Inverted bell-curve-based ensemble of deep learning models for detection of COVID-19 from chest X-rays

Novel Coronavirus 2019 disease or COVID-19 is a viral disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The use of chest X-rays (CXRs) has become an important practice to assist in the diagnosis of COVID-19 as they can be used to detect the abnormalities developed in the infected patients’ lungs. With the fast spread of the disease, many researchers across the world are striving to use several deep learning-based systems to identify the COVID-19 from such CXR images. To this end, we propose an inverted bell-curve-based ensemble of deep learning models for the detection of COVID-19 from CXR images. We first use a selection of models pretrained on ImageNet dataset and use the concept of transfer learning to retrain them with CXR datasets. Then the trained models are combined with the proposed inverted bell curve weighted ensemble method, where the output of each classifier is assigned a weight, and the final prediction is done by performing a weighted average of those outputs. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets: the COVID-19 Radiography Database and the IEEE COVID Chest X-ray Dataset. The accuracy, F1 score and the AUC ROC achieved by the proposed method are 99.66%, 99.75% and 99.99%, respectively, in the first dataset, and, 99.84%, 99.81% and 99.99%, respectively, in the other dataset. Experimental results ensure that the use of transfer learning-based models and their combination using the proposed ensemble method result in improved predictions of COVID-19 in CXRs.

ACCU3RATE: A mobile health application rating scale based on user reviews.

BACKGROUND: Over the last decade, mobile health applications (mHealth App) have evolved exponentially to assess and support our health and well-being. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled mHealth app rating tool, called ACCU3RATE, which takes multidimensional measures such as user star rating, user review and features declared by the developer to generate the rating of an app. However, currently, there is very little conceptual understanding on how user reviews affect app rating from a multi-dimensional perspective. This study applies AI-based text mining technique to develop more comprehensive understanding of user feedback based on several important factors, determining the mHealth app ratings. METHOD: Based on the literature, six variables were identified that influence the mHealth app rating scale. These factors are user star rating, user text review, user interface (UI) design, functionality, security and privacy, and clinical approval. Natural Language Toolkit package is used for interpreting text and to identify the App users' sentiment. Additional considerations were accessibility, protection and privacy, UI design for people living with physical disability. Moreover, the details of clinical approval, if exists, were taken from the developer's statement. Finally, we fused all the inputs using fuzzy logic to calculate the new app rating score. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: ACCU3RATE concentrates on heart related Apps found in the play store and App gallery. The findings indicate the efficacy of the proposed method as opposed to the current device scale. This study has implications for both App developers and consumers who are using mHealth Apps to monitor and track their health. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed mHealth scale has shown excellent reliability as well as internal consistency of the scale, and high inter-rater reliability index. It has also been noticed that the fuzzy based rating scale, as in ACCU3RATE, matches more closely to the rating performed by experts.

Short-Term Prediction of COVID-19 Cases Using Machine Learning Models

The first case in Bangladesh of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported on 8 March 2020, with the number of confirmed cases rapidly rising to over 175,000 by July 2020. In the absence of effective treatment, an essential tool of health policy is the modeling and forecasting of the progress of the pandemic. We, therefore, developed a cloud-based machine learning short-term forecasting model for Bangladesh, in which several regression-based machine learning models were applied to infected case data to estimate the number of COVID-19-infected people over the following seven days. This approach can accurately forecast the number of infected cases daily by training the prior 25 days sample data recorded on our web application. The outcomes of these efforts could aid the development and assessment of prevention strategies and identify factors that most affect the spread of COVID-19 infection in Bangladesh.

COVID-19 Infection Detection from Chest X-Ray Images Using Hybrid Social Group Optimization and Support Vector Classifier.

A novel strain of Coronavirus, identified as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-2 (SARS-CoV-2), outbroke in December 2019 causing the novel Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19). Since its emergence, the virus has spread rapidly and has been declared a global pandemic. As of the end of January 2021, there are almost 100 million cases worldwide with over 2 million confirmed deaths. Widespread testing is essential to reduce further spread of the disease, but due to a shortage of testing kits and limited supply, alternative testing methods are being evaluated. Recently researchers have found that chest X-Ray (CXR) images provide salient information about COVID-19. An intelligent system can help the radiologists to detect COVID-19 from these CXR images which can come in handy at remote locations in many developing nations. In this work, we propose a pipeline that uses CXR images to detect COVID-19 infection. The features from the CXR images were extracted and the relevant features were then selected using Hybrid Social Group Optimization algorithm. The selected features were then used to classify the CXR images using a number of classifiers. The proposed pipeline achieves a classification accuracy of 99.65% using support vector classifier, which outperforms other state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms for binary and multi-class classification.

One-shot Cluster-Based Approach for the Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has infected over more than 28.3 million people around the globe and killed 913K people worldwide as on 11 September 2020. With this pandemic, to combat the spreading of COVID-19, effective testing methodologies and immediate medical treatments are much required. Chest X-rays are the widely available modalities for immediate diagnosis of COVID-19. Hence, automation of detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images using machine learning approaches is of greater demand. A model for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images is proposed in this paper. A novel concept of cluster-based one-shot learning is introduced in this work. The introduced concept has an advantage of learning from a few samples against learning from many samples in case of deep leaning architectures. The proposed model is a multi-class classification model as it classifies images of four classes, viz., pneumonia bacterial, pneumonia virus, normal, and COVID-19. The proposed model is based on ensemble of Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifiers at decision level. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been demonstrated through extensive experimentation on a publicly available dataset consisting of 306 images. The proposed cluster-based one-shot learning has been found to be more effective on GRNN and PNN ensembled model to distinguish COVID-19 images from that of the other three classes. It has also been experimentally observed that the model has a superior performance over contemporary deep learning architectures. The concept of one-shot cluster-based learning is being first of its kind in literature, expected to open up several new dimensions in the field of machine learning which require further researching for various applications.

Social Group Optimization-Assisted Kapur's Entropy and Morphological Segmentation for Automated Detection of COVID-19 Infection from Computed Tomography Images.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been declared a global pandemic. Due to its infection rate and severity, it has emerged as one of the major global threats of the current generation. To support the current combat against the disease, this research aims to propose a machine learning-based pipeline to detect COVID-19 infection using lung computed tomography scan images (CTI). This implemented pipeline consists of a number of sub-procedures ranging from segmenting the COVID-19 infection to classifying the segmented regions. The initial part of the pipeline implements the segmentation of the COVID-19-affected CTI using social group optimization-based Kapur's entropy thresholding, followed by k-means clustering and morphology-based segmentation. The next part of the pipeline implements feature extraction, selection, and fusion to classify the infection. Principle component analysis-based serial fusion technique is used in fusing the features and the fused feature vector is then employed to train, test, and validate four different classifiers namely Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function, and Decision Tree. Experimental results using benchmark datasets show a high accuracy (> 91%) for the morphology-based segmentation task; for the classification task, the KNN offers the highest accuracy among the compared classifiers (> 87%). However, this should be noted that this method still awaits clinical validation, and therefore should not be used to clinically diagnose ongoing COVID-19 infection.