Identifying COVID19 from Chest CT Images: A Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Based Approach

Stacking Ensemble and ECA-EfficientNetV2 Convolutional Neural Networks on Classification of Multiple Chest Diseases Including COVID-19

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES

Early detection and treatment of COVID-19 patients is crucial. Convolutional neural networks have been proven to accurately extract features in medical images, which accelerates time required for testing and increases the effectiveness of COVID-19 diagnosis. This study proposes two classification models for multiple chest diseases including COVID-19.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The first is Stacking-ensemble model, which stacks six pretrained models including EfficientNetV2-B0, EfficientNetV2-B1, EfficientNetV2-B2, EfficientNetV2-B3, EfficientNetV2-S and EfficientNetV2-M. The second model is self-designed model ECA-EfficientNetV2 based on ECA-Net and EfficientNetV2. Ten-fold cross validation was performed for each model on chest X-ray and CT images. One more dataset, COVID-CT dataset, was tested to verify the performance of the proposed Stacking-ensemble and ECA-EfficientNetV2 models.

RESULTS

The best performance comes from the proposed ECA-EfficientNetV2 model with the highest Accuracy of 99.21%, Precision of 99.23%, Recall of 99.25%, F1-score of 99.20%, and (area under the curve) AUC of 99.51% on chest X-ray dataset; the best performance comes from the proposed ECA-EfficientNetV2 model with the highest Accuracy of 99.81%, Precision of 99.80%, Recall of 99.80%, F1-score of 99.81%, and AUC of 99.87% on chest CT dataset. The differences for five metrics between Stacking-ensemble and ECA-EfficientNetV2 models are not significant.

CONCLUSION

Ensemble model achieves better performance than single pretrained models. Compared to the SOTA, Stacking-ensemble and ECA-EfficientNetV2 models proposed in this study demonstrate promising performance on classification of multiple chest diseases including COVID-19.

A Systematic Review on Deep Structured Learning for COVID-19 Screening Using Chest CT from 2020 to 2022

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2019 led to the discovery of a novel coronavirus. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated it as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its rapid and widespread transmission. Its impact has had profound implications, particularly in the realm of public health. Extensive scientific endeavors have been directed towards devising effective treatment strategies and vaccines. Within the healthcare and medical imaging domain, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought significant advantages. This study delves into peer-reviewed research articles spanning the years 2020 to 2022, focusing on AI-driven methodologies for the analysis and screening of COVID-19 through chest CT scan data. We assess the efficacy of deep learning algorithms in facilitating decision making processes. Our exploration encompasses various facets, including data collection, systematic contributions, emerging techniques, and encountered challenges. However, the comparison of outcomes between 2020 and 2022 proves intricate due to shifts in dataset magnitudes over time. The initiatives aimed at developing AI-powered tools for the detection, localization, and segmentation of COVID-19 cases are primarily centered on educational and training contexts. We deliberate on their merits and constraints, particularly in the context of necessitating cross-population train/test models. Our analysis encompassed a review of 231 research publications, bolstered by a meta-analysis employing search keywords (COVID-19 OR Coronavirus) AND chest CT AND (deep learning OR artificial intelligence OR medical imaging) on both the PubMed Central Repository and Web of Science platforms.

ADU-Net: An Attention Dense U-Net based deep supervised DNN for automated lesion segmentation of COVID-19 from chest CT images

An automatic method for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of chest Computed Tomography (CT) images is essential for diagnosing COVID-19 patients. We aim to develop an automated COVID-19 prediction framework using deep learning. We put forth a novel Deep Neural Network (DNN) composed of an attention-based dense U-Net with deep supervision for COVID-19 lung lesion segmentation from chest CT images. We incorporate dense U-Net where convolution kernel size 5×5 is used instead of 3×3. The dense and transition blocks are introduced to implement a densely connected network on each encoder level. Also, the attention mechanism is applied between the encoder, skip connection, and decoder. These are used to keep both the high and low-level features efficiently. The deep supervision mechanism creates secondary segmentation maps from the features. Deep supervision combines secondary supervision maps from various resolution levels and produces a better final segmentation map. The trained artificial DNN model takes the test data at its input and generates a prediction output for COVID-19 lesion segmentation. The proposed model has been applied to the MedSeg COVID-19 chest CT segmentation dataset. Data pre-processing methods help the training process and improve performance. We compare the performance of the proposed DNN model with state-of-the-art models by computing the well-known metrics: dice coefficient, Jaccard coefficient, accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and precision. As a result, the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. This new model may be considered an efficient automated screening system for COVID-19 diagnosis and can potentially improve patient health care and management system.

A comprehensive review of COVID-19 detection with machine learning and deep learning techniques

Purpose

The first transmission of coronavirus to humans started in Wuhan city of China, took the shape of a pandemic called Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), and posed a principal threat to the entire world. The researchers are trying to inculcate artificial intelligence (Machine learning or deep learning models) for the efficient detection of COVID-19. This research explores all the existing machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) models, used for COVID-19 detection which may help the researcher to explore in different directions. The main purpose of this review article is to present a compact overview of the application of artificial intelligence to the research experts, helping them to explore the future scopes of improvement.

Methods

The researchers have used various machine learning, deep learning, and a combination of machine and deep learning models for extracting significant features and classifying various health conditions in COVID-19 patients. For this purpose, the researchers have utilized different image modalities such as CT-Scan, X-Ray, etc. This study has collected over 200 research papers from various repositories like Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, etc. These research papers were passed through various levels of scrutiny and finally, 50 research articles were selected.

Results

In those listed articles, the ML / DL models showed an accuracy of 99% and above while performing the classification of COVID-19. This study has also presented various clinical applications of various research. This study specifies the importance of various machine and deep learning models in the field of medical diagnosis and research.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is evident that ML/DL models have made significant progress in recent years, but there are still limitations that need to be addressed. Overfitting is one such limitation that can lead to incorrect predictions and overburdening of the models. The research community must continue to work towards finding ways to overcome these limitations and make machine and deep learning models even more effective and efficient. Through this ongoing research and development, we can expect even greater advances in the future.

Diabetic Foot Ulcer Identification: A Review

Diabetes is a chronic condition caused by an uncontrolled blood sugar levels in the human body. Its early diagnosis may prevent severe complications such as diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs). A DFU is a critical condition that can lead to the amputation of a diabetic patient's lower limb. The diagnosis of DFU is very complicated for the medical professional as it often goes through several costly and time-consuming clinical procedures. In the age of data deluge, the application of deep learning, machine learning, and computer vision techniques have provided various solutions for assisting clinicians in making more reliable and faster diagnostic decisions. Therefore, the automatic identification of DFU has recently received more attention from the research community. The wound characteristics and visual perceptions with respect to computer vision and deep learning, especially convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches, have provided potential solutions for DFU diagnosis. These approaches have the potential to be quite helpful in current medical practices. Therefore, a detailed comprehensive study of such existing approaches was required. The article aimed to provide researchers with a detailed current status of automatic DFU identification tasks. Multiple observations have been made from existing works, such as the use of traditional ML and advanced DL techniques being necessary to help clinicians make faster and more reliable diagnostic decisions. In traditional ML approaches, image features provide signification information about DFU wounds and help with accurate identification. However, advanced DL approaches have proven to be more promising than ML approaches. The CNN-based solutions proposed by various authors have dominated the problem domain. An interested researcher will successfully be able identify the overall idea in the DFU identification task, and this article will help them finalize the future research goal.

GW- CNNDC: Gradient weighted CNN model for diagnosing COVID-19 using radiography X-ray images

COVID-19 is one of the dangerous viruses that cause death if the patient doesn't identify it in the early stages. Firstly, this virus is identified in China, Wuhan city. This virus spreads very fast compared with other viruses. Many tests are there for detecting this virus, and also side effects may find while testing this disease. Corona-virus tests are now rare; there are restricted COVID-19 testing units and they can't be made quickly enough, causing alarm. Thus, we want to depend on other determination measures. There are three distinct sorts of COVID-19 testing systems: RTPCR, CT, and CXR. There are certain limitations to RTPCR, which is the most time-consuming technique, and CT-scan results in exposure to radiation which may cause further diseases. So, to overcome these limitations, the CXR technique emits comparatively less radiation, and the patient need not be close to the medical staff. COVID-19 detection from CXR images has been tested using a diversity of pre-trained deep-learning algorithms, with the best methods being fine-tuned to maximize detection accuracy. In this work, the model called GW-CNNDC is presented. The Lung Radiography pictures are portioned utilizing the Enhanced CNN model, deployed with RESNET-50 Architecture with an image size of 255*255 pixels. Afterward, the Gradient Weighted model is applied, which shows the specific separation regardless of whether the individual is impacted by Covid-19 affected area. This framework can perform twofold class assignments with exactness and accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and Loss value, and the model turns out proficiently for huge datasets with less measure of time.

Learning without forgetting by leveraging transfer learning for detecting COVID-19 infection from CT images

COVID-19, a global pandemic, has killed thousands in the last three years. Pathogenic laboratory testing is the gold standard but has a high false-negative rate, making alternate diagnostic procedures necessary to fight against it. Computer Tomography (CT) scans help diagnose and monitor COVID-19, especially in severe cases. But, visual inspection of CT images takes time and effort. In this study, we employ Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect coronavirus infection from CT images. The proposed study utilized transfer learning on the three pre-trained deep CNN models, namely VGG-16, ResNet, and wide ResNet, to diagnose and detect COVID-19 infection from the CT images. However, when the pre-trained models are retrained, the model suffers the generalization capability to categorize the data in the original datasets. The novel aspect of this work is the integration of deep CNN architectures with Learning without Forgetting (LwF) to enhance the model's generalization capabilities on both trained and new data samples. The LwF makes the network use its learning capabilities in training on the new dataset while preserving the original competencies. The deep CNN models with the LwF model are evaluated on original images and CT scans of individuals infected with Delta-variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The experimental results show that of the three fine-tuned CNN models with the LwF method, the wide ResNet model's performance is superior and effective in classifying original and delta-variant datasets with an accuracy of 93.08% and 92.32%, respectively.

Deep Learning Methods for Interpretation of Pulmonary CT and X-ray Images in Patients with COVID-19-Related Lung Involvement: A Systematic Review

SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus that has been affecting the global population by spreading rapidly and causing severe complications, which require prompt and elaborate emergency treatment. Automatic tools to diagnose COVID-19 could potentially be an important and useful aid. Radiologists and clinicians could potentially rely on interpretable AI technologies to address the diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19 patients. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for COVID-19 classification. The previous studies are methodically evaluated, and a summary of the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification approaches is presented. The reviewed papers have presented a variety of CNN models and architectures that were developed to provide an accurate and quick automatic tool to diagnose the COVID-19 virus based on presented CT scan or X-ray images. In this systematic review, we focused on the critical components of the deep learning approach, such as network architecture, model complexity, parameter optimization, explainability, and dataset/code availability. The literature search yielded a large number of studies over the past period of the virus spread, and we summarized their past efforts. State-of-the-art CNN architectures, with their strengths and weaknesses, are discussed with respect to diverse technical and clinical evaluation metrics to safely implement current AI studies in medical practice.

Multimodality Imaging of COVID-19 Using Fine-Tuned Deep Learning Models

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have been undertaken to provide assistive recommendations to patients to help overcome the burden of the expected shortage in clinicians. Thus, this study focused on diagnosing the COVID-19 virus using a set of fine-tuned deep learning models to overcome the latency in virus checkups. Five recent deep learning algorithms (EfficientB0, VGG-19, DenseNet121, EfficientB7, and MobileNetV2) were utilized to label both CT scan and chest X-ray images as positive or negative for COVID-19. The experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1 score, accuracy, and data access time.

Deep learning models-based CT-scan image classification for automated screening of COVID-19

COVID-19 is the most transmissible disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that severely infects the lungs and the upper respiratory tract of the human body. This virus badly affected the lives and wellness of millions of people worldwide and spread widely. Early diagnosis, timely treatment, and proper confinement of the infected patients are some possible ways to control the spreading of coronavirus. Computed tomography (CT) scanning has proven useful in diagnosing several respiratory lung problems, including COVID-19 infections. Automated detection of COVID-19 using chest CT-scan images may reduce the clinician's load and save the lives of thousands of people. This study proposes a robust framework for the automated screening of COVID-19 using chest CT-scan images and deep learning-based techniques. In this work, a publically accessible CT-scan image dataset (contains the 1252 COVID-19 and 1230 non-COVID chest CT images), two pre-trained deep learning models (DLMs) namely, MobileNetV2 and DarkNet19, and a newly-designed lightweight DLM, are utilized for the automated screening of COVID-19. A repeated ten-fold holdout validation method is utilized for the training, validation, and testing of DLMs. The highest classification accuracy of 98.91% is achieved using transfer-learned DarkNet19. The proposed framework is ready to be tested with more CT images. The simulation results with the publicly available COVID-19 CT scan image dataset are included to show the effectiveness of the presented study.

IoMT with Deep CNN: AI-Based Intelligent Support System for Pandemic Diseases

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an extended version of the Internet of Things (IoT). It mainly concentrates on the integration of medical things for servicing needy people who cannot get medical services easily, especially rural area people and aged peoples living alone. The main objective of this work is to design a real time interactive system for providing medical services to the needy who do not have a sufficient medical infrastructure. With the help of this system, people will get medical services at their end with minimal medical infrastructure and less treatment cost. However, the designed system could be upgraded to address the family of SARs viruses, and for experimentation, we have taken COVID-19 as a test case. The proposed system comprises of many modules, such as the user interface, analytics, cloud, etc. The proposed user interface is designed for interactive data collection. At the initial stage, it collects preliminary medical information, such as the pulse oxygen rate and RT-PCR results. With the help of a pulse oximeter, they could get the pulse oxygen level. With the help of swap test kit, they could find COVID-19 positivity. That information is uploaded as preliminary information to the designed proposed system via the designed UI. If the system identifies the COVID positivity, it requests that the person upload X-ray/CT images for ranking the severity of the disease. The system is designed for multi-model data. Hence, it can deal with X-ray, CT images, and textual data (RT-PCR results). Once X-ray/CT images are collected via the designed UI, those images are forwarded to the designed AI module for analytics. The proposed AI system is designed for multi-disease classification. It classifies the patients affected with COVID-19 or pneumonia or any other viral infection. It also measures the intensity level of lung infection for providing suitable treatment to the patients. Numerous deep convolution neural network (DCNN) architectures are available for medical image classification. We used ResNet-50, ResNet-100, ResNet-101, VGG 16, and VGG 19 for better classification. From the experimentation, it observed that ResNet101 and VGG 19 outperform, with an accuracy of 97% for CT images. ResNet101 outperforms with an accuracy of 98% for X-ray images. For obtaining enhanced accuracy, we used a major voting classifier. It combines all the classifiers result and presents the majority voted one. It results in reduced classifier bias. Finally, the proposed system presents an automatic test summary report textually. It can be accessed via user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). It results in a reduced report generation time and individual bias.

AMTLDC: a new adversarial multi-source transfer learning framework to diagnosis of COVID-19

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been widely used to diagnose diseases. However, in some tasks, such as the diagnosis of COVID-19 disease, due to insufficient data, the model is not properly trained and as a result, the generalizability of the model decreases. For example, if the model is trained on a CT scan dataset and tested on another CT scan dataset, it predicts near-random results. To address this, data from several different sources can be combined using transfer learning, taking into account the intrinsic and natural differences in existing datasets obtained with different medical imaging tools and approaches. In this paper, to improve the transfer learning technique and better generalizability between multiple data sources, we propose a multi-source adversarial transfer learning model, namely AMTLDC. In AMTLDC, representations are learned that are similar among the sources. In other words, extracted representations are general and not dependent on the particular dataset domain. We apply the AMTLDC to predict Covid-19 from medical images using a convolutional neural network. We show that accuracy can be improved using the AMTLDC framework, and surpass the results of current successful transfer learning approaches. In particular, we show that the AMTLDC works well when using different dataset domains, or when there is insufficient data.

Deep learning-based important weights-only transfer learning approach for COVID-19 CT-scan classification

COVID-19 has become a pandemic for the entire world, and it has significantly affected the world economy. The importance of early detection and treatment of the infection cannot be overstated. The traditional diagnosis techniques take more time in detecting the infection. Although, numerous deep learning-based automated solutions have recently been developed in this regard, nevertheless, the limitation of computational and battery power in resource-constrained devices makes it difficult to deploy trained models for real-time inference. In this paper, to detect the presence of COVID-19 in CT-scan images, an important weights-only transfer learning method has been proposed for devices with limited runt-time resources. In the proposed method, the pre-trained models are made point-of-care devices friendly by pruning less important weight parameters of the model. The experiments were performed on two popular VGG16 and ResNet34 models and the empirical results showed that pruned ResNet34 model achieved 95.47% accuracy, 0.9216 sensitivity, 0.9567 F-score, and 0.9942 specificity with 41.96% fewer FLOPs and 20.64% fewer weight parameters on the SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan dataset. The results of our experiments showed that the proposed method significantly reduces the run-time resource requirements of the computationally intensive models and makes them ready to be utilized on the point-of-care devices.

IoT-enabled stacked ensemble of deep neural networks for the diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest CT scans

The ongoing COVID-19 (novel coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has triggered a global emergency, resulting in significant casualties and a negative effect on socioeconomic and healthcare systems around the world. Hence, automatic and fast screening of COVID-19 infections has become an urgent need of this pandemic. Real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), a commonly used primary clinical method, is expensive and time-consuming for skilled health professionals. With the aid of various AI functionalities and advanced technologies, chest CT scans may thus be a viable alternative for quick and automatic screening of COVID-19. At the moment, significant advances in 5G cellular and internet of things (IoT) technology are finding use in various applications in the healthcare sector. This study presents an IoT-enabled deep learning-based stacking model to analyze chest CT scans for effective diagnosis of COVID-19 encounters. At first, patient data will be obtained using IoT devices and sent to a cloud server during the data procurement stage. Then we use different fine-tuned CNN sub-models, which are stacked together using a meta-learner to detect COVID-19 infection from input CT scans. The proposed model is evaluated using an open access dataset containing both COVID-19 infected and non-COVID CT images. Evaluation results show the efficacy of the proposed stacked model containing fine-tuned CNNs and a meta-learner in detecting coronavirus infections using CT scans.

Application of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for COVID-19 Screening Using Radiological Imaging: A Comprehensive Review

Lung, being one of the most important organs in human body, is often affected by various SARS diseases, among which COVID-19 has been found to be the most fatal disease in recent times. In fact, SARS-COVID 19 led to pandemic that spreads fast among the community causing respiratory problems. Under such situation, radiological imaging-based screening [mostly chest X-ray and computer tomography (CT) modalities] has been performed for rapid screening of the disease as it is a non-invasive approach. Due to scarcity of physician/chest specialist/expert doctors, technology-enabled disease screening techniques have been developed by several researchers with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). It can be remarkably observed that the researchers have introduced several AI/ML/DL (deep learning) algorithms for computer-assisted detection of COVID-19 using chest X-ray and CT images. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been conducted to summarize the works related to applications of AI/ML/DL for diagnostic prediction of COVID-19, mainly using X-ray and CT images. Following the PRISMA guidelines, total 265 articles have been selected out of 1715 published articles till the third quarter of 2021. Furthermore, this review summarizes and compares varieties of ML/DL techniques, various datasets, and their results using X-ray and CT imaging. A detailed discussion has been made on the novelty of the published works, along with advantages and limitations.

A self-supervised COVID-19 CT recognition system with multiple regularizations

The diagnosis of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) exploiting machine learning algorithms based on chest computed tomography (CT) images has become an important technology. Though many excellent computer-aided methods leveraging CT images have been designed, they do not possess sufficiently high recognition accuracy. Besides, these methods entail vast amounts of training data, which might be difficult to be satisfied in some real-world applications. To address these two issues, this paper proposes a novel COVID-19 recognition system based on CT images, which has high recognition accuracy, while only requiring a small amount of training data. Specifically, the system possesses the following three improvements: 1) Data: a novel redesigned BCELoss that incorporates Label Smoothing, Focal Loss, and Label Weighting Regularization (LSFLLW-R) technique for optimizing the solution space and preventing overfitting, 2) Model: a backbone network processed by two-phase contrastive self-supervised learning for classifying multiple labels, and 3) Method: a decision-fusing ensemble learning method for getting a more stable system, with balanced metric values. Our proposed system is evaluated on the small-scale expanded COVID-CT dataset, achieving an accuracy of 94.3%, a precision of 94.1%, a recall (sensitivity) of 93.4%, an F1-score of 94.7%, and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 98.9%, for COVID-19 diagnosis, respectively. These experimental results verify that our system can not only identify pathological locations effectively, but also achieve better performance in terms of accuracy, generalizability, and stability, compared with several other state-of-the-art COVID-19 diagnosis methods.

AI for COVID-19 Detection from Radiographs: Incisive Analysis of State of the Art Techniques, Key Challenges and Future Directions

Background and objective

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has had an evident impact on the way research addresses challenges in different domains. It has proven to be a huge asset, especially in the medical field, allowing for time-efficient and reliable solutions. This research aims to spotlight the impact of deep learning and machine learning models in the detection of COVID-19 from medical images. This is achieved by conducting a review of the state-of-the-art approaches proposed by the recent works in this field.

Methods

The main focus of this study is the recent developments of classification and segmentation approaches to image-based COVID-19 detection. The study reviews 140 research papers published in different academic research databases. These papers have been screened and filtered based on specified criteria, to acquire insights prudent to image-based COVID-19 detection.

Results

The methods discussed in this review include different types of imaging modality, predominantly X-rays and CT scans. These modalities are used for classification and segmentation tasks as well. This review seeks to categorize and discuss the different deep learning and machine learning architectures employed for these tasks, based on the imaging modality utilized. It also hints at other possible deep learning and machine learning architectures that can be proposed for better results towards COVID-19 detection. Along with that, a detailed overview of the emerging trends and breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence-based COVID-19 detection has been discussed as well.

Conclusion

This work concludes by stipulating the technical and non-technical challenges faced by researchers and illustrates the advantages of image-based COVID-19 detection with Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Machine learning techniques for CT imaging diagnosis of novel coronavirus pneumonia: a review

Since 2020, novel coronavirus pneumonia has been spreading rapidly around the world, bringing tremendous pressure on medical diagnosis and treatment for hospitals. Medical imaging methods, such as computed tomography (CT), play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating COVID-19. A large number of CT images (with large volume) are produced during the CT-based medical diagnosis. In such a situation, the diagnostic judgement by human eyes on the thousands of CT images is inefficient and time-consuming. Recently, in order to improve diagnostic efficiency, the machine learning technology is being widely used in computer-aided diagnosis and treatment systems (i.e., CT Imaging) to help doctors perform accurate analysis and provide them with effective diagnostic decision support. In this paper, we comprehensively review these frequently used machine learning methods applied in the CT Imaging Diagnosis for the COVID-19, discuss the machine learning-based applications from the various kinds of aspects including the image acquisition and pre-processing, image segmentation, quantitative analysis and diagnosis, and disease follow-up and prognosis. Moreover, we also discuss the limitations of the up-to-date machine learning technology in the context of CT imaging computer-aided diagnosis.

Ensemble of adapted convolutional neural networks (CNN) methods for classifying colon histopathological images

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) manifest the potential for computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADs) by learning features directly from images rather than using traditional feature extraction methods. Nevertheless, due to the limited sample sizes and heterogeneity in tumor presentation in medical images, CNN models suffer from training issues, including training from scratch, which leads to overfitting. Alternatively, a pre-trained neural network's transfer learning (TL) is used to derive tumor knowledge from medical image datasets using CNN that were designed for non-medical activations, alleviating the need for large datasets. This study proposes two ensemble learning techniques: E-CNN (product rule) and E-CNN (majority voting). These techniques are based on the adaptation of the pretrained CNN models to classify colon cancer histopathology images into various classes. In these ensembles, the individuals are, initially, constructed by adapting pretrained DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, and VGG16 models. The adaptation of these models is based on a block-wise fine-tuning policy, in which a set of dense and dropout layers of these pretrained models is joined to explore the variation in the histology images. Then, the models' decisions are fused via product rule and majority voting aggregation methods. The proposed model was validated against the standard pretrained models and the most recent works on two publicly available benchmark colon histopathological image datasets: Stoean (357 images) and Kather colorectal histology (5,000 images). The results were 97.20% and 91.28% accurate, respectively. The achieved results outperformed the state-of-the-art studies and confirmed that the proposed E-CNNs could be extended to be used in various medical image applications.

A lightweight CNN-based network on COVID-19 detection using X-ray and CT images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The traditional method of detecting COVID-19 disease mainly rely on the interpretation of computer tomography (CT) or X-ray images (X-ray) by doctors or professional researchers to identify whether it is COVID-19 disease, which is easy to cause identification mistakes. In this study, the technology of convolutional neural network is expected to be able to efficiently and accurately identify the COVID-19 disease.

METHODS

This study uses and fine-tunes seven convolutional neural networks including InceptionV3, ResNet50V2, Xception, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet-B0, and EfficientNetV2 on COVID-19 detection. In addition, we proposes a lightweight convolutional neural network, LightEfficientNetV2, on small number of chest X-ray and CT images. Five-fold cross-validation was used to evaluate the performance of each model. To confirm the performance of the proposed model, LightEfficientNetV2 was carried out on three different datasets (NIH Chest X-rays, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-CT).

RESULTS

On chest X-ray image dataset, the highest accuracy 96.50% was from InceptionV3 before fine-tuning; and the highest accuracy 97.73% was from EfficientNetV2 after fine-tuning. The accuracy of the LightEfficientNetV2 model proposed in this study is 98.33% on chest X-ray image. On CT images, the best transfer learning model before fine-tuning is MobileNetV2, with an accuracy of 94.46%; the best transfer learning model after fine-tuning is Xception, with an accuracy of 96.78%. The accuracy of the LightEfficientNetV2 model proposed in this study is 97.48% on CT image.

CONCLUSIONS

Compared with the SOTA, LightEfficientNetV2 proposed in this study demonstrates promising performance on chest X-ray images, CT images and three different datasets.

CVD-HNet: Classifying Pneumonia and COVID-19 in Chest X-ray Images Using Deep Network

The use of computer-assisted analysis to improve image interpretation has been a long-standing challenge in the medical imaging industry. In terms of image comprehension, Continuous advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence), predominantly in DL (Deep Learning) techniques, are supporting in the classification, Detection, and quantification of anomalies in medical images. DL techniques are the most rapidly evolving branch of AI, and it's recently been successfully pragmatic in a variety of fields, including medicine. This paper provides a classification method for COVID 19 infected X-ray images based on new novel deep CNN model. For COVID19 specified pneumonia analysis, two new customized CNN architectures, CVD-HNet1 (COVID-HybridNetwork1) and CVD-HNet2 (COVID-HybridNetwork2), have been designed. The suggested method utilizes operations based on boundaries and regions, as well as convolution processes, in a systematic manner. In comparison to existing CNNs, the suggested classification method achieves excellent Accuracy 98 percent, F Score 0.99 and MCC 0.97. These results indicate impressive classification accuracy on a limited dataset, with more training examples, much better results can be achieved. Overall, our CVD-HNet model could be a useful tool for radiologists in diagnosing and detecting COVID 19 instances early.

Complex features extraction with deep learning model for the detection of COVID19 from CT scan images using ensemble based machine learning approach

Recently the most infectious disease is the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID 19) creates a devastating effect on public health in more than 200 countries in the world. Since the detection of COVID19 using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is time-consuming and error-prone, the alternative solution of detection is Computed Tomography (CT) images. In this paper, Contrast Limited Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) was applied to CT images as a preprocessing step for enhancing the quality of the images. After that, we developed a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that extracted 100 prominent features from a total of 2482 CT scan images. These extracted features were then deployed to various machine learning algorithms - Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), and Random Forest (RF). Finally, we proposed an ensemble model for the COVID19 CT image classification. We also showed various performance comparisons with the state-of-art methods. Our proposed model outperforms the state-of-art models and achieved an accuracy, precision, and recall score of 99.73%, 99.46%, and 100%, respectively.

Effective hybrid deep learning model for COVID-19 patterns identification using CT images

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has attracted significant attention of researchers from various disciplines since the end of 2019. Although the global epidemic situation is stabilizing due to vaccination, new COVID-19 cases are constantly being discovered around the world. As a result, lung computed tomography (CT) examination, an aggregated identification technique, has been used to ameliorate diagnosis. It helps reveal missed diagnoses due to the ambiguity of nucleic acid polymerase chain reaction. Therefore, this study investigated how quickly and accurately hybrid deep learning (DL) methods can identify infected individuals with COVID-19 on the basis of their lung CT images. In addition, this study proposed a developed system to create a reliable COVID-19 prediction network using various layers starting with the segmentation of the lung CT scan image and ending with disease prediction. The initial step of the system starts with a proposed technique for lung segmentation that relies on a no-threshold histogram-based image segmentation method. Afterward, the GrabCut method was used as a post-segmentation method to enhance segmentation outcomes and avoid over-and under-segmentation problems. Then, three pre-trained models of standard DL methods, including Visual Geometry Group Network, convolutional deep belief network, and high-resolution network, were utilized to extract the most affective features from the segmented images that can help to identify COVID-19. These three described pre-trained models were combined as a new mechanism to increase the system's overall prediction capabilities. A publicly available dataset, namely, COVID-19 CT, was used to test the performance of the proposed model, which obtained a 95% accuracy rate. On the basis of comparison, the proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art studies. Because of its effectiveness in accurately screening COVID-19 CT images, the developed model will potentially be valuable as an additional diagnostic tool for leading clinical professionals.

A novel unsupervised approach based on the hidden features of Deep Denoising Autoencoders for COVID-19 disease detection

Chest imaging can represent a powerful tool for detecting the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Among the available technologies, the chest Computed Tomography (CT) scan is an effective approach for reliable and early detection of the disease. However, it could be difficult to rapidly identify by human inspection anomalous area in CT images belonging to the COVID-19 disease. Hence, it becomes necessary the exploitation of suitable automatic algorithms able to quick and precisely identify the disease, possibly by using few labeled input data, because large amounts of CT scans are not usually available for the COVID-19 disease. The method proposed in this paper is based on the exploitation of the compact and meaningful hidden representation provided by a Deep Denoising Convolutional Autoencoder (DDCAE). Specifically, the proposed DDCAE, trained on some target CT scans in an unsupervised way, is used to build up a robust statistical representation generating a target histogram. A suitable statistical distance measures how this target histogram is far from a companion histogram evaluated on an unknown test scan: if this distance is greater of a threshold, the test image is labeled as anomaly, i.e. the scan belongs to a patient affected by COVID-19 disease. Some experimental results and comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods show the effectiveness of the proposed approach reaching a top accuracy of 100% and similar high values for other metrics. In conclusion, by using a statistical representation of the hidden features provided by DDCAEs, the developed architecture is able to differentiate COVID-19 from normal and pneumonia scans with high reliability and at low computational cost.

Clinical informatics solutions in COVID-19 pandemic: Scoping literature review

Background

The global outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) disease has highlighted the importance of disease monitoring, diagnosing, treating, and screening. Technology-based instruments could efficiently assist healthcare systems during pandemics by allowing rapid and widespread transfer of information, real-time tracking of data transfer, and virtualization of meetings and patient visits. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the applications of clinical informatics (CI) during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Methods

A comprehensive search was performed on Medline and Scopus databases in September 2020. Eligible studies were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The extracted data from the studies reviewed were about study sample, study type, objectives, clinical informatics domain, applied method, sample size, outcomes, findings, and conclusion. The risk of bias was evaluated in the studies using appropriate instruments based on the type of each study. The selected studies were then subjected to thematic synthesis.

Results

In this review study, 72 out of 2716 retrieved articles met the inclusion criteria for full-text analysis. Most of the articles reviewed were done in China and the United States of America. The majority of the studies were conducted in the following CI domains: prediction models (60%), telehealth (36%), and mobile health (4%). Most of the studies in telehealth domain used synchronous methods, such as online and phone- or video-call consultations. Mobile applications were developed as self-triage, self-scheduling, and information delivery tools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most common types of prediction models among the reviewed studies were neural network (49%), classification (42%), and linear models (4.5%).

Conclusion

The present study showed clinical informatics applications during COVID-19 and identified current gaps in this field. Health information technology and clinical informatics seem to be useful in assisting clinicians and managers to combat COVID-19. The most common domains in clinical informatics for research on the COVID-19 crisis were prediction models and telehealth. It is suggested that future researchers conduct scoping reviews to describe and analyze other levels of medical informatics, including bioinformatics, imaging informatics, and public health informatics.

EDNC: Ensemble Deep Neural Network for COVID-19 Recognition

The automatic recognition of COVID-19 diseases is critical in the present pandemic since it relieves healthcare staff of the burden of screening for infection with COVID-19. Previous studies have proven that deep learning algorithms can be utilized to aid in the diagnosis of patients with potential COVID-19 infection. However, the accuracy of current COVID-19 recognition models is relatively low. Motivated by this fact, we propose three deep learning architectures, F-EDNC, FC-EDNC, and O-EDNC, to quickly and accurately detect COVID-19 infections from chest computed tomography (CT) images. Sixteen deep learning neural networks have been modified and trained to recognize COVID-19 patients using transfer learning and 2458 CT chest images. The proposed EDNC has then been developed using three of sixteen modified pre-trained models to improve the performance of COVID-19 recognition. The results suggested that the F-EDNC method significantly enhanced the recognition of COVID-19 infections with 97.75% accuracy, followed by FC-EDNC and O-EDNC (97.55% and 96.12%, respectively), which is superior to most of the current COVID-19 recognition models. Furthermore, a localhost web application has been built that enables users to easily upload their chest CT scans and obtain their COVID-19 results automatically. This accurate, fast, and automatic COVID-19 recognition system will relieve the stress of medical professionals for screening COVID-19 infections.

Clinical Characteristics of COVID-19 Patients and Application to an Artificial Intelligence System for Disease Surveillance

During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, we admitted suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients to our isolation wards between 2 March 2020 and 4 May 2020, following a well-designed and efficient assessment protocol. We included 217 patients suspected of COVID-19, of which 27 had confirmed COVID-19. The clinical characteristics of these patients were used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models such as support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, and artificial neural network for diagnosing COVID-19. When analyzing the performance of the models, SVM showed the highest sensitivity (SVM vs. decision tree vs. random forest vs. artificial neural network: 100% vs. 42.86% vs. 28.57% vs. 71.43%), while decision tree and random forest had the highest specificity (SVM vs. decision tree vs. random forest vs. artificial neural network: 88.37% vs. 100% vs. 100% vs. 94.74%) in the diagnosis of COVID-19. With the aid of AI models, physicians may identify COVID-19 patients earlier, even with few baseline data available, and segregate infected patients earlier to avoid hospital cluster infections and to ensure the safety of medical professionals and ordinary patients in the hospital.

A CNN based coronavirus disease prediction system for chest X-rays

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) proliferated globally in early 2020, causing existential dread in the whole world. Radiography is crucial in the clinical staging and diagnosis of COVID-19 and offers high potential to improve healthcare plans for tackling the pandemic. However high variations in infection characteristics and low contrast between normal and infected regions pose great challenges in preparing radiological reports. To address these challenges, this study presents CODISC-CNN (CNN based Coronavirus DIsease Prediction System for Chest X-rays) that can automatically extract the features from chest X-ray images for the disease prediction. However, to get the infected region of X-ray, edges of the images are detected by applying image preprocessing. Furthermore, to attenuate the shortage of labeled datasets data augmentation has been adapted. Extensive experiments have been performed to classify X-ray images into two classes (Normal and COVID), three classes (Normal, COVID, and Virus Bacteria), and four classes (Normal, COVID, and Virus Bacteria, and Virus Pneumonia) with the accuracy of 97%, 89%, and 84% respectively. The proposed CNN-based model outperforms many cutting-edge classification models and boosts state-of-the-art performance.

A deep adversarial model for segmentation-assisted COVID-19 diagnosis using CT images

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading rapidly around the world, resulting in a global pandemic. Imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) play an essential role in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease since lung infection or pneumonia is a common complication. However, training a deep network to learn how to diagnose COVID-19 rapidly and accurately in CT images and segment the infected regions like a radiologist is challenging. Since the infectious area is difficult to distinguish manually annotation, the segmentation results are time-consuming. To tackle these problems, we propose an efficient method based on a deep adversarial network to segment the infection regions automatically. Then, the predicted segment results can assist the diagnostic network in identifying the COVID-19 samples from the CT images. On the other hand, a radiologist-like segmentation network provides detailed information of the infectious regions by separating areas of ground-glass, consolidation, and pleural effusion, respectively. Our method can accurately predict the COVID-19 infectious probability and provide lesion regions in CT images with limited training data. Additionally, we have established a public dataset for multitask learning. Extensive experiments on diagnosis and segmentation show superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

ADA-COVID: Adversarial Deep Domain Adaptation-Based Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Lung CT Scans Using Triplet Embeddings

Rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 with high reliability is essential in the early stages. To this end, recent research often uses medical imaging combined with machine vision methods to diagnose COVID-19. However, the scarcity of medical images and the inherent differences in existing datasets that arise from different medical imaging tools, methods, and specialists may affect the generalization of machine learning-based methods. Also, most of these methods are trained and tested on the same dataset, reducing the generalizability and causing low reliability of the obtained model in real-world applications. This paper introduces an adversarial deep domain adaptation-based approach for diagnosing COVID-19 from lung CT scan images, termed ADA-COVID. Domain adaptation-based training process receives multiple datasets with different input domains to generate domain-invariant representations for medical images. Also, due to the excessive structural similarity of medical images compared to other image data in machine vision tasks, we use the triplet loss function to generate similar representations for samples of the same class (infected cases). The performance of ADA-COVID is evaluated and compared with other state-of-the-art COVID-19 diagnosis algorithms. The obtained results indicate that ADA-COVID achieves classification improvements of at least 3%, 20%, 20%, and 11% in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, respectively, compared to the best results of competitors, even without directly training on the same data. The implementation source code of the ADA-COVID is publicly available at https://github.com/MehradAria/ADA-COVID.

Decision fusion in healthcare and medicine: a narrative review

OBJECTIVE

To provide an overview of the decision fusion (DF) technique and describe the applications of the technique in healthcare and medicine at prevention, diagnosis, treatment and administrative levels.

BACKGROUND

The rapid development of technology over the past 20 years has led to an explosion in data growth in various industries, like healthcare. Big data analysis within the healthcare systems is essential for arriving to a value-based decision over a period of time. Diversity and uncertainty in big data analytics have made it impossible to analyze data by using conventional data mining techniques and thus alternative solutions are required. DF is a form of data fusion techniques that could increase the accuracy of diagnosis and facilitate interpretation, summarization and sharing of information.

METHODS

We conducted a review of articles published between January 1980 and December 2020 from various databases such as Google Scholar, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus and web of science using the keywords decision fusion (DF), information fusion, healthcare, medicine and big data. A total of 141 articles were included in this narrative review.

CONCLUSIONS

Given the importance of big data analysis in reducing costs and improving the quality of healthcare; along with the potential role of DF in big data analysis, it is recommended to know the full potential of this technique including the advantages, challenges and applications of the technique before its use. Future studies should focus on describing the methodology and types of data used for its applications within the healthcare sector.

Accurate detection of Covid-19 patients based on Feature Correlated Naïve Bayes (FCNB) classification strategy

The outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread between people around the world at a rapid rate so that the number of infected people and deaths is increasing quickly every day. Accordingly, it is a vital process to detect positive cases at an early stage for treatment and controlling the disease from spreading. Several medical tests had been applied for COVID-19 detection in certain injuries, but with limited efficiency. In this study, a new COVID-19 diagnosis strategy called Feature Correlated Naïve Bayes (FCNB) has been introduced. The FCNB consists of four phases, which are; Feature Selection Phase (FSP), Feature Clustering Phase (FCP), Master Feature Weighting Phase (MFWP), and Feature Correlated Naïve Bayes Phase (FCNBP). The FSP selects only the most effective features among the extracted features from laboratory tests for both COVID-19 patients and non-COVID-19 people by using the Genetic Algorithm as a wrapper method. The FCP constructs many clusters of features based on the selected features from FSP by using a novel clustering technique. These clusters of features are called Master Features (MFs) in which each MF contains a set of dependent features. The MFWP assigns a weight value to each MF by using a new weight calculation method. The FCNBP is used to classify patients based on the weighted Naïve Bayes algorithm with many modifications as the correlation between features. The proposed FCNB strategy has been compared to recent competitive techniques. Experimental results have proven the effectiveness of the FCNB strategy in which it outperforms recent competitive techniques because it achieves the maximum (99%) detection accuracy.

Deep learning empowered COVID-19 diagnosis using chest CT scan images for collaborative edge-cloud computing platform

The novel coronavirus outbreak has spread worldwide, causing respiratory infections in humans, leading to a huge global pandemic COVID-19. According to World Health Organization, the only way to curb this spread is by increasing the testing and isolating the infected. Meanwhile, the clinical testing currently being followed is not easily accessible and requires much time to give the results. In this scenario, remote diagnostic systems could become a handy solution. Some existing studies leverage the deep learning approach to provide an effective alternative to clinical diagnostic techniques. However, it is difficult to use such complex networks in resource constraint environments. To address this problem, we developed a fine-tuned deep learning model inspired by the architecture of the MobileNet V2 model. Moreover, the developed model is further optimized in terms of its size and complexity to make it compatible with mobile and edge devices. The results of extensive experimentation performed on a real-world dataset consisting of 2482 chest Computerized Tomography scan images strongly suggest the superiority of the developed fine-tuned deep learning model in terms of high accuracy and faster diagnosis time. The proposed model achieved a classification accuracy of 96.40%, with approximately ten times shorter response time than prevailing deep learning models. Further, McNemar's statistical test results also prove the efficacy of the proposed model.

Coronavirus Pneumonia Classification using X-Ray and CT Scan Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Models

Pneumonia is a life-threatening infectious disease affecting one or both lungs in humans. There are mainly two types of pneumonia: bacterial and viral. Likewise, patients with coronavirus can develop symptoms that belong to the common flu, pneumonia, and other respiratory diseases. Chest X-rays are the common method used to diagnose coronavirus pneumonia and it needs a medical expert to evaluate the result of X-ray. Furthermore, DL has garnered great attention among researchers in recent years in a variety of application domains such as medical image processing, computer vision, bioinformatics, and many others. In this paper, we present a comparison of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks models for automatically binary classification query chest X-ray & CT images dataset with the goal of taking precision tools to health professionals based on fined recent versions of ResNet50, InceptionV3, and VGGNet. The experiments were conducted using a chest X-ray & CT open dataset of 5856 images and confusion matrices are used to evaluate model performances.

Effects of Remifentanil and Sufentanil Anesthesia on Cardiac Function and Serological Parameters in Congenital Heart Surgery

In this study, we have investigated feasibility of remifentanil and sufentanil anesthesia in children with congenital heart disease surgery and its effects on cardiac function and serological parameters. For this purpose, a retrospective study was conducted on 120 children with congenital heart disease who underwent repair of ventricular septum or atrial septum in our hospital, specifically from January 2016 to January 2018, and 60 patients in each group were randomly divided into the control and treatment groups, respectively. The control group was anesthetized with sufentanil, and the treatment group was anesthetized with remifentanil. The heart function, serological indexes, and adverse reactions were observed and compared. We have observed that there was no significant difference in HR levels between these groups (P > 0.05), but SDP and DBP values of the two groups were decreased after anesthetic induction (P < 0.05). ACH, cortisol, and lactic acid in the treatment group were significantly lower than those in the control group, and the difference was statistically significant (P < 0.05). The incidence of bradycardia, nausea and vomiting, hypotension, muscle rigidity, and respiratory depression in the treatment group was 16.67% lower than that in the control group (P < 0.05). Remifentanil has less influence on hemodynamics and a better analgesic effect than fentanyl in inhibiting stress response in congenital heart surgery, which provides reference and basis for children congenital heart surgery.

Transfer learning based novel ensemble classifier for COVID-19 detection from chest CT-scans

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a deadly infection that affects the respiratory organs in humans as well as animals. By 2020, this disease turned out to be a pandemic affecting millions of individuals across the globe. Conducting rapid tests for a large number of suspects preventing the spread of the virus has become a challenge. In the recent past, several deep learning based approaches have been developed for automating the process of detecting COVID-19 infection from Lung Computerized Tomography (CT) scan images. However, most of them rely on a single model prediction for the final decision which may or may not be accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble approach that aggregates the strength of multiple deep neural network architectures before arriving at the final decision. We use various pre-trained models such as VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50, ResNet50V2, InceptionResNetV2, Xception, and MobileNet and fine-tune them using Lung CT Scan images. All these trained models are further used to create a strong ensemble classifier that makes the final prediction. Our experiments exhibit that the proposed ensemble approach is superior to existing ensemble approaches and set state-of-the-art results for detecting COVID-19 infection from lung CT scan images.

Deep-Learning-Based Natural Language Processing of Serial Free-Text Radiological Reports for Predicting Rectal Cancer Patient Survival

Most electronic medical records, such as free-text radiological reports, are unstructured; however, the methodological approaches to analyzing these accumulating unstructured records are limited. This article proposes a deep-transfer-learning-based natural language processing model that analyzes serial magnetic resonance imaging reports of rectal cancer patients and predicts their overall survival. To evaluate the model, a retrospective cohort study of 4,338 rectal cancer patients was conducted. The experimental results revealed that the proposed model utilizing pre-trained clinical linguistic knowledge could predict the overall survival of patients without any structured information and was superior to the carcinoembryonic antigen in predicting survival. The deep-transfer-learning model using free-text radiological reports can predict the survival of patients with rectal cancer, thereby increasing the utility of unstructured medical big data.

Deep neural networks ensemble to detect COVID-19 from CT scans

Research on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) detection methods has increased in the last months as more accurate automated toolkits are required. Recent studies show that CT scan images contain useful information to detect the COVID-19 disease. However, the scarcity of large and well balanced datasets limits the possibility of using detection approaches in real diagnostic contexts as they are unable to generalize. Indeed, the performance of these models quickly becomes inadequate when applied to samples captured in different contexts (e.g., different equipment or populations) from those used in the training phase. In this paper, a novel ensemble-based approach for more accurate COVID-19 disease detection using CT scan images is proposed. This work exploits transfer learning using pre-trained deep networks (e.g., VGG, Xception, and ResNet) evolved with a genetic algorithm, combined into an ensemble architecture for the classification of clustered images of lung lobes. The study is validated on a new dataset obtained as an integration of existing ones. The results of the experimental evaluation show that the ensemble classifier ensures effective performance, also exhibiting better generalization capabilities.

Automated Detection of COVID-19 Cases using Recent Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and CT images. ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY. IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY. ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2021;2021:3297-3300. [PMID: 34891945 DOI: 10.1109/embc46164.2021.9629689] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0]

COVID-19 is an acute severe respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. After its first appearance in Wuhan (China), it spread rapidly across the world and became a pandemic. It had a devastating effect on everyday life, public health, and the world economy. The use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques combined with radiological imaging can be helpful in speeding-up the detection of this disease. In this study, we propose the development of recent deep learning models for automatic COVID-19 detection using computed tomography (CT) images. The proposed models are fine-tuned and optimized to provide accurate results for multiclass classification of COVID-19 vs. Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) vs. Normal cases. Tests were conducted both at the image and patient-level and show that the proposed algorithms achieve very high scores. In addition, an explainability algorithm was developed to help visualize the symptoms of the disease detected by the best performing deep model.

Artificial Intelligence for COVID-19: A Systematic Review

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

A Histogram-Based Low-Complexity Approach for the Effective Detection of COVID-19 Disease from CT and X-ray Images

The global COVID-19 pandemic certainly has posed one of the more difficult challenges for researchers in the current century. The development of an automatic diagnostic tool, able to detect the disease in its early stage, could undoubtedly offer a great advantage to the battle against the pandemic. In this regard, most of the research efforts have been focused on the application of Deep Learning (DL) techniques to chest images, including traditional chest X-rays (CXRs) and Computed Tomography (CT) scans. Although these approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness in detecting the COVID-19 disease, they are of huge computational complexity and require large datasets for training. In addition, there may not exist a large amount of COVID-19 CXRs and CT scans available to researchers. To this end, in this paper, we propose an approach based on the evaluation of the histogram from a common class of images that is considered as the target. A suitable inter-histogram distance measures how this target histogram is far from the histogram evaluated on a test image: if this distance is greater than a threshold, the test image is labeled as anomaly, i.e., the scan belongs to a patient affected by COVID-19 disease. Extensive experimental results and comparisons with some benchmark state-of-the-art methods support the effectiveness of the developed approach, as well as demonstrate that, at least when the images of the considered datasets are homogeneous enough (i.e., a few outliers are present), it is not really needed to resort to complex-to-implement DL techniques, in order to attain an effective detection of the COVID-19 disease. Despite the simplicity of the proposed approach, all the considered metrics (i.e., accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure) attain a value of 1.0 under the selected datasets, a result comparable to the corresponding state-of-the-art DNN approaches, but with a remarkable computational simplicity.

COVID-19 disease identification from chest CT images using empirical wavelet transformation and transfer learning

In the current scenario, novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread is increasing day-by-day. It is very important to control and cure this disease. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), chest computerized tomography (CT) imaging options are available as a significantly useful and more truthful tool to classify COVID-19 within the epidemic region. Most of the hospitals have CT imaging machines. It will be fruitful to utilize the chest CT images for early diagnosis and classification of COVID-19 patients. This requires a radiology expert and a good amount of time to classify the chest CT-based COVID-19 images especially when the disease is spreading at a rapid rate. During this pandemic COVID-19, there is a need for an efficient automated way to check for infection. CT is one of the best ways to detect infection inpatients. This paper introduces a new method for preprocessing and classifying COVID-19 positive and negative from CT scan images. The method which is being proposed uses the concept of empirical wavelet transformation for preprocessing, selecting the best components of the red, green, and blue channels of the image are trained on the proposed network. With the proposed methodology, the classification accuracy of 85.5%, F1 score of 85.28%, and AUC of 96.6% are achieved.

The diagnostic accuracy of Artificial Intelligence-Assisted CT imaging in COVID-19 disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become critical in support of decision-making. This systematic review summarizes all the data currently available on the AI-assisted CT-Scan prediction accuracy for COVID-19. The ISI Web of Science, Cochrane Library, PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, Science Direct, PROSPERO, and EMBASE were systematically searched. We used the revised Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS-2) tool to assess all included studies' quality and potential bias. A hierarchical receiver-operating characteristic summary (HSROC) curve and a summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve have been implemented. The area under the curve (AUC) was computed to determine the diagnostic accuracy. Finally, 36 studies (a total of 39,246 image data) were selected for inclusion into the final meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity for AI was 0.90 (95% CI, 0.90–0.91), specificity was 0.91 (95% CI, 0.90–0.92) and the AUC was 0.96 (95% CI, 0.91–0.98). For deep learning (DL) method, the pooled sensitivity was 0.90 (95% CI, 0.90–0.91), specificity was 0.88 (95% CI, 0.87–0.88) and the AUC was 0.96 (95% CI, 0.93–0.97). In case of machine learning (ML), the pooled sensitivity was 0.90 (95% CI, 0.90–0.91), specificity was 0.95 (95% CI, 0.94–0.95) and the AUC was 0.97 (95% CI, 0.96–0.99). AI in COVID-19 patients is useful in identifying symptoms of lung involvement. More prospective real-time trials are required to confirm AI's role for high and quick COVID-19 diagnosis due to the possible selection bias and retrospective existence of currently available studies.

Convolutional neural networks for the diagnosis and prognosis of the coronavirus disease pandemic

A neural network is one of the current trends in deep learning, which is increasingly gaining attention owing to its contribution in transforming the different facets of human life. It also paves a way to approach the current crisis caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from all scientific directions. Convolutional neural network (CNN), a type of neural network, is extensively applied in the medical field, and is particularly useful in the current COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we present the application of CNNs for the diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 using X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images of COVID-19 patients. The CNN models discussed in this review were mainly developed for the detection, classification, and segmentation of COVID-19 images. The base models used for detection and classification were AlexNet, Visual Geometry Group Network with 16 layers, residual network, DensNet, GoogLeNet, MobileNet, Inception, and extreme Inception. U-Net and voxel-based broad learning network were used for segmentation. Even with limited datasets, these methods proved to be beneficial for efficiently identifying the occurrence of COVID-19. To further validate these observations, we conducted an experimental study using a simple CNN framework for the binary classification of COVID-19 CT images. We achieved an accuracy of 93% with an F1-score of 0.93. Thus, with the availability of improved medical image datasets, it is evident that CNNs are very useful for the efficient diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19.

A bi-stage feature selection approach for COVID-19 prediction using chest CT images

The rapid spread of coronavirus disease has become an example of the worst disruptive disasters of the century around the globe. To fight against the spread of this virus, clinical image analysis of chest CT (computed tomography) images can play an important role for an accurate diagnostic. In the present work, a bi-modular hybrid model is proposed to detect COVID-19 from the chest CT images. In the first module, we have used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to extract features from the chest CT images. In the second module, we have used a bi-stage feature selection (FS) approach to find out the most relevant features for the prediction of COVID and non-COVID cases from the chest CT images. At the first stage of FS, we have applied a guided FS methodology by employing two filter methods: Mutual Information (MI) and Relief-F, for the initial screening of the features obtained from the CNN model. In the second stage, Dragonfly algorithm (DA) has been used for the further selection of most relevant features. The final feature set has been used for the classification of the COVID-19 and non-COVID chest CT images using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed model has been tested on two open-access datasets: SARS-CoV-2 CT images and COVID-CT datasets and the model shows substantial prediction rates of 98.39% and 90.0% on the said datasets respectively. The proposed model has been compared with a few past works for the prediction of COVID-19 cases. The supporting codes are uploaded in the Github link: https://github.com/Soumyajit-Saha/A-Bi-Stage-Feature-Selection-on-Covid-19-Dataset

COVIDC: An expert system to diagnose COVID-19 and predict its severity using chest CT scans: Application in radiology

Early diagnosis of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is significantly important, especially in the absence or inadequate provision of a specific vaccine, to stop the surge of this lethal infection by advising quarantine. This diagnosis is challenging as most of the patients having COVID-19 infection stay asymptomatic while others showing symptoms are hard to distinguish from patients having different respiratory infections such as severe flu and Pneumonia. Due to cost and time-consuming wet-lab diagnostic tests for COVID-19, there is an utmost requirement for some alternate, non-invasive, rapid, and discounted automatic screening system. A chest CT scan can effectively be used as an alternative modality to detect and diagnose the COVID-19 infection. In this study, we present an automatic COVID-19 diagnostic and severity prediction system called COVIDC (COVID-19 detection using CT scans) that uses deep feature maps from the chest CT scans for this purpose. Our newly proposed system not only detects COVID-19 but also predicts its severity by using a two-phase classification approach (COVID vs non-COVID, and COVID-19 severity) with deep feature maps and different shallow supervised classification algorithms such as SVMs and random forest to handle data scarcity. We performed a stringent COVIDC performance evaluation not only through 10-fold cross-validation and an external validation dataset but also in a real setting under the supervision of an experienced radiologist. In all the evaluation settings, COVIDC outperformed all the existing state-of-the-art methods designed to detect COVID-19 with an F1 score of 0.94 on the validation dataset and justified its use to diagnose COVID-19 effectively in the real setting by classifying correctly 9 out of 10 COVID-19 CT scans. We made COVIDC openly accessible through a cloud-based webserver and python code available at https://sites.google.com/view/wajidarshad/software and https://github.com/wajidarshad/covidc.

Densely connected convolutional networks-based COVID-19 screening model

The extensively utilized tool to detect novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). However, RT-PCR kits are costly and consume critical time, around 6 to 9 hours to classify the subjects as COVID-19(+) or COVID-19(-). Due to the less sensitivity of RT-PCR, it suffers from high false-negative results. To overcome these issues, many deep learning models have been implemented in the literature for the early-stage classification of suspected subjects. To handle the sensitivity issue associated with RT-PCR, chest CT scans are utilized to classify the suspected subjects as COVID-19 (+), tuberculosis, pneumonia, or healthy subjects. The extensive study on chest CT scans of COVID-19 (+) subjects reveals that there are some bilateral changes and unique patterns. But the manual analysis from chest CT scans is a tedious task. Therefore, an automated COVID-19 screening model is implemented by ensembling the deep transfer learning models such as Densely connected convolutional networks (DCCNs), ResNet152V2, and VGG16. Experimental results reveal that the proposed ensemble model outperforms the competitive models in terms of accuracy, f-measure, area under curve, sensitivity, and specificity.

Automatic Screening of COVID-19 Using an Optimized Generative Adversarial Network

The quick spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has resulted in a global pandemic and more than fifteen million confirmed cases. To battle this spread, clinical imaging techniques, for example, computed tomography (CT), can be utilized for diagnosis. Automatic identification software tools are essential for helping to screen COVID-19 using CT images. However, there are few datasets available, making it difficult to train deep learning (DL) networks. To address this issue, a generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed in this work to generate more CT images. The Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is used to optimize the hyperparameters of GAN's generator. The proposed method is tested and validated with different classification and meta-heuristics algorithms using the SARS-CoV-2 CT-Scan dataset, consisting of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 images. The performance metrics of the proposed optimized model, including accuracy (99.22%), sensitivity (99.78%), specificity (97.78%), F1-score (98.79%), positive predictive value (97.82%), and negative predictive value (99.77%), as well as its confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, indicate that it performs better than state-of-the-art methods. This proposed model will help in the automatic screening of COVID-19 patients and decrease the burden on medicinal services frameworks.

Explainable COVID-19 Detection Using Chest CT Scans and Deep Learning

This paper explores how well deep learning models trained on chest CT images can diagnose COVID-19 infected people in a fast and automated process. To this end, we adopted advanced deep network architectures and proposed a transfer learning strategy using custom-sized input tailored for each deep architecture to achieve the best performance. We conducted extensive sets of experiments on two CT image datasets, namely, the SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan and the COVID19-CT. The results show superior performances for our models compared with previous studies. Our best models achieved average accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score values of 99.4%, 99.6%, 99.8%, 99.6%, and 99.4% on the SARS-CoV-2 dataset, and 92.9%, 91.3%, 93.7%, 92.2%, and 92.5% on the COVID19-CT dataset, respectively. For better interpretability of the results, we applied visualization techniques to provide visual explanations for the models' predictions. Feature visualizations of the learned features show well-separated clusters representing CT images of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases. Moreover, the visualizations indicate that our models are not only capable of identifying COVID-19 cases but also provide accurate localization of the COVID-19-associated regions, as indicated by well-trained radiologists.

The worldwide methods of artificial intelligence for detection and diagnosis of COVID-19

This chapter aims to present and review the early and recent initiatives, researches, and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and its methods on the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 virus. Common methods of AI will be presented on these applications including the traditional work on artificial neural networks and the recent approaches on machine learning and deep learning. In this chapter, a survey on many examples of the application of the AI methods on the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 will be highlighted including the early trials in China and the recent researches in other regions, beside most trials in all other regions of the World including Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa. This chapter will also show many comparisons of the explained approaches and trials based on methods, type of applications, and regions. Brief view of the future and expected applications and trends of AI in the area of detection and diagnosis of viruses and especially the COVID-19 are explained and discussed at the end of the chapter.