models, suggesting better deployment suitability on low-resource devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the problem of detecting disinformation about COVID-19 in online discussions. As the Internet expands, so does the amount of content on it. In addition to content based on facts, a large amount of content is being manipulated, which negatively affects the whole society. This effect is currently compounded by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which caused people to spend even more time online and to get more invested in this fake content. This work brings a brief overview of how toxic information looks like, how it is spread, and how to potentially prevent its dissemination by early recognition of disinformation using deep learning. We investigated the overall suitability of deep learning in solving problem of detection of disinformation in conversational content. We also provided a comparison of architecture based on convolutional and recurrent principles. We have trained three detection models based on three architectures using CNN (convolutional neural networks), LSTM (long short-term memory), and their combination. We have achieved the best results using LSTM (F1 = 0.8741, Accuracy = 0.8628). But the results of all three architectures were comparable, for example the CNN+LSTM architecture achieved F1 = 0.8672 and Accuracy = 0.852. The paper offers finding that introducing a convolutional component does not bring significant improvement. In comparison with our previous works, we noted that from all forms of antisocial posts, disinformation is the most difficult to recognize, since disinformation has no unique language, such as hate speech, toxic posts etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting return and profit is a primary challenge for financial practitioners and an even more critical issue when it comes to forecasting energy market returns. This research attempts to propose an effective method to predict the Brent Crude Oil return, which results in remarkable performance compared with the well-known models in the return prediction. The proposed hybrid model is based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) networks where the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) outputs are used as features, along with return lags, price, and macroeconomic variables to train the models, resulting in significant improvement in the model's performance. According to the obtained results, our proposed model performs better than other models, including artificial neural network (ANN), principal component analysis (PCA)-ANN, LSTM, and CNN. We show the efficiency of our proposed model by testing it with a simple trading strategy, indicating that the cumulative profit obtained from trading with the prediction results of the proposed 2D CNN-LSTM model is higher than those of the other models presented in this research. In the second part of this study, we consider the spread of COVID-19 and its impact on the financial markets to present a precise LSTM model that can reflect the impact of this disease on the Brent Crude Oil return. This paper uses the significance test and correlation measures to show the similarity between the series of Brent Crude Oil during the SARS and the COVID-19 pandemics, after which the data during the SARS period are used along with the data during COVID-19 to train the LSTM. The results demonstrate that the proposed LSTM model, tuned by the SARS data, can better predict the Brent Crude Oil return during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a transferable disease inherited from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A total of 594 million people have been infected, and 6.4 million human beings have died due to COVID-19. The fastest way to diagnose the disease is by radiography. Deep learning has been the most popular technique for image classification during the last decade. This paper aims to examine the contributions of machine learning for the detection of COVID-19 using Deep Learning and explores the overall application of convolutional neural networks of some famous state-of-the-art deep learning pre-trained models. In this research, our objective is to explore the various image classification strategies for CXIs and the application of deep learning models for optimization and feature selection. The study presented in this article shows that the accuracy of deep learning models when detecting COVID-19 on the basis of chest X-ray images ranges from 93 percent to above 99 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face mask detection has become a great challenge in computer vision, demanding the coalition of technology with COVID-19 awareness. Researchers have proposed deep learning models to detect the use of face masks. However, the incorrect use of a face mask can be as harmful as not wearing any protection at all. In this paper, we propose a compound convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture based on two computer vision tasks: object localization to discover faces in images/videos, followed by an image classification CNN to categorize the faces and show if someone is using a face mask correctly, incorrectly, or not at all. The first CNN is built upon RetinaFace, a model to detect faces in images, whereas the second CNN uses a ResNet-18 architecture as a classification backbone. Our model enables an accurate identification of people who are not correctly following the COVID-19 healthcare recommendations on face mask use. To enable further global use of our technology, we have released both the dataset used to train the classification model and our proposed computer vision pipeline to the public, and optimized it for embedded systems deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lifestyle of humans has changed noticeably since the contagious COVID-19 disease struck globally. People should wear a face mask as a protective measure to curb the spread of the contagious disease. Consequently, real-world applications (i.e., electronic customer relationship management) dealing with human ages extracted from face images must migrate to a robust system proficient to estimate the age of a person wearing a face mask. In this paper, we proposed a hierarchical age estimation model from masked facial images in a group-to-specific manner rather than a single regression model because age progression across different age groups is quite dissimilar. Our intention was to squeeze the feature space among limited age classes so that the model could fairly discern age. We generated a synthetic masked face image dataset over the IMDB-WIKI face image dataset to train and validate our proposed model due to the absence of a benchmark masked face image dataset with real age annotations. We somewhat mitigated the data sparsity problem of the large public IMDB-WIKI dataset using off-the-shelf down-sampling and up-sampling techniques as required. The age estimation task was fully modeled like a deep classification problem, and expected ages were formulated from SoftMax probabilities. We performed a classification task by deploying multiple low-memory and higher-accuracy-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our proposed hierarchical framework demonstrated marginal improvement in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) compared to the one-off model approach for masked face real age estimation. Moreover, this research is perhaps the maiden attempt to estimate the real age of a person from his/her masked face image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, China in December 2019, and put millions of people in a difficult situation. This fatal virus spread to over 227 countries and the number of infected patients increased to over 400 million cases, causing over 6 million deaths worldwide. Due to the serious consequence of this virus, it is necessary to develop a detection method that can respond quickly to prevent the spreading of COVID-19. Using chest X-ray images to detect COVID-19 is one of the promising techniques; however, with a large number of COVID-19 infected cases every day, the number of radiologists available to diagnose the chest X-ray images is not sufficient. We must have a computer aid system that helps doctors instantly and automatically determine COVID-19 cases. Recently, with the emergence of deep learning methods applied for medical and biomedical uses, using convolutional neural net and transformer applications for chest X-ray images can be a supplement for COVID-19 testing. In this paper, we attempt to classify three types of chest X-ray, which are normal, pneumonia, and COVID-19 using deep learning methods on a customized dataset. We also carry out an experiment on the COVID-19 severity assessment task using a tailored dataset. Five deep learning models were obtained to conduct our experiments: DenseNet121, ResNet50, InceptionNet, Swin Transformer, and Hybrid EfficientNet-DOLG neural networks. The results indicated that chest X-ray and deep learning could be reliable methods for supporting doctors in COVID-19 identification and severity assessment tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory medicine plays a fundamental role in the detection, diagnosis and management of COVID-19 infection. Recent observations of the morphology of cells circulating in blood found the presence of particular reactive lymphocytes (COVID-19 RL) in some of the infected patients and demonstrated that it was an indicator of a better prognosis of the disease. Visual morphological analysis is time consuming, requires smear review by expert clinical pathologists, and is prone to subjectivity. This paper presents a convolutional neural network system designed for automatic recognition of COVID-19 RL. It is based on the Xception71 structure and is trained using images of blood cells from real infected patients. An experimental study is carried out with a group of 92 individuals. The input for the system is a set of images selected by the clinical pathologist from the blood smear of a patient. The output is the prediction whether the patient belongs to the group associated with better prognosis of the disease. A threshold is obtained for the classification system to predict that the smear belongs to this group. With this threshold, the experimental test shows excellent performance metrics: 98.3% sensitivity and precision, 97.1% specificity, and 97.8% accuracy. The system does not require costly calculations and can potentially be integrated into clinical practice to assist clinical pathologists in a more objective smear review for early prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to false negative results of the real-time Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test, the complemental practices such as computed tomography (CT) and X-ray in combination with RT-PCR are discussed to achieve a more accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 in clinical practice. Since radiology includes visual understanding as well as decision making under limited conditions such as uncertainty, urgency, patient burden, and hospital facilities, mistakes are inevitable. Therefore, there is an immediate requirement to carry out further investigation and develop new accurate detection and identification methods to provide automatically quantitative evaluation of COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a new computer-aided diagnosis application for COVID-19 detection using deep learning techniques. A new technique, which receives symmetric X-ray data as the input, is presented in this study by combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with Ant Lion Optimization Algorithm (ALO) and Multiclass Naïve Bayes Classifier (NB). Moreover, several other classifiers such as Softmax, Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Decision Tree (DT) are combined with CNN. The promising results of these classifiers are evaluated and presented for accuracy, precision, and F1-score metrics. NB classifier with Ant Lion Optimization Algorithm and CNN produced the best results with 98.31% accuracy, 100% precision and 98.25% F1-score and with the lowest execution time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the rapid transmission of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is causing a significant health crisis worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued several guidelines for protection against the spreading of COVID-19. According to the WHO, the most effective preventive measure against COVID-19 is wearing a mask in public and crowded areas. It is quite difficult to manually monitor and determine people with masks and no masks. In this paper, different deep learning architectures were used for better results evaluations. After extensive experimentation, we selected a custom model having the best performance to identify whether people wear a face mask or not and allowing an easy deployment on a small device such as a Jetson Nano. The experimental evaluation is performed on the custom dataset that is developed from the website (See data collection section) after applying different masks on those images. The proposed model in comparison with other methods produced higher accuracy (99% for training accuracy and 99% for validation accuracy). Moreover, the proposed method can be deployed on resource-constrained devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the COVID-19 epidemic has had a major impact on day-to-day life of people all over the globe, and it demands various kinds of screening tests to detect the coronavirus. Conversely, the development of deep learning (DL) models combined with radiological images is useful for accurate detection and classification. DL models are full of hyperparameters, and identifying the optimal parameter configuration in such a high dimensional space is not a trivial challenge. Since the procedure of setting the hyperparameters requires expertise and extensive trial and error, metaheuristic algorithms can be employed. With this motivation, this paper presents an automated glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) with an inception-based deep convolutional neural network (IDCNN) for COVID-19 diagnosis and classification, called the GSO-IDCNN model. The presented model involves a Gaussian smoothening filter (GSF) to eradicate the noise that exists from the radiological images. Additionally, the IDCNN-based feature extractor is utilized, which makes use of the Inception v4 model. To further enhance the performance of the IDCNN technique, the hyperparameters are optimally tuned using the GSO algorithm. Lastly, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy classifier (ANFC) is used for classifying the existence of COVID-19. The design of the GSO algorithm with the ANFC model for COVID-19 diagnosis shows the novelty of the work. For experimental validation, a series of simulations were performed on benchmark radiological imaging databases to highlight the superior outcome of the GSO-IDCNN technique. The experimental values pointed out that the GSO-IDCNN methodology has demonstrated a proficient outcome by offering a maximal s e n s y of 0.9422, s p e c y of 0.9466, p r e c n of 0.9494, a c c y of 0.9429, and F 1 s c o r e of 0.9394. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is on a global scale and that wearing a face mask at work is the only effective way to avoid becoming infected with the virus. The pandemic made governments worldwide stay under lock-downs to prevent virus transmissions. Reports show that wearing face masks would reduce the risk of transmission. With the rise in population in cities, there is a greater need for efficient city management in today's world for reducing the impact of COVID-19 disease. For smart cities to prosper, significant improvements to occur in public transportation, roads, businesses, houses, city streets, and other facets of city life will have to be developed. The current public bus transportation system, such as it is, should be expanded with artificial intelligence. The autonomous mask detection and alert system are needed to find whether the person is wearing a face mask or not. This article presents a novel IoT-based face mask detection system in public transportation, especially buses. This system would collect real-time data via facial recognition. The main objective of the paper is to detect the presence of face masks in real-time video stream by utilizing deep learning, machine learning, and image processing techniques. To achieve this objective, a hybrid deep and machine learning model was designed and implemented. The model was evaluated using a new dataset in addition to public datasets. The results showed that the transformation of Convolution Neural Network (CNN) classifier has better performance over the Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifier; it has almost complete face-identification capabilities with respect to people's presence in the case where they are wearing masks, with an error rate of only 1.1%. Overall, compared with the standard models, AlexNet, Mobinet, and You Only Look Once (YOLO), the proposed model showed a better performance. Moreover, the experiments showed that the proposed model can detect faces and masks accurately with low inference time and memory, thus meeting the IoT limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, there is a substantial unmet need to diagnose various diseases effectively. The complexity of the different disease mechanisms and underlying symptoms of the patient population presents massive challenges in developing the early diagnosis tool and effective treatment. Machine learning (ML), an area of artificial intelligence (AI), enables researchers, physicians, and patients to solve some of these issues. Based on relevant research, this review explains how machine learning (ML) is being used to help in the early identification of numerous diseases. Initially, a bibliometric analysis of the publication is carried out using data from the Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) databases. The bibliometric study of 1216 publications was undertaken to determine the most prolific authors, nations, organizations, and most cited articles. The review then summarizes the most recent trends and approaches in machine-learning-based disease diagnosis (MLBDD), considering the following factors: algorithm, disease types, data type, application, and evaluation metrics. Finally, in this paper, we highlight key results and provides insight into future trends and opportunities in the MLBDD area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is a very dangerous virus. Initially detected in China, it has since spread all over the world causing many deaths. There are several variants of COVID-19, which have been categorized into two major groups. These groups are variants of concern and variants of interest. Variants of concern are more dangerous, and there is a need to develop a system that can detect and classify COVID-19 and its variants without touching an infected person. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage-based deep learning framework to detect and classify COVID-19 and its variants. CT scans and chest X-ray images are used. Initially, the detection is done through a convolutional neural network, and then spatial features are extracted with deep convolutional models, while handcrafted features are extracted from several handcrafted descriptors. Both spatial and handcrafted features are combined to make a feature vector. This feature vector is called the vocabulary of features (VoF), as it contains spatial and handcrafted features. This feature vector is fed as an input to the classifier to classify different variants. The proposed model is evaluated based on accuracy, F1-score, specificity, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and classification error. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a global health crisis. The rapid spread of the virus has led to the infection of a significant population and millions of deaths worldwide. Therefore, the world is in urgent need of a fast and accurate COVID-19 screening. Numerous researchers have performed exceptionally well to design pioneering deep learning (DL) models for the automatic screening of COVID-19 based on computerised tomography (CT) scans; however, there is still a concern regarding the performance stability affected by tiny perturbations and structural changes in CT images. This paper proposes a fusion of a moment invariant (MI) method and a DL algorithm for feature extraction to address the instabilities in the existing COVID-19 classification models. The proposed method incorporates the MI-based features into the DL models using the cascade fusion method. It was found that the fusion of MI features with DL features has the potential to improve the sensitivity and accuracy of the COVID-19 classification. Based on the evaluation using the SARSCoV- 2 dataset, the fusion of VGG16 and Hu moments shows the best result with 90% sensitivity and 93% accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chest diseases can be dangerous and deadly. They include many chest infections such as pneumonia, asthma, edema, and, lately, COVID-19. COVID-19 has many similar symptoms compared to pneumonia, such as breathing hardness and chest burden. However, it is a challenging task to differentiate COVID-19 from other chest diseases. Several related studies proposed a computer-aided COVID-19 detection system for the single-class COVID-19 detection, which may be misleading due to similar symptoms of other chest diseases. This paper proposes a framework for the detection of 15 types of chest diseases, including the COVID-19 disease, via a chest X-ray modality. Two-way classification is performed in proposed Framework. First, a deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture with a soft-max classifier is proposed. Second, transfer learning is applied using fully-connected layer of proposed CNN that extracted deep features. The deep features are fed to the classical Machine Learning (ML) classification methods. However, the proposed framework improves the accuracy for COVID-19 detection and increases the predictability rates for other chest diseases. The experimental results show that the proposed framework, when compared to other state-of-the-art models for diagnosing COVID-19 and other chest diseases, is more robust, and the results are promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 infection recognition is a very important step in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, many methods have been used to recognize COVID-19 infection including Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), X-ray scan, and Computed Tomography scan (CT- scan). In addition to the recognition of the COVID-19 infection, CT scans can provide more important information about the evolution of this disease and its severity. With the extensive number of COVID-19 infections, estimating the COVID-19 percentage can help the intensive care to free up the resuscitation beds for the critical cases and follow other protocol for less severity cases. In this paper, we introduce COVID-19 percentage estimation dataset from CT-scans, where the labeling process was accomplished by two expert radiologists. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of three Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures: ResneXt-50, Densenet-161, and Inception-v3. For the three CNN architectures, we use two loss functions: MSE and Dynamic Huber. In addition, two pretrained scenarios are investigated (ImageNet pretrained models and pretrained models using X-ray data). The evaluated approaches achieved promising results on the estimation of COVID-19 infection. Inception-v3 using Dynamic Huber loss function and pretrained models using X-ray data achieved the best performance for slice-level results: 0.9365, 5.10, and 9.25 for Pearson Correlation coefficient (PC), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), respectively. On the other hand, the same approach achieved 0.9603, 4.01, and 6.79 for PCsubj, MAEsubj, and RMSEsubj, respectively, for subject-level results. These results prove that using CNN architectures can provide accurate and fast solution to estimate the COVID-19 infection percentage for monitoring the evolution of the patient state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), originating in China, has rapidly spread worldwide. Physicians must examine infected patients and make timely decisions to isolate them. However, completing these processes is difficult due to limited time and availability of expert radiologists, as well as limitations of the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method. Deep learning, a sophisticated machine learning technique, leverages radiological imaging modalities for disease diagnosis and image classification tasks. Previous research on COVID-19 classification has encountered several limitations, including binary classification methods, single-feature modalities, small public datasets, and reliance on CT diagnostic processes. Additionally, studies have often utilized a flat structure, disregarding the hierarchical structure of pneumonia classification. This study aims to overcome these limitations by identifying pneumonia caused by COVID-19, distinguishing it from other types of pneumonia and healthy lungs using chest X-ray (CXR) images and related tabular medical data, and demonstrate the value of incorporating tabular medical data in achieving more accurate diagnoses. Resnet-based and VGG-based pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models were employed to extract features, which were then combined using early fusion for the classification of eight distinct classes. We leveraged the hierarchal structure of pneumonia classification within our approach to achieve improved classification outcomes. Since an imbalanced dataset is common in this field, a variety of versions of generative adversarial networks (GANs) were used to generate synthetic data. The proposed approach tested in our private datasets of 4523 patients achieved a macro-avg F1-score of 95.9% and an F1-score of 87.5% for COVID-19 identification using a Resnet-based structure. In conclusion, in this study, we were able to create an accurate deep learning multi-modal to diagnose COVID-19 and differentiate it from other kinds of pneumonia and normal lungs, which will enhance the radiological diagnostic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate forecasting remains a challenge, even with advanced techniques like deep learning (DL), ARIMA, and Holt–Winters (H&W), particularly for chaotic phenomena such as those observed in several areas, such as COVID-19, energy, and financial time series. Addressing this, we introduce a Forecasting Method with Filters and Residual Analysis (FMFRA), a hybrid methodology specifically applied to datasets of COVID-19 time series, which we selected for their complexity and exemplification of current forecasting challenges. FMFFRA consists of the following two approaches: FMFRA-DL, employing deep learning, and FMFRA-SSA, using singular spectrum analysis. This proposed method applies the following three phases: filtering, forecasting, and residual analysis. Initially, each time series is split into filtered and residual components. The second phase involves a simple fine-tuning for the filtered time series, while the third phase refines the forecasts and mitigates noise. FMFRA-DL is adept at forecasting complex series by distinguishing primary trends from insufficient relevant information. FMFRA-SSA is effective in data-scarce scenarios, enhancing forecasts through automated parameter search and residual analysis. Chosen for their geographical and substantial populations and chaotic dynamics, time series for Mexico, the United States, Colombia, and Brazil permitted a comparative perspective. FMFRA demonstrates its efficacy by improving the common forecasting performance measures of MAPE by 22.91%, DA by 13.19%, and RMSE by 25.24% compared to the second-best method, showcasing its potential for providing essential insights into various rapidly evolving domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates techniques for medical image classification, specifically focusing on COVID-19 scans obtained through computer tomography (CT). Firstly, handcrafted methods based on feature engineering are explored due to their suitability for training traditional machine learning (TML) classifiers (e.g., Support Vector Machine (SVM)) when faced with limited medical image datasets. In this context, I comprehensively evaluate and compare 27 descriptor sets. More recently, deep learning (DL) models have successfully analyzed and classified natural and medical images. However, the scarcity of well-annotated medical images, particularly those related to COVID-19, presents challenges for training DL models from scratch. Consequently, I leverage deep features extracted from 12 pre-trained DL models for classification tasks. This work presents a comprehensive comparative analysis between TML and DL approaches in COVID-19 image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of 2019 could be mounted in a rudimentary framing of a new medical problem, which globally introduces into the discussion a fulminant outbreak of coronavirus, consequently spreading COVID-19 that conducted long-lived and persistent repercussions. Hence, the theme proposed to be solved arises from the field of medical imaging, where a pulmonary CT-based standardized reporting system could be addressed as a solution. The core of it focuses on certain impediments such as the overworking of doctors, aiming essentially to solve a classification problem using deep learning techniques, namely, if a patient suffers from COVID-19, viral pneumonia, or is healthy from a pulmonary point of view. The methodology's approach was a meticulous one, denoting an empirical character in which the initial stage, given using data processing, performs an extraction of the lung cavity from the CT scans, which is a less explored approach, followed by data augmentation. The next step is comprehended by developing a CNN in two scenarios, one in which there is a binary classification (COVID and non-COVID patients), and the other one is represented by a three-class classification. Moreover, viral pneumonia is addressed. To obtain an efficient version, architectural changes were gradually made, involving four databases during this process. Furthermore, given the availability of pre-trained models, the transfer learning technique was employed by incorporating the linear classifier from our own convolutional network into an existing model, with the result being much more promising. The experimentation encompassed several models including MobileNetV1, ResNet50, DenseNet201, VGG16, and VGG19. Through a more in-depth analysis, using the CAM technique, MobilneNetV1 differentiated itself via the detection accuracy of possible pulmonary anomalies. Interestingly, this model stood out as not being among the most used in the literature. As a result, the following values of evaluation metrics were reached: loss (0.0751), accuracy (0.9744), precision (0.9758), recall (0.9742), AUC (0.9902), and F1 score (0.9750), from 1161 samples allocated for each of the three individual classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have garnered significant utilisation within automated image classification systems. CNNs possess the ability to leverage the spatial and temporal correlations inherent in a dataset. This study delves into the use of cutting-edge deep learning for precise image data classification, focusing on overcoming the difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to improve the accuracy and robustness of COVID-19 image classification, the study introduces a novel methodology that combines the strength of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This proposed study helps to mitigate the lack of labelled coronavirus (COVID-19) images, which has been a standard limitation in related research, and improves the model's ability to distinguish between COVID-19-related patterns and healthy lung images. The study uses a thorough case study and uses a sizable dataset of chest X-ray images covering COVID-19 cases, other respiratory conditions, and healthy lung conditions. The integrated model outperforms conventional DCNN-based techniques in terms of classification accuracy after being trained on this dataset. To address the issues of an unbalanced dataset, GAN will produce synthetic pictures and extract deep features from every image. A thorough understanding of the model's performance in real-world scenarios is also provided by the study's meticulous evaluation of the model's performance using a variety of metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaging plays a key role in the clinical management of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as the imaging findings reflect the pathological process in the lungs. The visual analysis of High-Resolution Computed Tomography of the chest allows for the differentiation of parenchymal abnormalities of COVID-19, which are crucial to be detected and quantified in order to obtain an accurate disease stratification and prognosis. However, visual assessment and quantification represent a time-consuming task for radiologists. In this regard, tools for semi-automatic segmentation, such as those based on Convolutional Neural Networks, can facilitate the detection of pathological lesions by delineating their contour. In this work, we compared four state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks based on the encoder–decoder paradigm for the binary segmentation of COVID-19 infections after training and testing them on 90 HRCT volumetric scans of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 collected from the database of the Pisa University Hospital. More precisely, we started from a basic model, the well-known UNet, then we added an attention mechanism to obtain an Attention-UNet, and finally we employed a recurrence paradigm to create a Recurrent–Residual UNet (R2-UNet). In the latter case, we also added attention gates to the decoding path of an R2-UNet, thus designing an R2-Attention UNet so as to make the feature representation and accumulation more effective. We compared them to gain understanding of both the cognitive mechanism that can lead a neural model to the best performance for this task and the good compromise between the amount of data, time, and computational resources required. We set up a five-fold cross-validation and assessed the strengths and limitations of these models by evaluating the performances in terms of Dice score, Precision, and Recall defined both on 2D images and on the entire 3D volume. From the results of the analysis, it can be concluded that Attention-UNet outperforms the other models by achieving the best performance of 81.93%, in terms of 2D Dice score, on the test set. Additionally, we conducted statistical analysis to assess the performance differences among the models. Our findings suggest that integrating the recurrence mechanism within the UNet architecture leads to a decline in the model's effectiveness for our particular application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a fast-spreading virus-related disease. On 28 March 2022, Worldometer (COVID-19 live update) reported that there were about 482,338,923 COVID-19 cases and 6,149,387 fatalities worldwide. Moreover, there were about 416,884,712 recovered patients. The primary clinical mechanism currently utilized for COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription–Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). Hospitals only have small quantities of COVID-19 test kits available due to the daily increase in cases. As an alternative diagnosis possibility, an automatic detection system was implemented. A vigorous technique for the automatic COVID-19 identification is the deep learning approach. Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is a modest tool that can be an alternate for diagnosing COVID-19-infected patients. With the use of deep learning, deep layer characteristics that are hidden from human sight may be observed using CXR imaging. One of the largest public databases, the "COVID-19 Radiography Database", comprises 21,164 CXR images and was taken from Kaggle. To achieve the best accuracy in this work, data cleansing and the balanced dataset approach were applied. The primary goal of data cleansing is to remove duplicate CXR images from the database. The accuracy of three distinct pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was compared and then analyzed (Xception, InceptionV3, and MobileNetV2). Among other models, Xception achieved the best testing accuracy of 94.13% with plain lung CXR pictures. The Gabor filtering image enhancement approach was also employed to identify COVID-19. Only for the MobileNetV2 model did enhance CXR images perform significantly better for classification than plain lung CXR images. This study attempts to enhance the system's accuracy to 100%, outperforming previous tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate lung segmentation plays a vital role in generating 3D projections of lung infections, which contribute to the diagnosis and treatment planning of various lung diseases, including cases like COVID-19. This study capitalizes on the capabilities of deep learning techniques to reconstruct 3D lung projections from CT-scans. In this pursuit, we employ well-established 2D architectural frameworks like UNet, LinkNet, Attention UNet, UNet 3+, and TransUNet. The dataset used comprises 20 3D CT-scans from COVID-19 patients, resulting in over 2900 raw 2D slices. Following preprocessing, the dataset is refined to encompass 2560 2D slices tailored for modeling. Preprocessing procedures involve mask refinement, image resizing, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), and image augmentation to enhance the data quality and diversity. Evaluation metrics, including Intersection over Union (IoU) and dice scores, are used to assess the models' performance. Among the models tested, Attention UNet stands out, demonstrating the highest performance. Its key trait of harnessing attention mechanisms enhances its ability to focus on crucial features. This translates to exceptional results, with an IoU score of 85.36% and dice score of 91.49%. These findings provide valuable insights into guiding the selection of an appropriate architecture tailored to specific requirements, considering factors such as segmentation accuracy and computational resources, in the context of 3D lung projection reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 epidemic poses a worldwide threat that transcends provincial, philosophical, spiritual, radical, social, and educational borders. By using a connected network, a healthcare system with the Internet of Things (IoT) functionality can effectively monitor COVID-19 cases. IoT helps a COVID-19 patient recognize symptoms and receive better therapy more quickly. A critical component in measuring, evaluating, and diagnosing the risk of infection is artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used to anticipate cases and forecast the alternate incidences number, retrieved instances, and injuries. In the context of COVID-19, IoT technologies are employed in specific patient monitoring and diagnosing processes to reduce COVID-19 exposure to others. This work uses an Indian dataset to create an enhanced convolutional neural network with a gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model for COVID-19 death prediction via IoT. The data were also subjected to data normalization and data imputation. The 4692 cases and eight characteristics in the dataset were utilized in this research. The performance of the CNN-GRU model for COVID-19 death prediction was assessed using five evaluation metrics, including median absolute error (MedAE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), and coefficient of determination (R2). ANOVA and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to determine the statistical significance of the presented model. The experimental findings showed that the CNN-GRU model outperformed other models regarding COVID-19 death prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has posed a serious threat to the lives and health of the majority of people worldwide. Since the early days of the outbreak, South Korea's government and citizens have made persistent efforts to provide effective prevention against further spread of the disease. In particular, the participation of individual citizens in complying with the necessary code of conduct to prevent spread of the infection, through measures such as social distancing and mask wearing, is as instrumental as the geographical tracking of the trajectory of the infected. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition method based on a wristband equipped with an IR array and inertial measurement unit (IMU) to detect individual compliance with codes of personal hygiene management, such as mask wearing, which are recommended to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The results of activity recognition were comparatively analyzed by applying conventional machine learning algorithms and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the IMU time series and IR array thermal images collected from 25 subjects. When CNN and 24 × 32 thermal images were used, 97.8% accuracy was achieved (best performance), and when 6 × 8 low-resolution thermal images were used, similar performance with 97.1% accuracy was obtained. In the case of using IMU, the performance of activity recognition was lower than that obtained with the IR array, but an accuracy of 93% was achieved even in the case of applying machine learning algorithms, indicating that it is more suitable for wearable devices with low computational capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgency of effective testing strategies had never been more apparent. The fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models, particularly within medical imaging (e.g., chest X-rays), holds promise in smart healthcare systems. Deep Learning (DL), a subset of AI, has exhibited prowess in enhancing classification accuracy, a crucial aspect in expediting COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the journey to harness DL's potential is rife with challenges: notably, the intricate landscape of medical data privacy. Striking a balance between utilizing patient data for insights while upholding privacy is formidable. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a solution by enabling collaborative model training across decentralized data sources, thus bypassing data centralization and preserving data privacy. This study presents a tailored, collaborative FL architecture for COVID-19 screening via chest X-ray images. Designed to facilitate cooperation among medical institutions, the framework ensures patient data remain localized, eliminating the need for direct data sharing. Addressing imbalanced and non-identically distributed data, the architecture is a robust solution. Implementation entails localized and fog-computing-based FL models. Localized models utilize Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on institution-specific datasets, while the FL model, refined iteratively, takes precedence in the final classification. Intriguingly, the global FL model, fortified by fog computing, emerges as the frontrunner in classification after weight refinement, surpassing local models. Validation within the COLAB platform gauges the model's performance through metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Remarkably, the proposed model excels across these metrics, solidifying its efficacy. This research navigates the confluence of AI, FL, and medical imaging, unveiling insights that could reshape healthcare delivery. The study enriches scientific discourse by addressing data privacy in collaborative learning and carries potential implications for enhanced patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung-related diseases continue to be a leading cause of global mortality. Timely and precise diagnosis is crucial to save lives, but the availability of testing equipment remains a challenge, often coupled with issues of reliability. Recent research has highlighted the potential of Chest X-ray (CXR) images in identifying various lung diseases, including COVID-19, fibrosis, pneumonia, and more. In this comprehensive study, four publicly accessible datasets have been combined to create a robust dataset comprising 6650 CXR images, categorized into seven distinct disease groups. To effectively distinguish between normal and six different lung-related diseases (namely, bacterial pneumonia, COVID-19, fibrosis, lung opacity, tuberculosis, and viral pneumonia), a Deep Learning (DL) architecture called a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network (MS-CNN) is introduced. The model is adapted to classify multiple numbers of lung disease classes, which is considered to be a persistent challenge in the field. While prior studies have demonstrated high accuracy in binary and limited-class scenarios, the proposed framework maintains this accuracy across a diverse range of lung conditions. The innovative model harnesses the power of combining predictions from multiple feature maps at different resolution scales, significantly enhancing disease classification accuracy. The approach aims to shorten testing duration compared to the state-of-the-art models, offering a potential solution toward expediting medical interventions for patients with lung-related diseases and integrating explainable AI (XAI) for enhancing prediction capability. The results demonstrated an impressive accuracy of 96.05%, with average values for precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC at 0.97, 0.95, 0.95, and 0.94, respectively, for the seven-class classification. The model exhibited exceptional performance across multi-class classifications, achieving accuracy rates of 100%, 99.65%, 99.21%, 98.67%, and 97.47% for two, three, four, five, and six-class scenarios, respectively. The novel approach not only surpasses many pre-existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies but also sets a new standard for the diagnosis of lung-affected diseases using multi-class CXR data. Furthermore, the integration of XAI techniques such as SHAP and Grad-CAM enhanced the transparency and interpretability of the model's predictions. The findings hold immense promise for accelerating and improving the accuracy and confidence of diagnostic decisions in the field of lung disease identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung disease is a respiratory disease that poses a high risk to people worldwide and includes pneumonia and COVID-19. As such, quick and precise identification of lung disease is vital in medical treatment. Early detection and diagnosis can significantly reduce the life-threatening nature of lung diseases and improve the quality of life of human beings. Chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) scan images are currently the best techniques to detect and diagnose lung infection. The increase in the chest X-ray or CT scan images at the time of training addresses the overfitting dilemma, and multi-class classification of lung diseases will deal with meaningful information and overfitting. Overfitting deteriorates the performance of the model and gives inaccurate results. This study reduces the overfitting issue and computational complexity by proposing a new enhanced kernel convolution function. Alongside an enhanced kernel convolution function, this study used convolution neural network (CNN) models to determine pneumonia and COVID-19. Each CNN model was applied to the collected dataset to extract the features and later applied these features as input to the classification models. This study shows that extracting deep features from the common layers of the CNN models increased the performance of the classification procedure. The multi-class classification improves the diagnostic performance, and the evaluation metrics improved significantly with the improved support vector machine (SVM). The best results were obtained using the improved SVM classifier fed with the features provided by CNN, and the success rate of the improved SVM was 99.8%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recently discovered coronavirus (COVID-19) poses a major danger to human life and health across the planet. The most important step in managing and combating COVID-19 is to accurately screen and diagnose affected people. The imaging technology of lung X-ray is a useful imaging identification/detection approach among them. The help of such computer-aided machines and diagnoses to examine lung X-ray images of COVID-19 instances can give supplemental assessment ideas to specialists, easing their workload to some level. The novel concept of this study is a hybridized approach merging pertinent manual features with deep spatial features for the classification of COVID-19. Further, we employed traditional transfer learning techniques in this investigation, utilizing four different pre-trained CNN-based deep learning models, with the Inception model showing a reasonably accurate result and a diagnosis accuracy of 82.17%. We provide a successful diagnostic approach that blends deep characteristics with machine learning classification to further increase clinical performance. It employs a complete diagnostic model. Two datasets were used to test the suggested approach, and it did quite well on several of them. On 1102 lung X-ray scans, the model was originally evaluated. The results of the experiments indicate that the suggested SVM model has a diagnostic accuracy of 95.57%. When compared to the Xception model's baseline, the diagnostic accuracy had risen by 17.58 percent. The sensitivity, specificity, and AUC of the proposed models were 95.37 percent, 95.39%, and 95.77%, respectively. To show the adaptability of our approach, we also verified our proposed model on other datasets. Finally, we arrived at results that were conclusive. When compared to research of a comparable kind, our suggested CNN model has a greater accuracy of classification and diagnostic effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, over 760 million confirmed cases and over 6.8 million deaths have been reported globally, according to the World Health Organization. While the SARS-CoV-2 virus carried by COVID-19 patients can be identified though the reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test with high accuracy, clinical misdiagnosis between COVID-19 and pneumonia patients remains a challenge. Therefore, we developed a novel CovC-ReDRNet model to distinguish COVID-19 patients from pneumonia patients as well as normal cases. ResNet-18 was introduced as the backbone model and tailored for the feature representation afterward. In our feature-based randomized neural network (RNN) framework, the feature representation automatically pairs with the deep random vector function link network (dRVFL) as the optimal classifier, producing a CovC-ReDRNet model for the classification task. Results based on five-fold cross-validation reveal that our method achieved 94.94%, 97.01%, 97.56%, 96.81%, and 95.84% MA sensitivity, MA specificity, MA accuracy, MA precision, and MA F1-score, respectively. Ablation studies evidence the superiority of ResNet-18 over different backbone networks, RNNs over traditional classifiers, and deep RNNs over shallow RNNs. Moreover, our proposed model achieved a better MA accuracy than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the highest score of which was 95.57%. To conclude, our CovC-ReDRNet model could be perceived as an advanced computer-aided diagnostic model with high speed and high accuracy for classifying and predicting COVID-19 diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been endangering human health and life since 2019. The timely quarantine, diagnosis, and treatment of infected people are the most necessary and important work. The most widely used method of detecting COVID-19 is real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Along with RT-PCR, computed tomography (CT) has become a vital technique in diagnosing and managing COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 reveals a number of radiological signatures that can be easily recognized through chest CT. These signatures must be analyzed by radiologists. It is, however, an error-prone and time-consuming process. Deep Learning-based methods can be used to perform automatic chest CT analysis, which may shorten the analysis time. The aim of this study is to design a robust and rapid medical recognition system to identify positive cases in chest CT images using three Ensemble Learning-based models. There are several techniques in Deep Learning for developing a detection system. In this paper, we employed Transfer Learning. With this technique, we can apply the knowledge obtained from a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to a different but related task. In order to ensure the robustness of the proposed system for identifying positive cases in chest CT images, we used two Ensemble Learning methods namely Stacking and Weighted Average Ensemble (WAE) to combine the performances of three fine-tuned Base-Learners (VGG19, ResNet50, and DenseNet201). For Stacking, we explored 2-Levels and 3-Levels Stacking. The three generated Ensemble Learning-based models were trained on two chest CT datasets. A variety of common evaluation measures (accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score) are used to perform a comparative analysis of each method. The experimental results show that the WAE method provides the most reliable performance, achieving a high recall value which is a desirable outcome in medical applications as it poses a greater risk if a true infected patient is not identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to build explainable and interpretable machine learning (or deep learning) methods without sacrificing prediction performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successful in making predictions, especially in image classification. These popular and well-documented successes use extremely deep CNNs such as VGG16, DenseNet121, and Xception. However, these well-known deep learning models use tens of millions of parameters based on a large number of pretrained filters that have been repurposed from previous data sets. Among these identified filters, a large portion contain no information yet remain as input features. Thus far, there is no effective method to omit these noisy features from a data set, and their existence negatively impacts prediction performance. In this paper, a novel interaction-based convolutional neural network (ICNN) is introduced that does not make assumptions about the relevance of local information. Instead, a model-free influence score (I-score) is proposed to directly extract the influential information from images to form important variable modules. This innovative technique replaces all pretrained filters found by trial-and-error with explainable, influential, and predictive variable sets (modules) determined by the I-score. In other words, future researchers need not rely on pretrained filters; the suggested algorithm identifies only the variables or pixels with high I-score values that are extremely predictive and important. The proposed method and algorithm were tested on real-world data set and a state-of-the-art prediction performance of 99.8% was achieved without sacrificing the explanatory power of the model. This proposed design can efficiently screen patients infected by COVID-19 before human diagnosis and can be a benchmark for addressing future XAI problems in large-scale data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019) is responsible for the acute respiratory disease in humans known as COVID-19. This infection was found in the Wuhan and Hubei provinces of China in the month of December 2019, after which it spread all over the world. By March, 2020, this epidemic had spread to about 117 countries and its different variants continue to disturb human life all over the world, causing great damage to the economy. Through this paper, we have attempted to identify and predict the novel coronavirus from influenza-A viral cases and healthy patients without infection through applying deep learning technology over patient pulmonary computed tomography (CT) images, as well as by the model that has been evaluated. The CT image data used under this method has been collected from various radiopedia data from online sources with a total of 548 CT images, of which 232 are from 12 patients infected with COVID-19, 186 from 17 patients with influenza A virus, and 130 are from 15 healthy candidates without infection. From the results of examination of the reference data determined from the point of view of CT imaging cases in general, the accuracy of the proposed model is 79.39%. Thus, this deep learning model will help in establishing early screening of COVID-19 patients and thus prove to be an analytically robust method for clinical experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]