A Framework for Susceptibility Analysis of Brain Tumours Based on Uncertain Analytical Cum Algorithmic Modeling.

Susceptibility analysis is an intelligent technique that not only assists decision makers in assessing the suspected severity of any sort of brain tumour in a patient but also helps them diagnose and cure these tumours. This technique has been proven more useful in those developing countries where the available health-based and funding-based resources are limited. By employing set-based operations of an arithmetical model, namely fuzzy parameterised complex intuitionistic fuzzy hypersoft set (FPCIFHSS), this study seeks to develop a robust multi-attribute decision support mechanism for appraising patients' susceptibility to brain tumours. The FPCIFHSS is regarded as more reliable and generalised for handling information-based uncertainties because its complex components and fuzzy parameterisation are designed to deal with the periodic nature of the data and dubious parameters (sub-parameters), respectively. In the proposed FPCIFHSS-susceptibility model, some suitable types of brain tumours are approximated with respect to the most relevant symptoms (parameters) based on the expert opinions of decision makers in terms of complex intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (CIFNs). After determining the fuzzy parameterised values of multi-argument-based tuples and converting the CIFNs into fuzzy values, the scores for such types of tumours are computed based on a core matrix which relates them with fuzzy parameterised multi-argument-based tuples. The sub-intervals within [0, 1] denote the susceptibility degrees of patients corresponding to these types of brain tumours. The susceptibility of patients is examined by observing the membership of score values in the sub-intervals.

COVID-CheXNet: hybrid deep learning framework for identifying COVID-19 virus in chest X-rays images.

The outbreaks of Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic have increased the pressure on healthcare and medical systems worldwide. The timely diagnosis of infected patients is a critical step to limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. The chest radiography imaging has shown to be an effective screening technique in diagnosing the COVID-19 epidemic. To reduce the pressure on radiologists and control of the epidemic, fast and accurate a hybrid deep learning framework for diagnosing COVID-19 virus in chest X-ray images is developed and termed as the COVID-CheXNet system. First, the contrast of the X-ray image was enhanced and the noise level was reduced using the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and Butterworth bandpass filter, respectively. This was followed by fusing the results obtained from two different pre-trained deep learning models based on the incorporation of a ResNet34 and high-resolution network model trained using a large-scale dataset. Herein, the parallel architecture was considered, which provides radiologists with a high degree of confidence to discriminate between the healthy and COVID-19 infected people. The proposed COVID-CheXNet system has managed to correctly and accurately diagnose the COVID-19 patients with a detection accuracy rate of 99.99%, sensitivity of 99.98%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, F1-score of 99.99%, MSE of 0.011%, and RMSE of 0.012% using the weighted sum rule at the score-level. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed COVID-CheXNet system are established along with the possibility of using it in real clinical centers for fast diagnosis and treatment supplement, with less than 2 s per image to get the prediction result.

Event-Specific Transmission Forecasting of SARS-CoV-2 in a Mixed-Mode Ventilated Office Room Using an ANN.

The emerging novel variants and re-merging old variants of SARS-CoV-2 make it critical to study the transmission probability in mixed-mode ventilated office environments. Artificial neural network (ANN) and curve fitting (CF) models were created to forecast the R-Event. The R-Event is defined as the anticipated number of new infections that develop in particular events occurring over the course of time in any defined space. In the spring and summer of 2022, real-time data for an office environment were collected in India in a mixed-mode ventilated office space in a composite climate. The performances of the proposed CF and ANN models were compared with respect to traditional statistical indicators, such as the correlation coefficient, RMSE, MAE, MAPE, NS index, and a20-index, in order to determine the merit of the two approaches. Thirteen input features, namely the indoor temperature (TIn), indoor relative humidity (RHIn), area of opening (AO), number of occupants (O), area per person (AP), volume per person (VP), CO2 concentration (CO2), air quality index (AQI), outer wind speed (WS), outdoor temperature (TOut), outdoor humidity (RHOut), fan air speed (FS), and air conditioning (AC), were selected to forecast the R-Event as the target. The main objective was to determine the relationship between the CO2 level and R-Event, ultimately producing a model for forecasting infections in office building environments. The correlation coefficients for the CF and ANN models in this case study were 0.7439 and 0.9999, respectively. This demonstrates that the ANN model is more accurate in R-Event prediction than the curve fitting model. The results show that the proposed ANN model is reliable and significantly accurate in forecasting the R-Event values for mixed-mode ventilated offices.

The Assessment of Medication Effects in Omicron Patients through MADM Approach Based on Distance Measures of Interval-Valued Fuzzy Hypersoft Set.

Omicron, so-called COVID-2, is an emerging variant of COVID-19 which is proved to be the most fatal amongst the other variants such as alpha, beta and gamma variants (α, ß, γ variants) due to its stern and perilous nature. It has caused hazardous effects globally in a very short span of time. The diagnosis and medication of Omicron patients are both challenging undertakings for researchers (medical experts) due to the involvement of various uncertainties and the vagueness of its altering behavior. In this study, an algebraic approach, interval-valued fuzzy hypersoft set (iv-FHSS), is employed to assess the conditions of patients after the application of suitable medication. Firstly, the distance measures between two iv-FHSSs are formulated with a brief description some of its properties, then a multi-attribute decision-making framework is designed through the proposal of an algorithm. This framework consists of three phases of medication. In the first phase, the Omicron-diagnosed patients are shortlisted and an iv-FHSS is constructed for such patients and then they are medicated. Another iv-FHSS is constructed after their first medication. Similarly, the relevant iv-FHSSs are constructed after second and third medications in other phases. The distance measures of these post-medication-based iv-FHSSs are computed with pre-medication-based iv-FHSS and the monotone pattern of distance measures are analyzed. It is observed that a decreasing pattern of computed distance measures assures that the medication is working well and the patients are recovering. In case of an increasing pattern, the medication is changed and the same procedure is repeated for the assessment of its effects. This approach is reliable due to the consideration of parameters (symptoms) and sub parameters (sub symptoms) jointly as multi-argument approximations.

MEF: Multidimensional Examination Framework for Prioritization of COVID-19 Severe Patients and Promote Precision Medicine Based on Hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approaches.

Effective prioritization plays critical roles in precision medicine. Healthcare decisions are complex, involving trade-offs among numerous frequently contradictory priorities. Considering the numerous difficulties associated with COVID-19, approaches that could triage COVID-19 patients may help in prioritizing treatment and provide precise medicine for those who are at risk of serious disease. Prioritizing a patient with COVID-19 depends on a variety of examination criteria, but due to the large number of these biomarkers, it may be hard for medical practitioners and emergency systems to decide which cases should be given priority for treatment. The aim of this paper is to propose a Multidimensional Examination Framework (MEF) for the prioritization of COVID-19 severe patients on the basis of combined multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. In contrast to the existing literature, the MEF has not considered only a single dimension of the examination factors; instead, the proposed framework included different multidimensional examination criteria such as demographic, laboratory findings, vital signs, symptoms, and chronic conditions. A real dataset that consists of data from 78 patients with different examination criteria was used as a base in the construction of Multidimensional Evaluation Matrix (MEM). The proposed framework employs the CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method to identify objective weights and importance for multidimensional examination criteria. Furthermore, the VIKOR (VIekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje) method is utilized to prioritize COVID-19 severe patients. The results based on the CRITIC method showed that the most important examination criterion for prioritization is COVID-19 patients with heart disease, followed by cough and nasal congestion symptoms. Moreover, the VIKOR method showed that Patients 8, 3, 9, 59, and 1 are the most urgent cases that required the highest priority among the other 78 patients. Finally, the proposed framework can be used by medical organizations to prioritize the most critical COVID-19 patient that has multidimensional examination criteria and to promptly give appropriate care for more precise medicine.

Identification of Cardiac Patients Based on the Medical Conditions Using Machine Learning Models.

Chronic diseases are the most severe health concern today, and heart disease is one of them. Coronary artery disease (CAD) affects blood flow to the heart, and it is the most common type of heart disease which causes a heart attack. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking significantly increase the risk of heart disease. To estimate the risk of heart disease is a complex process because it depends on various input parameters. The linear and analytical models failed due to their assumptions and limited dataset. The existing studies have used medical data for classification purposes, which help to identify the exact condition of the patient, but no one has developed any correlation equation which can be directly used to identify the patients. In this paper, mathematical models have been developed using the medical database of patients suffering from heart disease. Curve fitting and artificial neural network (ANN) have been applied to model the condition of patients to find out whether the patient is suffering from heart disease or not. The developed curve fitting model can identify the cardiac patient with accuracy, having a coefficient of determination (R 2-value) of 0.6337 and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.293 at a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.3688, and the ANN-based model can identify the cardiac patient with accuracy having a coefficient of determination (R 2-value) of 0.8491 and MAE of 0.20 at RMSE of 0.267, it has been found that ANN provides superior mathematical modeling than curve fitting method in identifying the heart disease patients. Medical professionals can utilize this model to identify heart patients without any angiography or computed tomography angiography test.

Identifying defective solar cells in electroluminescence images using deep feature representations.

Electroluminescence (EL) imaging is a technique for acquiring images of photovoltaic (PV) modules and examining them for surface defects. Analysis of EL images has been manually performed by visual inspection of images by experts. This manual procedure is tedious, time-consuming, subjective, and requires deep expert knowledge. In this work, a hybrid and fully-automated classification system is developed for detecting different types of defects in EL images. The system fuses the deep feature representations extracted from two different deep learning models (Inception-V3 and ResNet50) to form more discriminative feature vectors. These feature vectors are then fed into the classifier layer to assign them into one of different types of defects. A large-scale, challenging solar cells dataset composed of 2,624 EL images was used to assess the performance of the proposed system in both the binary classification (functional vs defective) task and multi-class classification (functional, mild, moderate, and severe) task. The proposed system has managed to detect the correct defect type with less than 1 s per image with an accuracy rate of 98.15% and 95.35% in the binary classification and multi-classification task, respectively.

Automated System for Identifying COVID-19 Infections in Computed Tomography Images Using Deep Learning Models.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel disease that affects healthcare on a global scale and cannot be ignored because of its high fatality rate. Computed tomography (CT) images are presently being employed to assist doctors in detecting COVID-19 in its early stages. In several scenarios, a combination of epidemiological criteria (contact during the incubation period), the existence of clinical symptoms, laboratory tests (nucleic acid amplification tests), and clinical imaging-based tests are used to diagnose COVID-19. This method can miss patients and cause more complications. Deep learning is one of the techniques that has been proven to be prominent and reliable in several diagnostic domains involving medical imaging. This study utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN), stacked autoencoder, and deep neural network to develop a COVID-19 diagnostic system. In this system, classification undergoes some modification before applying the three CT image techniques to determine normal and COVID-19 cases. A large-scale and challenging CT image dataset was used in the training process of the employed deep learning model and reporting their final performance. Experimental outcomes show that the highest accuracy rate was achieved using the CNN model with an accuracy of 88.30%, a sensitivity of 87.65%, and a specificity of 87.97%. Furthermore, the proposed system has outperformed the current existing state-of-the-art models in detecting the COVID-19 virus using CT images.

A modern deep learning framework in robot vision for automated bean leaves diseases detection.

The bean leaves can be affected by several diseases, such as angular leaf spots and bean rust, which can cause big damage to bean crops and decrease their productivity. Thus, treating these diseases in their early stages can improve the quality and quantity of the product. Recently, several robotic frameworks based on image processing and artificial intelligence have been used to treat these diseases in an automated way. However, incorrect diagnosis of the infected leaf can lead to the use of chemical treatments for normal leaf thereby the issue will not be solved, and the process may be costly and harmful. To overcome these issues, a modern deep learning framework in robot vision for the early detection of bean leaves diseases is proposed. The proposed framework is composed of two primary stages, which detect the bean leaves in the input images and diagnosing the diseases within the detected leaves. The U-Net architecture based on a pre-trained ResNet34 encoder is employed for detecting the bean leaves in the input images captured in uncontrolled environmental conditions. In the classification stage, the performance of five diverse deep learning models (e.g., Densenet121, ResNet34, ResNet50, VGG-16, and VGG-19) is assessed accurately to identify the healthiness of bean leaves. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using a challenging and extensive dataset composed of 1295 images of three different classes (e.g., Healthy, Angular Leaf Spot, and Bean Rust). In the binary classification task, the best performance is achieved using the Densenet121 model with a CAR of 98.31%, Sensitivity of 99.03%, Specificity of 96.82%, Precision of 98.45%, F1-Score of 98.74%, and AUC of 100%. The higher CAR of 91.01% is obtained using the same model in the multi-classification task, with less than 2 s per image to produce the final decision.

A fully automated cell segmentation and morphometric parameter system for quantifying corneal endothelial cell morphology.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Corneal endothelial cell abnormalities may be associated with a number of corneal and systemic diseases. Damage to the endothelial cells can significantly affect corneal transparency by altering hydration of the corneal stroma, which can lead to irreversible endothelial cell pathology requiring corneal transplantation. To date, quantitative analysis of endothelial cell abnormalities has been manually performed by ophthalmologists using time consuming and highly subjective semi-automatic tools, which require an operator interaction. We developed and applied a fully-automated and real-time system, termed the Corneal Endothelium Analysis System (CEAS) for the segmentation and computation of endothelial cells in images of the human cornea obtained by in vivo corneal confocal microscopy. METHODS: First, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) Band-pass filter is applied to reduce noise and enhance the image quality to make the cells more visible. Secondly, endothelial cell boundaries are detected using watershed transformations and Voronoi tessellations to accurately quantify the morphological parameters of the human corneal endothelial cells. The performance of the automated segmentation system was tested against manually traced ground-truth images based on a database consisting of 40 corneal confocal endothelial cell images in terms of segmentation accuracy and obtained clinical features. In addition, the robustness and efficiency of the proposed CEAS system were compared with manually obtained cell densities using a separate database of 40 images from controls (n = 11), obese subjects (n = 16) and patients with diabetes (n = 13). RESULTS: The Pearson correlation coefficient between automated and manual endothelial cell densities is 0.9 (p < 0.0001) and a Bland-Altman plot shows that 95% of the data are between the 2SD agreement lines. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the CEAS system, and the possibility of utilizing it in a real world clinical setting to enable rapid diagnosis and for patient follow-up, with an execution time of only 6 seconds per image.

A fully automatic nerve segmentation and morphometric parameter quantification system for early diagnosis of diabetic neuropathy in corneal images.

Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy (DPN) is one of the most common types of diabetes that can affect the cornea. An accurate analysis of the nerve structures can assist the early diagnosis of this disease. This paper proposes a robust, fast and fully automatic nerve segmentation and morphometric parameter quantification system for corneal confocal microscope images. The segmentation part consists of three main steps. First, a preprocessing step is applied to enhance the visibility of the nerves and remove noise using anisotropic diffusion filtering, specifically a Coherence filter followed by Gaussian filtering. Second, morphological operations are applied to remove unwanted objects in the input image such as epithelial cells and small nerve segments. Finally, an edge detection step is applied to detect all the nerves in the input image. In this step, an efficient algorithm for connecting discontinuous nerves is proposed. In the morphometric parameters quantification part, a number of features are extracted, including thickness, tortuosity and length of nerve, which may be used for the early diagnosis of diabetic polyneuropathy and when planning Laser-Assisted in situ Keratomileusis (LASIK) or Photorefractive keratectomy (PRK). The performance of the proposed segmentation system is evaluated against manually traced ground-truth images based on a database consisting of 498 corneal sub-basal nerve images (238 are normal and 260 are abnormal). In addition, the robustness and efficiency of the proposed system in extracting morphometric features with clinical utility was evaluated in 919 images taken from healthy subjects and diabetic patients with and without neuropathy. We demonstrate rapid (13 seconds/image), robust and effective automated corneal nerve quantification. The proposed system will be deployed as a useful clinical tool to support the expertise of ophthalmologists and save the clinician time in a busy clinical setting.