CoviFL: Edge-Assisted Federated Learning for Remote COVID-19 Detection in an AIoMT Framework

Detection of COVID-19 has been a global challenge due to the lack of proper resources across all regions. Recently, research has been conducted for non-invasive testing of COVID-19 using an individual's cough audio as input to deep learning models. However, these methods do not pay sufficient attention to resource and infrastructure constraints for real-life practical deployment and the lack of focus on maintaining user data privacy makes these solutions unsuitable for large-scale use. We propose a resource-efficient CoviFL framework using an AIoMT approach for remote COVID-19 detection while maintaining user data privacy. Federated learning has been used to decentralize the CoviFL CNN model training and test the COVID-19 status of users with an accuracy of 93.01 % on portable AIoMT edge devices. Experiments on real-world datasets suggest that the proposed CoviFL solution is promising for large-scale deployment even in resource and infrastructure-constrained environments making it suitable for remote COVID-19 detection. © 2022 IEEE.

Rapid Lung Ultrasound COVID-19 Severity Scoring with Resource-Efficient Deep Feature Extraction

Artificial intelligence-based analysis of lung ultrasound imaging has been demonstrated as an effective technique for rapid diagnostic decision support throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such techniques can require days- or weeks-long training processes and hyper-parameter tuning to develop intelligent deep learning image analysis models. This work focuses on leveraging ‘off-the-shelf’ pre-trained models as deep feature extractors for scoring disease severity with minimal training time. We propose using pre-trained initializations of existing methods ahead of simple and compact neural networks to reduce reliance on computational capacity. This reduction of computational capacity is of critical importance in time-limited or resource-constrained circumstances, such as the early stages of a pandemic. On a dataset of 49 patients, comprising over 20,000 images, we demonstrate that the use of existing methods as feature extractors results in the effective classification of COVID-19-related pneumonia severity while requiring only minutes of training time. Our methods can achieve an accuracy of over 0.93 on a 4-level severity score scale and provides comparable per-patient region and global scores compared to expert annotated ground truths. These results demonstrate the capability for rapid deployment and use of such minimally-adapted methods for progress monitoring, patient stratification and management in clinical practice for COVID-19 patients, and potentially in other respiratory diseases. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.