COVID-19 detection in chest X-ray images using deep boosted hybrid learning

Big data analysis for Covid-19 in hospital information systems

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global public health crisis, affecting hundreds of countries. With the increasing number of infected cases, developing automated COVID-19 identification tools based on CT images can effectively assist clinical diagnosis and reduce the tedious workload of image interpretation. To expand the dataset for machine learning methods, it is necessary to aggregate cases from different medical systems to learn robust and generalizable models. This paper proposes a novel deep learning joint framework that can effectively handle heterogeneous datasets with distribution discrepancies for accurate COVID-19 identification. We address the cross-site domain shift by redesigning the COVID-Net's network architecture and learning strategy, and independent feature normalization in latent space to improve prediction accuracy and learning efficiency. Additionally, we propose using a contrastive training objective to enhance the domain invariance of semantic embeddings and boost classification performance on each dataset. We develop and evaluate our method with two large-scale public COVID-19 diagnosis datasets containing CT images. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves the performance both datasets, outperforming the original COVID-Net trained on each dataset by 13.27% and 15.15% in AUC respectively, also exceeding existing state-of-the-art multi-site learning methods.

Efficient pneumonia detection using Vision Transformers on chest X-rays

Pneumonia is a widespread and acute respiratory infection that impacts people of all ages. Early detection and treatment of pneumonia are essential for avoiding complications and enhancing clinical results. We can reduce mortality, improve healthcare efficiency, and contribute to the global battle against a disease that has plagued humanity for centuries by devising and deploying effective detection methods. Detecting pneumonia is not only a medical necessity but also a humanitarian imperative and a technological frontier. Chest X-rays are a frequently used imaging modality for diagnosing pneumonia. This paper examines in detail a cutting-edge method for detecting pneumonia implemented on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture on a public dataset of chest X-rays available on Kaggle. To acquire global context and spatial relationships from chest X-ray images, the proposed framework deploys the ViT model, which integrates self-attention mechanisms and transformer architecture. According to our experimentation with the proposed Vision Transformer-based framework, it achieves a higher accuracy of 97.61%, sensitivity of 95%, and specificity of 98% in detecting pneumonia from chest X-rays. The ViT model is preferable for capturing global context, comprehending spatial relationships, and processing images that have different resolutions. The framework establishes its efficacy as a robust pneumonia detection solution by surpassing convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures.

COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray images using CLAHE-YCrCb, LBP, and machine learning algorithms

BACKGROUND

COVID-19 is a disease that caused a contagious respiratory ailment that killed and infected hundreds of millions. It is necessary to develop a computer-based tool that is fast, precise, and inexpensive to detect COVID-19 efficiently. Recent studies revealed that machine learning and deep learning models accurately detect COVID-19 using chest X-ray (CXR) images. However, they exhibit notable limitations, such as a large amount of data to train, larger feature vector sizes, enormous trainable parameters, expensive computational resources (GPUs), and longer run-time.

RESULTS

In this study, we proposed a new approach to address some of the above-mentioned limitations. The proposed model involves the following steps: First, we use contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) to enhance the contrast of CXR images. The resulting images are converted from CLAHE to YCrCb color space. We estimate reflectance from chrominance using the Illumination-Reflectance model. Finally, we use a normalized local binary patterns histogram generated from reflectance (Cr) and YCb as the classification feature vector. Decision tree, Naive Bayes, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, and logistic regression were used as the classification algorithms. The performance evaluation on the test set indicates that the proposed approach is superior, with accuracy rates of 99.01%, 100%, and 98.46% across three different datasets, respectively. Naive Bayes, a probabilistic machine learning algorithm, emerged as the most resilient.

CONCLUSION

Our proposed method uses fewer handcrafted features, affordable computational resources, and less runtime than existing state-of-the-art approaches. Emerging nations where radiologists are in short supply can adopt this prototype. We made both coding materials and datasets accessible to the general public for further improvement. Check the manuscript's availability of the data and materials under the declaration section for access.

COVID-19 infection analysis framework using novel boosted CNNs and radiological images

COVID-19, a novel pathogen that emerged in late 2019, has the potential to cause pneumonia with unique variants upon infection. Hence, the development of efficient diagnostic systems is crucial in accurately identifying infected patients and effectively mitigating the spread of the disease. However, the system poses several challenges because of the limited availability of labeled data, distortion, and complexity in image representation, as well as variations in contrast and texture. Therefore, a novel two-phase analysis framework has been developed to scrutinize the subtle irregularities associated with COVID-19 contamination. A new Convolutional Neural Network-based STM-BRNet is developed, which integrates the Split-Transform-Merge (STM) block and Feature map enrichment (FME) techniques in the first phase. The STM block captures boundary and regional-specific features essential for detecting COVID-19 infectious CT slices. Additionally, by incorporating the FME and Transfer Learning (TL) concept into the STM blocks, multiple enhanced channels are generated to effectively capture minute variations in illumination and texture specific to COVID-19-infected images. Additionally, residual multipath learning is used to improve the learning capacity of STM-BRNet and progressively increase the feature representation by boosting at a high level through TL. In the second phase of the analysis, the COVID-19 CT scans are processed using the newly developed SA-CB-BRSeg segmentation CNN to accurately delineate infection in the images. The SA-CB-BRSeg method utilizes a unique approach that combines smooth and heterogeneous processes in both the encoder and decoder. These operations are structured to effectively capture COVID-19 patterns, including region-homogenous, texture variation, and border. By incorporating these techniques, the SA-CB-BRSeg method demonstrates its ability to accurately analyze and segment COVID-19 related data. Furthermore, the SA-CB-BRSeg model incorporates the novel concept of CB in the decoder, where additional channels are combined using TL to enhance the learning of low contrast regions. The developed STM-BRNet and SA-CB-BRSeg models achieve impressive results, with an accuracy of 98.01%, recall of 98.12%, F-score of 98.11%, Dice Similarity of 96.396%, and IOU of 98.85%. The proposed framework will alleviate the workload and enhance the radiologist's decision-making capacity in identifying the infected region of COVID-19 and evaluating the severity stages of the disease.

An Optimized Model Based on Deep Learning and Gated Recurrent Unit for COVID-19 Death Prediction

The COVID-19 epidemic poses a worldwide threat that transcends provincial, philosophical, spiritual, radical, social, and educational borders. By using a connected network, a healthcare system with the Internet of Things (IoT) functionality can effectively monitor COVID-19 cases. IoT helps a COVID-19 patient recognize symptoms and receive better therapy more quickly. A critical component in measuring, evaluating, and diagnosing the risk of infection is artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used to anticipate cases and forecast the alternate incidences number, retrieved instances, and injuries. In the context of COVID-19, IoT technologies are employed in specific patient monitoring and diagnosing processes to reduce COVID-19 exposure to others. This work uses an Indian dataset to create an enhanced convolutional neural network with a gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model for COVID-19 death prediction via IoT. The data were also subjected to data normalization and data imputation. The 4692 cases and eight characteristics in the dataset were utilized in this research. The performance of the CNN-GRU model for COVID-19 death prediction was assessed using five evaluation metrics, including median absolute error (MedAE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), and coefficient of determination (R2). ANOVA and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to determine the statistical significance of the presented model. The experimental findings showed that the CNN-GRU model outperformed other models regarding COVID-19 death prediction.

Utilization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Accurate Chest X-Ray Diagnosis and Disease Detection

Chest radiography is a widely used diagnostic imaging procedure in medical practice, which involves prompt reporting of future imaging tests and diagnosis of diseases in the images. In this study, a critical phase in the radiology workflow is automated using the three convolutional neural network (CNN) models, viz. DenseNet121, ResNet50, and EfficientNetB1 for fast and accurate detection of 14 class labels of thoracic pathology diseases based on chest radiography. These models were evaluated on an AUC score for normal versus abnormal chest radiographs using 112120 chest X-ray14 datasets containing various class labels of thoracic pathology diseases to predict the probability of individual diseases and warn clinicians of potential suspicious findings. With DenseNet121, the AUROC scores for hernia and emphysema were predicted as 0.9450 and 0.9120, respectively. Compared to the score values obtained for each class on the dataset, the DenseNet121 outperformed the other two models. This article also aims to develop an automated server to capture fourteen thoracic pathology disease results using a tensor processing unit (TPU). The results of this study demonstrate that our dataset can be used to train models with high diagnostic accuracy for predicting the likelihood of 14 different diseases in abnormal chest radiographs, enabling accurate and efficient discrimination between different types of chest radiographs. This has the potential to bring benefits to various stakeholders and improve patient care.

Lymphocyte detection for cancer analysis using a novel fusion block based channel boosted CNN

Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, specialized immune cells, are considered an important biomarker in cancer analysis. Automated lymphocyte detection is challenging due to its heterogeneous morphology, variable distribution, and presence of artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel Boosted Channels Fusion-based CNN "BCF-Lym-Detector" for lymphocyte detection in multiple cancer histology images. The proposed network initially selects candidate lymphocytic regions at the tissue level and then detects lymphocytes at the cellular level. The proposed "BCF-Lym-Detector" generates diverse boosted channels by utilizing the feature learning capability of different CNN architectures. In this connection, a new adaptive fusion block is developed to combine and select the most relevant lymphocyte-specific features from the generated enriched feature space. Multi-level feature learning is used to retain lymphocytic spatial information and detect lymphocytes with variable appearances. The assessment of the proposed "BCF-Lym-Detector" show substantial improvement in terms of F-score (0.93 and 0.84 on LYSTO and NuClick, respectively), which suggests that the diverse feature extraction and dynamic feature selection enhanced the feature learning capacity of the proposed network. Moreover, the proposed technique's generalization on unseen test sets with a good recall (0.75) and F-score (0.73) shows its potential use for pathologists' assistance.

A multimodal AI-based non-invasive COVID-19 grading framework powered by deep learning, manta ray, and fuzzy inference system from multimedia vital signs

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. One of the key challenges in controlling and managing the pandemic is accurate and rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 cases. Traditional diagnostic methods such as RT-PCR tests are time-consuming and require specialized equipment and trained personnel. Computer-aided diagnosis systems and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as promising tools for developing cost-effective and accurate diagnostic approaches. Most studies in this area have focused on diagnosing COVID-19 based on a single modality, such as chest X-rays or cough sounds. However, relying on a single modality may not accurately detect the virus, especially in its early stages. In this research, we propose a non-invasive diagnostic framework consisting of four cascaded layers that work together to accurately detect COVID-19 in patients. The first layer of the framework performs basic diagnostics such as patient temperature, blood oxygen level, and breathing profile, providing initial insights into the patient's condition. The second layer analyzes the coughing profile, while the third layer evaluates chest imaging data such as X-ray and CT scans. Finally, the fourth layer utilizes a fuzzy logic inference system based on the previous three layers to generate a reliable and accurate diagnosis. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we used two datasets: the Cough Dataset and the COVID-19 Radiography Database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective and trustworthy in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and balanced accuracy. The audio-based classification achieved an accuracy of 96.55%, while the CXR-based classification achieved an accuracy of 98.55%. The proposed framework has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy and speed of COVID-19 diagnosis, allowing for more effective control and management of the pandemic. Furthermore, the framework's non-invasive nature makes it a more attractive option for patients, reducing the risk of infection and discomfort associated with traditional diagnostic methods.

COVID-19 detection based on self-supervised transfer learning using chest X-ray images

PURPOSE

Considering several patients screened due to COVID-19 pandemic, computer-aided detection has strong potential in assisting clinical workflow efficiency and reducing the incidence of infections among radiologists and healthcare providers. Since many confirmed COVID-19 cases present radiological findings of pneumonia, radiologic examinations can be useful for fast detection. Therefore, chest radiography can be used to fast screen COVID-19 during the patient triage, thereby determining the priority of patient's care to help saturated medical facilities in a pandemic situation.

METHODS

In this paper, we propose a new learning scheme called self-supervised transfer learning for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images. We compared six self-supervised learning (SSL) methods (Cross, BYOL, SimSiam, SimCLR, PIRL-jigsaw, and PIRL-rotation) with the proposed method. Additionally, we compared six pretrained DCNNs (ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet101, CheXNet, DenseNet201, and InceptionV3) with the proposed method. We provide quantitative evaluation on the largest open COVID-19 CXR dataset and qualitative results for visual inspection.

RESULTS

Our method achieved a harmonic mean (HM) score of 0.985, AUC of 0.999, and four-class accuracy of 0.953. We also used the visualization technique Grad-CAM++ to generate visual explanations of different classes of CXR images with the proposed method to increase the interpretability.

CONCLUSIONS

Our method shows that the knowledge learned from natural images using transfer learning is beneficial for SSL of the CXR images and boosts the performance of representation learning for COVID-19 detection. Our method promises to reduce the incidence of infections among radiologists and healthcare providers.

Deep Hybrid Learning Prediction of Patient-Specific Quality Assurance in Radiotherapy: Implementation in Clinical Routine

BACKGROUND

Arc therapy allows for better dose deposition conformation, but the radiotherapy plans (RT plans) are more complex, requiring patient-specific pre-treatment quality assurance (QA). In turn, pre-treatment QA adds to the workload. The objective of this study was to develop a predictive model of Delta4-QA results based on RT-plan complexity indices to reduce QA workload.

METHODS

Six complexity indices were extracted from 1632 RT VMAT plans. A machine learning (ML) model was developed for classification purpose (two classes: compliance with the QA plan or not). For more complex locations (breast, pelvis and head and neck), innovative deep hybrid learning (DHL) was trained to achieve better performance.

RESULTS

For not complex RT plans (with brain and thorax tumor locations), the ML model achieved 100% specificity and 98.9% sensitivity. However, for more complex RT plans, specificity falls to 87%. For these complex RT plans, an innovative QA classification method using DHL was developed and achieved a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 97.72%.

CONCLUSIONS

The ML and DHL models predicted QA results with a high degree of accuracy. Our predictive QA online platform is offering substantial time savings in terms of accelerator occupancy and working time.

A fuzzy fine-tuned model for COVID-19 diagnosis

The COVID-19 disease pandemic spread rapidly worldwide and caused extensive human death and financial losses. Therefore, finding accurate, accessible, and inexpensive methods for diagnosing the disease has challenged researchers. To automate the process of diagnosing COVID-19 disease through images, several strategies based on deep learning, such as transfer learning and ensemble learning, have been presented. However, these techniques cannot deal with noises and their propagation in different layers. In addition, many of the datasets already being used are imbalanced, and most techniques have used binary classification, COVID-19, from normal cases. To address these issues, we use the blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator to filter out inappropriate data in the dataset. In order to increase the volume and diversity of the data, we merge two datasets. This combination of two datasets allows multi-class classification between the three states of normal, COVID-19, and types of pneumonia, including bacterial and viral types. A weighted multi-class cross-entropy is used to reduce the effect of data imbalance. In addition, a fuzzy fine-tuned Xception model is applied to reduce the noise propagation in different layers. Quantitative analysis shows that our proposed model achieves 96.60% accuracy on the merged test set, which is more accurate than previously mentioned state-of-the-art methods.

Detection of Covid-19 and other pneumonia cases from CT and X-ray chest images using deep learning based on feature reuse residual block and depthwise dilated convolutions neural network

Covid-19 has become a worldwide epidemic which has caused the death of millions in a very short time. This disease, which is transmitted rapidly, has mutated and different variations have emerged. Early diagnosis is important to prevent the spread of this disease. In this study, a new deep learning-based architecture is proposed for rapid detection of Covid-19 and other symptoms using CT and X-ray chest images. This method, called CovidDWNet, is based on a structure based on feature reuse residual block (FRB) and depthwise dilated convolutions (DDC) units. The FRB and DDC units efficiently acquired various features in the chest scan images and it was seen that the proposed architecture significantly improved its performance. In addition, the feature maps obtained with the CovidDWNet architecture were estimated with the Gradient boosting (GB) algorithm. With the CovidDWNet+GB architecture, which is a combination of CovidDWNet and GB, a performance increase of approximately 7% in CT images and between 3% and 4% in X-ray images has been achieved. The CovidDWNet+GB architecture achieved the highest success compared to other architectures, with 99.84% and 100% accuracy rates, respectively, on different datasets containing binary class (Covid-19 and Normal) CT images. Similarly, the proposed architecture showed the highest success with 96.81% accuracy in multi-class (Covid-19, Lung Opacity, Normal and Viral Pneumonia) X-ray images and 96.32% accuracy in the dataset containing X-ray and CT images. When the time to predict the disease in CT or X-ray images is examined, it is possible to say that it has a high speed because the CovidDWNet+GB method predicts thousands of images within seconds.

Dual_Pachi: Attention-based dual path framework with intermediate second order-pooling for Covid-19 detection from chest X-ray images

Numerous machine learning and image processing algorithms, most recently deep learning, allow the recognition and classification of COVID-19 disease in medical images. However, feature extraction, or the semantic gap between low-level visual information collected by imaging modalities and high-level semantics, is the fundamental shortcoming of these techniques. On the other hand, several techniques focused on the first-order feature extraction of the chest X-Ray thus making the employed models less accurate and robust. This study presents Dual_Pachi: Attention Based Dual Path Framework with Intermediate Second Order-Pooling for more accurate and robust Chest X-ray feature extraction for Covid-19 detection. Dual_Pachi consists of 4 main building Blocks; Block one converts the received chest X-Ray image to CIE LAB coordinates (L & AB channels which are separated at the first three layers of a modified Inception V3 Architecture.). Block two further exploit the global features extracted from block one via a global second-order pooling while block three focuses on the low-level visual information and the high-level semantics of Chest X-ray image features using a multi-head self-attention and an MLP Layer without sacrificing performance. Finally, the fourth block is the classification block where classification is done using fully connected layers and SoftMax activation. Dual_Pachi is designed and trained in an end-to-end manner. According to the results, Dual_Pachi outperforms traditional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art approaches described in the literature with an accuracy of 0.96656 (Data_A) and 0.97867 (Data_B) for the Dual_Pachi approach and an accuracy of 0.95987 (Data_A) and 0.968 (Data_B) for the Dual_Pachi without attention block model. A Grad-CAM-based visualization is also built to highlight where the applied attention mechanism is concentrated.

LCSB-inception: Reliable and effective light-chroma separated branches for Covid-19 detection from chest X-ray images

According to the World Health Organization, an estimate of more than five million infections and 355,000 deaths have been recorded worldwide since the emergence of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Various researchers have developed interesting and effective deep learning frameworks to tackle this disease. However, poor feature extraction from the Chest X-ray images and the high computational cost of the available models impose difficulties to an accurate and fast Covid-19 detection framework. Thus, the major purpose of this study is to offer an accurate and efficient approach for extracting COVID-19 features from chest X-rays that is also less computationally expensive than earlier research. To achieve the specified goal, we explored the Inception V3 deep artificial neural network. This study proposed LCSB-Inception; a two-path (L and AB channel) Inception V3 network along the first three convolutional layers. The RGB input image is first transformed to CIE LAB coordinates (L channel which is aimed at learning the textural and edge features of the Chest X-Ray and AB channel which is aimed at learning the color variations of the Chest X-ray images). The L achromatic channel and the AB channels filters are set to 50%L-50%AB. This method saves between one-third and one-half of the parameters in the divided branches. We further introduced a global second-order pooling at the last two convolutional blocks for more robust image feature extraction against the conventional max-pooling. The detection accuracy of the LCSB-Inception is further improved by employing the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) image enhancement technique on the input image before feeding them to the network. The proposed LCSB-Inception network is experimented on using two loss functions (Categorically smooth loss and categorically Cross-entropy) and two learning rates whereas Accuracy, Precision, Sensitivity, Specificity F1-Score, and AUC Score were used for evaluation via the chestX-ray-15k (Data_1) and COVID-19 Radiography dataset (Data_2). The proposed models produced an acceptable outcome with an accuracy of 0.97867 (Data_1) and 0.98199 (Data_2) according to the experimental findings. In terms of COVID-19 identification, the suggested models outperform conventional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art techniques presented in the literature based on the results.

A Novel Lightweight Approach to COVID-19 Diagnostics Based on Chest X-ray Images

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

CoviXNet: A novel and efficient deep learning model for detection of COVID-19 using chest X-Ray images

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has created havoc on humanity by causing millions of deaths and adverse physical and mental health effects. To prepare humankind for the fast and efficient detection of the virus and its variants shortly, COVID-19 detection using Artificial Intelligence and Computer-Aided Diagnosis has been the subject of several studies. To detect COVID-19, there are numerous publicly accessible datasets of Chest X-rays that the researchers have combined to solve the problem of inadequate data. The cause for concern here is that in combining two or more datasets, some of the images might be duplicates, so a curated dataset has been used in this study, taken from an author’s paper. This dataset consists of 1281 COVID-19, 3270 Normal X-rays, and 1656 viral-pneumonia infected Chest X-ray images. Dataset has been pre-processed and divided carefully to ensure that there are no duplicate images. A comparative study on many traditional pre-trained models was performed, analyzing top-performing models. Fine-tuned InceptionV3, Modified EfficientNet B0&B1 produced an accuracy of 99.78% on binary classification, i.e., covid-19 infected and normal Chest X-ray image. ResNetV2 had a classification accuracy of 97.90% for 3-class classification i.e., covid-19 infected, normal, and pneumonia. Furthermore, a trailblazing custom CNN-based model, CoviXNet, has been proposed consisting of 15 layers that take efficiency into account. The proposed model CoviXNet exhibited a 10-fold accuracy of 99.47% on binary classification and 96.61% on 3-class. CoviXNet has shown phenomenal performance with exceptional accuracy and minimum computational cost. We anticipate that this comparative study, along with the proposed model CoviXNet, can assist medical centers with the efficient real-life detection of Coronavirus.

Automated COVID-19 Classification Using Heap-Based Optimization with the Deep Transfer Learning Model

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates prompt identification of affected persons to restrict the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. Radiological imaging such as computed tomography (CT) and chest X-rays (CXR) is considered an effective way to diagnose COVID-19. However, it needs an expert's knowledge and consumes more time. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) and medical images are discovered to be helpful in effectively assessing and providing treatment for COVID-19 infected patients. In particular, deep learning (DL) models act as a vital part of a high-performance classification model for COVID-19 recognition on CXR images. This study develops a heap-based optimization with the deep transfer learning model for detection and classification (HBODTL-DC) of COVID-19. The proposed HBODTL-DC system majorly focuses on the identification of COVID-19 on CXR images. To do so, the presented HBODTL-DC model initially exploits the Gabor filtering (GF) technique to enhance the image quality. In addition, the HBO algorithm with a neural architecture search network (NasNet) large model is employed for the extraction of feature vectors. Finally, Elman Neural Network (ENN) model gets the feature vectors as input and categorizes the CXR images into distinct classes. The experimental validation of the HBODTL-DC model takes place on the benchmark CXR image dataset from the Kaggle repository, and the outcomes are checked in numerous dimensions. The experimental outcomes stated the supremacy of the HBODTL-DC model over recent approaches with a maximum accuracy of 0.9992.

Ensemble of Deep Neural Networks based on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem for screening Covid-19 and Pneumonia from radiograph images

COVID-19 detection using Artificial Intelligence and Computer-Aided Diagnosis has been the subject of several studies. Deep Neural Networks with hundreds or even millions of parameters (weights) are referred to as ”black boxes” because their behavior is difficult to comprehend, even when the model’s structure and weights are visible. On the same dataset, different Deep Convolutional Neural Networks perform differently. So, we do not necessarily have to rely on just one model; instead, we can evaluate our final score by combining multiple models. While including multiple models in the voter pool, it is not always true that the accuracy will improve. So, In this regard, the authors proposed a novel approach to determine the voting ensemble score of individual classifiers based on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT). The authors demonstrated that the theorem holds while ensembling the N number of classifiers in Neural Networks. With the help of CJT, the authors proved that a model’s presence in the voter pool would improve the likelihood that the majority vote will be accurate if it is more accurate than the other models. Besides this, the authors also proposed a Domain Extended Transfer Learning (DETL) ensemble model as a soft voting ensemble method and compared it with CJT based ensemble method. Furthermore, as deep learning models typically fail in real-world testing, a novel dataset has been used with no duplicate images. Duplicates in the dataset are quite problematic since they might affect the training process. Therefore, having a dataset devoid of duplicate images is considered to prevent data leakage problems that might impede the thorough assessment of the trained models. The authors also employed an algorithm for faster training to save computational efforts. Our proposed method and experimental results outperformed the state-of-the-art with the DETL-based ensemble model showing an accuracy of 97.26%, COVID-19, sensitivity of 98.37%, and specificity of 100%. CJT-based ensemble model showed an accuracy of 98.22%, COVID-19, sensitivity of 98.37%, and specificity of 99.79%.

Malaria Parasite Classification Framework using a Novel Channel Squeezed and Boosted CNN

Malaria is a life-threatening infection that infects the red blood cells (RBCs) that gradually grows throughout the body. The plasmodium parasite is caused by a female anopheles mosquito bite and severely affects numerous individuals within the world every year. Therefore, early detection tests are required to predict infected parasitic cells. The proposed technique exploits deep convolutional neural network (CNN) learning capability to detect the thin-blood smear parasitic patients from healthy individuals. In this regard, the detection is accomplished using a novel STM-SB-RENet block-based CNN that employs the idea of split-transform-merge (STM) and channel Squeezing-Boosting (SB) in a modified fashion. In this connection, a new convolutional block-based STM is developed, which systematically implements region and edge operations to explore the parasitic malaria pattern related to region-homogeneity, structural obstruction, and boundary-defining features. Moreover, the diverse boosted feature maps are achieved by incorporating the new channel SB and Transfer Learning (TL) idea in each STM block at abstract, intermediate, and target levels to capture minor contrast and texture variation between parasitic and normal artifacts. The malaria input images to the proposed models are initially transformed using discrete wavelet transform to generate enhanced and reduced feature space. The proposed architectures are validated using hold-out cross-validation on the National Institute of Health Malaria dataset. The proposed methods outperform the train from scratch, and TL-based fine-tuned existing techniques. The considerable performance (accuracy: 97.98%, sensitivity: 0.988, F-score: 0.980, and AUC: 0.996) of STM-SB-RENet suggests that it can be utilized to screen parasitic malaria patients.

A New Deep Hybrid Boosted and Ensemble Learning-Based Brain Tumor Analysis Using MRI

Brain tumor analysis is essential to the timely diagnosis and effective treatment of patients. Tumor analysis is challenging because of tumor morphology factors like size, location, texture, and heteromorphic appearance in medical images. In this regard, a novel two-phase deep learning-based framework is proposed to detect and categorize brain tumors in magnetic resonance images (MRIs). In the first phase, a novel deep-boosted features space and ensemble classifiers (DBFS-EC) scheme is proposed to effectively detect tumor MRI images from healthy individuals. The deep-boosted feature space is achieved through customized and well-performing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and consequently, fed into the ensemble of machine learning (ML) classifiers. While in the second phase, a new hybrid features fusion-based brain-tumor classification approach is proposed, comprised of both static and dynamic features with an ML classifier to categorize different tumor types. The dynamic features are extracted from the proposed brain region-edge net (BRAIN-RENet) CNN, which is able to learn the heteromorphic and inconsistent behavior of various tumors. In contrast, the static features are extracted by using a histogram of gradients (HOG) feature descriptor. The effectiveness of the proposed two-phase brain tumor analysis framework is validated on two standard benchmark datasets, which were collected from Kaggle and Figshare and contain different types of tumors, including glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and normal images. Experimental results suggest that the proposed DBFS-EC detection scheme outperforms the standard and achieved accuracy (99.56%), precision (0.9991), recall (0.9899), F1-Score (0.9945), MCC (0.9892), and AUC-PR (0.9990). The classification scheme, based on the fusion of feature spaces of proposed BRAIN-RENet and HOG, outperform state-of-the-art methods significantly in terms of recall (0.9913), precision (0.9906), accuracy (99.20%), and F1-Score (0.9909) in the CE-MRI dataset.

Machine Learning with Quantum Seagull Optimization Model for COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Image Classification

Early and accurate detection of COVID-19 is an essential process to curb the spread of this deadly disease and its mortality rate. Chest radiology scan is a significant tool for early management and diagnosis of COVID-19 since the virus targets the respiratory system. Chest X-ray (CXR) images are highly useful in the effective detection of COVID-19, thanks to its availability, cost-effective means, and rapid outcomes. In addition, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep learning (DL) models play a significant role in designing automated diagnostic processes using CXR images. With this motivation, the current study presents a new Quantum Seagull Optimization Algorithm with DL-based COVID-19 diagnosis model, named QSGOA-DL technique. The proposed QSGOA-DL technique intends to detect and classify COVID-19 with the help of CXR images. In this regard, the QSGOA-DL technique involves the design of EfficientNet-B4 as a feature extractor, whereas hyperparameter optimization is carried out with the help of QSGOA technique. Moreover, the classification process is performed by a multilayer extreme learning machine (MELM) model. The novelty of the study lies in the designing of QSGOA for hyperparameter optimization of the EfficientNet-B4 model. An extensive series of simulations was carried out on the benchmark test CXR dataset, and the results were assessed under different aspects. The simulation results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed QSGOA-DL technique compared to recent approaches.

Review on COVID-19 diagnosis models based on machine learning and deep learning approaches

COVID-19 is the disease evoked by a new breed of coronavirus called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Recently, COVID-19 has become a pandemic by infecting more than 152 million people in over 216 countries and territories. The exponential increase in the number of infections has rendered traditional diagnosis techniques inefficient. Therefore, many researchers have developed several intelligent techniques, such as deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), which can assist the healthcare sector in providing quick and precise COVID-19 diagnosis. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the most recent DL and ML techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. The studies are published from December 2019 until April 2021. In general, this paper includes more than 200 studies that have been carefully selected from several publishers, such as IEEE, Springer and Elsevier. We classify the research tracks into two categories: DL and ML and present COVID-19 public datasets established and extracted from different countries. The measures used to evaluate diagnosis methods are comparatively analysed and proper discussion is provided. In conclusion, for COVID-19 diagnosing and outbreak prediction, SVM is the most widely used machine learning mechanism, and CNN is the most widely used deep learning mechanism. Accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are the most widely used measurements in previous studies. Finally, this review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of machine learning for COVID-19 and inspire their works for future development. This review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of ML and DL for COVID-19 and inspire their works for future development.

Application of CycleGAN and transfer learning techniques for automated detection of COVID-19 using X-ray images

Coronavirus (which is also known as COVID-19) is severely impacting the wellness and lives of many across the globe. There are several methods currently to detect and monitor the progress of the disease such as radiological image from patients' chests, measuring the symptoms and applying polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. X-ray imaging is one of the popular techniques used to visualise the impact of the virus on the lungs. Although manual detection of this disease using radiology images is more popular, it can be time-consuming, and is prone to human errors. Hence, automated detection of lung pathologies due to COVID-19 utilising deep learning (Bowles et al.) techniques can assist with yielding accurate results for huge databases. Large volumes of data are needed to achieve generalizable DL models; however, there are very few public databases available for detecting COVID-19 disease pathologies automatically. Standard data augmentation method can be used to enhance the models' generalizability. In this research, the Extensive COVID-19 X-ray and CT Chest Images Dataset has been used and generative adversarial network (GAN) coupled with trained, semi-supervised CycleGAN (SSA- CycleGAN) has been applied to augment the training dataset. Then a newly designed and finetuned Inception V3 transfer learning model has been developed to train the algorithm for detecting COVID-19 pandemic. The obtained results from the proposed Inception-CycleGAN model indicated Accuracy = 94.2%, Area under Curve = 92.2%, Mean Squared Error = 0.27, Mean Absolute Error = 0.16. The developed Inception-CycleGAN framework is ready to be tested with further COVID-19 X-Ray images of the chest.

Deep diagnostic agent forest (DDAF): A deep learning pathogen recognition system for pneumonia based on CT

BACKGROUND

Even though antibiotics agents are widely used, pneumonia is still one of the most common causes of death around the world. Some severe, fast-spreading pneumonia can even cause huge influence on global economy and life security. In order to give optimal medication regimens and prevent infectious pneumonia's spreading, recognition of pathogens is important.

METHOD

In this single-institution retrospective study, 2,353 patients with their CT volumes are included, each of whom was infected by one of 12 known kinds of pathogens. We propose Deep Diagnostic Agent Forest (DDAF) to recognize the pathogen of a patient based on ones' CT volume, which is a challenging multiclass classification problem, with large intraclass variations and small interclass variations and very imbalanced data.

RESULTS

The model achieves 0.899 ± 0.004 multi-way area under curves of receiver (AUC) for level-I pathogen recognition, which are five rough groups of pathogens, and 0.851 ± 0.003 AUC for level-II recognition, which are 12 fine-level pathogens. The model also outperforms the average result of seven human readers in level-I recognition and outperforms all readers in level-II recognition, who can only reach an average result of 7.71 ± 4.10% accuracy.

CONCLUSION

Deep learning model can help in recognition pathogens using CTs only, which might help accelerate the process of etiological diagnosis.

COVID-19 Patient Detection Based on Fusion of Transfer Learning and Fuzzy Ensemble Models Using CXR Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of millions of people and put a significant strain on healthcare facilities. To combat this disease, it is necessary to monitor affected patients in a timely and cost-effective manner. In this work, CXR images were used to identify COVID-19 patients. We compiled a CXR dataset with equal number of 2313 COVID positive, pneumonia and normal CXR images and utilized various transfer learning models as base classifiers, including VGG16, GoogleNet, and Xception. The proposed methodology combines fuzzy ensemble techniques, such as Majority Voting, Sugeno Integral, and Choquet Fuzzy, and adaptively combines the decision scores of the transfer learning models to identify coronavirus infection from CXR images. The proposed fuzzy ensemble methods outperformed each individual transfer learning technique and several state-of-the-art ensemble techniques in terms of accuracy and prediction. Specifically, VGG16 + Choquet Fuzzy, GoogleNet + Choquet Fuzzy, and Xception + Choquet Fuzzy achieved accuracies of 97.04%, 98.48%, and 99.57%, respectively. The results of this work are intended to help medical practitioners achieve an earlier detection of coronavirus compared to other detection strategies, which can further save millions of lives and advantageously influence society.

Detection of Exceptional Malware Variants Using Deep Boosted Feature Spaces and Machine Learning

Malware is a key component of cyber-crime, and its analysis is the first line of defence against cyber-attack. This study proposes two new malware classification frameworks: Deep Feature Space-based Malware classification (DFS-MC) and Deep Boosted Feature Space-based Malware classification (DBFS-MC). In the proposed DFS-MC framework, deep features are generated from the customized CNN architectures and are fed to a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for malware classification, while, in the DBFS-MC framework, the discrimination power is enhanced by first combining deep feature spaces of two customized CNN architectures to achieve boosted feature spaces. Further, the detection of exceptional malware is performed by providing the deep boosted feature space to SVM. The performance of the proposed malware classification frameworks is evaluated on the MalImg malware dataset using the hold-out cross-validation technique. Malware variants like Autorun.K, Swizzor.gen!I, Wintrim.BX and Yuner.A is hard to be correctly classified due to their minor inter-class differences in their features. The proposed DBFS-MC improved performance for these difficult to discriminate malware classes using the idea of feature boosting generated through customized CNNs. The proposed classification framework DBFS-MC showed good results in term of accuracy: 98.61%, F-score: 0.96, precision: 0.96, and recall: 0.96 on stringent test data, using 40% unseen data.

Detection and analysis of COVID-19 in medical images using deep learning techniques

The main purpose of this work is to investigate and compare several deep learning enhanced techniques applied to X-ray and CT-scan medical images for the detection of COVID-19. In this paper, we used four powerful pre-trained CNN models, VGG16, DenseNet121, ResNet50,and ResNet152, for the COVID-19 CT-scan binary classification task. The proposed Fast.AI ResNet framework was designed to find out the best architecture, pre-processing, and training parameters for the models largely automatically. The accuracy and F1-score were both above 96% in the diagnosis of COVID-19 using CT-scan images. In addition, we applied transfer learning techniques to overcome the insufficient data and to improve the training time. The binary and multi-class classification of X-ray images tasks were performed by utilizing enhanced VGG16 deep transfer learning architecture. High accuracy of 99% was achieved by enhanced VGG16 in the detection of X-ray images from COVID-19 and pneumonia. The accuracy and validity of the algorithms were assessed on X-ray and CT-scan well-known public datasets. The proposed methods have better results for COVID-19 diagnosis than other related in literature. In our opinion, our work can help virologists and radiologists to make a better and faster diagnosis in the struggle against the outbreak of COVID-19.