Blockchain-Based Deep CNN for Brain Tumor Prediction Using MRI Scans.

Brain tumors are nonlinear and present with variations in their size, form, and textural variation; this might make it difficult to diagnose them and perform surgical excision using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. The procedures that are currently available are conducted by radiologists, brain surgeons, and clinical specialists. Studying brain MRIs is laborious, error-prone, and time-consuming, but they nonetheless show high positional accuracy in the case of brain cells. The proposed convolutional neural network model, an existing blockchain-based method, is used to secure the network for the precise prediction of brain tumors, such as pituitary tumors, meningioma tumors, and glioma tumors. MRI scans of the brain are first put into pre-trained deep models after being normalized in a fixed dimension. These structures are altered at each layer, increasing their security and safety. To guard against potential layer deletions, modification attacks, and tempering, each layer has an additional block that stores specific information. Multiple blocks are used to store information, including blocks related to each layer, cloud ledger blocks kept in cloud storage, and ledger blocks connected to the network. Later, the features are retrieved, merged, and optimized utilizing a Genetic Algorithm and have attained a competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods using different ML classifiers.

Routing Protocols for Low Power and Lossy Networks in Internet of Things Applications.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications has taken the attention of several researchers. In an effort to provide interoperability and IPv6 support for the IoT devices, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the 6LoWPAN stack. However, the particularities and hardware limitations of networks associated with IoT devices lead to several challenges, mainly for routing protocols. On its stack proposal, IETF standardizes the RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) as the routing protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). RPL is a tree-based proactive routing protocol that creates acyclic graphs among the nodes to allow data exchange. Although widely considered and used by current applications, different recent studies have shown its limitations and drawbacks. Among these, it is possible to highlight the weak support of mobility and P2P traffic, restrictions for multicast transmissions, and lousy adaption for dynamic throughput. Motivated by the presented issues, several new solutions have emerged during recent years. The approaches range from the consideration of different routing metrics to an entirely new solution inspired by other routing protocols. In this context, this work aims to present an extensive survey study about routing solutions for IoT/LLN, not limited to RPL enhancements. In the course of the paper, the routing requirements of LLNs, the initial protocols, and the most recent approaches are presented. The IoT routing enhancements are divided according to its main objectives and then studied individually to point out its most important strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, as the main contribution, this study presents a comprehensive discussion about the considered approaches, identifying the still remaining open issues and suggesting future directions to be recognized by new proposals.

Management Platforms and Protocols for Internet of Things: A Survey.

Internet of Things (IoT) management systems require scalability, standardized communication, and context-awareness to achieve the management of connected devices with security and accuracy in real environments. Interoperability and heterogeneity between hardware and application layers are also critical issues. To attend to the network requirements and different functionalities, a dynamic and context-sensitive configuration management system is required. Thus, reference architectures (RAs) represent a basic architecture and the definition of key characteristics for the construction of IoT environments. Therefore, choosing the best technologies of the IoT management platforms and protocols through comparison and evaluation is a hard task, since they are difficult to compare due to their lack of standardization. However, in the literature, there are no management platforms focused on addressing all IoT issues. For this purpose, this paper surveys the available policies and solutions for IoT Network Management and devices. Among the available technologies, an evaluation was performed using features such as heterogeneity, scalability, supported technologies, and security. Based on this evaluation, the most promising technologies were chosen for a detailed performance evaluation study (through simulation and deployment in real environments). In terms of contributions, these protocols and platforms were studied in detail, the main features of each approach are highlighted and discussed, open research issues are identified as well as the lessons learned on the topic.

Cybersecurity and privacy issues for socially integrated mobile healthcare applications operating in a multi-cloud environment.

Social media has enabled information-sharing across massively large networks of people without spending much financial resources and time that are otherwise required in the print and electronic media. Mobile-based social media applications have overwhelmingly changed the information-sharing perspective. However, with the advent of such applications at an unprecedented scale, the privacy of the information is compromised to a larger extent if breach mitigation is not adequate. Since healthcare applications are also being developed for mobile devices so that they also benefit from the power of social media, cybersecurity privacy concerns for such sensitive applications have become critical. This article discusses the architecture of a typical mobile healthcare application, in which customized privacy levels are defined for the individuals participating in the system. It then elaborates on how the communication across a social network in a multi-cloud environment can be made more secure and private, especially for healthcare applications.

A Robust Deep Learning Approach for Position-Independent Smartphone-Based Human Activity Recognition.

Recently, modern smartphones equipped with a variety of embedded-sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, have been used as an alternative platform for human activity recognition (HAR), since they are cost-effective, unobtrusive and they facilitate real-time applications. However, the majority of the related works have proposed a position-dependent HAR, i.e., the target subject has to fix the smartphone in a pre-defined position. Few studies have tackled the problem of position-independent HAR. They have tackled the problem either using handcrafted features that are less influenced by the position of the smartphone or by building a position-aware HAR. The performance of these studies still needs more improvement to produce a reliable smartphone-based HAR. Thus, in this paper, we propose a deep convolution neural network model that provides a robust position-independent HAR system. We build and evaluate the performance of the proposed model using the RealWorld HAR public dataset. We find that our deep learning proposed model increases the overall performance compared to the state-of-the-art traditional machine learning method from 84% to 88% for position-independent HAR. In addition, the position detection performance of our model improves superiorly from 89% to 98%. Finally, the recognition time of the proposed model is evaluated in order to validate the applicability of the model for real-time applications.

Nature-Inspired Algorithm for Training Multilayer Perceptron Networks in e-health Environments for High-Risk Pregnancy Care.

Nature presents an infinite source of inspiration for computational models and paradigms, in particular for researchers associated with the area known as natural computing. The simultaneous optimization of the architectures and weights of artificial neural networks (ANNs) through biologically inspired algorithms is an interesting approach for obtaining efficient networks with relatively good generalization capabilities. This methodology constitutes a concordance between a low structural complexity model and low training error rates. Currently, complexity and high error rates are the leading issues faced in the development of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) for pregnancy care. Hence, in this paper the use of a biologically inspired technique, known as particle swarm optimization (PSO), is proposed for reducing the computational cost of the ANN-based method referred to as the multilayer perceptron (MLP), without reducing its precision rate. The results show that the PSO algorithm is able to improve computational model performance, showing lower validation error rates than the conventional approach. This technique can select the best parameters and provide an efficient solution for training the MLP algorithm. The proposed nature-inspired algorithm and its parameter adjustment method improve the performance and precision of CDSSs. This technique can be applied in electronic health (e-health) systems as a useful tool for handling uncertainty in the decision-making process related to high-risk pregnancy. The proposed method outperformed, on average, other approaches by 26.4% in terms of precision and 14.9% in terms of the true positive ratio (TPR), and showed a reduction of 35.4% in the false positive ratio (FPR). Furthermore, this method was superior to the MLP algorithm in terms of precision and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve by 2.3 and 10.2%, respectively, when applied to the delivery outcome for pregnant women.

Cost-Effective Encryption-Based Autonomous Routing Protocol for Efficient and Secure Wireless Sensor Networks.

The deployment of intelligent remote surveillance systems depends on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) composed of various miniature resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes. The development of routing protocols for WSNs is a major challenge because of their severe resource constraints, ad hoc topology and dynamic nature. Among those proposed routing protocols, the biology-inspired self-organized secure autonomous routing protocol (BIOSARP) involves an artificial immune system (AIS) that requires a certain amount of time to build up knowledge of neighboring nodes. The AIS algorithm uses this knowledge to distinguish between self and non-self neighboring nodes. The knowledge-building phase is a critical period in the WSN lifespan and requires active security measures. This paper proposes an enhanced BIOSARP (E-BIOSARP) that incorporates a random key encryption mechanism in a cost-effective manner to provide active security measures in WSNs. A detailed description of E-BIOSARP is presented, followed by an extensive security and performance analysis to demonstrate its efficiency. A scenario with E-BIOSARP is implemented in network simulator 2 (ns-2) and is populated with malicious nodes for analysis. Furthermore, E-BIOSARP is compared with state-of-the-art secure routing protocols in terms of processing time, delivery ratio, energy consumption, and packet overhead. The findings show that the proposed mechanism can efficiently protect WSNs from selective forwarding, brute-force or exhaustive key search, spoofing, eavesdropping, replaying or altering of routing information, cloning, acknowledgment spoofing, HELLO flood attacks, and Sybil attacks.