Multilevel Thresholding of Grayscale Complex Crop Images using Minimum Cross Entropy

Crop image segmentation plays a key step in the field of agriculture. The crop images present near the environs have complex backgrounds and their grayscale histogram is mostly multimodal. Hence, multilevel segmentation of grayscale crop images may be helpful for better analysis. This paper proposed multilevel thresholding of grayscale crop images incorporated with minimum cross entropy as an objective function. The time complexity of this technique increases with the threshold levels. Hence, the coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) has been amalgamated with the objective function. This technique improves the image's accuracy. The CHIO is a humanbased algorithm that separates the foreground and background efficiently with multiple thresholds value. The simulation has been performed on grayscale crop images. It is. compared with bacterial foraging algorithm (BFO), and beta differential algorithm (BDE) to validate the accuracy. The results validates that the proposed method outperforms BFO and BDE for grayscale crop images in terms of fidelity parameters. The qualitative and quantitative results evidence the proficiency of suggested method. © 2023 IEEE.

A fuzzy fine-tuned model for COVID-19 diagnosis.

The COVID-19 disease pandemic spread rapidly worldwide and caused extensive human death and financial losses. Therefore, finding accurate, accessible, and inexpensive methods for diagnosing the disease has challenged researchers. To automate the process of diagnosing COVID-19 disease through images, several strategies based on deep learning, such as transfer learning and ensemble learning, have been presented. However, these techniques cannot deal with noises and their propagation in different layers. In addition, many of the datasets already being used are imbalanced, and most techniques have used binary classification, COVID-19, from normal cases. To address these issues, we use the blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator to filter out inappropriate data in the dataset. In order to increase the volume and diversity of the data, we merge two datasets. This combination of two datasets allows multi-class classification between the three states of normal, COVID-19, and types of pneumonia, including bacterial and viral types. A weighted multi-class cross-entropy is used to reduce the effect of data imbalance. In addition, a fuzzy fine-tuned Xception model is applied to reduce the noise propagation in different layers. Quantitative analysis shows that our proposed model achieves 96.60% accuracy on the merged test set, which is more accurate than previously mentioned state-of-the-art methods.

Emergency response scheme selection with T-spherical hesitant probabilistic fuzzy TODIM-TPZSG approach

This paper aims to investigate an innovative framework to handle emergency response scheme selection (ERSS) issues by integrating TODIM and TPZSG (two-person zero-sum game) methods under novel T-spherical hesitant probabilistic fuzzy set (T-SHPFS) environments. First, T-SHPFS is defined as an extension of the existing tools, which can depict the complex assessment information including several possible values of the various membership functions' degrees and the associated statistical uncertainty information. Concomitantly, T-SHPFS's normalization method, comparison laws, operation rules, cross-entropy measure and Hausdorff distance are explored. Then, an objective attribute weight determining model is constructed, considering the credibility of T-SHPF evaluations and the divergence degrees between attribute assessments simultaneously. Next, an integrated TODIM-TPZSG decision-making approach is developed to select the most desirable emergency response scheme. Finally, an illustrative example concerning the selection of the best medical waste disposal method during the COVID-19 epidemic is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed TODIM-TPZSG method. Sensitivity analysis and comparisons between the TODIM-TPZSG and other representative methods are also provided to demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed method. The results reveal that the developed T-SHPFSs give DMs more assessment freedom;the proposed TODIM-TPZSG approach considers the decision makers' psychological behaviors;the ranking results of the proposed method can reflect the specific divergence degrees among the alternatives;and the needed computation burden and computational complexity are low and less affected by the number of alternatives and criteria than most current ERSS methods. © 2023

A Bi-Level Vaccination Points Location Problem That Aims at Social Distancing and Equity for the Inhabitants

Designing efficient vaccination programs that consider the needs of the population is very relevant to prevent reoccurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government needs to provide vaccination points to give out vaccine doses to the population. In this paper, the authors analyze the location of vaccination points whilst addressing the inhabitants' preferences. Two objectives that prevent crowding of inhabitants are considered. The government aims for the minimum distance between located vaccination points is maximized, and for the number of inhabitants that attend the different vaccination points to be equitable. One of the key aspects of this problem is the assumption that inhabitants freely choose the located vaccination point to go. That decision affects the objectives of the government, since crowding at vaccination points may appear due to the inhabitants' decisions. This problem is modeled as a bi-objective, bi-level program, in which the upper level is associated to the government and the lower level to the inhabitants. To approximate the Pareto front of this problem, a cross-entropy metaheuristic is proposed. The algorithm incorporates criteria to handle two objective functions in a simultaneous manner, and optimally solve the lower-level problem for each government decision. The proposed algorithm is tested over an adapted set of benchmark instances and pertinent analysis of the results is included. An important managerial insight is that locating far vaccination points does not lead us to a more equitable allocation of inhabitants. © 2023 by the authors.

Uncertainty quantification in mechanistic epidemic models via cross-entropy approximate Bayesian computation.

This paper proposes a data-driven approximate Bayesian computation framework for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification of epidemic models, which incorporates two novelties: (i) the identification of the initial conditions by using plausible dynamic states that are compatible with observational data; (ii) learning of an informative prior distribution for the model parameters via the cross-entropy method. The new methodology's effectiveness is illustrated with the aid of actual data from the COVID-19 epidemic in Rio de Janeiro city in Brazil, employing an ordinary differential equation-based model with a generalized SEIR mechanistic structure that includes time-dependent transmission rate, asymptomatics, and hospitalizations. A minimization problem with two cost terms (number of hospitalizations and deaths) is formulated, and twelve parameters are identified. The calibrated model provides a consistent description of the available data, able to extrapolate forecasts over a few weeks, making the proposed methodology very appealing for real-time epidemic modeling.

Multi-modal image classification of COVID-19 cases using computed tomography and X-rays scans

COVID pandemic across the world and the emergence of new variants have intensified the need to identify COVID-19 cases quickly and efficiently. In this paper, a novel dual-mode multi-modal approach is presented to detect a covid patient. This has been done using the combination of image of the chest X-ray/CT scan and the clinical notes provided with the scan. Data augmentation techniques are used to extrapolate the dataset. Five different types of image and text models have been employed, including transfer learning. The binary cross entropy loss function and the adam optimizer are used to compile all of these models. The multi-modal is also tried out with existing pre-trained models such as: VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionResNetV2 and MobileNetV2. The final multi-modal gives an accuracy of 97.8% on the testing data. The study provides a different approach to identifying COVID-19 cases using just the scan images and the corresponding notes. © 2022

Assessing Hospitalization for SARS-CoV-2 Confirmed Cases by a Cross-Entropy Weighted Ensemble Classifier

The potential need of hospitalization for patients with acute respiratory COVID-19 infection caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus is a critical decision, as it has a direct effect on the potential response. In addition, it leads to an allocation of resources (bed, care, and medical personnel) that, given the pandemic, are limited. According to official information reported since March 1, 2020 and updated to June 30, 2021, an ensemble of classifiers weighted by the cross-entropy information measure is proposed. We considered data based on the knowledge of a set of features before a wide availability of vaccines or identified variants of the virus were present. The aim is to contribute toward the enhancement of a better-informed assessment of risk by the general population when exposed to the disease in the aforementioned period. The results show an improvement in the detection of cases susceptible to hospitalization, with an accuracy of 91.46%, and in a restrictive scenario, there is a preventive alert to patients, even though under the established criteria should not be admitted, to remain under monitoring to anticipate the evolution of the disease to a severe stage. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Causal Confirmation Measures: From Simpson's Paradox to COVID-19.

When we compare the influences of two causes on an outcome, if the conclusion from every group is against that from the conflation, we think there is Simpson's Paradox. The Existing Causal Inference Theory (ECIT) can make the overall conclusion consistent with the grouping conclusion by removing the confounder's influence to eliminate the paradox. The ECIT uses relative risk difference Pd = max(0, (R - 1)/R) (R denotes the risk ratio) as the probability of causation. In contrast, Philosopher Fitelson uses confirmation measure D (posterior probability minus prior probability) to measure the strength of causation. Fitelson concludes that from the perspective of Bayesian confirmation, we should directly accept the overall conclusion without considering the paradox. The author proposed a Bayesian confirmation measure b* similar to Pd before. To overcome the contradiction between the ECIT and Bayesian confirmation, the author uses the semantic information method with the minimum cross-entropy criterion to deduce causal confirmation measure Cc = (R - 1)/max(R, 1). Cc is like Pd but has normalizing property (between -1 and 1) and cause symmetry. It especially fits cases where a cause restrains an outcome, such as the COVID-19 vaccine controlling the infection. Some examples (about kidney stone treatments and COVID-19) reveal that Pd and Cc are more reasonable than D; Cc is more useful than Pd.

Diagnosis of Acute Respiratory Syndromes from X-Rays using Customised CNN Architecture

This work presents the diagnosis of various acute respiratory syndromes using customized CNN architecture from X-ray images. Complications of viral pneumonia results in influenza and COVID-19. The respiratory syndromes occur due to bacterial and fungal infections as well. Hence, the objective was to use customized CNN architecture to perform a multi-class pneumonia classification. VGG16 architecture is carefully trained for pneumonia classification with ReLU activation and categorical cross-entropy loss function. The proposed model is efficient and robust and yielded 97.87% accuracy on the train set and 90% accuracy on the test set. The experimental results suggest that the model efficiently detects all sorts of lung diseases, including COVID 19. © 2022 IEEE.

SVD-CLAHE boosting and balanced loss function for Covid-19 detection from an imbalanced Chest X-Ray dataset.

Covid-19 disease has had a disastrous effect on the health of the global population, for the last two years. Automatic early detection of Covid-19 disease from Chest X-Ray (CXR) images is a very crucial step for human survival against Covid-19. In this paper, we propose a novel data-augmentation technique, called SVD-CLAHE Boosting and a novel loss function Balanced Weighted Categorical Cross Entropy (BWCCE), in order to detect Covid 19 disease efficiently from a highly class-imbalanced Chest X-Ray image dataset. Our proposed SVD-CLAHE Boosting method is comprised of both oversampling and under-sampling methods. First, a novel Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based contrast enhancement and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) methods are employed for oversampling the data in minor classes. Simultaneously, a Random Under Sampling (RUS) method is incorporated in major classes, so that the number of images per class will be more balanced. Thereafter, Balanced Weighted Categorical Cross Entropy (BWCCE) loss function is proposed in order to further reduce small class imbalance after SVD-CLAHE Boosting. Experimental results reveal that ResNet-50 model on the augmented dataset (by SVD-CLAHE Boosting), along with BWCCE loss function, achieved 95% F1 score, 94% accuracy, 95% recall, 96% precision and 96% AUC, which is far better than the results by other conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models like InceptionV3, DenseNet-121, Xception etc. as well as other existing models like Covid-Lite and Covid-Net. Hence, our proposed framework outperforms other existing methods for Covid-19 detection. Furthermore, the same experiment is conducted on VGG-19 model in order to check the validity of our proposed framework. Both ResNet-50 and VGG-19 model are pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. We publicly shared our proposed augmented dataset on Kaggle website (https://www.kaggle.com/tr1gg3rtrash/balanced-augmented-covid-cxr-dataset), so that any research community can widely utilize this dataset. Our code is available on GitHub website online (https://github.com/MrinalTyagi/SVD-CLAHE-and-BWCCE).

Comparison of Convolutional Neural Networks and Transformers for the Classification of Images of COVID-19, Pneumonia and Healthy Individuals as Observed with Computed Tomography.

In this work, the performance of five deep learning architectures in classifying COVID-19 in a multi-class set-up is evaluated. The classifiers were built on pretrained ResNet-50, ResNet-50r (with kernel size 5×5 in the first convolutional layer), DenseNet-121, MobileNet-v3 and the state-of-the-art CaiT-24-XXS-224 (CaiT) transformer. The cross entropy and weighted cross entropy were minimised with Adam and AdamW. In total, 20 experiments were conducted with 10 repetitions and obtained the following metrics: accuracy (Acc), balanced accuracy (BA), F1 and F2 from the general Fß macro score, Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC), sensitivity (Sens) and specificity (Spec) followed by bootstrapping. The performance of the classifiers was compared by using the Friedman-Nemenyi test. The results show that less complex architectures such as ResNet-50, ResNet-50r and DenseNet-121 were able to achieve better generalization with rankings of 1.53, 1.71 and 3.05 for the Matthew Correlation Coefficient, respectively, while MobileNet-v3 and CaiT obtained rankings of 3.72 and 5.0, respectively.

FLOSSC: A Computer-Aided Tool for Detecting Corona Virus Infections through Chest X-Ray Images

Artificial intelligence has radically altered the world, and it continues to progress at an alarming rate as time passes. AI applications include healthcare and medical solutions, illness diagnostics, agriculture, constructing security infrastructures, autonomous cars, intelligent systems, industrial production, robotics, and much more. COVID19 is a deadly virus that first appeared in China in 2019 and soon spread over the world. By 2020, the globe had witnessed a tremendous epidemic, with countless lives lost as a result of this dreadful virus, which has now become a severe health danger. Furthermore, in 2021, several nations will be infected with new Covid19 forms that are more deadly and spread quicker. The research describes the proposed methodology for diagnosing covid-19 and pneumonia from human chest X-ray images using transfer learning with Resnet-18 and VGG-16 neural networks. The focal loss function was also used to homogenize the imbalanced dataset, which included X-ray images of normal, pneumonia, and Covid-19 patients. The purpose is to assess the performance and accuracy of fine-tuned neural networks after including Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Focal Loss (FL) functions. However, when we used our Resnet-18 and VGG-16 neural networks with BCE and FL functions, the VGG-16 with FL function outperformed all other models, with training and validation accuracy of 98.37 percent and 97.37 percent, correspondingly.

Fuzzy Information Discrimination Measures and Their Application to Low Dimensional Embedding Construction in the UMAP Algorithm.

Dimensionality reduction techniques are often used by researchers in order to make high dimensional data easier to interpret visually, as data visualization is only possible in low dimensional spaces. Recent research in nonlinear dimensionality reduction introduced many effective algorithms, including t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP), dimensionality reduction technique based on triplet constraints (TriMAP), and pairwise controlled manifold approximation (PaCMAP), aimed to preserve both the local and global structure of high dimensional data while reducing the dimensionality. The UMAP algorithm has found its application in bioinformatics, genetics, genomics, and has been widely used to improve the accuracy of other machine learning algorithms. In this research, we compare the performance of different fuzzy information discrimination measures used as loss functions in the UMAP algorithm while constructing low dimensional embeddings. In order to achieve this, we derive the gradients of the considered losses analytically and employ the Adam algorithm during the loss function optimization process. From the conducted experimental studies we conclude that the use of either the logarithmic fuzzy cross entropy loss without reduced repulsion or the symmetric logarithmic fuzzy cross entropy loss with sufficiently large neighbor count leads to better global structure preservation of the original multidimensional data when compared to the loss function used in the original UMAP algorithm implementation.

An approach to categorize chest X-ray images using sparse categorical cross entropy

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is the most recent threat to global health. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing, computed tomography (CT) scans, and chest X-ray (CXR) images are being used to identify Coronavirus, one of the most serious community viruses of the twenty-first century. Because CT scans and RT-PCR analyses are not available in most health divisions, CXR images are typically the most time-saving and cost-effective tool for physicians in making decisions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become increasingly popular because of recent technical advancements. The goal of this project is to combine machine learning, deep learning, and the health-care sector to create a categorization technique for detecting the Coronavirus and other respiratory disorders. The three conditions evaluated in this study were COVID-19, viral Pneumonia, and normal lungs. Using X-ray pictures, this research developed a sparse categorical cross-entropy technique for recognizing all three categories. The proposed model had a training accuracy of 91% and a training loss of 0.63, as well as a validation accuracy of 81% and a validation loss of 0.7108. © 2021 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Diagnosing Covid-19 chest x-rays with a lightweight truncated DenseNet with partial layer freezing and feature fusion.

Due to the unforeseen turn of events, our world has undergone another global pandemic from a highly contagious novel coronavirus named COVID-19. The novel virus inflames the lungs similarly to Pneumonia, making it challenging to diagnose. Currently, the common standard to diagnose the virus's presence from an individual is using a molecular real-time Reverse-Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) test from fluids acquired through nasal swabs. Such a test is difficult to acquire in most underdeveloped countries with a few experts that can perform the test. As a substitute, the widely available Chest X-Ray (CXR) became an alternative to rule out the virus. However, such a method does not come easy as the virus still possesses unknown characteristics that even experienced radiologists and other medical experts find difficult to diagnose through CXRs. Several studies have recently used computer-aided methods to automate and improve such diagnosis of CXRs through Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on computer vision and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN), which some require heavy processing costs and other tedious methods to produce. Therefore, this work proposed the Fused-DenseNet-Tiny, a lightweight DCNN model based on a densely connected neural network (DenseNet) truncated and concatenated. The model trained to learn CXR features based on transfer learning, partial layer freezing, and feature fusion. Upon evaluation, the proposed model achieved a remarkable 97.99 % accuracy, with only 1.2 million parameters and a shorter end-to-end structure. It has also shown better performance than some existing studies and other massive state-of-the-art models that diagnosed COVID-19 from CXRs.

Channels' Confirmation and Predictions' Confirmation: From the Medical Test to the Raven Paradox.

After long arguments between positivism and falsificationism, the verification of universal hypotheses was replaced with the confirmation of uncertain major premises. Unfortunately, Hemple proposed the Raven Paradox. Then, Carnap used the increment of logical probability as the confirmation measure. So far, many confirmation measures have been proposed. Measure F proposed by Kemeny and Oppenheim among them possesses symmetries and asymmetries proposed by Elles and Fitelson, monotonicity proposed by Greco et al., and normalizing property suggested by many researchers. Based on the semantic information theory, a measure b* similar to F is derived from the medical test. Like the likelihood ratio, measures b* and F can only indicate the quality of channels or the testing means instead of the quality of probability predictions. Furthermore, it is still not easy to use b*, F, or another measure to clarify the Raven Paradox. For this reason, measure c* similar to the correct rate is derived. Measure c* supports the Nicod Criterion and undermines the Equivalence Condition, and hence, can be used to eliminate the Raven Paradox. An example indicates that measures F and b* are helpful for diagnosing the infection of Novel Coronavirus, whereas most popular confirmation measures are not. Another example reveals that all popular confirmation measures cannot be used to explain that a black raven can confirm "Ravens are black" more strongly than a piece of chalk. Measures F, b*, and c* indicate that the existence of fewer counterexamples is more important than more positive examples' existence, and hence, are compatible with Popper's falsification thought.