COVID-CheXNet: hybrid deep learning framework for identifying COVID-19 virus in chest X-rays images.

The outbreaks of Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic have increased the pressure on healthcare and medical systems worldwide. The timely diagnosis of infected patients is a critical step to limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. The chest radiography imaging has shown to be an effective screening technique in diagnosing the COVID-19 epidemic. To reduce the pressure on radiologists and control of the epidemic, fast and accurate a hybrid deep learning framework for diagnosing COVID-19 virus in chest X-ray images is developed and termed as the COVID-CheXNet system. First, the contrast of the X-ray image was enhanced and the noise level was reduced using the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and Butterworth bandpass filter, respectively. This was followed by fusing the results obtained from two different pre-trained deep learning models based on the incorporation of a ResNet34 and high-resolution network model trained using a large-scale dataset. Herein, the parallel architecture was considered, which provides radiologists with a high degree of confidence to discriminate between the healthy and COVID-19 infected people. The proposed COVID-CheXNet system has managed to correctly and accurately diagnose the COVID-19 patients with a detection accuracy rate of 99.99%, sensitivity of 99.98%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, F1-score of 99.99%, MSE of 0.011%, and RMSE of 0.012% using the weighted sum rule at the score-level. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed COVID-CheXNet system are established along with the possibility of using it in real clinical centers for fast diagnosis and treatment supplement, with less than 2 s per image to get the prediction result.

Novel Crow Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Selection Approach for Optimal Deep Learning COVID-19 Diagnostic Model.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, computerized COVID-19 diagnosis studies are proliferating. The diversity of COVID-19 models raises the questions of which COVID-19 diagnostic model should be selected and which decision-makers of healthcare organizations should consider performance criteria. Because of this, a selection scheme is necessary to address all the above issues. This study proposes an integrated method for selecting the optimal deep learning model based on a novel crow swarm optimization algorithm for COVID-19 diagnosis. The crow swarm optimization is employed to find an optimal set of coefficients using a designed fitness function for evaluating the performance of the deep learning models. The crow swarm optimization is modified to obtain a good selected coefficient distribution by considering the best average fitness. We have utilized two datasets: the first dataset includes 746 computed tomography images, 349 of them are of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the other 397 are of healthy individuals, and the second dataset are composed of unimproved computed tomography images of the lung for 632 positive cases of COVID-19 with 15 trained and pretrained deep learning models with nine evaluation metrics are used to evaluate the developed methodology. Among the pretrained CNN and deep models using the first dataset, ResNet50 has an accuracy of 91.46% and a F1-score of 90.49%. For the first dataset, the ResNet50 algorithm is the optimal deep learning model selected as the ideal identification approach for COVID-19 with the closeness overall fitness value of 5715.988 for COVID-19 computed tomography lung images case considered differential advancement. In contrast, the VGG16 algorithm is the optimal deep learning model is selected as the ideal identification approach for COVID-19 with the closeness overall fitness value of 5758.791 for the second dataset. Overall, InceptionV3 had the lowest performance for both datasets. The proposed evaluation methodology is a helpful tool to assist healthcare managers in selecting and evaluating the optimal COVID-19 diagnosis models based on deep learning.

Remote ischaemic conditioning: defining critical criteria for success-report from the 11th Hatter Cardiovascular Workshop.

The Hatter Cardiovascular Institute biennial workshop, originally scheduled for April 2020 but postponed for 2 years due to the Covid pandemic, was organised to debate and discuss the future of Remote Ischaemic Conditioning (RIC). This evolved from the large multicentre CONDI-2-ERIC-PPCI outcome study which demonstrated no additional benefit when using RIC in the setting of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). The workshop discussed how conditioning has led to a significant and fundamental understanding of the mechanisms preventing cell death following ischaemia and reperfusion, and the key target cyto-protective pathways recruited by protective interventions, such as RIC. However, the obvious need to translate this protection to the clinical setting has not materialised largely due to the disconnect between preclinical and clinical studies. Discussion points included how to adapt preclinical animal studies to mirror the patient presenting with an acute myocardial infarction, as well as how to refine patient selection in clinical studies to account for co-morbidities and ongoing therapy. These latter scenarios can modify cytoprotective signalling and need to be taken into account to allow for a more robust outcome when powered appropriately. The workshop also discussed the potential for RIC in other disease settings including ischaemic stroke, cardio-oncology and COVID-19. The workshop, therefore, put forward specific classifications which could help identify so-called responders vs. non-responders in both the preclinical and clinical settings.

Automated System for Identifying COVID-19 Infections in Computed Tomography Images Using Deep Learning Models.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel disease that affects healthcare on a global scale and cannot be ignored because of its high fatality rate. Computed tomography (CT) images are presently being employed to assist doctors in detecting COVID-19 in its early stages. In several scenarios, a combination of epidemiological criteria (contact during the incubation period), the existence of clinical symptoms, laboratory tests (nucleic acid amplification tests), and clinical imaging-based tests are used to diagnose COVID-19. This method can miss patients and cause more complications. Deep learning is one of the techniques that has been proven to be prominent and reliable in several diagnostic domains involving medical imaging. This study utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN), stacked autoencoder, and deep neural network to develop a COVID-19 diagnostic system. In this system, classification undergoes some modification before applying the three CT image techniques to determine normal and COVID-19 cases. A large-scale and challenging CT image dataset was used in the training process of the employed deep learning model and reporting their final performance. Experimental outcomes show that the highest accuracy rate was achieved using the CNN model with an accuracy of 88.30%, a sensitivity of 87.65%, and a specificity of 87.97%. Furthermore, the proposed system has outperformed the current existing state-of-the-art models in detecting the COVID-19 virus using CT images.