A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF X-RAY AND CT IMAGES IN COVID-19 DETECTION USING IMAGE PROCESSING AND DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUES

A review on lung disease recognition by acoustic signal analysis with deep learning networks

Recently, assistive explanations for difficulties in the health check area have been made viable thanks in considerable portion to technologies like deep learning and machine learning. Using auditory analysis and medical imaging, they also increase the predictive accuracy for prompt and early disease detection. Medical professionals are thankful for such technological support since it helps them manage further patients because of the shortage of skilled human resources. In addition to serious illnesses like lung cancer and respiratory diseases, the plurality of breathing difficulties is gradually rising and endangering society. Because early prediction and immediate treatment are crucial for respiratory disorders, chest X-rays and respiratory sound audio are proving to be quite helpful together. Compared to related review studies on lung disease classification/detection using deep learning algorithms, only two review studies based on signal analysis for lung disease diagnosis have been conducted in 2011 and 2018. This work provides a review of lung disease recognition with acoustic signal analysis with deep learning networks. We anticipate that physicians and researchers working with sound-signal-based machine learning will find this material beneficial.

A Novel Deep Learning-Based Classification Framework for COVID-19 Assisted with Weighted Average Ensemble Modeling

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the deadly virus SARS-CoV-2 that affects the lung of the patient. Different symptoms, including fever, muscle pain and respiratory syndrome, can be identified in COVID-19-affected patients. The disease needs to be diagnosed in a timely manner, otherwise the lung infection can turn into a severe form and the patient's life may be in danger. In this work, an ensemble deep learning-based technique is proposed for COVID-19 detection that can classify the disease with high accuracy, efficiency, and reliability. A weighted average ensemble (WAE) prediction was performed by combining three CNN models, namely Xception, VGG19 and ResNet50V2, where 97.25% and 94.10% accuracy was achieved for binary and multiclass classification, respectively. To accurately detect the disease, different test methods have been proposed and developed, some of which are even being used in real-time situations. RT-PCR is one of the most successful COVID-19 detection methods, and is being used worldwide with high accuracy and sensitivity. However, complexity and time-consuming manual processes are limitations of this method. To make the detection process automated, researchers across the world have started to use deep learning to detect COVID-19 applied on medical imaging. Although most of the existing systems offer high accuracy, different limitations, including high variance, overfitting and generalization errors, can be found that can degrade the system performance. Some of the reasons behind those limitations are a lack of reliable data resources, missing preprocessing techniques, a lack of proper model selection, etc., which eventually create reliability issues. Reliability is an important factor for any healthcare system. Here, transfer learning with better preprocessing techniques applied on two benchmark datasets makes the work more reliable. The weighted average ensemble technique with hyperparameter tuning ensures better accuracy than using a randomly selected single CNN model.

Multiresolution analysis for COVID-19 diagnosis from chest CT images: wavelet vs. contourlet transforms

Chest computer tomography (CT) provides a readily available and efficient tool for COVID-19 diagnosis. Wavelet and contourlet transforms have the advantages of being localized in both space and time. In addition, multiresolution analysis allows for the separation of relevant image information in the different subbands. In the present study, transform-based features were investigated for COVID-19 classification using chest CT images. Several textural and statistical features were computed from the approximation and detail subbands in order to fully capture disease symptoms in the chest CT images. Initially, multiresolution analysis was performed considering three different wavelet and contourlet levels to determine the transform and decomposition level most suitable for feature extraction. Analysis showed that contourlet features computed from the first decomposition level (L1) led to the most reliable COVID-19 classification results. The complete feature vector was computed in less than 25 ms for a single image having of resolution 256 × 256 pixels. Next, particle swarm optimization (PSO) was implemented to find the best set of L1-Contourlet features for enhanced performance. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F-score of a 100% were achieved by the reduced feature set using the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The presented contourlet-based COVID-19 detection method was also shown to outperform several state-of-the-art deep learning approaches from literature. The present study demonstrates the reliability of transform-based features for COVID-19 detection with the advantage of reduced computational complexity. Transform-based features are thus suitable for integration within real-time automatic screening systems used for the initial screening of COVID-19.

A Review of Recent Advances in Deep Learning Models for Chest Disease Detection Using Radiography

Chest X-ray radiography (CXR) is among the most frequently used medical imaging modalities. It has a preeminent value in the detection of multiple life-threatening diseases. Radiologists can visually inspect CXR images for the presence of diseases. Most thoracic diseases have very similar patterns, which makes diagnosis prone to human error and leads to misdiagnosis. Computer-aided detection (CAD) of lung diseases in CXR images is among the popular topics in medical imaging research. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) provided techniques to make this task more efficient and faster. Numerous experiments in the diagnosis of various diseases proved the potential of these techniques. In comparison to previous reviews our study describes in detail several publicly available CXR datasets for different diseases. It presents an overview of recent deep learning models using CXR images to detect chest diseases such as VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, Inception, EfficientNet, RetinaNet, and ensemble learning methods that combine multiple models. It summarizes the techniques used for CXR image preprocessing (enhancement, segmentation, bone suppression, and data-augmentation) to improve image quality and address data imbalance issues, as well as the use of DL models to speed-up the diagnosis process. This review also discusses the challenges present in the published literature and highlights the importance of interpretability and explainability to better understand the DL models' detections. In addition, it outlines a direction for researchers to help develop more effective models for early and automatic detection of chest diseases.

Machine Learning and COVID-19: Lessons from SARS-CoV-2

Currently, methods in machine learning have opened a significant number of applications to construct classifiers with capacities to recognize, identify, and interpret patterns hidden in massive amounts of data. This technology has been used to solve a variety of social and health issues against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In this chapter, we present some supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques that have contributed in three aspects to supplying information to health authorities and diminishing the deadly effects of the current worldwide outbreak on the population. First is the identification and construction of powerful classifiers capable of predicting severe, moderate, or asymptomatic responses in COVID-19 patients starting from clinical or high-throughput technologies. Second is the identification of groups of patients with similar physiological responses to improve the triage classification and inform treatments. The final aspect is the combination of machine learning methods and schemes from systems biology to link associative studies with mechanistic frameworks. This chapter aims to discuss some practical applications in the use of machine learning techniques to handle data coming from social behavior and high-throughput technologies, associated with COVID-19 evolution.

Preliminary Stages for COVID-19 Detection Using Image Processing

COVID-19 was first discovered in December 2019 in Wuhan. There have been reports of thousands of illnesses and hundreds of deaths in almost every region of the world. Medical images, when combined with cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence, have the potential to improve the efficiency of the public health system and deliver faster and more reliable findings in the detection of COVID-19. The process of developing the COVID-19 diagnostic system begins with image accusation and proceeds via preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. According to literature review, several attempts to develop taxonomies for COVID-19 detection using image processing methods have been introduced. However, most of these adhere to a standard category that exclusively considers classification methods. Therefore, in this study a new taxonomy for the early stages of COVID-19 detection is proposed. It attempts to offer a full grasp of image processing in COVID-19 while considering all phases required prior to classification. The survey concludes with a discussion of outstanding concerns and future directions.

Combined Cloud-Based Inference System for the Classification of COVID-19 in CT-Scan and X-Ray Images

In the past few years, most of the work has been done around the classification of covid-19 using different images like CT-scan, X-ray, and ultrasound. But none of that is capable enough to deal with each of these image types on a single common platform and can identify the possibility that a person is suffering from COVID or not. Thus, we realized there should be a platform to identify COVID-19 in CT-scan and X-ray images on the fly. So, to fulfill this need, we proposed an AI model to identify CT-scan and X-ray images from each other and then use this inference to classify them of COVID positive or negative. The proposed model uses the inception architecture under the hood and trains on the open-source extended covid-19 dataset. The dataset consists of plenty of images for both image types and is of size 4 GB. We achieved an accuracy of 100%, average macro-Precision of 100%, average macro-Recall of 100%, average macro f1-score of 100%, and AUC score of 99.6%. Furthermore, in this work, cloud-based architecture is proposed to massively scale and load balance as the Number of user requests rises. As a result, it will deliver a service with minimal latency to all users.

A Deep Learning Approach for the Morphological Recognition of Reactive Lymphocytes in Patients with COVID-19 Infection

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