Research on ship tracking and control for COVID-19 epidemic prevention based on multi-source information fusion

With the normalization of COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control, big data analysis technology has become an important support for scientific and accurate prevention and control. As a transportation means for water traffic, ship management plays an important role in the whole COVID-19 epidemic prevention system. It is the key to improve the efficiency of water traffic epidemic prevention to identify and track the key ships. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of key ships identification and tracking in epidemic prevention and control, a real-time ship tracking and control platform for epidemic prevention is proposed. By fusing the multi-source information, the platform changes the epidemic prevention way of water traffic from the manual query method to the data analysis method. The platform has been applied in the local maritime regulatory department, and it improves the identifying, tracking and control efficiency of key ships. © 2022 IEEE.

SNIF-DFA: A Signal Processing and Information Fusion Method for Smart Gua Sha Device

Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, there are more needs for remote patient care especially in rehabilitation requiring direct contact. However, traditional Chinese rehabilitation technologies, such as gua sha, often need to be implemented by well-trained professionals. To automate and professionalize gua sha, it is necessary to record the nursing and rehabilitation process and reproduce the process in developing smart gua sha equipment. This paper proposes a new signal processing and sensor fusion method for developing a piece of smart gua sha equipment. A novel stabilized numerical integration method based on information fusion and detrended fluctuation analysis (SNIF-DFA) is performed to obtain the velocity and displacement information during gua sha operation. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional numerical integration method with respect to information accuracy and realizes accurate position calculations. This is of great significance in developing robots or automated machines that reproduce the nursing and rehabilitation operations of medical professionals. IEEE

IoT-Based Epidemic Monitoring via Improved Gated Recurrent Unit Model

During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, non-contact health monitoring and human activity detection by various sensors have attracted tremendous attention. Robot monitoring will result in minimizing the life threat to health providers during the COVID-19 pandemic period. How to improve the performance and generalization of the monitoring model is a critical but challenging task. This paper constructs an epidemic monitoring architecture based on multi-sensor information fusion and applies it in medical robots’ services, such as patient-care, disinfection, garbage disposal, etc. We propose a gated recurrent unit model based on a genetic algorithm (GA-GRU)to realize the effective feature selection and improve the effectiveness and accuracy of the localization, navigation, and activity monitoring for indoor wireless sensor networks (WSNs). By using two GRU layers in the GA-GRU, we improve the generalization capability in multiple WSNs. All these advantages of GA-GRU make it outperform other representative algorithms in a variety of evaluation metrics. The experiments on the WSNs verify that the proposed GA-GRU leads to successful runs and provides optimal performances. These results suggest the GA-GRU method may be preferable for epidemic monitoring in medicine and allied areas with particular relation to the control of the epidemic or pandemic such as COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods for audiovisual recognition of people in masks

In the modern world, wearing masks, respirators and facial clothes is very popular. The novel coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019 has also significantly increased the applicability of masks in public places. The most affective person recognition methods are identification by face image and voice recording. However, person recognition systems are facing new challenges due to masks covering most of the subject’s face. Existence of new problems for intelligent systems determines the relevance of masked person recognition systems research, therefore the subject of the study is the systems and datasets for masked people recognition. The article discusses analysis of the main approaches to masked people identity recognition: masked face recognition, masked voice recognition and audiovisual methods. In addition, this article includes comparative analysis of images and recordings datasets required for person recognition systems. The results of the study showed that among the methods that use face images the most effective are methods based on convolutional neural networks and the mask area feature extraction. The methods of x-vector analysis showed a slight drop in efficiency which allows us to conclude that they are applicable in the tasks of recognizing the identity of a speaker in a mask. Results of this study help with formulation of requirements for perspective masked person recognition systems and determining directions for further research. © 2022, ITMO University. All rights reserved.

LCFNet: A Lightweight Context Fusion Network for COVID-19 Segmentation

The rapid and uncontrollable spread of COVID-19 has seriously threatened global public health. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 is the main key to control and manage the epidemic. COVID-19 segmentation can provide great insights to accelerate clinical decisions. COVID-19 segmentation based on deep learning method has attracted extensive research in the field of medical image analysis. However, most existing networks are heavyweight networks, which causes structural redundancy and expensive computational cost. Moreover, the segmentation problem of low-contrast COVID-19 image and the obscure boundary between the infected area and normal tissues affects accuracy of segmentation. To solve the problems, we propose a lightweight contextual information fusion network, LCFNet, for COVID-19 segmentation. We introduce a contextual information fusion strategy combining multiple global pyramid guidance (GPG) with scale-aware pyramid fusion (SAPF) module and deep supervision (DS) module, which can capture more fine-grained image features. We conduct experiments on two COVID-19 datasets. We perform the ablation studies, demonstrating the effectiveness of key components of the proposed method. Compared with traditional segmentation methods, LCFNet model match more consistently with the ground-truth boundary, which shows the superiority of the proposed method. Moreove, LCFNet has 1.68M parameters, which demonstrates the robustness of the proposed method. Our proposed method can further induce the number of model parameters. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach has achieved significant improvements and is also superior to other segmentation methods. © 2022 SPIE.

A deep neural networks-based fusion model for COVID-19 rumor detection from online social media

Purpose The COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, which has caused large number of deaths and huge economic losses. These losses are not only caused by the virus but also by the related rumors. Nowadays, online social media are quite popular, where billions of people express their opinions and propagate information. Rumors about COVID-19 posted on online social media usually spread rapidly;it is hard to analyze and detect rumors only by artificial processing. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel model called the Topic-Comment-based Rumor Detection model (TopCom) to detect rumors as soon as possible. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted COVID-19 rumor detection from Sina Weibo, one of the most widely used Chinese online social media. The authors constructed a dataset about COVID-19 from January 1 to June 30, 2020 with a web crawler, including both rumor and non-rumors. The rumor detection task is regarded as a binary classification problem. The proposed TopCom model exploits the topical memory networks to fuse latent topic information with original microblogs, which solves the sparsity problems brought by short-text microblogs. In addition, TopCom fuses comments with corresponding microblogs to further improve the performance. Findings Experimental results on a publicly available dataset and the proposed COVID dataset have shown superiority and efficiency compared with baselines. The authors further randomly selected microblogs posted from July 1-31, 2020 for the case study, which also shows the effectiveness and application prospects for detecting rumors about COVID-19 automatically. Originality/value The originality of TopCom lies in the fusion of latent topic information of original microblogs and corresponding comments with DNNs-based models for the COVID-19 rumor detection task, whose value is to help detect rumors automatically in a short time.

MMFC: MULTI-MODAL FUSION CASCADE FRAMEWORK FOR COVID-19 DISEASE COURSE CLASSIFICATION

Many deep learning methods have been proposed for the diagnosis of COVID-19 since the global pandemic. However, few studies have focused on the disease course classification of COVID-19, which is crucial for radiologists to determine treatment plans. This paper proposes a Multi-Modal Fusion Cascade (MMFC) framework for this task, which can make the most of multi-modal information, including CT image and bio-information (laboratory examination, clinical characterization, etc.). The proposed framework consists of two parts: Bio-Visual Feature Learning Module (BFL) and Joint Decision Module (JD). Firstly, BFL learns the discriminative visual features from the mediastinal window with the assistance of bio-information. According to the official Treatment Protocol of China, the bio-information is chosen and helps the BFL better extract the images’ bio-visual features and then obtained a disease course classification result based on CT images. Secondly, JD uses bio-information again and fuses the confidence of BFL’s result to make the joint decision. Experimental results show that our framework significantly improves accuracy and sensitivity compared to the baseline. © 2021 IEEE

Multi-modal Information Fusion-powered Regional Covid-19 Epidemic Forecasting

With the current raging spread of the COVID19, early forecasting of the future epidemic trend is of great significance to public health security. The COVID-19 is virulent and spreads widely. An outbreak in one region often triggers the spread of others, and regions with relatively close association would show a strong correlation in the spread of the epidemic. In the real world, many factors affect the spread of the outbreak between regions. These factors exist in the form of multimodal data, such as the time-series data of the epidemic, the geographic relationship, and the strength of social contacts between regions. However, most of the current work only uses historical epidemic data or single-modal geographic location data to forecast the spread of the epidemic, ignoring the correlation and complementarity in multi-modal data and its impact on the disease spread between regions. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal InformatioN fusion COVID-19 Epidemic forecasting model (MINE). It fuses inter-regional and intra-regional multi-modal information to capture the temporal and spatial relevance of the COVID-19 spread in different regions. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best results compared to state-of-art methods on benchmark datasets. © 2021 IEEE.

COVID19-HPSMP : COVID-19 adopted Hybrid and Parallel deep information fusion framework for stock price movement prediction.

The novel of coronavirus (COVID-19) has suddenly and abruptly changed the world as we knew at the start of the 3rd decade of the 21st century. Particularly, COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected financial econometrics and stock markets across the globe. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)-based prediction models, especially Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures, have the potential to act as a key enabling factor to reduce the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and future possible ones on financial markets. In this regard, first, a unique COVID-19 related PRIce MOvement prediction ( COVID19 PRIMO ) dataset is introduced in this paper, which incorporates effects of social media trends related to COVID-19 on stock market price movements. Afterwards, a novel hybrid and parallel DNN-based framework is proposed that integrates different and diversified learning architectures. Referred to as the COVID-19 adopted Hybrid and Parallel deep fusion framework for Stock price Movement Prediction ( COVID19-HPSMP ), innovative fusion strategies are used to combine scattered social media news related to COVID-19 with historical mark data. The proposed COVID19-HPSMP consists of two parallel paths (hence hybrid), one based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Local/Global Attention modules, and one integrated CNN and Bi-directional Long Short term Memory (BLSTM) path. The two parallel paths are followed by a multilayer fusion layer acting as a fusion center that combines localized features. Performance evaluations are performed based on the introduced COVID19 PRIMO dataset illustrating superior performance of the proposed framework.

A novel fusion-based deep learning model for sentiment analysis of COVID-19 tweets.

Undoubtedly, coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused one of the biggest challenges of all times. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 150 million infected cases and one million deaths globally as of May 5, 2021. Understanding the sentiment of people expressed in their social media comments can help in monitoring, controlling, and ultimately eradicating the disease. This is a sensitive matter as the threat of infectious disease significantly affects the way people think and behave in various ways. In this study, we proposed a novel method based on the fusion of four deep learning and one classical supervised machine learning model for sentiment analysis of coronavirus-related tweets from eight countries. Also, we analyzed coronavirus-related searches using Google Trends to better understand the change in the sentiment pattern at different times and places. Our findings reveal that the coronavirus attracted the attention of people from different countries at different times in varying intensities. Also, the sentiment in their tweets is correlated to the news and events that occurred in their countries including the number of newly infected cases, number of recoveries and deaths. Moreover, common sentiment patterns can be observed in various countries during the spread of the virus. We believe that different social media platforms have great impact on raising people's awareness about the importance of this disease as well as promoting preventive measures among people in the community.

An analysis model of diagnosis and treatment for COVID-19 pandemic based on medical information fusion.

Exploring the complicated relationships underlying the clinical information is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Currently, few approaches are mature enough to show operational impact. Based on electronic medical records (EMRs) of 570 COVID-19 inpatients, we proposed an analysis model of diagnosis and treatment for COVID-19 based on the machine learning algorithms and complex networks. Introducing the medical information fusion, we constructed the heterogeneous information network to discover the complex relationships among the syndromes, symptoms, and medicines. We generated the numerical symptom (medicine) embeddings and divided them into seven communities (syndromes) using the combination of Skip-Gram model and Spectral Clustering (SC) algorithm. After analyzing the symptoms and medicine networks, we identified the key factors using six evaluation metrics of node centrality. The experimental results indicate that the proposed analysis model is capable of discovering the critical symptoms and symptom distribution for diagnosis; the key medicines and medicine combinations for treatment. Based on the latest COVID-19 clinical guidelines, this model could result in the higher accuracy results than the other representative clustering algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed model is able to provide tremendously valuable guidance and help the physicians to combat the COVID-19.