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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]

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]

Medicine is one of the fields where the advancement of computer science is making significant progress. Some diseases require an immediate diagnosis in order to improve patient outcomes. The usage of computers in medicine improves precision and accelerates data processing and diagnosis. In order to categorize biological images, hybrid machine learning, a combination of various deep learning approaches, was utilized, and a meta-heuristic algorithm was provided in this research. In addition, two different medical datasets were introduced, one covering the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain tumors and the other dealing with chest X-rays (CXRs) of COVID-19. These datasets were introduced to the combination network that contained deep learning techniques, which were based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) or autoencoder, to extract features and combine them with the next step of the meta-heuristic algorithm in order to select optimal features using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. This combination sought to reduce the dimensionality of the datasets while maintaining the original performance of the data. This is considered an innovative method and ensures highly accurate classification results across various medical datasets. Several classifiers were employed to predict the diseases. The COVID-19 dataset found that the highest accuracy was 99.76% using the combination of CNN-PSO-SVM. In comparison, the brain tumor dataset obtained 99.51% accuracy, the highest accuracy derived using the combination method of autoencoder-PSO-KNN. [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]

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]

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), pneumonia, tuberculosis, and breast cancer have one thing in common: these diseases can be diagnosed using radiological studies such as X-rays images. With radiological studies and technology, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) results in a very useful technique to analyze and detect abnormalities using the images generated by X-ray machines. Some deep-learning techniques such as a convolutional neural network (CNN) can help physicians to obtain an effective pre-diagnosis. However, popular CNNs are enormous models and need a huge amount of data to obtain good results. In this paper, we introduce NanoChest-net, which is a small but effective CNN model that can be used to classify among different diseases using images from radiological studies. NanoChest-net proves to be effective in classifying among different diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and COVID-19. In two of the five datasets used in the experiments, NanoChest-net obtained the best results, while on the remaining datasets our model proved to be as good as baseline models from the state of the art such as the ResNet50, Xception, and DenseNet121. In addition, NanoChest-net is useful to classify radiological studies on the same level as state-of-the-art algorithms with the advantage that it does not require a large number of operations. [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]

Featured Application: This work could be used to aid radiologists in the screening process, contributing to the fight against COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has changed the world as we know it. An early diagnosis is crucial in order to prevent new outbreaks and control its rapid spread. Medical imaging techniques, such as X-ray or chest computed tomography, are commonly used for this purpose due to their reliability for COVID-19 diagnosis. Computer-aided diagnosis systems could play an essential role in aiding radiologists in the screening process. In this work, a novel Deep Learning-based system, called COVID-XNet, is presented for COVID-19 diagnosis in chest X-ray images. The proposed system performs a set of preprocessing algorithms to the input images for variability reduction and contrast enhancement, which are then fed to a custom Convolutional Neural Network in order to extract relevant features and perform the classification between COVID-19 and normal cases. The system is trained and validated using a 5-fold cross-validation scheme, achieving an average accuracy of 94.43% and an AUC of 0.988. The output of the system can be visualized using Class Activation Maps, highlighting the main findings for COVID-19 in X-ray images. These promising results indicate that COVID-XNet could be used as a tool to aid radiologists and contribute to the fight against COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied in the medical diagnosis of different types of diseases. However, selecting the architecture and the best set of hyperparameters among the possible combinations can be a significant challenge. The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of the Hyperband optimization algorithm in the process of optimizing a CNN applied to the diagnosis of SARS-Cov2 disease (COVID-19). The test was performed with the Optuna framework, and the optimization process aimed to optimize four hyperparameters: (1) backbone architecture, (2) the number of inception modules, (3) the number of neurons in the fully connected layers, and (4) the learning rate. CNNs were trained on 2175 computed tomography (CT) images. The CNN that was proposed by the optimization process was a VGG16 with five inception modules, 128 neurons in the two fully connected layers, and a learning rate of 0.0027. The proposed method achieved a sensitivity, precision, and accuracy of 97%, 82%, and 88%, outperforming the sensitivity of the Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests (53–88%) and the accuracy of the diagnosis performed by human experts (72%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]