A modified binary version of aphid-ant mutualism for feature selection: a COVID-19 case study

The speedy development of intelligent technologies and gadgets has led to a drastic increment of dimensions within the datasets in recent years. Dimension reduction algorithms, such as feature selection methods, are crucial to resolving this obstacle. Currently, metaheuristic algorithms have been extensively used in feature selection tasks due to their acceptable computational cost and performance. In this article, a binary-modified version of aphid-ant mutualism (AAM) called binary aphid-ant mutualism (BAAM) is introduced to solve the feature selection problems. Like AAM, in BAAM, the intensification and diversification mechanisms are modeled via the intercommunication of aphids with other colonies' members, including aphids and ants. However, unlike AAM, the number of colonies' members can change in each iteration based on the attraction power of their leaders. Moreover, the second- and third-best individuals can take the place of the ringleader and lead the pioneer colony. Also, to maintain the population diversity, prevent premature convergence, and facilitate information sharing between individuals of colonies including aphids and ants, a random cross-over operator is utilized in BAAM. The proposed BAAM is compared with five other feature selection algorithms using several evaluation metrics. Twelve medical and nine non-medical benchmark datasets with different numbers of features, instances, and classes from the University of California, Irvine and Arizona State University repositories are considered for all the experiments. Moreover, a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) dataset is used to validate the effectiveness of the BAAM in real-world applications. Based on the acquired outcomes, the proposed BAAM outperformed other comparative methods in terms of classification accuracy using various classifiers, including K nearest neighbor, kernel-based extreme learning machine, and multi-class support vector machine, choosing the most informative features, the best and mean fitness values and convergence speed in most cases. As an instance, in the COVID-19 dataset, BAAM achieved 96.53% average accuracy and selected the most informative feature subset.

A robust semi-fragile watermarking system using Pseudo-Zernike moments and dual tree complex wavelet transform for social media content authentication.

With the growing use of mobile devices and Online Social Networks (OSNs), sharing digital content, especially digital images is extremely high as well as popular. This made us convenient to handle the ongoing COVID-19 crisis which has brought about years of change in the sharing of digital content online. On the other hand, the digital image processing tools which are powerful enough to make the perfect image duplication compromises the privacy of the transmitted digital content. Therefore, content authentication, proof of ownership, and integrity of digital images are considered crucial problems in the world of digital that can be accomplished by employing a digital watermarking technique. On contrary, watermarking issues are to triumph trade-offs among imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. However, most existing systems are unable to handle the problem of tamper detection and recovery in case of intentional and unintentional attacks concerning these trade-offs. Also, the existing system fails to withstand the geometrical attacks. To resolve the above shortcomings, this proposed work offers a new multi-biometric based semi-fragile watermarking system using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) and pseudo-Zernike moments (PZM) for content authentication of social media data. In this research work, the DTCWT-based coefficients are used for achieving maximum embedding capacity. The Rotation and noise invariance properties of Pseudo Zernike moments make the system attain the highest level of robustness when compared to conventional watermarking systems. To achieve authentication and proof of identity, the watermarks of about four numbers are used for embedding as a replacement for a single watermark image in traditional systems. Among four watermarks, three are the biometric images namely Logo or unique image of the user, fingerprint biometric of the owner, and the metadata of the original media to be transmitted. In addition, to achieve the tamper localization property, the Pseudo Zernike moments of the original cover image are obtained as a feature vector and also embedded as a watermark. To attain a better level of security, each watermark is converted into Zernike moments, Arnold scrambled image, and SHA outputs respectively. Then, to sustain the trade-off among the watermarking parameters, the optimal embedding location is determined. Moreover, the watermarked image is also signed by the owner's other biometric namely digital signature, and converted into Public key matrix Pkm and embedded onto the higher frequency subband namely, HL of the 1-level DWT. The proposed system also accomplishes a multi-level authentication, among that the first level is attained by the decryption of the extracted multiple watermark images with the help of the appropriate decryption mechanism which is followed by the comparison of the authentication key which is extracted using the key which is regenerated at the receiver's end. The simulation outcomes evident that the proposed system shows superior performance towards content authentication, to most remarkable intentional and unintentional attacks among the existing watermarking systems.

A Novel Approach of Smart Contract based Distributed Ledger Technology using Deep Learning Techniques to Secure Medical Images

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is on-demand research area, generally utilized in most of medical applications. Security is a challenging problem in decentralized platform while handling with medical data or images. An effective deep learning-based blockchain framework with reduced transaction cost is proposed to enhance the security of medical images in IoMT. The proposed study involves four different stages like image acquisition, encryption, optimal key generation, secured storing. The input images initially are collected in the image acquisition stage. Then, the collected medical images are encrypted using coupled map lattice (CML). This encryption process assists to preserve the input medical images from the attackers. In order to provide more confidentiality to the encrypted images, optimal keys are generated using opposition-based sparrow search optimization (O-SSO) algorithm. These encrypted images are stored using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and smart contract based blockchain technology. This blockchain technology enhances the data integrity and authenticity and allows secured transmission of medical images. After decrypting the image, the disease is diagnosed in the classification stage using proposed Recurrent Generative Neural Network (RGNN) model. The proposed study used python tool for simulation analysis and the medical images are gathered from CT images in COVID-19 dataset. © 2022 IEEE.

PI control based on parameter space approach supported metaheuristic optimization algorithms and ANFIS in a natural gas combined cycle power plant

In this article, proportional‐integral (PI) control to ensure stable operation of a steam turbine in a natural gas combined cycle power plant is investigated, since active power control is very important due to the constantly changing power flow differences between supply and demand in power systems. For this purpose, an approach combining stability and optimization in PI control of a steam turbine in a natural gas combined cycle power plant is proposed. First, the regions of the PI controller, which will stabilize this power plant system in closed loop, are obtained by parameter space approach method. In the next step of this article, it is aimed to find the best parameter values of the PI controller, which stabilizes the system in the parameter space, with artificial intelligence‐based control and metaheuristic optimization. Through parameter space approach, the proposed optimization algorithms limit the search space to a stable region. The controller parameters are examined with Particle Swarm Optimization based PI, artificial bee colony based PI, genetic algorithm based PI, gray wolf optimization based PI, equilibrium optimization based PI, atom search optimization based PI, coronavirus herd immunity optimization based PI, and adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference system based PI (ANFIS‐PI) algorithms. The optimized PI controller parameters are applied to the system model, and the transient responses performances of the system output signals are compared. Comparison results of all these methods based on parameter space approach that guarantee stability for this power plant system are presented. According to the results, ANFIS‐ PI controller is better than other methods.

An Efficient COVID-19 Disease Outbreak Prediction Using BI-SSOA-TMLPNN and ARIMA

Globally, people's health and wealth are affected by the outbreak of the corona virus. It is a virus, which infects from common fever to severe acute respiratory syndrome. It has the potency to transmit from one person to another. It is established that this virus spread is augmenting speedily devoid of any symptoms. Therefore, the prediction of this outbreak situation with mathematical modelling is highly significant along with necessary. To produce informed decisions along with to adopt pertinent control measures, a number of outbreak prediction methodologies for COVID-19 are being utilized by officials worldwide. An effectual COVID-19 outbreaks' prediction by employing Squirrel Search Optimization Algorithm centric Tanh Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN) (SSOA-TMLPNN) along with Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) methodologies is proposed here. Initially, from the openly accessible sources, the input time series COVID-19 data are amassed. Then, pre-processing is performed for better classification outcomes after collecting the data. Next, by utilizing Sine-centered Empirical Mode Decomposition (S-EMD) methodology, the data decomposition is executed. Subsequently, the data are input to the Brownian motion Intense (BI) - SSOA-TMLPNN classifier. In this, the diseased, recovered, and death cases in the country are classified. After that, regarding the time-series data, the corona-virus's future outbreak is predicted by employing ARIMA. Afterwards, data visualization is conducted. Lastly, to evaluate the proposed model's efficacy, its outcomes are analogized with certain prevailing methodologies. The obtained outcomes revealed that the proposed methodology surpassed the other existing methodologies. © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company.

A Lightweight Depthwise Separable Convolution Neural Network for Screening Covid-19 Infection from Chest CT and X-ray Images

Because Covid-19 spreads swiftly in the community, an automatic detection system is required to prevent Covid-19 from spreading among humans as a rapid diagnostic tool. In this paper, we propose to employ Convolution Neural Networks to detect coronavirus-infected patients using Computed Tomography and X-ray images. In addition, we look into the transfer learning of a deep CNN model, DenseNet201 for detecting infection from CT and X-ray scans. Grid Search optimization is utilized to select ideal values for hyperparameters, while image augmentation is employed to increase the model's capacity to generalize. We further modify DenseNet architecture to incorporate a depthwise separable convolution for detecting coronavirus-infected patients utilizing CT and Xray images. Interestingly, all of the proposed models scored greater than 94% accuracy, which is equivalent to or higher than the accuracy of earlier deep learning models. Further, we demonstrate that depthwise separable convolution reduces the training time and computation complexity.

Medical Staff Scheduling Problem in Chinese Mobile Cabin Hospitals During Covid-19 Outbreak

In this paper, we discuss the medical staff scheduling problem in the Mobile Cabin Hospital (MCH) during the pandemic outbreaks. We investigate the working contents and patterns of the medical staff in the MCH of Wuhan during the outbreak of Covid-19. Two types of medical staff are considered in the paper, i.e., physicians and nurses. Besides, two different types of physicians are considered, i.e., the expert physician and general physician, and the duties vary among different types of physicians. The objective of the studied problem is to get the minimized number of medical staff required to accomplish all the duties in the MCH during the planning horizon. To solve the studied problem, a general Variable Neighborhood Search (general VNS) is proposed, involving the initialization, the correction strategy, the neighborhood structure, the shaking procedure, the local search procedure, and the move or not procedure. The mutation operation is adopted in the shaking procedure to make sure the diversity of the solution and three neighborhood structure operations are applied in the local search procedure to improve the quality of the solution. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Advanced Meta-Heuristics, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Feature Selectors for Efficient COVID-19 X-Ray Chest Image Classification.

The chest X-ray is considered a significant clinical utility for basic examination and diagnosis. The human lung area can be affected by various infections, such as bacteria and viruses, leading to pneumonia. Efficient and reliable classification method facilities the diagnosis of such infections. Deep transfer learning has been introduced for pneumonia detection from chest X-rays in different models. However, there is still a need for further improvements in the feature extraction and advanced classification stages. This paper proposes a classification method with two stages to classify different cases from the chest X-ray images based on a proposed Advanced Squirrel Search Optimization Algorithm (ASSOA). The first stage is the feature learning and extraction processes based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model named ResNet-50 with image augmentation and dropout processes. The ASSOA algorithm is then applied to the extracted features for the feature selection process. Finally, the Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) Neural Network's connection weights are optimized by the proposed ASSOA algorithm (using the selected features) to classify input cases. A Kaggle chest X-ray images (Pneumonia) dataset consists of 5,863 X-rays is employed in the experiments. The proposed ASSOA algorithm is compared with the basic Squirrel Search (SS) optimization algorithm, Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and Genetic Algorithm (GA) for feature selection to validate its efficiency. The proposed (ASSOA + MLP) is also compared with other classifiers, based on (SS + MLP), (GWO + MLP), and (GA + MLP), in performance metrics. The proposed (ASSOA + MLP) algorithm achieved a classification mean accuracy of (99.26%). The ASSOA + MLP algorithm also achieved a classification mean accuracy of (99.7%) for a chest X-ray COVID-19 dataset tested from GitHub. The results and statistical tests demonstrate the high effectiveness of the proposed method in determining the infected cases.