Pulmonary disease diagnosis using African vulture optimized weighted support vector machine approach

Pulmonary disease is a kind of disease that affects the lungs and other parts of the respiratory system and is mainly caused by smoking, asbestos, secondhand smoke, and other forms of air pollutants. Several types of pulmonary diseases are emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, asthma, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and so on. Pulmonary diseases are otherwise known as lung disorders and respiratory diseases. Pulmonary diseases are predicted by several methods using x-ray images and CT scan images. Some of the recent works predict only a specific disease, and optimal prediction is not yet achieved. Hence, we proposed a novel method known as African vulture optimization (AVO) algorithm-based weighted support vector machine approach (w-SVM). The proposed method in this article predicts emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, and normal kinds from the NIH chest x-ray dataset. The X-images are preprocessed after data acquisition to obtain the desired size and to remove undesirable noise. The preprocessed images are then sent into the SVM for feature extraction, and the AVO is used to improve the SVM so that a kernel function may be obtained. The proposed w-SVM effectively predicts the emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, and normal classes from the dataset. The experimental analyses are conducted and compared with existing works and concluded that the proposed work outperforms other approaches in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Matthews's correlation coefficient, prediction time, and modeling time.

Candidate Drugs for the Potential Treatment of Coronavirus Diseases

Coronaviruses (CoVs) infect humans and can cause lung, kidney, heart, brain, and intestinal infections that can range from mild to lethal type. Especially, β-coronaviruses causing severe-acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-1, the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV) are dangerous and can easily be transmitted from human to human. The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, has become a global crisis. In this situation, the development of anticoronaviral therapies is highly warranted. However, to date, no approved vaccines or drugs against CoV infections are available. In this chapter, we have made an effort to discuss molecular level targets for the development of therapies against coronavirus diseases, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2, targeting CoV replication and its life cycle. These targets include the spike glycoprotein and its host-receptors for viral entry, proteases that are essential for cleaving polyproteins to produce functional proteins, and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase for viral RNA replication.