Prediction of viral-host interactions of COVID-19 by computational methods.

Experimental approaches are currently used to determine viral-host interactions, but these approaches are both time-consuming and costly. For these reasons, computational-based approaches are recommended. In this study, using computational-based approaches, viral-host interactions of SARS-CoV-2 virus and human proteins were predicted. The study consists of four different stages; in the first stage viral and host protein sequences were obtained. In the second stage, protein sequences were converted into numerical expressions by various protein mapping methods. These methods are entropy-based, AVL-tree, FIBHASH, binary encoding, CPNR, PAM250, BLOSUM62, Atchley factors, Meiler parameters, EIIP, AESNN1, Miyazawa energies, Micheletti potentials, Z-scale, and hydrophobicity. In the third stage, a deep learning model was designed and BiLSTM was used for this. In the last stage, the protein sequences were classified, and the viral-host interactions were predicted. The performances of protein mapping methods were determined by accuracy, F1-score, specificity, sensitivity, and AUC scores. According to the classification results, the best classification process was obtained by the entropy-based method. With this method, 94.74% accuracy, and 0.95 AUC score were calculated. Then, the most successful classification process was performed with the Z-scale and 91.23% accuracy, and 0.96 AUC score were obtained. Although other protein mapping methods are not as efficient as Z-scale and entropy-based methods, they have achieved successful classification. AVL-tree, FIBHASH, binary encoding, CPNR, PAM250, BLOSUM62, Atchley factors, Meiler parameters and AESNN1 methods showed over 80% accuracy, F1-score, and AUC score. Accuracy scores of EIIP, Miyazawa energies, Micheletti potentials and hydrophobicity methods remained below 80%. When the results were examined in general, it was observed that the computational approaches were successful in predicting viral-host interactions between SARS-CoV-2 virus and human proteins.

A Novel Protein Mapping Method for Predicting the Protein Interactions in COVID-19 Disease by Deep Learning.

The new type of corona virus (SARS-COV-2) emerging in Wuhan, China has spread rapidly to the world and has become a pandemic. In addition to having a significant impact on daily life, it also shows its effect in different areas, including public health and economy. Currently, there is no vaccine or antiviral drug available to prevent the COVID-19 disease. Therefore, determination of protein interactions of new types of corona virus is vital in clinical studies, drug therapy, identification of preclinical compounds and protein functions. Protein-protein interactions are important to examine protein functions and pathways involved in various biological processes and to determine the cause and progression of diseases. Various high-throughput experimental methods have been used to identify protein-protein interactions in organisms, yet, there is still a huge gap in specifying all possible protein interactions in an organism. In addition, since the experimental methods used include cloning, labeling, affinity purification mass spectrometry, the processes take a long time. Determining these interactions with artificial intelligence-based methods rather than experimental approaches may help to identify protein functions faster. Thus, protein-protein interaction prediction using deep-learning algorithms has been employed in conjunction with experimental method to explore new protein interactions. However, to predict protein interactions with artificial intelligence techniques, protein sequences need to be mapped. There are various types and numbers of protein-mapping methods in the literature. In this study, we wanted to contribute to the literature by proposing a novel protein-mapping method based on the AVL tree. The proposed method was inspired by the fast search performance on the dictionary structure of AVL tree and was used to verify the protein interactions between SARS-COV-2 virus and human. First, protein sequences were mapped by both the proposed method and various protein-mapping methods. Then, the mapped protein sequences were normalized and classified by bidirectional recurrent neural networks. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with accuracy, f1-score, precision, recall, and AUC scores. Our results indicated that our mapping method predicts the protein interactions between SARS-COV-2 virus proteins and human proteins at an accuracy of 97.76%, precision of 97.60%, recall of 98.33%, f1-score of 79.42%, and with AUC 89% in average.

Convolutional capsnet: A novel artificial neural network approach to detect COVID-19 disease from X-ray images using capsule networks.

Coronavirus is an epidemic that spreads very quickly. For this reason, it has very devastating effects in many areas worldwide. It is vital to detect COVID-19 diseases as quickly as possible to restrain the spread of the disease. The similarity of COVID-19 disease with other lung infections makes the diagnosis difficult. In addition, the high spreading rate of COVID-19 increased the need for a fast system for the diagnosis of cases. For this purpose, interest in various computer-aided (such as CNN, DNN, etc.) deep learning models has been increased. In these models, mostly radiology images are applied to determine the positive cases. Recent studies show that, radiological images contain important information in the detection of coronavirus. In this study, a novel artificial neural network, Convolutional CapsNet for the detection of COVID-19 disease is proposed by using chest X-ray images with capsule networks. The proposed approach is designed to provide fast and accurate diagnostics for COVID-19 diseases with binary classification (COVID-19, and No-Findings), and multi-class classification (COVID-19, and No-Findings, and Pneumonia). The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 97.24%, and 84.22% for binary class, and multi-class, respectively. It is thought that the proposed method may help physicians to diagnose COVID-19 disease and increase the diagnostic performance. In addition, we believe that the proposed method may be an alternative method to diagnose COVID-19 by providing fast screening.

Comparison of deep learning approaches to predict COVID-19 infection.

The SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) has become a pandemic and has expanded all over the world. Because of increasing number of cases day by day, it takes time to interpret the laboratory findings thus the limitations in terms of both treatment and findings are emerged. Due to such limitations, the need for clinical decisions making system with predictive algorithms has arisen. Predictive algorithms could potentially ease the strain on healthcare systems by identifying the diseases. In this study, we perform clinical predictive models that estimate, using deep learning and laboratory data, which patients are likely to receive a COVID-19 disease. To evaluate the predictive performance of our models, precision, F1-score, recall, AUC, and accuracy scores calculated. Models were tested with 18 laboratory findings from 600 patients and validated with 10 fold cross-validation and train-test split approaches. The experimental results indicate that our predictive models identify patients that have COVID-19 disease at an accuracy of 86.66%, F1-score of 91.89%, precision of 86.75%, recall of 99.42%, and AUC of 62.50%. It is observed that predictive models trained on laboratory findings could be used to predict COVID-19 infection, and can be helpful for medical experts to prioritize the resources correctly. Our models (available at (https://github.com/burakalakuss/COVID-19-Clinical)) can be employed to assists medical experts in validating their initial laboratory findings, and can also be used for clinical prediction studies.