Automated COVID-19 screening framework via Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Chest X-ray Medical Images

COVID-19 screening using chest X-rays plays a significant role in the early diagnosis of COVID-19 illness during the ongoing pandemic. Manually identifying this infection from chest X-ray films is a challenging and time-consuming technique due to time restrictions and the competence of radiologists. Also, the manual Covid-19 identification technique is made much more difficult and opaquer by the feature similarity between positive and negative chest X-ray images. Therefore, we propose an automated COVID-19 screening framework that utilizes artificial intelligence techniques with a transfer learning approach for COVID-19 diagnosis using chest X-ray images. Specifically, we employ the transfer learning concept for feature extraction before further processing with modified deep neural networks. Also, Grad-CAM visualization is used for our case study to support the predicted diagnosis. The results of the experiments on the publicly accessible dataset show that the convolutional neural network model, which is simple yet effective, performs significantly better than other deep learning techniques across all metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. © 2022 IEEE.

Multivariate time series analysis on variables that influence pandemic expansion

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on social and economic systems worldwide. The variance in the rapidly increasing number of illnesses and deaths in each country is primarily due to national policies and actions. As a result, governments and institutions need to get insights into the critical factors influencing COVID-19 future case counts to properly manage the adverse effects of pandemics and promptly prepare appropriate measures. Thus, in this paper, we conduct extensive experiments on the real-world covid-19 datasets to examine the important factors influencing in the pandemic growth. In particular, we perform an exploratory data analysis to get the statistic and characteristics of multivariate time-series data on pandemic dynamic. Also, we utilize a statistical measure such as Pearson correlation to compute the relations of the past on the future daily new cases. The experimental results demonstrate that some restrictions have a positive effect on daily new confirmed cases at the early stage of the local pandemic transmission. Also, the results show that the early trend of COVID-19 can be explained well by human mobility in various categories. Thus, our proposed framework can be served as a guideline for future pandemic prevention and control decision-making. © 2022 IEEE.

An Improved Face Mask-aware Recognition System Based on Deep Learning

Face mask detection and recognition have been incorporated into many applications in daily life, especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic. To mitigate the spread of coronavirus, wearing face masks has become commonplace. However, traditional face detection and recognition systems utilize main facial features such as the mouth, nose, and eyes to determine a person’s identity. Masks make facial detection and recognition tasks more challenging since certain parts of the face are concealed. Yet, how to improve the performance of existing systems with a face mask overlaid on the original face input images remains an open area of inquiry. In this study, we propose an improved face mask-aware recognition system named ‘MAR’ based on deep learning, which can tackle challenges in face mask detection and recognition. MAR consists of five main modules to handle various kinds of input images. We re-train the CenterNet model with our augmented face mask inputs to perform face mask detection and propose four variations on face mask recognition models based on the pre-trained ArcFace to handle facial recognition. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models on the VGGFACE2 dataset and achieve a high accuracy score on both detection and recognition tasks. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Beyond fear go viral: A machine learning study on infodemic detection during covid-19 pandemic

With the restrictions in our daily life activities under the current situation of the covid-19 pandemic worldwide, billions of people rely on social media platforms to share and obtaining covid-19 related news information. This made social media platforms easily be used as a source of myths and disinformation, which can cause severe public risks. It is thus of vital importance to constraint the spread of misinformation to the public. Although many works have shown promising results on the misinformation detection problem, only a few studies focus on the infodemic detection during the covid-19 pandemic, especially in the low resource language like Thai. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct extensive experiments on the real-world social network datasets to detect misinformation about covid-19 targeting both English and Thai languages. In particular, we perform an exploratory data analysis to get the statistic and characteristics of real and fake content. Also, we evaluate a series of three feature extraction, seven traditional machine learning, and eleven deep learning methods in detecting the fabricated content on social media platforms. The experimental results demonstrate that the transformer-based model significantly outperforms other deep learning and traditional machine learning methods in all metrics, including accuracy and F-measure. © 2022 IEEE.