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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]

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]

Structural Modeling, Vaccines, and Antiviral Drug Discovery The second section is dedicated to the development and applications of computer-aided procedures for antiviral drug discovery, vaccine candidate selection, and understanding the behavior of the virus, simulating the dynamics of drug targets. In April 2020, during the last pandemic health emergency, we launched a Special Issue hosted by Computation - section Computational Biology, entitled "Computation to Fight SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)". In the field of antiviral drug discovery, Brogi and collaborators published two papers within the Special Issue considering two different SARS-CoV-2 drug targets, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) and the main protease (Mpro or 3CLpro). The findings of this study provide crucial information for anti-COVID-19 drug discovery efforts, identify the primary binding sites for the most significant SARS-CoV-2 proteins, and present a crucial path for the development of novel antivirals [[25]]. [Extracted from the article]

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]

In the case of pandemics such as COVID-19, the rapid development of medicines addressing the symptoms is necessary to alleviate the pressure on the medical system. One of the key steps in medicine evaluation is the determination of p I C 50 factor, which is a negative logarithmic expression of the half maximal inhibitory concentration ( I C 50 ). Determining this value can be a lengthy and complicated process. A tool allowing for a quick approximation of p I C 50 based on the molecular makeup of medicine could be valuable. In this paper, the creation of the artificial intelligence (AI)-based model is performed using a publicly available dataset of molecules and their p I C 50 values. The modeling algorithms used are artificial and convolutional neural networks (ANN and CNN). Three approaches are tested—modeling using just molecular properties (MP), encoded SMILES representation of the molecule, and the combination of both input types. Models are evaluated using the coefficient of determination ( R 2 ) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in a five-fold cross-validation scheme to assure the validity of the results. The obtained models show that the highest quality regression ( R 2 ¯ = 0.99 ,   σ R 2 ¯ = 0.001 ;   M A P E ¯ = 0.009 % ,   σ M A P E ¯ = 0.009 ), by a large margin, is obtained when using a hybrid neural network trained with both MP and SMILES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which emerged as a pandemic, has engulfed so many lives and affected millions of people across the world since December 2019. Although this disease is under control nowadays, yet it is still affecting people in many countries. The traditional way of diagnosis is time taking, less efficient, and has a low rate of detection of this disease. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic system that expedites the diagnosis process while retaining its performance and accuracy. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) potentially provide powerful solutions to address this problem. In this study, a state-of-the-art CNN model densely connected squeeze convolutional neural network (DCSCNN) has been developed for the classification of X-ray images of COVID-19, pneumonia, normal, and lung opacity patients. Data were collected from different sources. We applied different preprocessing techniques to enhance the quality of images so that our model could learn accurately and give optimal performance. Moreover, the attention regions and decisions of the AI model were visualized using the Grad-CAM and LIME methods. The DCSCNN combines the strength of the Dense and Squeeze networks. In our experiment, seven kinds of classification have been performed, in which six are binary classifications (COVID vs. normal, COVID vs. lung opacity, lung opacity vs. normal, COVID vs. pneumonia, pneumonia vs. lung opacity, pneumonia vs. normal) and one is multiclass classification (COVID vs. pneumonia vs. lung opacity vs. normal). The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, the development of the DCSNN model which is capable of performing binary classification as well as multiclass classification with excellent classification accuracy. Second, to ensure trust, transparency, and explainability of the model, we applied two popular Explainable AI techniques (XAI). i.e., Grad-CAM and LIME. These techniques helped to address the black-box nature of the model while improving the trust, transparency, and explainability of the model. Our proposed DCSCNN model achieved an accuracy of 98.8% for the classification of COVID-19 vs normal, followed by COVID-19 vs. lung opacity: 98.2%, lung opacity vs. normal: 97.2%, COVID-19 vs. pneumonia: 96.4%, pneumonia vs. lung opacity: 95.8%, pneumonia vs. normal: 97.4%, and lastly for multiclass classification of all the four classes i.e., COVID vs. pneumonia vs. lung opacity vs. normal: 94.7%, respectively. The DCSCNN model provides excellent classification performance consequently, helping doctors to diagnose diseases quickly and efficiently. [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]

Background: This paper presents a novel lightweight approach based on machine learning methods supporting COVID-19 diagnostics based on X-ray images. The presented schema offers effective and quick diagnosis of COVID-19. Methods: Real data (X-ray images) from hospital patients were used in this study. All labels, namely those that were COVID-19 positive and negative, were confirmed by a PCR test. Feature extraction was performed using a convolutional neural network, and the subsequent classification of samples used Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost. Results: The LightGBM model was the most effective in classifying patients on the basis of features extracted from X-ray images, with an accuracy of 1.00, a precision of 1.00, a recall of 1.00 and an F1-score of 1.00. Conclusion: The proposed schema can potentially be used as a support for radiologists to improve the diagnostic process. The presented approach is efficient and fast. Moreover, it is not excessively complex computationally. [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]

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 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]

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is putting healthcare systems across the world under unprecedented and increasing pressure according to the World Health Organization (WHO). With the advances in computer algorithms and especially Artificial Intelligence, the detection of this type of virus in the early stages will help in fast recovery and help in releasing the pressure off healthcare systems. In this paper, a GAN with deep transfer learning for coronavirus detection in chest X-ray images is presented. The lack of datasets for COVID-19 especially in chest X-rays images is the main motivation of this scientific study. The main idea is to collect all the possible images for COVID-19 that exists until the writing of this research and use the GAN network to generate more images to help in the detection of this virus from the available X-rays images with the highest accuracy possible. The dataset used in this research was collected from different sources and it is available for researchers to download and use it. The number of images in the collected dataset is 307 images for four different types of classes. The classes are the COVID-19, normal, pneumonia bacterial, and pneumonia virus. Three deep transfer models are selected in this research for investigation. The models are the Alexnet, Googlenet, and Restnet18. Those models are selected for investigation through this research as it contains a small number of layers on their architectures, this will result in reducing the complexity, the consumed memory and the execution time for the proposed model. Three case scenarios are tested through the paper, the first scenario includes four classes from the dataset, while the second scenario includes 3 classes and the third scenario includes two classes. All the scenarios include the COVID-19 class as it is the main target of this research to be detected. In the first scenario, the Googlenet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 80.6% in testing accuracy. In the second scenario, the Alexnet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 85.2% in testing accuracy, while in the third scenario which includes two classes (COVID-19, and normal), Googlenet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 100% in testing accuracy and 99.9% in the validation accuracy. All the performance measurement strengthens the obtained results through the research. [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]

Social media is a great source of data for analyses, since they provide ways for people to share emotions, feelings, ideas, and even symptoms of diseases. By the end of 2019, a global pandemic alert was raised, relative to a virus that had a high contamination rate and could cause respiratory complications. To help identify those who may have the symptoms of this disease or to detect who is already infected, this paper analyzed the performance of eight machine learning algorithms (KNN, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, SVM, simple Multilayer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Networks and BERT) in the search and classification of tweets that mention self-report of COVID-19 symptoms. The dataset was labeled using a set of disease symptom keywords provided by the World Health Organization. The tests showed that Random Forest algorithm had the best results, closely followed by BERT and Convolution Neural Network, although traditional machine learning algorithms also have can also provide good results. This work could also aid in the selection of algorithms in the identification of diseases symptoms in social media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is the most prevalent coronavirus infection with respiratory symptoms such as fever, cough, dyspnea, pneumonia, and weariness being typical in the early stages. On the other hand, COVID-19 has a direct impact on the circulatory and respiratory systems as it causes a failure to some human organs or severe respiratory distress in extreme circumstances. Early diagnosis of COVID-19 is extremely important for the medical community to limit its spread. For a large number of suspected cases, manual diagnostic methods based on the analysis of chest images are insufficient. Faced with this situation, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have shown great potential in automatic diagnostic tasks. This paper aims at proposing a fast and precise medical diagnosis support system (MDSS) that can distinguish COVID-19 precisely in chest-X-ray images. This MDSS uses a concatenation technique that aims to combine pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNN) depend on the transfer learning (TL) technique to build a highly accurate model. The models enable storage and application of knowledge learned from a pre-trained CNN to a new task, viz., COVID-19 case detection. For this purpose, we employed the concatenation method to aggregate the performances of numerous pre-trained models to confirm the reliability of the proposed method for identifying the patients with COVID-19 disease from X-ray images. The proposed system was trialed on a dataset that included four classes: normal, viral-pneumonia, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 cases. Various general evaluation methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The first proposed model achieved an accuracy rate of 99.80% while the second model reached an accuracy of 99.71%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are an inevitable part of our daily lives. These social media platforms are effective tools for disseminating news, photos, and other types of information. In addition to the positives of the convenience of these platforms, they are often used for propagating malicious data or information. This misinformation may misguide users and even have dangerous impact on society's culture, economics, and healthcare. The propagation of this enormous amount of misinformation is difficult to counter. Hence, the spread of misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and its treatment and vaccination may lead to severe challenges for each country's frontline workers. Therefore, it is essential to build an effective machine-learning (ML) misinformation-detection model for identifying the misinformation regarding COVID-19. In this paper, we propose three effective misinformation detection models. The proposed models are long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, which is a special type of RNN; a multichannel convolutional neural network (MC-CNN); and k-nearest neighbors (KNN). Simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed models in terms of various evaluation metrics. The proposed models obtained superior results to those from the literature. [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]

This study introduces a novel method for detecting the post-COVID state using ECG data. By leveraging a convolutional neural network, we identify "cardiospikes" present in the ECG data of individuals who have experienced a COVID-19 infection. With a test sample, we achieve an 87 percent accuracy in detecting these cardiospikes. Importantly, our research demonstrates that these observed cardiospikes are not artifacts of hardware–software signal distortions, but rather possess an inherent nature, indicating their potential as markers for COVID-specific modes of heart rhythm regulation. Additionally, we conduct blood parameter measurements on recovered COVID-19 patients and construct corresponding profiles. These findings contribute to the field of remote screening using mobile devices and heart rate telemetry for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become one of the threats to the world. Computed tomography (CT) is an informative tool for the diagnosis of COVID-19 patients. Many deep learning approaches on CT images have been proposed and brought promising performance. However, due to the high complexity and non-transparency of deep models, the explanation of the diagnosis process is challenging, making it hard to evaluate whether such approaches are reliable. In this paper, we propose a visual interpretation architecture for the explanation of the deep learning models and apply the architecture in COVID-19 diagnosis. Our architecture designs a comprehensive interpretation about the deep model from different perspectives, including the training trends, diagnostic performance, learned features, feature extractors, the hidden layers, the support regions for diagnostic decision, and etc. With the interpretation architecture, researchers can make a comparison and explanation about the classification performance, gain insight into what the deep model learned from images, and obtain the supports for diagnostic decisions. Our deep model achieves the diagnostic result of 94.75%, 93.22%, 96.69%, 97.27%, and 91.88% in the criteria of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value, which are 8.30%, 4.32%, 13.33%, 10.25%, and 6.19% higher than that of the compared traditional methods. The visualized features in 2-D and 3-D spaces provide the reasons for the superiority of our deep model. Our interpretation architecture would allow researchers to understand more about how and why deep models work, and can be used as interpretation solutions for any deep learning models based on convolutional neural network. It can also help deep learning methods to take a step forward in the clinical COVID-19 diagnosis field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread fear and panic has emerged about COVID-19 on social media platforms which are often supported by falsified and altered content. This mass hysteria creates public anxiety due to misinformation, misunderstandings, and ignorance of the impact of COVID-19. To assist health professionals in addressing this epidemic more appropriately at the onset, sentiment analysis can potentially help the authorities for devising appropriate strategies. This study analyzes tweets related to COVID-19 using a machine learning approach and offers a high-accuracy solution. Experiments are performed involving different machine and deep learning models along with various features such as Word2vec, term-frequency, term-frequency document frequency, and feature fusion of both feature-generating approaches. The proposed approach combines the extra tree classifier and convolutional neural network and uses feature fusion to achieve the highest accuracy score of 99%. The proposed approach obtains far better results than existing sentiment analysis approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The evolution of this pandemic has raised global health concerns, making people worry about how to protect themselves and their families. This has greatly impacted people's sentiments. There was a dire need to investigate a large amount of social data such as tweets and others that emerged during the post-pandemic era for the assessment of people's sentiments. As a result, this study aims at Arabic tweet-based sentiment analysis considering the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. The datasets have been collected in two different periods in three major regions in Saudi Arabia, which are: Riyadh, Dammam, and Jeddah. Tweets were annotated with three sentiments: positive, negative, and neutral after due pre-processing. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and bi-directional long short memory (BiLSTM) deep learning algorithms were applied for classifying the sentiment of Arabic tweets. This experiment showed that the performance of CNN achieved 92.80% accuracy. The performance of BiLSTM was scored at 91.99% in terms of accuracy. Moreover, as an outcome of this study, an overwhelming upsurge in negative sentiments were observed in the dataset during COVID-19 compared to the negative sentiments of the dataset before COVID-19. The technique has been compared with the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature and it was observed that the proposed technique is promising in terms of various performance parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced social and economic changes that are still affecting our lives. The coronavirus is proinflammatory, it is replicating, and it is quickly spreading. The most affected organ is the lung, and the evolution of the disease can degenerate very rapidly from the early phase, also known as mild to moderate and even severe stages, where the percentage of recovered patients is very low. Therefore, a fast and automatic method to detect the disease stages for patients who underwent a computer tomography investigation can improve the clinical protocol. Transfer learning is used do tackle this issue, mainly by decreasing the computational time. The dataset is composed of images from public databases from 118 patients and new data from 55 patients collected during the COVID-19 spread in Romania in the spring of 2020. Even if the disease detection by the computerized tomography scans was studied using deep learning algorithms, to our knowledge, there are no studies related to the multiclass classification of the images into pulmonary damage stages. This could be helpful for physicians to automatically establish the disease severity and decide on the proper treatment for patients and any special surveillance, if needed. An evaluation study was completed by considering six different pre-trained CNNs. The results are encouraging, assuring an accuracy of around 87%. The clinical impact is still huge, even if the disease spread and severity are currently diminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic placed significant stress on an already overburdened health system. The diagnosis was based on detection of a positive RT-PCR test, which may be delayed when there is peak demand for testing. Rapid risk stratification of high-risk patients allows for the prioritization of resources for patient care. The study aims were to classify patients as severe or not severe based on outcomes using machine learning on routine laboratory tests. Data were extracted for all individuals who had at least one SARS-CoV-2 PCR test conducted via the NHLS between the periods of 1 March 2020 to 7 July 2020. Exclusion criteria: those 18 years, and those with indeterminate PCR tests. Results for 15437 patients (3301 positive and 12,136 negative) were used to fit six machine learning models, namely the logistic regression (LR) (the base model), decision trees (DT), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), convolutional neural network (CNN) and self-normalising neural network (SNN). Model development was carried out by splitting the data into training and testing set of a ratio 70:30, together with a 10-fold cross-validation re-sampling technique. For risk stratification, admission to high care or ICU was the outcome for severe disease. Performance of the models varied: sensitivity was best for RF at 75% and accuracy of 75% for CNN. The area under the curve ranged from 57% for CNN to 75% for RF. RF and SNN were the best-performing models. Machine Learning (ML) can be incorporated into the laboratory information system and offers promise for early identification and risk stratification of COVID-19 patients, particularly in areas of resource-poor settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has proliferated around the world and caused panic to all people as it claimed many lives. Since COVID-19 is highly contagious and spreads quickly, an early diagnosis is essential. Identifying the COVID-19 patients' mortality risk factors is essential for reducing this risk among infected individuals. For the timely examination of large datasets, new computing approaches must be created. Many machine learning (ML) techniques have been developed to predict the mortality risk factors and severity for COVID-19 patients. Contrary to expectations, deep learning approaches as well as ML algorithms have not been widely applied in predicting the mortality and severity from COVID-19. Furthermore, the accuracy achieved by ML algorithms is less than the anticipated values. In this work, three supervised deep learning predictive models are utilized to predict the mortality risk and severity for COVID-19 patients. The first one, which we refer to as CV-CNN, is built using a convolutional neural network (CNN); it is trained using a clinical dataset of 12,020 patients and is based on the 10-fold cross-validation (CV) approach for training and validation. The second predictive model, which we refer to as CV-LSTM + CNN, is developed by combining the long short-term memory (LSTM) approach with a CNN model. It is also trained using the clinical dataset based on the 10-fold CV approach for training and validation. The first two predictive models use the clinical dataset in its original CSV form. The last one, which we refer to as IMG-CNN, is a CNN model and is trained alternatively using the converted images of the clinical dataset, where each image corresponds to a data row from the original clinical dataset. The experimental results revealed that the IMG-CNN predictive model outperforms the other two with an average accuracy of 94.14%, a precision of 100%, a recall of 91.0%, a specificity of 100%, an F1-score of 95.3%, an AUC of 93.6%, and a loss of 0.22. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of reports present artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which support pneumonia detection caused by COVID-19 from chest CT (computed tomography) scans. Only a few studies provided access to the source code, which limits the analysis of the out-of-distribution generalization ability. This study presents Cimatec-CovNet-19, a new light 3D convolutional neural network inspired by the VGG16 architecture that supports COVID-19 identification from chest CT scans. We trained the algorithm with a dataset of 3000 CT Scans (1500 COVID-19-positive) with images from different parts of the world, enhanced with 3000 images obtained with data augmentation techniques. We introduced a novel pre-processing approach to perform a slice-wise selection based solely on the lung CT masks and an empirically chosen threshold for the very first slice. It required only 16 slices from a CT examination to identify COVID-19. The model achieved a recall of 0.88, specificity of 0.88, ROC-AUC of 0.95, PR-AUC of 0.95, and F1-score of 0.88 on a test set with 414 samples (207 COVID-19). These results support Cimatec-CovNet-19 as a good and light screening tool for COVID-19 patients. The whole code is freely available for the scientific community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has caused millions of infections and deaths over the last 2 years. Machine learning models have been proposed as an alternative to conventional epidemiologic models in an effort to optimize short- and medium-term forecasts that will help health authorities to optimize the use of policies and resources to tackle the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Although previous machine learning models based on time pattern analysis for COVID-19 sensed data have shown promising results, the spread of the virus has both spatial and temporal components. This manuscript proposes a new deep learning model that combines a time pattern extraction based on the use of a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) over a preceding spatial analysis based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) applied to a sequence of COVID-19 incidence images. The model has been validated with data from the 286 health primary care centers in the Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid region, Spain). The results show improved scores in terms of both root mean square error (RMSE) and explained variance (EV) when compared with previous models that have mainly focused on the temporal patterns and dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stock exchange analysis is regarded as a stochastic and demanding real-world setting in which fluctuations in stock prices are influenced by a wide range of aspects and events. In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in social media-based data analytics for analyzing stock exchange markets. This is due to the fact that the sentiments around major global events like Brexit or COVID-19 significantly affect business decisions and investor perceptions, as well as transactional trading statistics and index values. Hence, in this research, we examined a case study from the Brexit event to assess the influence that feelings on the subject have had on the stock markets of European Union (EU) nations. Brexit has implications for Britain and other countries under the umbrella of the European Union (EU). However, a common point of debate is the EU's contribution preferences and benefit imbalance. For this reason, the Brexit event and its impact on stock markets for major contributors and countries with minimum donations need to be evaluated accurately. As a result, to achieve accurate analysis of the stock exchanges of different EU nations from two different viewpoints, i.e., the major contributors and countries contributing least, in response to the Brexit event, we suggest an optimal deep learning and machine learning model that incorporates social media sentiment analysis regarding Brexit to perform stock market prediction. More precisely, the machine learning-based models include support vector machines (SVM) and linear regression (LR), while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used as a deep learning model. In addition, this method incorporates around 1.82 million tweets regarding the major contributors and countries contributing least to the EU budget. The findings show that sentiment analysis of Brexit events using a deep learning model delivers better results in comparison with machine learning models, in terms of root mean square values (RMSE). The outcomes of stock exchange analysis for the least contributing nations in relation to the Brexit event can aid them in making stock market judgments that will eventually benefit their country and improve their poor economies. Likewise, the results of stock exchange analysis for major contributing nations can assist in lowering the possibility of loss in relation to investments, as well as helping them to make effective decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a design for unmanned chemical factories and implementation based on ultra-low-cost Internet of Things technology, to combat the impact of COVID-19 on industrial factories. A safety and private blockchain network architecture was established, including a three-layer network structure comprising edge, fog, and cloud calculators. Edge computing uses a programmable logic controller and a single-chip microcomputer to transmit and control the motion path of a four-axis robotic arm motor. The fog computing architecture is implemented using Python software. The structure is integrated and applied using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative controller (FOPID). In addition, edge computing and fog computing signals are transmitted through the blockchain, and can be directly uploaded to the cloud computing controller for signal integration. The integrated application of the production line sensor and image recognition based on the network layer was addressed. We verified the image recognition of the CNN and the robot motor signal control of the FOPID. This study proposes that a CNN + FOPID method can improve the efficiency of the factory by more than 50% compared with traditional manual operators. The low-cost, high-efficiency equipment of the new method has substantial contribution and application potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human lives and caused severe economic crises worldwide. COVID-19 virus transmission generally occurs through a small respiratory droplet ejected from the mouth or nose of an infected person to another person. To reduce and prevent the spread of COVID-19 transmission, the World Health Organization (WHO) advises the public to wear face masks as one of the most practical and effective prevention methods. Early face mask detection is very important to prevent the spread of COVID-19. For this purpose, we investigate several deep learning-based architectures such as VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet-101, ResNet-50, EfficientNet, MobileNetV1, and MobileNetV2. After these experiments, we propose an efficient and effective model for face mask detection with the potential to be deployable over edge devices. Our proposed model is based on MobileNetV2 architecture that extracts salient features from the input data that are then passed to an autoencoder to form more abstract representations prior to the classification layer. The proposed model also adopts extensive data augmentation techniques (e.g., rotation, flip, Gaussian blur, sharping, emboss, skew, and shear) to increase the number of samples for effective training. The performance of our proposed model is evaluated on three publicly available datasets and achieved the highest performance as compared to other state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instagram is perhaps the most rapidly gaining in popularity of photo and video sharing social networking applications. It has been widely adopted by both end-users and organizations, posting their personal experiences or expressing their opinion during significant events and periods of crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the search for effective vaccine treatment. We identify the three major companies involved in vaccine research and extract their Instagram posts, after vaccination has started, as well as users' reception using respective hashtags, constructing the datasets. Statistical differences regarding the companies are initially presented, on textual, as well as visual features, i.e., image classification by transfer learning. Appropriate preprocessing of English language posts and content analysis is subsequently performed, by automatically annotating the posts as one of four intent classes, thus facilitating the training of nine classifiers for a potential application capable of predicting user's intent. By designing and carrying out a controlled experiment we validate that the resulted algorithms' accuracy ranking is significant, identifying the two best performing algorithms; this is further improved by ensemble techniques. Finally, polarity analysis on users' posts, leveraging a convolutional neural network, reveals a rather neutral to negative sentiment, with highly polarized user posts' distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has infected 223 countries and caused 2.8 million deaths worldwide (at the time of writing this article), and the death rate is increasing continuously. Early diagnosis of COVID patients is a critical challenge for medical practitioners, governments, organizations, and countries to overcome the rapid spread of the deadly virus in any geographical area. In this situation, the previous epidemic evidence on Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques encouraged the researchers to play a significant role in detecting COVID-19. Similarly, the rising scope of ML/DL methodologies in the medical domain also advocates its significant role in COVID-19 detection. This systematic review presents ML and DL techniques practiced in this era to predict, diagnose, classify, and detect the coronavirus. In this study, the data was retrieved from three prevalent full-text archives, i.e., Science Direct, Web of Science, and PubMed, using the search code strategy on 16 March 2021. Using professional assessment, among 961 articles retrieved by an initial query, only 40 articles focusing on ML/DL-based COVID-19 detection schemes were selected. Findings have been presented as a country-wise distribution of publications, article frequency, various data collection, analyzed datasets, sample sizes, and applied ML/DL techniques. Precisely, this study reveals that ML/DL technique accuracy lay between 80% to 100% when detecting COVID-19. The RT-PCR-based model with Support Vector Machine (SVM) exhibited the lowest accuracy (80%), whereas the X-ray-based model achieved the highest accuracy (99.7%) using a deep convolutional neural network. However, current studies have shown that an anal swab test is super accurate to detect the virus. Moreover, this review addresses the limitations of COVID-19 detection along with the detailed discussion of the prevailing challenges and future research directions, which eventually highlight outstanding issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To predict the spread of the new coronavirus infection COVID-19, the critical values of spread indicators have been determined for deciding on the introduction of restrictive measures using the city of Moscow as an example. A model was developed using classical methods of mathematical modeling based on exponential regression, the accuracy of the forecast was estimated, and the shortcomings of mathematical methods for predicting the spread of infection for more than two weeks. As a solution to the problem of the accuracy of long-term forecasts for more than two weeks, two models based on machine learning methods are proposed: a recurrent neural network with two layers of long short-term memory (LSTM) blocks and a 1-D convolutional neural network with a description of the choice of an optimization algorithm. The forecast accuracy of ML models was evaluated in comparison with the exponential regression model and one another using the example of data on the number of COVID-19 cases in the city of Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: The study proposes an automated deep learning-based classification model, based on a Convolutional Neural Network, that demonstrates a rapid detection rate for COVID-19. The training dataset consists of 3616 COVID-19 chest X-ray images and 10,192 healthy chest X-ray images which were then augmented. Initially using the dataset, the symptoms of COVID-19 were detected by employing eleven existing CNN models. MobileNetV2 showed enough promise to make it a candidate for further modification. The resulting model produced the highest accuracy of 98% in classifying COVID-19 and healthy chest X-rays among all the implemented CNN models. The results suggest that the proposed method can efficiently identify the symptoms of infection from chest X-ray images better than existing methods. COVID-19, regarded as the deadliest virus of the 21st century, has claimed the lives of millions of people around the globe in less than two years. Since the virus initially affects the lungs of patients, X-ray imaging of the chest is helpful for effective diagnosis. Any method for automatic, reliable, and accurate screening of COVID-19 infection would be beneficial for rapid detection and reducing medical or healthcare professional exposure to the virus. In the past, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) proved to be quite successful in the classification of medical images. In this study, an automatic deep learning classification method for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images is suggested using a CNN. A dataset consisting of 3616 COVID-19 chest X-ray images and 10,192 healthy chest X-ray images was used. The original data were then augmented to increase the data sample to 26,000 COVID-19 and 26,000 healthy X-ray images. The dataset was enhanced using histogram equalization, spectrum, grays, cyan and normalized with NCLAHE before being applied to CNN models. Initially using the dataset, the symptoms of COVID-19 were detected by employing eleven existing CNN models; VGG16, VGG19, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, NFNet, ResNet50, ResNet101, DenseNet, EfficientNetB7, AlexNet, and GoogLeNet. From the models, MobileNetV2 was selected for further modification to obtain a higher accuracy of COVID-19 detection. Performance evaluation of the models was demonstrated using a confusion matrix. It was observed that the modified MobileNetV2 model proposed in the study gave the highest accuracy of 98% in classifying COVID-19 and healthy chest X-rays among all the implemented CNN models. The second-best performance was achieved from the pre-trained MobileNetV2 with an accuracy of 97%, followed by VGG19 and ResNet101 with 95% accuracy for both the models. The study compares the compilation time of the models. The proposed model required the least compilation time with 2 h, 50 min and 21 s. Finally, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed to test the statistical significance. The results suggest that the proposed method can efficiently identify the symptoms of infection from chest X-ray images better than existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]