Forecasting major impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on country-driven sectors: challenges, lessons, and future roadmap.

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has produced a global health calamity that has a profound impact on the way of perceiving the world and everyday lives. This has appeared as the greatest threat of the time for the entire world in terms of its impact on human mortality rate and many other societal fronts or driving forces whose estimations are yet to be known. Therefore, this study focuses on the most crucial sectors that are severely impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular reference to India. Considered based on their direct link to a country's overall economy, these sectors include economic and financial, educational, healthcare, industrial, power and energy, oil market, employment, and environment. Based on available data about the pandemic and the above-mentioned sectors, as well as forecasted data about COVID-19 spreading, four inclusive mathematical models, namely-exponential smoothing, linear regression, Holt, and Winters, are used to analyse the gravity of the impacts due to this COVID-19 outbreak which is also graphically visualized. All the models are tested using data such as COVID-19 infection rate, number of daily cases and deaths, GDP of India, and unemployment. Comparing the obtained results, the best prediction model is presented. This study aims to evaluate the impact of this pandemic on country-driven sectors and recommends some strategies to lessen these impacts on a country's economy.

A Framework of Intelligent Mental Health Monitoring in Smart Cities and Societies

In any smart city and society, the citizens' mental health is one of the utmost concerns. Nowadays, people from different sectors of our community face a severe mental health threat due to the prolonged pandemic of COVID-19. Depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours, and posttraumatic stress disorder are widespread terms nowadays for students, health care workers, jobless people, etc. And Machine Learning (ML), image processing, expert systems, Internet of Things (IoT) are performing an essential function in the significant acceleration of the automation process within the healthcare industry. Therefore, this article aims to address the problem of preventing mental health disorders by early predicting individuals using the developed web portal "Mind Turner”;and by integrating the mentioned emerging tools in this way, later chronic mental health disorders can be avoided. We used the Random Forest Classifier to detect stress levels from the Question-Answer-based assessment, and SVM is used to detect facial emotions. Finally, both are combined using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic to predict the probable mental health of a person, i.e. acute depression, moderate depression and not depressed. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of IETE Journal of Research is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Classification of Mental Stress from Wearable Physiological Sensors Using Image-Encoding-Based Deep Neural Network.

The human body is designed to experience stress and react to it, and experiencing challenges causes our body to produce physical and mental responses and also helps our body to adjust to new situations. However, stress becomes a problem when it continues to remain without a period of relaxation or relief. When a person has long-term stress, continued activation of the stress response causes wear and tear on the body. Chronic stress results in cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression, and diabetes, and thus is deeply detrimental to our health. Previous researchers have performed a lot of work regarding mental stress, using mainly machine-learning-based approaches. However, most of the methods have used raw, unprocessed data, which cause more errors and thereby affect the overall model performance. Moreover, corrupt data values are very common, especially for wearable sensor datasets, which may also lead to poor performance in this regard. This paper introduces a deep-learning-based method for mental stress detection by encoding time series raw data into Gramian Angular Field images, which results in promising accuracy while detecting the stress levels of an individual. The experiment has been conducted on two standard benchmark datasets, namely WESAD (wearable stress and affect detection) and SWELL. During the studies, testing accuracies of 94.8% and 99.39% are achieved for the WESAD and SWELL datasets, respectively. For the WESAD dataset, chest data are taken for the experiment, including the data of sensor modalities such as three-axis acceleration (ACC), electrocardiogram (ECG), body temperature (TEMP), respiration (RESP), etc.

Application of Mathematical Modeling in Prediction of COVID-19 Transmission Dynamics.

The entire world has been affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 since early 2020. Human carriers are largely the spreaders of this new disease, and it spreads much faster compared to previously identified coronaviruses and other flu viruses. Although vaccines have been invented and released, it will still be a challenge to overcome this disease. To save lives, it is important to better understand how the virus is transmitted from one host to another and how future areas of infection can be predicted. Recently, the second wave of infection has hit multiple countries, and governments have implemented necessary measures to tackle the spread of the virus. We investigated the three phases of COVID-19 research through a selected list of mathematical modeling articles. To take the necessary measures, it is important to understand the transmission dynamics of the disease, and mathematical modeling has been considered a proven technique in predicting such dynamics. To this end, this paper summarizes all the available mathematical models that have been used in predicting the transmission of COVID-19. A total of nine mathematical models have been thoroughly reviewed and characterized in this work, so as to understand the intrinsic properties of each model in predicting disease transmission dynamics. The application of these nine models in predicting COVID-19 transmission dynamics is presented with a case study, along with detailed comparisons of these models. Toward the end of the paper, key behavioral properties of each model, relevant challenges and future directions are discussed.

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.

Deep transfer learning for COVID-19 detection and infection localization with superpixel based segmentation.

The evolution the novel corona virus disease (COVID-19) as a pandemic has inflicted several thousand deaths per day endangering the lives of millions of people across the globe. In addition to thermal scanning mechanisms, chest imaging examinations provide valuable insights to the detection of this virus, diagnosis and prognosis of the infections. Though Chest CT and Chest X-ray imaging are common in the clinical protocols of COVID-19 management, the latter is highly preferred, attributed to its simple image acquisition procedure and mobility of the imaging mechanism. However, Chest X-ray images are found to be less sensitive compared to Chest CT images in detecting infections in the early stages. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework to enhance the diagnostic values of these images for improved clinical outcomes. It is realized as a variant of the conventional SqueezeNet classifier with segmentation capabilities, which is trained with deep features extracted from the Chest X-ray images of a standard dataset for binary and multi class classification. The binary classifier achieves an accuracy of 99.53% in the discrimination of COVID-19 and Non COVID-19 images. Similarly, the multi class classifier performs classification of COVID-19, Viral Pneumonia and Normal cases with an accuracy of 99.79%. This model called the COVID-19 Super pixel SqueezNet (COVID-SSNet) performs super pixel segmentation of the activation maps to extract the regions of interest which carry perceptual image features and constructs an overlay of the Chest X-ray images with these regions. The proposed classifier model adds significant value to the Chest X-rays for an integral examination of the image features and the image regions influencing the classifier decisions to expedite the COVID-19 treatment regimen.

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.

TClustVID: A novel machine learning classification model to investigate topics and sentiment in COVID-19 tweets.

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV2 infection, varies greatly in its severity but presents with serious respiratory symptoms with vascular and other complications, particularly in older adults. The disease can be spread by both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected individuals. Uncertainty remains over key aspects of the virus infectiousness (particularly the newly emerging variants) and the disease has had severe economic impacts globally. For these reasons, COVID-19 is the subject of intense and widespread discussion on social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. These public forums substantially influence public opinions and in some cases can exacerbate the widespread panic and misinformation spread during the crisis. Thus, this work aimed to design an intelligent clustering-based classification and topic extracting model named TClustVID that analyzes COVID-19-related public tweets to extract significant sentiments with high accuracy. We gathered COVID-19 Twitter datasets from the IEEE Dataport repository and employed a range of data preprocessing methods to clean the raw data, then applied tokenization and produced a word-to-index dictionary. Thereafter, different classifications were employed on these datasets which enabled the exploration of the performance of traditional classification and TClustVID. Our analysis found that TClustVID showed higher performance compared to traditional methodologies that are determined by clustering criteria. Finally, we extracted significant topics from the clusters, split them into positive, neutral and negative sentiments, and identified the most frequent topics using the proposed model. This approach is able to rapidly identify commonly prevailing aspects of public opinions and attitudes related to COVID-19 and infection prevention strategies spreading among different populations.

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.