Innovations in detecting skull fractures: A review of computer-aided techniques in CT imaging.

BACKGROUND/INTRODUCTION: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains a leading cause of disability and mortality, with skull fractures being a frequent and serious consequence. Accurate and rapid diagnosis of these fractures is crucial, yet current manual methods via cranial CT scans are time-consuming and prone to error. METHODS: This review paper focuses on the evolution of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for detecting skull fractures in TBI patients. It critically assesses advancements from feature-based algorithms to modern machine learning and deep learning techniques. We examine current approaches to data acquisition, the use of public datasets, algorithmic strategies, and performance metrics RESULTS: The review highlights the potential of CAD systems to provide quick and reliable diagnostics, particularly outside regular clinical hours and in under-resourced settings. Our discussion encapsulates the challenges inherent in automated skull fracture assessment and suggests directions for future research to enhance diagnostic accuracy and patient care. CONCLUSION: With CAD systems, we stand on the cusp of significantly improving TBI management, underscoring the need for continued innovation in this field.

An ensemble classification method based on machine learning models for malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URL).

Web applications are important for various online businesses and operations because of their platform stability and low operation cost. The increasing usage of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices within a network has contributed to the rise of network intrusion issues due to malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Generally, malicious URLs are initiated to promote scams, attacks, and frauds which can lead to high-risk intrusion. Several methods have been developed to detect malicious URLs in previous works. There has been a good amount of work done to detect malicious URLs using various methods such as random forest, regression, LightGBM, and more as reported in the literature. However, most of the previous works focused on the binary classification of malicious URLs and are tested on limited URL datasets. Nevertheless, the detection of malicious URLs remains a challenging task that remains open to research. Hence, this work proposed a stacking-based ensemble classifier to perform multi-class classification of malicious URLs on larger URL datasets to justify the robustness of the proposed method. This study focuses on obtaining lexical features directly from the URL to identify malicious websites. Then, the proposed stacking-based ensemble classifier is developed by integrating Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. In addition, hyperparameter tuning was performed using the Randomized Search method to optimize the proposed classifier. The proposed stacking-based ensemble classifier aims to take advantage of the performance of each machine learning model and aggregate the output to improve prediction accuracy. The classification accuracies of the machine learning model when applied individually are 93.6%, 95.2%, 95.7% and 94.8% for random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost respectively. The proposed stacking-based ensemble classifier has shown significant results in classifying four classes of malicious URLs (phishing, malware, defacement, and benign) with an average accuracy of 96.8% when benchmarked with previous works.

An automated solid waste detection using the optimized YOLO model for riverine management.

Due to urbanization, solid waste pollution is an increasing concern for rivers, possibly threatening human health, ecological integrity, and ecosystem services. Riverine management in urban landscapes requires best management practices since the river is a vital component in urban ecological civilization, and it is very imperative to synchronize the connection between urban development and river protection. Thus, the implementation of proper and innovative measures is vital to control garbage pollution in the rivers. A robot that cleans the waste autonomously can be a good solution to manage river pollution efficiently. Identifying and obtaining precise positions of garbage are the most crucial parts of the visual system for a cleaning robot. Computer vision has paved a way for computers to understand and interpret the surrounding objects. The development of an accurate computer vision system is a vital step toward a robotic platform since this is the front-end observation system before consequent manipulation and grasping systems. The scope of this work is to acquire visual information about floating garbage on the river, which is vital in building a robotic platform for river cleaning robots. In this paper, an automated detection system based on the improved You Only Look Once (YOLO) model is developed to detect floating garbage under various conditions, such as fluctuating illumination, complex background, and occlusion. The proposed object detection model has been shown to promote rapid convergence which improves the training time duration. In addition, the proposed object detection model has been shown to improve detection accuracy by strengthening the non-linear feature extraction process. The results showed that the proposed model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) value of 89%. Hence, the proposed model is considered feasible for identifying five classes of garbage, such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans, plastic bags, styrofoam, and plastic containers.