Machine Learning Approaches for Tackling Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

An Improved Long Short-Term Memory Algorithm for Cardiovascular Disease Prediction

Cardiovascular diseases, prevalent as leading health concerns, demand early diagnosis for effective risk prevention. Despite numerous diagnostic models, challenges persist in network configuration and performance degradation, impacting model accuracy. In response, this paper introduces the Optimally Configured and Improved Long Short-Term Memory (OCI-LSTM) model as a robust solution. Leveraging the Salp Swarm Algorithm, irrelevant features are systematically eliminated, and the Genetic Algorithm is employed to optimize the LSTM's network configuration. Validation metrics, including the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score, affirm the model's efficacy. Comparative analysis with a Deep Neural Network and Deep Belief Network establishes the OCI-LSTM's superiority, showcasing a notable accuracy increase of 97.11%. These advancements position the OCI-LSTM as a promising model for accurate and efficient early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Future research could explore real-world implementation and further refinement for seamless integration into clinical practice.

Positive influence of managing cancer and living meaningfully (CALM) on fear of cancer recurrence in breast cancer survivors

To evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of managing cancer and living meaningfully (CALM), an intervention used to reduce the fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) in breast cancer survivors and improve their quality of life (QoL). A total of 103 breast cancer survivors were enrolled. Participants were randomly assigned to the CALM group or the care as usual (CAU) group. The participants completed a survey at baseline (T0) and after two (T1), four (T2), and six (T3) intervention sessions. The patients were assessed using the Cancer Worry Scale (CWS), Psychological Distress Thermometer (DT), Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast (FACT-B) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). After the intervention, the CALM group showed a significant decrease in levels of FCR, distress, anxiety, and depression (χ2=154.353, χ2=130.292, χ2=148.879, and χ2=78.681; P<0.001, 0.001, 0.001, and 0.001, respectively) and an increased QoL (χ2=122.822, P<0.001). Compared with the CAU group, the CALM group showed significant differences in FCR, distress, QoL, anxiety and depression (F=292.431, F=344.156, F=11.115, F=45.124, and F=16.155; P<0.001, P<0.001, P=0.01, P<0.001, and P<0.001, respectively). Negative correlations were found between CWS and FACT-B scores in the CALM group (T0: r=-0.6345, P<0.001; T1: r=-0.4127, P=0.0017; T2: r=-0.2919, P=0.0306; and T3: r=-0.3188, P=0.0177) and in the CAU group (T0: r=-0.7714, P<0.0001; T1: r=-0.6549, P<0.0001; T2: r=-0.5060, P=0.0002; and T3: r=-0.3151, P=0.0291). Thus, the CALM intervention reduced FCR, distress, anxiety and depression in breast cancer survivors and improved QoL.

Analysis of COVID-19 Death Cases Using Machine Learning

COVID-19 has threatened the existence of human life for more than the last 2 years. More than 460 million confirmed cases and 6 million deaths have been reported worldwide due to COVID-19. To measure the severity of the COVID-19, the mortality rate plays an important role. Understanding the nature of COVID-19 and forecasting the death cases of COVID-19 require more investigation of the real effect for different risk factors. In this work, various regression machine learning models are proposed to extract the relationship between different factors and the death rate of COVID-19. The optimal regression tree algorithm employed in this work estimates the impact of essential causal variables that significantly affect the mortality rates. We have generated a real-time forecast for the death case of COVID-19 using machine learning techniques. The analysis is evaluated with the well-known regression models XGBoost, Random Forest, and SVM on the data sets of the US, India, Italy, and three continents Asia, Europe, and North America. The results show that the models can be used to forecast the death cases for the near future in case of an epidemic like Novel Coronavirus.

Efficient prediction of early-stage diabetes using XGBoost classifier with random forest feature selection technique

Diabetes is one of the most common and serious diseases affecting human health. Early diagnosis and treatment are vital to prevent or delay complications related to diabetes. An automated diabetes detection system assists physicians in the early diagnosis of the disease and reduces complications by providing fast and precise results. This study aims to introduce a technique based on a combination of multiple linear regression (MLR), random forest (RF), and XGBoost (XG) to diagnose diabetes from questionnaire data. MLR-RF algorithm is used for feature selection, and XG is used for classification in the proposed system. The dataset is the diabetic hospital data in Sylhet, Bangladesh. It contains 520 instances, including 320 diabetics and 200 control instances. The performance of the classifiers is measured concerning accuracy (ACC), precision (PPV), recall (SEN, sensitivity), F1 score (F1), and the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC). The results show that the proposed system achieves an accuracy of 99.2%, an AUC of 99.3%, and a prediction time of 0.04825 seconds. The feature selection method improves the prediction time, although it does not affect the accuracy of the four compared classifiers. The results of this study are quite reasonable and successful when compared with other studies. The proposed method can be used as an auxiliary tool in diagnosing diabetes.

Automatic lung disease classification from the chest X-ray images using hybrid deep learning algorithm

The chest X-ray images provide vital information about the congestion cost-effectively. We propose a novel Hybrid Deep Learning Algorithm (HDLA) framework for automatic lung disease classification from chest X-ray images. The model consists of steps including pre-processing of chest X-ray images, automatic feature extraction, and detection. In a pre-processing step, our goal is to improve the quality of raw chest X-ray images using the combination of optimal filtering without data loss. The robust Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed using the pre-trained model for automatic lung feature extraction. We employed the 2D CNN model for the optimum feature extraction in minimum time and space requirements. The proposed 2D CNN model ensures robust feature learning with highly efficient 1D feature estimation from the input pre-processed image. As the extracted 1D features have suffered from significant scale variations, we optimized them using min-max scaling. We classify the CNN features using the different machine learning classifiers such as AdaBoost, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RM), Backpropagation Neural Network (BNN), and Deep Neural Network (DNN). The experimental results claim that the proposed model improves the overall accuracy by 3.1% and reduces the computational complexity by 16.91% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Predictive algorithm for the regional spread of coronavirus infection across the Russian Federation

BACKGROUND

Outbreaks of infectious diseases are a complex phenomenon with many interacting factors. Regional health authorities need prognostic modeling of the epidemic process.

METHODS

For these purposes, various mathematical algorithms can be used, which are a useful tool for studying the infections spread dynamics. Epidemiological models act as evaluation and prognosis models. The authors outlined the experience of developing a short-term predictive algorithm for the spread of the COVID-19 in the region of the Russian Federation based on the SIR model: Susceptible (vulnerable), Infected (infected), Recovered (recovered). The article describes in detail the methodology of a short-term predictive algorithm, including an assessment of the possibility of building a predictive model and the mathematical aspects of creating such forecast algorithms.

RESULTS

Findings show that the predicted results (the mean square of the relative error of the number of infected and those who had recovered) were in agreement with the real-life situation: σ(I) = 0.0129 and σ(R) = 0.0058, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study shows that despite a large number of sophisticated modifications, each of which finds its scope, it is advisable to use a simple SIR model to quickly predict the spread of coronavirus infection. Its lower accuracy is fully compensated by the adaptive calibration of parameters based on monitoring the current situation with updating indicators in real-time.

Conv-CapsNet: capsule based network for COVID-19 detection through X-Ray scans

Coronavirus, a virus that spread worldwide rapidly and was eventually declared a pandemic. The rapid spread made it essential to detect Coronavirus infected people to control the further spread. Recent studies show that radiological images such as X-Rays and CT scans provide essential information in detecting infection using deep learning models. This paper proposes a shallow architecture based on Capsule Networks with convolutional layers to detect COVID-19 infected persons. The proposed method combines the ability of the capsule network to understand spatial information with convolutional layers for efficient feature extraction. Due to the model's shallow architecture, it has 23M parameters to train and requires fewer training samples. The proposed system is fast and robust and correctly classifies the X-Ray images into three classes, i.e. COVID-19, No Findings, and Viral Pneumonia. Experimental results on the X-Ray dataset show that our model performs well despite having fewer samples for the training and achieved an average accuracy of 96.47% for multi-class and 97.69% for binary classification on 5-fold cross-validation. The proposed model would be useful to researchers and medical professionals for assistance and prognosis for COVID-19 infected patients.

Neurodegenerative diseases detection and grading using gait dynamics

Detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and grading of these diseases' severity have high clinical significance. These tasks based on walking analysis stand out compared to other methods due to their simplicity and non-invasiveness. This study has emerged to realize an artificial intelligence-based disease detection and severity prediction system for neurodegenerative diseases using gait features obtained from gait signals. For the detection of the disease, the problem is divided into parts which are subgroups of 4 classes consisting of Parkinson's, Huntington's, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis diseases, and the control group. In addition, the disease vs. control subgroup where all diseases are collected under a single label, the subgroups where each disease is separately against the control group. For disease severity grading, each disease was divided into subgroups and a solution was sought for the prediction problem mentioned by various machine and deep learning methods separately for each group. In this context, the resulting detection performance was measured by the metrics of Accuracy, F1 Score, Precision, and Recall while the resulting prediction performance was measured by the metrics such as R, R2, MAE, MedAE, MSE, and RMSE.

A hybrid forecasting technique for infection and death from the mpox virus

Objectives

The rising of new cases and death counts from the mpox virus (MPV) is alarming. In order to mitigate the impact of the MPV it is essential to have information of the virus's future position using more precise time series and stochastic models. In this present study, a hybrid forecasting system has been developed for new cases and death counts for MPV infection using the world daily cumulative confirmed and death series.

Methods

The original cumulative series was decomposed into new two subseries, such as a trend component and a stochastic series using the Hodrick-Prescott filter. To assess the efficacy of the proposed models, a comparative analysis with several widely recognized benchmark models, including auto-regressive (AR) model, auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) model, non-parametric auto-regressive (NPAR) model and artificial neural network (ANN), was performed.

Results

The introduction of two novel hybrid models, HPF 1 1 and HPF 3 4 , which demonstrated superior performance compared to all other models, as evidenced by their remarkable results in key performance indicators such as root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), is a significant advancement in disease prediction.

Conclusion

The new models developed can be implemented in forecasting other diseases in the future. To address the current situation effectively, governments and stakeholders must implement significant changes to ensure strict adherence to standard operating procedures (SOPs) by the public. Given the anticipated continuation of increasing trends in the coming days, these measures are essential for mitigating the impact of the outbreak.

New and emerging forms of data and technologies: literature and bibliometric review

With the increased digitalisation of our society, new and emerging forms of data present new values and opportunities for improved data driven multimedia services, or even new solutions for managing future global pandemics (i.e., Disease X). This article conducts a literature review and bibliometric analysis of existing research records on new and emerging forms of multimedia data. The literature review engages with qualitative search of the most prominent journal and conference publications on this topic. The bibliometric analysis engages with statistical software (i.e. R) analysis of Web of Science data records. The results are somewhat unexpected. Despite the special relationship between the US and the UK, there is not much evidence of collaboration in research on this topic. Similarly, despite the negative media publicity on the current relationship between the US and China (and the US sanctions on China), the research on this topic seems to be growing strong. However, it would be interesting to repeat this exercise after a few years and compare the results. It is possible that the effect of the current US sanctions on China has not taken its full effect yet.

An AI model of sonographer's evaluation+ S-Detect + elastography + clinical information improves the preoperative identification of benign and malignant breast masses

Purpose

The purpose of the study was to build an AI model with selected preoperative clinical features to further improve the accuracy of the assessment of benign and malignant breast nodules.

Methods

Patients who underwent ultrasound, strain elastography, and S-Detect before ultrasound-guided biopsy or surgical excision were enrolled. The diagnosis model was built using a logistic regression model. The diagnostic performances of different models were evaluated and compared.

Results

A total of 179 lesions (101 benign and 78 malignant) were included. The whole dataset consisted of a training set (145 patients) and an independent test set (34 patients). The AI models constructed based on clinical features, ultrasound features, and strain elastography to predict and classify benign and malignant breast nodules had ROC AUCs of 0.87, 0.81, and 0.79 in the test set. The AUCs of the sonographer and S-Detect were 0.75 and 0.82, respectively, in the test set. The AUC of the combined AI model with the best performance was 0.89 in the test set. The combined AI model showed a better specificity of 0.92 than the other models. The sonographer's assessment showed better sensitivity (0.97 in the test set).

Conclusion

The combined AI model could improve the preoperative identification of benign and malignant breast masses and may reduce unnecessary breast biopsies.

COL11A1 as an novel biomarker for breast cancer with machine learning and immunohistochemistry validation

Machine learning (ML) algorithms were used to identify a novel biological target for breast cancer and explored its relationship with the tumor microenvironment (TME) and patient prognosis. The edgR package identified hub genes associated with overall survival (OS) and prognosis, which were validated using public datasets. Of 149 up-regulated genes identified in tumor tissues, three ML algorithms identified COL11A1 as a hub gene. COL11A1was highly expressed in breast cancer samples and associated with a poor prognosis, and positively correlated with a stromal score (r=0.49, p<0.001) and the ESTIMATE score (r=0.29, p<0.001) in the TME. Furthermore, COL11A1 negatively correlated with B cells, CD4 and CD8 cells, but positively associated with cancer-associated fibroblasts. Forty-three related immune-regulation genes associated with COL11A1 were identified, and a five-gene immune regulation signature was built. Compared with clinical factors, this gene signature was an independent risk factor for prognosis (HR=2.591, 95%CI 1.831-3.668, p=7.7e-08). A nomogram combining the gene signature with clinical variables, showed better predictive performance (C-index=0.776). The model correction prediction curve showed little bias from the ideal curve. COL11A1 is a potential therapeutic target in breast cancer and may be involved in the tumor immune infiltration; its high expression is strongly associated with poor prognosis.

Enhancement of license plate recognition performance using Xception with Mish activation function

The current breakthroughs in the highway research sector have resulted in a greater awareness and focus on the construction of an effective Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). One of the most actively researched areas is Vehicle Licence Plate Recognition (VLPR), concerned with determining the characters contained in a vehicle's Licence Plate (LP). Many existing methods have been used to deal with different environmental complexity factors but are limited to motion deblurring. The aim of our research is to provide an effective and robust solution for recognizing characters present in license plates in complex environmental conditions. Our proposed approach is capable of handling not only the motion-blurred LPs but also recognizing the characters present in different types of low resolution and blurred license plates, illegible vehicle plates, license plates present in different weather and light conditions, and various traffic circumstances, as well as high-speed vehicles. Our research provides a series of different approaches to execute different steps in the character recognition process. The proposed approach presents the concept of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) with Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) Discriminator (DCTGAN), a joint image super resolution and deblurring approach that uses a discrete cosine transform with low computational complexity to remove various types of blur and complexities from licence plates. License Plates (LPs) are detected using the Improved Bernsen Algorithm (IBA) with Connected Component Analysis(CCA). Finally, with the aid of the proposed Xception model with transfer learning, the characters in LPs are recognised. Here we have not used any segmentation technique to split the characters. Four benchmark datasets such as Stanford Cars, FZU Cars, HumAIn 2019 Challenge datasets, and Application-Oriented License Plate (AOLP) dataset, as well as our own collected dataset, were used for the validation of our proposed algorithm. This dataset includes the images of vehicles captured in different lighting and weather conditions such as sunny, rainy, cloudy, blurred, low illumination, foggy, and night. The suggested strategy does better than the current best practices in both numbers and quality.

Wearable technology for early detection of COVID-19: A systematic scoping review

Wearable technology is an emerging method for the early detection of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. This scoping review explored the types, mechanisms, and accuracy of wearable technology for the early detection of COVID-19. This review was conducted according to the five-step framework of Arksey and O'Malley. Studies published between December 31, 2019 and December 15, 2021 were obtained from 10 electronic databases, namely, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ProQuest, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Taylor & Francis Online. Grey literature, reference lists, and key journals were also searched. All types of articles describing wearable technology for the detection of COVID-19 infection were included. Two reviewers independently screened the articles against the eligibility criteria and extracted the data using a data charting form. A total of 40 articles were included in this review. There are 22 different types of wearable technology used to detect COVID-19 infections early in the existing literature and are categorized as smartwatches or fitness trackers (67%), medical devices (27%), or others (6%). Based on deviations in physiological characteristics, anomaly detection models that can detect COVID-19 infection early were built using artificial intelligence or statistical analysis techniques. Reported area-under-the-curve values ranged from 75% to 94.4%, and sensitivity and specificity values ranged from 36.5% to 100% and 73% to 95.3%, respectively. Further research is necessary to validate the effectiveness and clinical dependability of wearable technology before healthcare policymakers can mandate its use for remote surveillance.

Detection of COVID-19 Using Deep Learning Techniques and Cost Effectiveness Evaluation: A Survey

Graphical-design-based symptomatic techniques in pandemics perform a quintessential purpose in screening hit causes that comparatively render better outcomes amongst the principal radioscopy mechanisms in recognizing and diagnosing COVID-19 cases. The deep learning paradigm has been applied vastly to investigate radiographic images such as Chest X-Rays (CXR) and CT scan images. These radiographic images are rich in information such as patterns and clusters like structures, which are evident in conformance and detection of COVID-19 like pandemics. This paper aims to comprehensively study and analyze detection methodology based on Deep learning techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. Deep learning technology is a good, practical, and affordable modality that can be deemed a reliable technique for adequately diagnosing the COVID-19 virus. Furthermore, the research determines the potential to enhance image character through artificial intelligence and distinguishes the most inexpensive and most trustworthy imaging method to anticipate dreadful viruses. This paper further discusses the cost-effectiveness of the surveyed methods for detecting COVID-19, in contrast with the other methods. Several finance-related aspects of COVID-19 detection effectiveness of different methods used for COVID-19 detection have been discussed. Overall, this study presents an overview of COVID-19 detection using deep learning methods and their cost-effectiveness and financial implications from the perspective of insurance claim settlement.

Machine Learning-Based Research for COVID-19 Detection, Diagnosis, and Prediction: A Survey

The year 2020 experienced an unprecedented pandemic called COVID-19, which impacted the whole world. The absence of treatment has motivated research in all fields to deal with it. In Computer Science, contributions mainly include the development of methods for the diagnosis, detection, and prediction of COVID-19 cases. Data science and Machine Learning (ML) are the most widely used techniques in this area. This paper presents an overview of more than 160 ML-based approaches developed to combat COVID-19. They come from various sources like Elsevier, Springer, ArXiv, MedRxiv, and IEEE Xplore. They are analyzed and classified into two categories: Supervised Learning-based approaches and Deep Learning-based ones. In each category, the employed ML algorithm is specified and a number of used parameters is given. The parameters set for each of the algorithms are gathered in different tables. They include the type of the addressed problem (detection, diagnosis, or detection), the type of the analyzed data (Text data, X-ray images, CT images, Time series, Clinical data,...) and the evaluated metrics (accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-Score, and AUC). The study discusses the collected information and provides a number of statistics drawing a picture about the state of the art. Results show that Deep Learning is used in 79% of cases where 65% of them are based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 17% use Specialized CNN. On his side, supervised learning is found in only 16% of the reviewed approaches and only Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Regression algorithms are employed.

A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Model for Liver Segmentation in Medical Diagnosis

Liver segmentation and recognition from computed tomography (CT) images is a warm topic in image processing which is helpful for doctors and practitioners. Currently, many deep learning methods are used for liver segmentation that takes a long time to train the model which makes this task challenging and limited to larger hardware resources. In this research, we proposed a very lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the liver region from CT scan images. The suggested CNN algorithm consists of 3 convolutional and 2 fully connected layers, where softmax is used to discriminate the liver from background. Random Gaussian distribution is used for weight initialization which achieved a distance-preserving-embedding of the information. The proposed network is known as Ga-CNN (Gaussian-weight initialization of CNN). General experiments are performed on three benchmark datasets including MICCAI SLiver'07, 3Dircadb01, and LiTS17. Experimental results show that the proposed method performed well on each benchmark dataset.

Alerts in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS): A Bibliometric Review and Content Analysis

A clinical decision support system (CDSS) informs or generates medical recommendations for healthcare practitioners. An alert is the most common way for a CDSS to interact with practitioners. Research about alerts in CDSS has proliferated over the past ten years. The research trend is ongoing with new emerging terms and focus. Bibliometric analysis is ideal for researchers to understand the research trend and future directions. Influential articles, institutes, countries, authors, and commonly used keywords were analyzed to grasp a comprehensive view on our topic, alerts in CDSS. Articles published between 2011 and 2021 were extracted from the Web of Science database. There were 728 articles included for bibliometric analysis, among which 24 papers were selected for content analysis. Our analysis shows that the research direction has shifted from patient safety to system utility, implying the importance of alert usability to be clinically impactful. Finally, we conclude with future research directions such as the optimization of alert mechanisms and comprehensiveness to enhance alert appropriateness and to reduce alert fatigue.

A deep learning-driven low-power, accurate, and portable platform for rapid detection of COVID-19 using reverse-transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification

This paper presents a deep learning-driven portable, accurate, low-cost, and easy-to-use device to perform Reverse-Transcription Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) to facilitate rapid detection of COVID-19. The 3D-printed device-powered using only a 5 Volt AC-DC adapter-can perform 16 simultaneous RT-LAMP reactions and can be used multiple times. Moreover, the experimental protocol is devised to obviate the need for separate, expensive equipment for RNA extraction in addition to eliminating sample evaporation. The entire process from sample preparation to the qualitative assessment of the LAMP amplification takes only 45 min (10 min for pre-heating and 35 min for RT-LAMP reactions). The completion of the amplification reaction yields a fuchsia color for the negative samples and either a yellow or orange color for the positive samples, based on a pH indicator dye. The device is coupled with a novel deep learning system that automatically analyzes the amplification results and pays attention to the pH indicator dye to screen the COVID-19 subjects. The proposed device has been rigorously tested on 250 RT-LAMP clinical samples, where it achieved an overall specificity and sensitivity of 0.9666 and 0.9722, respectively with a recall of 0.9892 for Ct < 30. Also, the proposed system can be widely used as an accurate, sensitive, rapid, and portable tool to detect COVID-19 in settings where access to a lab is difficult, or the results are urgently required.

Fusion of multi-scale bag of deep visual words features of chest X-ray images to detect COVID-19 infection

Chest X-ray (CXR) images have been one of the important diagnosis tools used in the COVID-19 disease diagnosis. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have been used heavily to analyze these images. Compared to other DL-based methods, the bag of deep visual words-based method (BoDVW) proposed recently is shown to be a prominent representation of CXR images for their better discriminability. However, single-scale BoDVW features are insufficient to capture the detailed semantic information of the infected regions in the lungs as the resolution of such images varies in real application. In this paper, we propose a new multi-scale bag of deep visual words (MBoDVW) features, which exploits three different scales of the 4th pooling layer’s output feature map achieved from VGG-16 model. For MBoDVW-based features, we perform the Convolution with Max pooling operation over the 4th pooling layer using three different kernels: \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$1 \times 1$$\end{document}1×1, \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$2 \times 2$$\end{document}2×2, and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$3 \times 3$$\end{document}3×3. We evaluate our proposed features with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification algorithm on four CXR public datasets (CD1, CD2, CD3, and CD4) with over 5000 CXR images. Experimental results show that our method produces stable and prominent classification accuracy (84.37%, 88.88%, 90.29%, and 83.65% on CD1, CD2, CD3, and CD4, respectively).

UMLF-COVID: an unsupervised meta-learning model specifically designed to identify X-ray images of COVID-19 patients

BACKGROUND

With the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide, quick screening for possible COVID-19 patients has become the focus of international researchers. Recently, many deep learning-based Computed Tomography (CT) image/X-ray image fast screening models for potential COVID-19 patients have been proposed. However, the existing models still have two main problems. First, most of the existing supervised models are based on pre-trained model parameters. The pre-training model needs to be constructed on a dataset with features similar to those in COVID-19 X-ray images, which limits the construction and use of the model. Second, the number of categories based on the X-ray dataset of COVID-19 and other pneumonia patients is usually imbalanced. In addition, the quality is difficult to distinguish, leading to non-ideal results with the existing model in the multi-class classification COVID-19 recognition task. Moreover, no researchers have proposed a COVID-19 X-ray image learning model based on unsupervised meta-learning.

METHODS

This paper first constructed an unsupervised meta-learning model for fast screening of COVID-19 patients (UMLF-COVID). This model does not require a pre-trained model, which solves the limitation problem of model construction, and the proposed unsupervised meta-learning framework solves the problem of sample imbalance and sample quality.

RESULTS

The UMLF-COVID model is tested on two real datasets, each of which builds a three-category and four-category model. And the experimental results show that the accuracy of the UMLF-COVID model is 3-10% higher than that of the existing models.

CONCLUSION

In summary, we believe that the UMLF-COVID model is a good complement to COVID-19 X-ray fast screening models.