Predicting COVID-19 in China Using Hybrid AI Model

An Artificial Neural Network-Based Approach for Predicting the COVID-19 Daily Effective Reproduction Number Rt in Italy

Since December 2019, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has had a considerable impact on the health and socio-economic fabric of Italy. The effective reproduction number Rt is one of the most representative indicators of the contagion status as it reports the number of new infections caused by an infected subject in a partially immunized population. The task of predicting Rt values forward in time is challenging and, historically, it has been addressed by exploiting compartmental models or statistical frameworks. The present study proposes an Artificial Neural Networks-based approach to predict the Rt temporal trend at a daily resolution. For each Italian region and autonomous province, 21 daily COVID-19 indicators were exploited for the 7-day ahead prediction of the Rt trend by means of different neural network architectures, i.e., Feed Forward, Mono-Dimensional Convolutional, and Long Short-Term Memory. Focusing on Lombardy, which is one of the most affected regions, the predictions proved to be very accurate, with a minimum Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) ranging from 0.035 at day t + 1 to 0.106 at day t + 7. Overall, the results show that it is possible to obtain accurate forecasts in Italy at a daily temporal resolution instead of the weekly resolution characterizing the official Rt data.

Bi-level artificial intelligence model for risk classification of acute respiratory diseases based on Chinese clinical data

Objective: The high incidence of respiratory diseases has dramatically increased the medical burden under the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2020. It is of considerable significance to utilize a new generation of information technology to improve the artificial intelligence level of respiratory disease diagnosis. Methods: Based on the semi-structured data of Chinese Electronic Medical Records (CEMRs) from the China Hospital Pharmacovigilance System, this paper proposed a bi-level artificial intelligence model for the risk classification of acute respiratory diseases. It includes two levels. The first level is a dedicated design of the “BiLSTM+Dilated Convolution+3D Attention+CRF” deep learning model that is used for Chinese Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CCNER) to extract valuable information from the unstructured data in the CEMRs. Incorporating the transfer learning and semi-supervised learning technique into the proposed deep learning model achieves higher accuracy and efficiency in the CCNER task than the popular “Bert+BiLSTM+CRF” approach. Combining the extracted entity data with other structured data in the CEMRs, the second level is a customized XGBoost to realize the risk classification of acute respiratory diseases. Results: The empirical study shows that the proposed model could provide practical technical support for improving diagnostic accuracy. Conclusion: Our study provides a proof-of-concept for implementing a hybrid artificial intelligence-based system as a tool to aid clinicians in tackling CEMR data and enhancing the diagnostic evaluation under diagnostic uncertainty.

Intelligent Data Analysis for Infection Spread Prediction

Intelligent data analysis based on artificial intelligence and Big Data tools is widely used by the scientific community to overcome global challenges. One of these challenges is the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, which began in early 2020. Data science not only provides an opportunity to assess the impact caused by a pandemic, but also to predict the infection spread. In addition, the model expansion by economic, social, and infrastructural factors makes it possible to predict changes in all spheres of human activity in competitive epidemiological conditions. This article is devoted to the use of anonymized and personal data in predicting the coronavirus infection spread. The basic “Susceptible–Exposed–Infected–Recovered” model was extended by including a set of demographic, administrative, and social factors. The developed model is more predictive and applicable in assessing future pandemic impact. After a series of simulation experiment results, we concluded that personal data use in high-level modeling of the infection spread is excessive.

Visualizing the features of inflection point shown on a temporal bar graph using the data of COVID-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND

Exponential-like infection growth leading to peaks (denoted by inflection points [IP] or turning points) is usually the hallmark of infectious disease outbreaks, including coronaviruses. To determine the IPs of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), we applied the item response theory model to detect phase transitions for each country/region and characterize the IP feature on the temporal bar graph (TBG).

METHODS

The IP (using the item difficulty parameter to locate) was verified by the differential equation in calculus and interpreted by the TBG with 2 virtual and real empirical data (i.e., from Collatz conjecture and COVID-19 pandemic in 2020). Comparisons of IPs, R2, and burst strength [BS = ln() denoted by the infection number at IP(Nip) and the item slope parameter(a) in item response theory were made for countries/regions and continents on the choropleth map and the forest plot.

RESULTS

We found that the evolution of COVID-19 on the TBG makes the data clear and easy to understand, the shorter IP (=53.9) was in China and the longest (=247.3) was in Europe, and the highest R2 (as the variance explained by the model) was in the US, with a mean R2 of 0.98. We successfully estimated the IPs for countries/regions on COVID-19 in 2020 and presented them on the TBG.

CONCLUSION

Temporal visualization is recommended for researchers in future relevant studies (e.g., the evolution of keywords in a specific discipline) and is not merely limited to the IP search in COVID-19 pandemics as we did in this study.

Model-based ensembles: Lessons learned from retrospective analysis of COVID-19 infection forecasts across 10 countries

Mathematical models of different types and data intensities are highly used by researchers, epidemiologists, and national authorities to explore the inherently unpredictable progression of COVID-19, including the effects of different non-pharmaceutical interventions. Regardless of model complexity, forecasts of future COVID-19 infections, deaths and hospitalization are associated with large uncertainties, and critically depend on the quality of the training data, and in particular how well the recorded national or regional numbers of infections, deaths and recoveries reflect the the actual situation. In turn, this depends on, e.g., local test and abatement strategies, treatment capacities and available technologies. Other influencing factors including temperature and humidity, which are suggested by several authors to affect the spread of COVID-19 in some countries, are generally only considered by the most complex models and further serve to inflate the uncertainty. Here we use comparative and retrospective analyses to illuminate the aggregated effect of these systematic biases on ensemble-based model forecasts. We compare the actual progression of active infections across ten of the most affected countries in the world until late November 2020 with "re-forecasts" produced by two of the most commonly used model types: (i) a compartment-type, susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model; and (ii) a statistical (Holt-Winters) time series model. We specifically examine the sensitivity of the model parameters, estimated systematically from different subsets of the data and thereby different time windows, to illustrate the associated implications for short- to medium-term forecasting and for probabilistic projections based on (single) model ensembles as inspired by, e.g., weather forecasting and climate research. Our findings portray considerable variations in forecasting skill in between the ten countries and demonstrate that individual model predictions are highly sensitive to parameter assumptions. Significant skill is generally only confirmed for short-term forecasts (up to a few weeks) with some variation across locations and periods.

Artificial intelligence for COVID-19: battling the pandemic with computational intelligence

The new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic leading to over 180 million confirmed cases and nearly 4 million deaths until June 2021, according to the World Health Organization. Since the initial report in December 2019 , COVID-19 has demonstrated a high transmission rate (with an R0 > 2), a diverse set of clinical characteristics (e.g., high rate of hospital and intensive care unit admission rates, multi-organ dysfunction for critically ill patients due to hyperinflammation, thrombosis, etc.), and a tremendous burden on health care systems around the world. To understand the serious and complex diseases and develop effective control, treatment, and prevention strategies, researchers from different disciplines have been making significant efforts from different aspects including epidemiology and public health, biology and genomic medicine, as well as clinical care and patient management. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced into the healthcare field to aid clinical decision-making for disease diagnosis and treatment such as detecting cancer based on medical images, and has achieved superior performance in multiple data-rich application scenarios. In the COVID-19 pandemic, AI techniques have also been used as a powerful tool to overcome the complex diseases. In this context, the goal of this study is to review existing studies on applications of AI techniques in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, these efforts can be grouped into the fields of epidemiology, therapeutics, clinical research, social and behavioral studies and are summarized. Potential challenges, directions, and open questions are discussed accordingly, which may provide new insights into addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and would be helpful for researchers to explore more related topics in the post-pandemic era.

COVID 19 Pandemic, Socio-Economic Behaviour and Infection Characteristics: An Inter-Country Predictive Study Using Deep Learning

This work aims to develop a data driven multi-horizon incidence forecasting model considering the inter-country variability in static socio-economic factors. The specific objectives of this study are to predict the future country-wise COVID 19 incidences, to locate the influences of individual socio-economic factors on the predictions, to analyze the clusters of countries on the basis of influential explanatory variables and thus to search for intra-cluster and inter-cluster characteristics. To that respect this study has used the deep neural network based temporal fusion transformer for the predictions, Pearson correlation to understand the influence of socio-economic variables on incidence and hierarchical clustering for cluster-analysis. The findings conclude that the inter-country infection related predictions vary widely over spatio-temporal variability and different socio-economic variables have different influences over this inter-country variability. It is observed that greater the population size, stronger the global connectedness, larger the social cohesion, higher the population density and meaningful the gender based discrimination higher will be the future spread. On the other hand greater the development level, higher the nutritional status, greater the access to quality health services, greater the urban population and greater the material poverty lesser will be the future spread. Definite spatial pattern of influence of the explanatory variables emerged from cluster analysis. To minimize the vulnerability towards unforeseen biological calamities modern and sustainable development policies are needed; affluence may not guarantee less infection. But these policies should vary between economies due to the variation in socio-economic status of the countries worldwide.

Detecting COVID-19-Related Fake News Using Feature Extraction

Since its emergence in December 2019, there have been numerous posts and news regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in social media, traditional print, and electronic media. These sources have information from both trusted and non-trusted medical sources. Furthermore, the news from these media are spread rapidly. Spreading a piece of deceptive information may lead to anxiety, unwanted exposure to medical remedies, tricks for digital marketing, and may lead to deadly factors. Therefore, a model for detecting fake news from the news pool is essential. In this work, the dataset which is a fusion of news related to COVID-19 that has been sourced from data from several social media and news sources is used for classification. In the first step, preprocessing is performed on the dataset to remove unwanted text, then tokenization is carried out to extract the tokens from the raw text data collected from various sources. Later, feature selection is performed to avoid the computational overhead incurred in processing all the features in the dataset. The linguistic and sentiment features are extracted for further processing. Finally, several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms are trained to classify the COVID-19-related dataset. These algorithms are then evaluated using various metrics. The results show that the random forest classifier outperforms the other classifiers with an accuracy of 88.50%.

Detecting Cybersecurity Attacks in Internet of Things Using Artificial Intelligence Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

In recent years, technology has advanced to the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), where the Internet of things (IoTs), fog computing, computer security, and cyberattacks have evolved exponentially on a large scale. The rapid development of IoT devices and networks in various forms generate enormous amounts of data which in turn demand careful authentication and security. Artificial intelligence (AI) is considered one of the most promising methods for addressing cybersecurity threats and providing security. In this study, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) that categorize, map and survey the existing literature on AI methods used to detect cybersecurity attacks in the IoT environment. The scope of this SLR includes an in-depth investigation on most AI trending techniques in cybersecurity and state-of-art solutions. A systematic search was performed on various electronic databases (SCOPUS, Science Direct, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, ACM, and MDPI). Out of the identified records, 80 studies published between 2016 and 2021 were selected, surveyed and carefully assessed. This review has explored deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) techniques used in IoT security, and their effectiveness in detecting attacks. However, several studies have proposed smart intrusion detection systems (IDS) with intelligent architectural frameworks using AI to overcome the existing security and privacy challenges. It is found that support vector machines (SVM) and random forest (RF) are among the most used methods, due to high accuracy detection another reason may be efficient memory. In addition, other methods also provide better performance such as extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), neural networks (NN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). This analysis also provides an insight into the AI roadmap to detect threats based on attack categories. Finally, we present recommendations for potential future investigations.

Using artificial intelligence technology to fight COVID-19: a review

In late December 2019, a new type of coronavirus was discovered, which was later named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2). Since its discovery, the virus has spread globally, with 2,975,875 deaths as of 15 April 2021, and has had a huge impact on our health systems and economy. How to suppress the continued spread of new coronary pneumonia is the main task of many scientists and researchers. The introduction of artificial intelligence technology has provided a huge contribution to the suppression of the new coronavirus. This article discusses the main application of artificial intelligence technology in the suppression of coronavirus from three major aspects of identification, prediction, and development through a large amount of literature research, and puts forward the current main challenges and possible development directions. The results show that it is an effective measure to combine artificial intelligence technology with a variety of new technologies to predict and identify COVID-19 patients.

A new hybrid prediction model of cumulative COVID-19 confirmed data

Establishing an accurate and efficient prediction model is of great significance for governments and other social organizations to formulate prevention and control policies and curb the explosive spread of the pandemic. To improve prediction accuracy of cumulative COVID-19 confirmed data, a new hybrid prediction model based on gradient-based optimizer variational mode decomposition (GVMD), extreme learning machine (ELM), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), named GVMD-ELM-ARIMA, is proposed. To solve the problem of selecting the k value and the penalty factor α in variational mode decomposition (VMD), this paper proposes gradient-based optimizer variational mode decomposition (GVMD), which realizes the self-adaptive determination of k value and α value. Firstly, GVMD decomposes the cumulative COVID-19 confirmed data into some intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residual component (IMFr). Secondly, IMFs are predicted by ELM. Then, IMFr is predicted by ARIMA. Finally, the final prediction results are obtained by reconstructing the prediction result of IMFs and IMFr. The cumulative COVID-19 confirmed data of the United States, India and Russia is used to verify its effectiveness. Taking the United States as an example, compared with the average MAPE, RMSE and MAE of the single model, the average MAPE of the hybrid model is reduced by 47.27%, the average RMSE is reduced by 44.50%, and the average MAE is reduced by 55.34%. Compared with GVMD-ELM-ELM, GVMD-ELM-ARIMA proposed in this paper reduces the MAPE by 60%, the RMSE by 56.85%, and the MAE by 61.61%. The experimental results show that GVMD-ELM-ARIMA has best prediction accuracy, and it provides a new method for predicting the cumulative COVID-19 confirmed data.

Investigation of robustness of hybrid artificial neural network with artificial bee colony and firefly algorithm in predicting COVID-19 new cases: case study of Iran

As an ongoing public health menace, the novel coronavirus pandemic has challenged the world. With several mutations and a high transmission rate, the virus is able to infect individuals in an exponential manner. At the same time, Iran is confronted with multiple wave peaks and the health care system is facing a major challenge. In consequence, developing a robust forecasting methodology can assist health authorities for effective planning. In that regard, with the help of Artificial Neural Network-Artificial Bee Colony (ANN-ABC) and Artificial Neural Network- Firefly Algorithm (ANN-FA) as two robust hybrid artificial intelligence-based models, the current study intends to select the optimal model with the maximum accuracy rate. To do so, first a sample of COVID-19 confirmed cases in Iran ranging from 19 February 2020 to 25 July 2021 is compiled. 75% (25%) of total observation is randomly allocated as training (testing) data. Afterwards, an ANN model is trained with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Accordingly, based on R-squared and root-mean-square error criteria, the optimal number of hidden neurons is computed as 17. The proposed ANN model is employed to develop ANN-ABC and ANN-FA models for achieving the maximum accuracy rate. According to ANN-ABC, the R- squared values of the optimal model are 0.9884 and 0.9885 at train and test stages. In respect to ANN-FA, the R-squared ranged from 0.9954 to 0.9940 at the train and test phases, which indicates the outperformance of ANN-FA for predicting COVID-19 new cases in Iran. Finally, the proposed ANN-ABC and ANN-FA are applied for simulating the COVID-19 new cases data in different countries. The results revealed that both models can be used as a robust predictor of COVID-19 data and in a majority of cases ANN-FA outperforms the ANN-ABC.

COVID-19 Symptoms app analysis to foresee healthcare impacts: Evidence from Northern Ireland

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies, such as symptom tracking apps, are crucial for coping with the global pandemic crisis by providing near real-time, in situ information for the medical and governmental response. However, in such a dynamic and diverse environment, methods are still needed to support public health decision-making. This paper uses the lens of strong structuration theory to investigate networks of COVID-19 symptoms in the Belfast metropolitan area. A self-supervised machine learning method measuring information entropy was applied to the Northern Ireland COVIDCare app. The findings reveal: (1) relevant stratifications of disease symptoms, (2) particularities in health-wealth networks, and (3) the predictive potential of artificial intelligence to extract entangled knowledge from data in COVID-related apps. The proposed method proved to be effective for near real-time in-situ analysis of COVID-19 progression and to focus and complement public health decisions. Our contribution is relevant to an understanding of SARS-COV-2 symptom entanglements in localised environments. It can assist decision-makers in designing both reactive and proactive health measures that should be personalised to the heterogeneous needs of different populations. Moreover, near real-time assessment of pandemic symptoms using digital technologies will be critical to create early warning systems of emerging SARS-CoV-2 strains and predict the need for healthcare resources.

Applications of artificial intelligence in COVID-19 pandemic: A comprehensive review

During the current global public health emergency caused by novel coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), researchers and medical experts started working day and night to search for new technologies to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent studies have shown that artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully employed in the health sector for various healthcare procedures. This study comprehensively reviewed the research and development on state-of-the-art applications of artificial intelligence for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process of literature retrieval, the relevant literature from citation databases including ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Preprints from arXiv, medRxiv, and bioRxiv was selected. Recent advances in the field of AI-based technologies are critically reviewed and summarized. Various challenges associated with the use of these technologies are highlighted and based on updated studies and critical analysis, research gaps and future recommendations are identified and discussed. The comparison between various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods, the dominant AI-based technique, mostly used ML and DL methods for COVID-19 detection, diagnosis, screening, classification, drug repurposing, prediction, and forecasting, and insights about where the current research is heading are highlighted. Recent research and development in the field of artificial intelligence has greatly improved the COVID-19 screening, diagnostics, and prediction and results in better scale-up, timely response, most reliable, and efficient outcomes, and sometimes outperforms humans in certain healthcare tasks. This review article will help researchers, healthcare institutes and organizations, government officials, and policymakers with new insights into how AI can control the COVID-19 pandemic and drive more research and studies for mitigating the COVID-19 outbreak.

On Comparing Cross-Validated Forecasting Models with a Novel Fuzzy-TOPSIS Metric: A COVID-19 Case Study

Time series cross-validation is a technique to select forecasting models. Despite the sophistication of cross-validation over single test/training splits, traditional and independent metrics, such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), are commonly used to assess the model’s accuracy. However, what if decision-makers have different models fitting expectations to each moment of a time series? What if the precision of the forecasted values is also important? This is the case of predicting COVID-19 in Amapá, a Brazilian state in the Amazon rainforest. Due to the lack of hospital capacities, a model that promptly and precisely responds to notable ups and downs in the number of cases may be more desired than average models that only have good performances in more frequent and calm circumstances. In line with this, this paper proposes a hybridization of the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and fuzzy sets to create a similarity metric, the closeness coefficient (CC), that enables relative comparisons of forecasting models under heterogeneous fitting expectations and also considers volatility in the predictions. We present a case study using three parametric and three machine learning models commonly used to forecast COVID-19 numbers. The results indicate that the introduced fuzzy similarity metric is a more informative performance assessment metric, especially when using time series cross-validation.

Hybrid deep learning of social media big data for predicting the evolution of COVID-19 transmission

In this study, a hybrid deep-learning model termed as ODANN, built upon neural networks (NN) coupled with data assimilation and natural language processing (NLP) features extraction methods, has been constructed to concurrently process daily COVID-19 time-series records and large volumes of COVID-19 related Twitter data, as representative of the global community's aggregated emotional responses towards the current pandemic, to model the growth rate in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases globally via a proposed G parameter. Overall, there were 3 key components to ODANN's development phase, namely: (i) data hydration and pre-processing were performed on COVID-19 related Twitter data ranging between 23 January 2020 and 10 May 2020, which amounted to over 100 million Tweets written in English language; (ii) multiple NLP features extraction methods were subsequently leveraged to encode the hydrated Twitter data into useful semantic word vectors for training ODANN under an optimal set of hyperparameters; and (iii) historical time-series data of defined characteristics were also assimilated into ODANN's selected hidden layer(s) to model the G parameter daily with a lead-time of 1 day. By far, our experimental results demonstrated that by adopting a rolling time-window size of 5 days, with respect to the number of historical time-series records for assimilating different data features, enabled ODANN to outperform other traditional time-series models and recent studies, in terms of the computed RMSE and MAE scores attained from the model's testing step. Overall, the summarized results from ODANN demonstrated its competitive edge in modelling and forecasting the growth rate in the number of COVID-19 cases globally.

The role of data-driven artificial intelligence on COVID-19 disease management in public sphere: a review

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with acute intense respiratory syndrome which spread around the world for the very first time impacting the way of life with drastic uncertainty. It rapidly reached almost every nook and corner of the world and the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced COVID-19 as a pandemic. The health care institutions around the globe are looking for viable and real-time technological solutions to handle the virus for evading its spread and circumvent probable demises. Importantly, the artificial intelligence tools and techniques are playing a major role in fighting the effect of virus on the economic jolt by mimicking human intelligence by screening, analyzing, predicting and tracking the existing and likely future patients. Since the first reported case, all the government organizations in the world jumped into action to prevent it and many studies reported the role of AI in taking decisions analyzing big data available in public sphere. Thereby, this review focuses on identifying the significant implication of AI techniques used for the COVID-19 disease management in the public sphere by agglomerating the latest available information. It also discusses the pitfalls and future directions in handling sensitive big data required for advanced neural networks.

Random-Forest-Bagging Broad Learning System With Applications for COVID-19 Pandemic

The rapid geographic spread of COVID-19, to which various factors may have contributed, has caused a global health crisis. Recently, the analysis and forecast of the COVID-19 pandemic have attracted worldwide attention. In this work, a large COVID-19 data set consisting of COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 testing capacity, economic level, demographic information, and geographic location data in 184 countries and 1241 areas from December 18, 2019, to September 30, 2020, were developed from public reports released by national health authorities and bureau of statistics. We proposed a machine learning model for COVID-19 prediction based on the broad learning system (BLS). Here, we leveraged random forest (RF) to screen out the key features. Then, we combine the bagging strategy and BLS to develop a random-forest-bagging BLS (RF-Bagging-BLS) approach to forecast the trend of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we compared the forecasting results with linear regression (LR) model, [Formula: see text]-nearest neighbors (KNN), decision tree (DT), adaptive boosting (Ada), RF, gradient boosting DT (GBDT), support vector regression (SVR), extra trees (ETs) regressor, CatBoost (CAT), LightGBM (LGB), XGBoost (XGB), and BLS.The RF-Bagging BLS model showed better forecasting performance in terms of relative mean-square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination ([Formula: see text]), adjusted coefficient of determination ([Formula: see text]), median absolute error (MAD), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) than other models. Hence, the proposed model demonstrates superior predictive power over other benchmark models.

Leveraging weather data for forecasting cases-to-mortality rates due to COVID-19

There are several recent publications criticizing the failure of COVID-19 forecasting models, with swinging over predictions and underpredictions, which have made it difficult for decision and policy making. Observing the failures of several COVID-19 forecasting models and the alarming spread of the virus, we seek to use some stable response for forecasting COVID-19, viz., ratios of COVID-19 cases to mortalities, rather than COVID-19 cases or fatalities. A trend of low COVID-19 cases-to-mortality ratios calls for urgent attention: the need for vaccines, for instance. Studies have shown that there are influences of weather parameters on COVID-19; and COVID-19 may have come to stay and could manifest a seasonal outbreak profile similar to other infectious respiratory diseases. In this paper, the influences of some weather, geographical, economic and demographic covariates were evaluated on COVID-19 response based on a series of Granger-causality tests. The effect of four weather parameters, viz., temperature, rainfall, solar irradiation and relative humidity, on daily COVID-19 cases-to-mortality ratios of 36 countries from 5 continents of the world were determined through regression analysis. Regression studies show that these four weather factors impact ratios of COVID-19 cases-to-mortality differently. The most impactful factor is temperature which is positively correlated with COVID-19 cases-to-mortality responses in 24 out of 36 countries. Temperature minimally affects COVID-19 cases-to-mortality ratios in the tropical countries. The most influential weather factor - temperature - was incorporated in training random forest and deep learning models for forecasting the cases-to-mortality rate of COVID-19 in clusters of countries in the world with similar weather conditions. Evaluation of trained forecasting models incorporating temperature features show better performance compared to a similar set of models trained without temperature features. This implies that COVID-19 forecasting models will predict more accurately if temperature features are factored in, especially for temperate countries.

Pay attention to doctor-patient dialogues: Multi-modal knowledge graph attention image-text embedding for COVID-19 diagnosis

The sudden increase in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases puts high pressure on healthcare services worldwide. At this stage, fast, accurate, and early clinical assessment of the disease severity is vital. In general, there are two issues to overcome: (1) Current deep learning-based works suffer from multimodal data adequacy issues; (2) In this scenario, multimodal (e.g., text, image) information should be taken into account together to make accurate inferences. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-modal knowledge graph attention embedding for COVID-19 diagnosis. Our method not only learns the relational embedding from nodes in a constituted knowledge graph but also has access to medical knowledge, aiming at improving the performance of the classifier through the mechanism of medical knowledge attention. The experimental results show that our approach significantly improves classification performance compared to other state-of-the-art techniques and possesses robustness for each modality from multi-modal data. Moreover, we construct a new COVID-19 multi-modal dataset based on text mining, consisting of 1393 doctor-patient dialogues and their 3706 images (347 X-ray + 2598 CT + 761 ultrasound) about COVID-19 patients and 607 non-COVID-19 patient dialogues and their 10754 images (9658 X-ray + 494 CT + 761 ultrasound), and the fine-grained labels of all. We hope this work can provide insights to the researchers working in this area to shift the attention from only medical images to the doctor-patient dialogue and its corresponding medical images.

Prediction of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections based on complex network

Novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) epidemic outbreak at the end of 2019 and threaten global public health, social stability, and economic development, which is characterized by highly contagious and asymptomatic infections. At present, governments around the world are taking decisive action to limit the human and economic impact of COVID-19, but very few interventions have been made to target the transmission of asymptomatic infected individuals. Thus, it is a quite crucial and complex problem to make accurate forecasts of epidemic trends, which many types of research dedicated to deal with it. In this article, we set up a novel COVID-19 transmission model by introducing traditional SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infected-removed) disease transmission models into complex network and propose an effective prediction algorithm based on the traditional machine learning algorithm TrustRank, which can predict asymptomatic infected individuals in a population contact network. Our simulation results show that our method largely outperforms the graph neural network algorithm for new coronary pneumonia prediction and our method is also robust and gives good results even if the network information is incomplete.

Artificial Intelligence for COVID-19: A Systematic Review

Background: Recently, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has affected more than 200 countries and lead to enormous losses. This study systematically reviews the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in COVID-19, especially for diagnosis, estimation of epidemic trends, prognosis, and exploration of effective and safe drugs and vaccines; and discusses the potential limitations. Methods: We report this systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We searched PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library from inception to 19 September 2020 for published studies of AI applications in COVID-19. We used PROBAST (prediction model risk of bias assessment tool) to assess the quality of literature related to the diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19. We registered the protocol (PROSPERO CRD42020211555). Results: We included 78 studies: 46 articles discussed AI-assisted diagnosis for COVID-19 with total accuracy of 70.00 to 99.92%, sensitivity of 73.00 to 100.00%, specificity of 25 to 100.00%, and area under the curve of 0.732 to 1.000. Fourteen articles evaluated prognosis based on clinical characteristics at hospital admission, such as clinical, laboratory and radiological characteristics, reaching accuracy of 74.4 to 95.20%, sensitivity of 72.8 to 98.00%, specificity of 55 to 96.87% and AUC of 0.66 to 0.997 in predicting critical COVID-19. Nine articles used AI models to predict the epidemic of the COVID-19, such as epidemic peak, infection rate, number of infected cases, transmission laws, and development trend. Eight articles used AI to explore potential effective drugs, primarily through drug repurposing and drug development. Finally, 1 article predicted vaccine targets that have the potential to develop COVID-19 vaccines. Conclusions: In this review, we have shown that AI achieved high performance in diagnosis, prognosis evaluation, epidemic prediction and drug discovery for COVID-19. AI has the potential to enhance significantly existing medical and healthcare system efficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CNN-based framework for classifying temporal relations with question encoder

Temporal-relation classification plays an important role in the field of natural language processing. Various deep learning-based classifiers, which can generate better models using sentence embedding, have been proposed to address this challenging task. These approaches, however, do not work well due to the lack of task-related information. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel framework that incorporates prior information by employing awareness of events and time expressions (time–event entities) with various window sizes to focus on context words around the entities as a filter. We refer to this module as “question encoder.” In our approach, this kind of prior information can extract task-related information from simple sentence embedding. Our experimental results on a publicly available Timebank-Dense corpus demonstrate that our approach outperforms some state-of-the-art techniques, including CNN-, LSTM-, and BERT-based temporal relation classifiers.

Application of machine learning in the prediction of COVID-19 daily new cases: A scoping review

COVID-19 has produced a global pandemic affecting all over of the world. Prediction of the rate of COVID-19 spread and modeling of its course have critical impact on both health system and policy makers. Indeed, policy making depends on judgments formed by the prediction models to propose new strategies and to measure the efficiency of the imposed policies. Based on the nonlinear and complex nature of this disorder and difficulties in estimation of virus transmission features using traditional epidemic models, artificial intelligence methods have been applied for prediction of its spread. Based on the importance of machine and deep learning approaches in the estimation of COVID-19 spreading trend, in the present study, we review studies which used these strategies to predict the number of new cases of COVID-19. Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, long short-term memory, recurrent neural network and multilayer perceptron are among the mostly used strategies in this regard. We compared the performance of several machine learning methods in prediction of COVID-19 spread. Root means squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), R2 coefficient of determination (R2), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) parameters were selected as performance measures for comparison of the accuracy of models. R2 values have ranged from 0.64 to 1 for artificial neural network (ANN) and Bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM), respectively. Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) have also have R2 values near 1. ARIMA and LSTM had the highest MAPE values. Collectively, these models are capable of identification of learning parameters that affect dissimilarities in COVID-19 spread across various regions or populations, combining numerous intervention methods and implementing what-if scenarios by integrating data from diseases having analogous trends with COVID-19. Therefore, application of these methods would help in precise policy making to design the most appropriate interventions and avoid non-efficient restrictions.

Particle swarm optimization of partitions and fuzzy order for fuzzy time series forecasting of COVID-19

Major hyperparameters which affect fuzzy time series (FTS) forecasting are the number of partitions, length of partition intervals in the universe of discourse, and the fuzzy order. There are very few studies which have considered an integrated solution to optimize all the hyperparameters. In this paper, we strive to achieve optimum values of all three hyperparameters for fuzzy time series forecasting of the COVID-19 pandemic using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. We specifically propose two techniques, namely nested FTS-PSO and exhaustive search FTS-PSO for determining the optimal interval length, as an augmentation to the FTS-PSO model that optimizes the interval length and the fuzzy order. Nested PSO has two PSO loops: (i) the inner PSO optimizes the combination of fuzzy order and boundaries of intervals for a given number of partitions defined by the outer loop, and the resultant cost is fed back to the outer PSO; (ii) the outer PSO optimizes the number of partitions to reduce the cost while meeting the defined constraint. Exhaustive search FTS-PSO also has two loops where the inner loop is similar to nested FTS-PSO while the outer loop iterates over a pre-defined search space of number of partitions. We analyze the effectiveness of the two approaches by comparing with ARIMA, FbProphet, and the state-of-the-art FTS and FTS-PSO models. We adopt COVID-19 highly affected 10 countries worldwide to perform forecasting of coronavirus confirmed cases. We consider two phases of COVID-19 spread, one from the year 2020 and another from 2021. Our study provides an analytical aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic, and aims to achieve optimal number and length of intervals along with fuzzy order for FTS forecasting of COVID-19. The results prove that the exhaustive search FTS-PSO outperformed all the methods whereas nested FTS-PSO performed moderately well.

Deep spatio-temporal emotion analysis of geo-tagged tweets for predicting location based communal emotion during COVID-19 Lock-down

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the globe has enforced lockdown restrictions that influence the people’s socio-economic lifecycle. The objective of this paper is to predict the communal emotion of people from different locations during the COVID-19 lockdown. The proposed work aims in developing a deep spatio-temporal analysis framework of geo-tagged tweets to predict the emotions of different topics based on location. An optimized Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach is presented for finding the optimal hyper-parameters using grid search. A multi-class emotion classification model is then built via a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict emotions for each topic based on locations. The proposed work is experimented with the twitter streaming API dataset. The experimental results prove that the presented LDA model-using grid search along with the RNN model for emotion classification outperforms the other state of art methods with an improved accuracy of 94.6%.

Evolutionary warning system for COVID-19 severity: Colony predation algorithm enhanced extreme learning machine

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was distributed globally at the end of December 2019 due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Early diagnosis and successful COVID-19 assessment are missing, clinical care is ineffective, and deaths are high. In this study, we investigate whether the level of biochemical indicators helps to discriminate and classify the severity of the COVID-19 using the machine learning method. This research creates an efficient intelligence method for the diagnosis of COVID-19 from the perspective of biochemical indexes. The framework is proposed by integrating an enhanced new stochastic called the colony predation algorithm (CPA) with a kernel extreme learning machine (KELM), abbreviated as ECPA-KELM. The core feature of the approach is the ECPA algorithm which incorporates the two main operators that have been abstained from the grey wolf optimizer and moth-flame optimizer to improve and restore the CPA research functions and are simultaneously used to optimize the parameters and to select features for KELM. The ECPA output is checked thoroughly using IEEE CEC2017 benchmark to verify the capacity of the proposed methodology. Finally, in the diagnosis of COVID-19 using biochemical indexes, the designed ECPA-KELM model and other competing KELM models based on other optimization are used. Checking statistical results will display improved predictive properties for all metrics and higher stability. ECPA-KELM can also be used to discriminate and classify the severity of the COVID-19 as a possible computer-aided method and provide effective early warning for the treatment and diagnosis of COVID-19.

An explainable AI system for automated COVID-19 assessment and lesion categorization from CT-scans

COVID-19 infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 pathogen has been a catastrophic pandemic outbreak all over the world, with exponential increasing of confirmed cases and, unfortunately, deaths. In this work we propose an AI-powered pipeline, based on the deep-learning paradigm, for automated COVID-19 detection and lesion categorization from CT scans. We first propose a new segmentation module aimed at automatically identifying lung parenchyma and lobes. Next, we combine the segmentation network with classification networks for COVID-19 identification and lesion categorization. We compare the model's classification results with those obtained by three expert radiologists on a dataset of 166 CT scans. Results showed a sensitivity of 90.3% and a specificity of 93.5% for COVID-19 detection, at least on par with those yielded by the expert radiologists, and an average lesion categorization accuracy of about 84%. Moreover, a significant role is played by prior lung and lobe segmentation, that allowed us to enhance classification performance by over 6 percent points. The interpretation of the trained AI models reveals that the most significant areas for supporting the decision on COVID-19 identification are consistent with the lesions clinically associated to the virus, i.e., crazy paving, consolidation and ground glass. This means that the artificial models are able to discriminate a positive patient from a negative one (both controls and patients with interstitial pneumonia tested negative to COVID) by evaluating the presence of those lesions into CT scans. Finally, the AI models are integrated into a user-friendly GUI to support AI explainability for radiologists, which is publicly available at http://perceivelab.com/covid-ai. The whole AI system is unique since, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first AI-based software, publicly available, that attempts to explain to radiologists what information is used by AI methods for making decisions and that proactively involves them in the decision loop to further improve the COVID-19 understanding.

Ranking of Importance Measures of Tweet Communities: Application to Keyword Extraction From COVID-19 Tweets in Japan

This article presents a method that detects tweet communities with similar topics and ranks the communities by importance measures. By identifying the tweet communities that have high importance measures, it is possible for users to easily find important information about the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Specifically, we first construct a community network, whose nodes are tweet communities obtained by applying a community detection method to a tweet network. The community network is constructed based on textual similarities between tweet communities and sizes of tweet communities. Second, we apply algorithms for calculating centrality to the community network. Because the obtained centrality is based on tweet community sizes as well, we call it the importance measure in distinction to conventional centrality. The importance measure can simultaneously evaluate the importance of topics in the entire data set and occupancy (or dominance) of tweet communities in the network structure. We conducted experiments by collecting Japanese tweets about COVID-19 from March 1, 2020 to May 15, 2020. The results show that the proposed method is able to extract keywords that have a high correlation with the number of people infected with COVID-19 in Japan. Because users can browse the keywords from a small number of central tweet communities, quick and easy understanding of important information becomes feasible.

Role of deep learning in early detection of COVID-19: Scoping review

BACKGROUND

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed disruption on an unprecedented scale affecting our daily lives including but not limited to healthcare, business, education, and transportation. Deep Learning (DL) is a branch of Artificial intelligence (AI) applications, the recent growth of DL includes features that could be helpful in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing such features could support public health efforts.

OBJECTIVE

Investigate the literature available in the use of DL technology to support dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. We summarize the literature that uses DL features to analyze datasets for the purpose of a quick COVID-19 detection.

METHODS

This review follows PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). We have scanned the most two commonly used databases (IEEE, ACM). Search terms were identified based on the target intervention (DL) and the target population (COVID-19). Two authors independently handled study selection and one author assigned for data extraction. A narrative approach is used to synthesize the extracted data.

RESULTS

We retrieved 53 studies and after passing through PRISMA excluding criteria, only 17 studies are considered in this review. All studies used deep learning for detection of COVID-19 cases in early stage based on different diagnostic modalities. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transfer Learning (TL) were the most commonly used techniques.

CONCLUSION

The included studies showed that DL techniques has significant impact on early detection of COVID-19 with high accuracy rate. However, most of the proposed methods are still in development and not tested in a clinical setting. Further investigation and collaboration are required from the research community and healthcare professionals in order to develop and standardize guidelines for use of DL in the healthcare domain.

Country transition index based on hierarchical clustering to predict next COVID-19 waves

COVID-19 has widely spread around the world, impacting the health systems of several countries in addition to the collateral damage that societies will face in the next years. Although the comparison between countries is essential for controlling this disease, the main challenge is the fact of countries are not simultaneously affected by the virus. Therefore, from the COVID-19 dataset by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, we present a temporal analysis on the number of new cases and deaths among countries using artificial intelligence. Our approach incrementally models the cases using a hierarchical clustering that emphasizes country transitions between infection groups over time. Then, one can compare the current situation of a country against others that have already faced previous waves. By using our approach, we designed a transition index to estimate the most probable countries' movements between infectious groups to predict next wave trends. We draw two important conclusions: (1) we show the historical infection path taken by specific countries and emphasize changing points that occur when countries move between clusters with small, medium, or large number of cases; (2) we estimate new waves for specific countries using the transition index.

Artificial Intelligence in Action: Addressing the COVID-19 Pandemic with Natural Language Processing

The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has had a significant impact on society, both because of the serious health effects of COVID-19 and because of public health measures implemented to slow its spread. Many of these difficulties are fundamentally information needs; attempts to address these needs have caused an information overload for both researchers and the public. Natural language processing (NLP)-the branch of artificial intelligence that interprets human language-can be applied to address many of the information needs made urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic. This review surveys approximately 150 NLP studies and more than 50 systems and datasets addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We detail work on four core NLP tasks: information retrieval, named entity recognition, literature-based discovery, and question answering. We also describe work that directly addresses aspects of the pandemic through four additional tasks: topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis, caseload forecasting, and misinformation detection. We conclude by discussing observable trends and remaining challenges.

Transmission trend of the COVID-19 pandemic predicted by dendritic neural regression

In 2020, a novel coronavirus disease became a global problem. The disease was called COVID-19, as the first patient was diagnosed in December 2019. The disease spread around the world quickly due to its powerful viral ability. To date, the spread of COVID-19 has been relatively mild in China due to timely control measures. However, in other countries, the pandemic remains severe, and COVID-19 protection and control policies are urgently needed, which has motivated this research. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, many researchers have hoped to identify the mechanism of COVID-19 transmission and predict its spread by using machine learning (ML) methods to supply meaningful reference information to decision-makers in various countries. Since the historical data of COVID-19 is time series data, most researchers have adopted recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which can capture time information, for this problem. However, even with a state-of-the-art RNN, it is still difficult to perfectly capture the temporal information and nonlinear characteristics from the historical data of COVID-19. Therefore, in this study, we develop a novel dendritic neural regression (DNR) method to improve prediction performance. In the DNR, the multiplication operator is used to capture the nonlinear relationships between input feature signals in the dendrite layer. Considering the complex and large landscape of DNR's weight space, a new scale-free state-of-matter search (SFSMS) algorithm is proposed to optimize the DNR, which combines the state-of-matter search algorithm with a scale-free local search. The SFSMS achieves a better global search ability and thus can effectively reduce the possibility of falling into local minima. In addition, according to Takens's theorem, phase space reconstruction techniques are used to discover the information hidden in the high-dimensional space of COVID-19 data, which further improves the precision of prediction. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method is more competitive in solving this problem than other prevailing methods.

A systematic review on AI/ML approaches against COVID-19 outbreak

A pandemic disease, COVID-19, has caused trouble worldwide by infecting millions of people. The studies that apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods for various purposes against the COVID-19 outbreak have increased because of their significant advantages. Although AI/ML applications provide satisfactory solutions to COVID-19 disease, these solutions can have a wide diversity. This increase in the number of AI/ML studies and diversity in solutions can confuse deciding which AI/ML technique is suitable for which COVID-19 purposes. Because there is no comprehensive review study, this study systematically analyzes and summarizes related studies. A research methodology has been proposed to conduct the systematic literature review for framing the research questions, searching criteria and relevant data extraction. Finally, 264 studies were taken into account after following inclusion and exclusion criteria. This research can be regarded as a key element for epidemic and transmission prediction, diagnosis and detection, and drug/vaccine development. Six research questions are explored with 50 AI/ML approaches in COVID-19, 8 AI/ML methods for patient outcome prediction, 14 AI/ML techniques in disease predictions, along with five AI/ML methods for risk assessment of COVID-19. It also covers AI/ML method in drug development, vaccines for COVID-19, models in COVID-19, datasets and their usage and dataset applications with AI/ML.

Data-driven methods for present and future pandemics: Monitoring, modelling and managing

This survey analyses the role of data-driven methodologies for pandemic modelling and control. We provide a roadmap from the access to epidemiological data sources to the control of epidemic phenomena. We review the available methodologies and discuss the challenges in the development of data-driven strategies to combat the spreading of infectious diseases. Our aim is to bring together several different disciplines required to provide a holistic approach to epidemic analysis, such as data science, epidemiology, and systems-and-control theory. A 3M-analysis is presented, whose three pillars are: Monitoring, Modelling and Managing. The focus is on the potential of data-driven schemes to address three different challenges raised by a pandemic: (i) monitoring the epidemic evolution and assessing the effectiveness of the adopted countermeasures; (ii) modelling and forecasting the spread of the epidemic; (iii) making timely decisions to manage, mitigate and suppress the contagion. For each step of this roadmap, we review consolidated theoretical approaches (including data-driven methodologies that have been shown to be successful in other contexts) and discuss their application to past or present epidemics, such as Covid-19, as well as their potential application to future epidemics.

Opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence in the medical field: current application, emerging problems, and problem-solving strategies

Recent advancements in the field of artificial intelligence have demonstrated success in a variety of clinical tasks secondary to the development and application of big data, supercomputing, sensor networks, brain science, and other technologies. However, no projects can yet be used on a large scale in real clinical practice because of the lack of standardized processes, lack of ethical and legal supervision, and other issues. We analyzed the existing problems in the field of artificial intelligence and herein propose possible solutions. We call for the establishment of a process framework to ensure the safety and orderly development of artificial intelligence in the medical industry. This will facilitate the design and implementation of artificial intelligence products, promote better management via regulatory authorities, and ensure that reliable and safe artificial intelligence products are selected for application.

K-SEIR-Sim: A simple customized software for simulating the spread of infectious diseases

Infectious disease is a great enemy of humankind. The ravages of COVID-19 are leading to profound crises across the world. There is an urgent requirement for analyzing the current pandemic situation, predicting trends over time, and assessing the effectiveness of containment measures. Thus, numerous statistical models, primarily based on the susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered or removed (SEIR) model, have been established. However, these models are highly technical, which are difficult for the public and governing bodies to understand and use. To address this issue, we developed a simple operating software based on our improved K-SEIR model termed as the kernelkernel SEIR simulator (K-SEIR-Sim). This software includes natural propagation parameters, containment measure parameters, and certain characteristic parameters that can deduce the effects of natural propagation and containment measures. Further, the applicability of the proposed software was demonstrated using the example of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and the city of Wuhan, China. Operating results verified the potency of the proposed software in evaluating the epidemic situation and human intervention during COVID-19. Importantly, the software can perform real-time, backward-looking, and forward-looking analysis by functioning in data-driven and model-driven ways. All of them have considerable practical values in their applications according to the actual needs of personal use. Conclusively, K-SEIR-Sim is the first simple customized operating software that is highly valuable for the global fight against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Control strategies for COVID-19 epidemic with vaccination, shield immunity and quarantine: A metric temporal logic approach

Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, various public health control strategies have been proposed and tested against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. We study three specific COVID-19 epidemic control models: the susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered (SEIR) model with vaccination control; the SEIR model with shield immunity control; and the susceptible, un-quarantined infected, quarantined infected, confirmed infected (SUQC) model with quarantine control. We express the control requirement in metric temporal logic (MTL) formulas (a type of formal specification languages) which can specify the expected control outcomes such as "the deaths from the infection should never exceed one thousand per day within the next three months" or "the population immune from the disease should eventually exceed 200 thousand within the next 100 to 120 days". We then develop methods for synthesizing control strategies with MTL specifications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to systematically synthesize control strategies based on the COVID-19 epidemic models with formal specifications. We provide simulation results in three different case studies: vaccination control for the COVID-19 epidemic with model parameters estimated from data in Lombardy, Italy; shield immunity control for the COVID-19 epidemic with model parameters estimated from data in Lombardy, Italy; and quarantine control for the COVID-19 epidemic with model parameters estimated from data in Wuhan, China. The results show that the proposed synthesis approach can generate control inputs such that the time-varying numbers of individuals in each category (e.g., infectious, immune) satisfy the MTL specifications. The results also show that early intervention is essential in mitigating the spread of COVID-19, and more control effort is needed for more stringent MTL specifications. For example, based on the model in Lombardy, Italy, achieving less than 100 deaths per day and 10000 total deaths within 100 days requires 441.7% more vaccination control effort than achieving less than 1000 deaths per day and 50000 total deaths within 100 days.

Accurate Classification of COVID-19 Based on Incomplete Heterogeneous Data using a KNN Variant Algorithm

Great efforts are now underway to control the coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19). Millions of people are medically examined, and their data keep piling up awaiting classification. The data are typically both incomplete and heterogeneous which hampers classical classification algorithms. Some researchers have recently modified the popular KNN algorithm as a solution, where they handle incompleteness by imputation and heterogeneity by converting categorical data into numbers. In this article, we introduce a novel KNN variant (KNNV) algorithm that provides better results as demonstrated by thorough experimental work. We employ rough set theoretic techniques to handle both incompleteness and heterogeneity, as well as to find an ideal value for K. The KNNV algorithm takes an incomplete, heterogeneous dataset, containing medical records of people, and identifies those cases with COVID-19. We use in the process two popular distance metrics, Euclidean and Mahalanobis, in an effort to widen the operational scope. The KNNV algorithm is implemented and tested on a real dataset from the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology. The experimental results show that it can efficiently and accurately classify COVID-19 cases. It is also compared to three KNN derivatives. The comparison results show that it greatly outperforms all its competitors in terms of four metrics: precision, recall, accuracy, and F-Score. The algorithm given in this article can be easily applied to classify other diseases. Moreover, its methodology can be further extended to do general classification tasks outside the medical field.

Accurate Classification of COVID-19 Based on Incomplete Heterogeneous Data using a KNN Variant Algorithm

Great efforts are now underway to control the coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19). Millions of people are medically examined, and their data keep piling up awaiting classification. The data are typically both incomplete and heterogeneous which hampers classical classification algorithms. Some researchers have recently modified the popular KNN algorithm as a solution, where they handle incompleteness by imputation and heterogeneity by converting categorical data into numbers. In this article, we introduce a novel KNN variant (KNNV) algorithm that provides better results as demonstrated by thorough experimental work. We employ rough set theoretic techniques to handle both incompleteness and heterogeneity, as well as to find an ideal value for K. The KNNV algorithm takes an incomplete, heterogeneous dataset, containing medical records of people, and identifies those cases with COVID-19. We use in the process two popular distance metrics, Euclidean and Mahalanobis, in an effort to widen the operational scope. The KNNV algorithm is implemented and tested on a real dataset from the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology. The experimental results show that it can efficiently and accurately classify COVID-19 cases. It is also compared to three KNN derivatives. The comparison results show that it greatly outperforms all its competitors in terms of four metrics: precision, recall, accuracy, and F-Score. The algorithm given in this article can be easily applied to classify other diseases. Moreover, its methodology can be further extended to do general classification tasks outside the medical field.

Forecasting of Covid-19 Cases Using Machine Learning Approach

Aims:

The objective of this research is to predict the covid-19 cases in India based on the machine learning approaches.

Background:

Covid-19, a respiratory disease caused by one of the coronavirus family members, has led to a pandemic situation worldwide in 2020. This virus was detected firstly in Wuhan city of China in December 2019. This viral disease has taken less than three months to spread across the globe.

Objective:

In this paper, we proposed a regression model based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) to forecast the number of deaths, the number of recovered cases, and total confirmed cases for the next 30 days.

Method:

For prediction, the data was collected from Github and the ministry of India's health and family welfare from March 14, 2020, to December 3, 2020. The model has been designed in Python 3.6 in Anaconda to forecast the forecasting value of corona trends until September 21, 2020. The proposed methodology is based on the prediction of values using SVM based regression model with polynomial, linear, rbf kernel. The dataset has been divided into train and test datasets with 40% and 60% test size and verified with real data. The model performance parameters were evaluated as a mean square error, mean absolute error, and percentage accuracy.

Results and Conclusion:

The results show that the polynomial model has obtained 95% above accuracy score, linear scored above 90%, and rbf scored above 85% in predicting cumulative death, conformed cases, and recovered cases.

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning for Detection of Respiratory Illness by Chest CT Imaging and Tracking of COVID-19 Pandemic in the US

BACKGROUND

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread quickly throughout the United States (US) causing significant disruption in healthcare and society. Tools to identify hot spots are important for public health planning. The goal of our study was to determine if natural language processing (NLP) algorithm assessment of thoracic computed tomography (CT) imaging reports correlated with the incidence of official COVID-19 cases in the US.

METHODS

Using de-identified HIPAA compliant patient data from our common imaging platform interconnected with over 2,100 facilities covering all 50 states, we developed three NLP algorithms to track positive CT imaging features of respiratory illness typical in SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. We compared our findings against the number of official COVID-19 daily, weekly and state-wide.

RESULTS

The NLP algorithms were applied to 450,114 patient chest CT comprehensive reports gathered from January 1st to October 3rd, 2020. The best performing NLP model exhibited strong correlation with daily official COVID-19 cases (r2=0.82, p<0.005). The NLP models demonstrated an early rise in cases followed by the increase of official cases, suggesting the possibility of an early predictive marker, with strong correlation to official cases on a weekly basis (r2=0.91, p<0.005). There was also substantial correlation between the NLP and official COVID-19 incidence by state (r2=0.92, p<0.005).

CONCLUSION

Using big data, we developed a novel machine-learning based NLP algorithm that can track imaging findings of respiratory illness detected on chest CT imaging reports with strong correlation with the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.

Multi-Objective Optimization of Integrated Civilian-Military Scheduling of Medical Supplies for Epidemic Prevention and Control

In a large-scale epidemic, such as the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19), there is huge demand for a variety of medical supplies, such as medical masks, ventilators, and sickbeds. Resources from civilian medical services are often not sufficient for fully satisfying all of these demands. Resources from military medical services, which are normally reserved for military use, can be an effective supplement to these demands. In this paper, we formulate a problem of integrated civilian-military scheduling of medical supplies for epidemic prevention and control, the aim of which is to simultaneously maximize the overall satisfaction rate of the medical supplies and minimize the total scheduling cost, while keeping a minimum ratio of medical supplies reservation for military use. We propose a multi-objective water wave optimization (WWO) algorithm in order to efficiently solve this problem. Computational results on a set of problem instances constructed based on real COVID-19 data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Contribution of machine learning approaches in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection

PROBLEM

The lately emerged SARS-CoV-2 infection, which has put the whole world in an aberrant demanding situation, has generated an urgent need for developing effective responses through artificial intelligence (AI).

AIM

This paper aims to overview the recent applications of machine learning techniques contributing to prevention, diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of coronavirus disease (SARS-CoV-2).

METHODS

A progressive investigation of the recent publications up to November 2020, related to AI approaches towards managing the challenges of COVID-19 infection was made.

RESULTS

For patient diagnosis and screening, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are broadly applied for classification purposes. Moreover, Deep Neural Network (DNN) and homology modeling are the most used SARS-CoV-2 drug repurposing models.

CONCLUSION

While the fields of diagnosis of the SARS-CoV-2 infection by medical image processing and its dissemination pattern through machine learning have been sufficiently studied, some areas such as treatment outcome in patients and drug development need to be further investigated using AI approaches.

The spatial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in China under the prevention and control measures at the early outbreak

Background

Since severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was firstly reported in Wuhan City, China in December 2019, Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) that is caused by SARS-CoV-2 is predominantly spread from person-to-person on worldwide scales. Now, COVID-19 is a non-traditional and major public health issue the world is facing, and the outbreak is a global pandemic. The strict prevention and control measures have mitigated the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and shown positive changes with important progress in China. But prevention and control tasks remain arduous for the world. The objective of this study is to discuss the difference of spatial transmission characteristics of COVID-19 in China at the early outbreak stage with resolute efforts. Simultaneously, the COVID-19 trend of China at the early time was described from the statistical perspective using a mathematical model to evaluate the effectiveness of the prevention and control measures.

Methods

In this study, the accumulated number of confirmed cases publicly reported by the National Health Committee of the People’s Republic of China (CNHC) from January 20 to February 11, 2020, were grouped into three partly overlapping regions: Chinese mainland including Hubei province, Hubei province alone, and the other 30 provincial-level regions on Chinese mainland excluding Hubei province, respectively. A generalized-growth model (GGM) was used to estimate the basic reproduction number to evaluate the transmissibility in different spatial locations. The prevention and control of COVID-19 in the early stage were analyzed based on the number of new cases of confirmed infections daily reported.

Results

Results indicated that the accumulated number of confirmed cases reported from January 20 to February 11, 2020, is well described by the GGM model with a larger correlation coefficient than 0.99. When the accumulated number of confirmed cases is well fitted by an exponential function, the basic reproduction number of COVID-19 of the 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland, Hubei province, and the other 30 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland excluding Hubei province, is 2.68, 6.46 and 2.18, respectively. The consecutive decline of the new confirmed cases indicated that the prevention and control measures taken by the Chinese government have contained the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in a short period.

Conclusions

The estimated basic reproduction number thorough GGM model can reflect the spatial difference of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in China at the early stage. The strict prevention and control measures of SARS-CoV-2 taken at the early outbreak can effectively reduce the new confirmed cases outside Hubei and have mitigated the spread and yielded positive results since February 2, 2020. The research results indicated that the outbreak of COVID-19 in China was sustaining localized at the early outbreak stage and has been gradually curbed by China’s resolute efforts.

Role of Machine Learning Techniques to Tackle the COVID-19 Crisis: Systematic Review

BACKGROUND

SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, has caused havoc worldwide, with patients presenting a spectrum of complications that have pushed health care experts to explore new technological solutions and treatment plans. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies have played a substantial role in solving complex problems, and several organizations have been swift to adopt and customize these technologies in response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature on the role of AI as a comprehensive and decisive technology to fight the COVID-19 crisis in the fields of epidemiology, diagnosis, and disease progression.

METHODS

A systematic search of PubMed, Web of Science, and CINAHL databases was performed according to PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) guidelines to identify all potentially relevant studies published and made available online between December 1, 2019, and June 27, 2020. The search syntax was built using keywords specific to COVID-19 and AI.

RESULTS

The search strategy resulted in 419 articles published and made available online during the aforementioned period. Of these, 130 publications were selected for further analyses. These publications were classified into 3 themes based on AI applications employed to combat the COVID-19 crisis: Computational Epidemiology, Early Detection and Diagnosis, and Disease Progression. Of the 130 studies, 71 (54.6%) focused on predicting the COVID-19 outbreak, the impact of containment policies, and potential drug discoveries, which were classified under the Computational Epidemiology theme. Next, 40 of 130 (30.8%) studies that applied AI techniques to detect COVID-19 by using patients' radiological images or laboratory test results were classified under the Early Detection and Diagnosis theme. Finally, 19 of the 130 studies (14.6%) that focused on predicting disease progression, outcomes (ie, recovery and mortality), length of hospital stay, and number of days spent in the intensive care unit for patients with COVID-19 were classified under the Disease Progression theme.

CONCLUSIONS

In this systematic review, we assembled studies in the current COVID-19 literature that utilized AI-based methods to provide insights into different COVID-19 themes. Our findings highlight important variables, data types, and available COVID-19 resources that can assist in facilitating clinical and translational research.

General practitioner trainees' career perspectives after COVID-19: a qualitative study in China

Background

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been a worldwide public health emergency that has put great pressure on medical workers and the medical system. General Practitioners (GPs) played an important role in controlling the epidemic, and GP trainees also took an active part in this approach. This study was to explore Chinese GP trainees’ career perspectives after COVID-19.

Methods

We conducted a qualitative research study which included 12 GP trainees from three teaching hospitals in China. Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted. Grounded theory and thematic analysis were used to code the data and identify categories and factors.

Results

Eleven participants chose to continue a GP career after COVID-19, and nearly half of the participants strengthened their determination to dedicate themselves to this career. Only one participant decided to change the career choice because of interest in another specialty. Four main themes influencing GP trainees’ perceptions of career development after COVID-19 emerged from the interviews: changes of GPs’ work content in COVID-19, challenges of being a GP, psychological changes of the career, how to provide better primary care. Although some negative psychological changes existed, most of participants were inspired by role models and medical colleagues. They had more in-depth understanding of GPs’ role and responsibility during COVID-19, and exhibited intensions for self-improvement in career development, especially in public health education and self-protection in preventing infectious diseases. In addition, the wide use of telemedicine provided a new work way for GP trainees. However, challenges, such as increased workloads, low income, lack of resources in primary medical institutions, and distrust of GPs are faced by trainees during the outbreak.

Conclusions

Overall, no substantial changes were seen in the career choice of GP trainees after COVID-19 outbreak. However, they were inspired and had an in-depth understanding about the GP’s work and responsibility during an epidemic. Owing to the challenges faced by the GPs, measures are needed to improve the GP education and work environment in the training phase.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12875-020-01364-x.

ALeRT-COVID: Attentive Lockdown-awaRe Transfer Learning for Predicting COVID-19 Pandemics in Different Countries

Countries across the world are in different stages of COVID-19 trajectory, among which many have implemented lockdown measures to prevent its spread. Although the lockdown is effective in such prevention, it may put the economy into a depression. Predicting the epidemic progression with the government switching the lockdown on or off is critical. We propose a transfer learning approach called ALeRT-COVID using attention-based recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture to predict the epidemic trends for different countries. A source model was trained on the pre-defined source countries and then transferred to each target country. The lockdown measure was introduced to our model as a predictor and the attention mechanism was utilized to learn the different contributions of the confirmed cases in the past days to the future trend. Results demonstrated that the transfer learning strategy is helpful especially for early-stage countries. By introducing the lockdown predictor and the attention mechanism, ALeRT-COVID showed a significant improvement in the prediction performance. We predicted the confirmed cases in 1 week when extending and easing lockdown separately. Our results show that lockdown measures are still necessary for several countries. We expect our research can help different countries to make better decisions on the lockdown measures.

Automatic Evaluation of the Lung Condition of COVID-19 Patients Using X-ray Images and Convolutional Neural Networks

COVID-19 represents one of the greatest challenges in modern history. Its impact is most noticeable in the health care system, mostly due to the accelerated and increased influx of patients with a more severe clinical picture. These facts are increasing the pressure on health systems. For this reason, the aim is to automate the process of diagnosis and treatment. The research presented in this article conducted an examination of the possibility of classifying the clinical picture of a patient using X-ray images and convolutional neural networks. The research was conducted on the dataset of 185 images that consists of four classes. Due to a lower amount of images, a data augmentation procedure was performed. In order to define the CNN architecture with highest classification performances, multiple CNNs were designed. Results show that the best classification performances can be achieved if ResNet152 is used. This CNN has achieved AUCmacro¯ and AUCmicro¯ up to 0.94, suggesting the possibility of applying CNN to the classification of the clinical picture of COVID-19 patients using an X-ray image of the lungs. When higher layers are frozen during the training procedure, higher AUCmacro¯ and AUCmicro¯ values are achieved. If ResNet152 is utilized, AUCmacro¯ and AUCmicro¯ values up to 0.96 are achieved if all layers except the last 12 are frozen during the training procedure.