Automated Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using Horizontal and Vertical Patch Division-Based Pre-Trained DenseNET with Digital Fundus Images.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes that can lead to progressive vision loss. Regular surveillance with fundal photography, early diagnosis, and prompt intervention are paramount to reducing the incidence of DR-induced vision loss. However, manual interpretation of fundal photographs is subject to human error. In this study, a new method based on horizontal and vertical patch division was proposed for the automated classification of DR images on fundal photographs. The novel sides of this study are given as follows. We proposed a new non-fixed-size patch division model to obtain high classification results and collected a new fundus image dataset. Moreover, two datasets are used to test the model: a newly collected three-class (normal, non-proliferative DR, and proliferative DR) dataset comprising 2355 DR images and the established open-access five-class Asia Pacific Tele-Ophthalmology Society (APTOS) 2019 dataset comprising 3662 images. Two analysis scenarios, Case 1 and Case 2, with three (normal, non-proliferative DR, and proliferative DR) and five classes (normal, mild DR, moderate DR, severe DR, and proliferative DR), respectively, were derived from the APTOS 2019 dataset. These datasets and these cases have been used to demonstrate the general classification performance of our proposal. By applying transfer learning, the last fully connected and global average pooling layers of the DenseNet201 architecture were used to extract deep features from input DR images and each of the eight subdivided horizontal and vertical patches. The most discriminative features are then selected using neighborhood component analysis. These were fed as input to a standard shallow cubic support vector machine for classification. Our new DR dataset obtained 94.06% and 91.55% accuracy values for three-class classification with 80:20 hold-out validation and 10-fold cross-validation, respectively. As can be seen from steps of the proposed model, a new patch-based deep-feature engineering model has been proposed. The proposed deep-feature engineering model is a cognitive model, since it uses efficient methods in each phase. Similar excellent results were seen for three-class classification with the Case 1 dataset. In addition, the model attained 87.43% and 84.90% five-class classification accuracy rates using 80:20 hold-out validation and 10-fold cross-validation, respectively, on the Case 2 dataset, which outperformed prior DR classification studies based on the five-class APTOS 2019 dataset. Our model attained about >2% classification results compared to others. These findings demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed model for classification of DR images.

Exemplar Darknet19 feature generation technique for automated kidney stone detection with coronal CT images.

Kidney stone is a commonly seen ailment and is usually detected by urologists using computed tomography (CT) images. It is difficult and time-consuming to detect small stones in CT images. Hence, an automated system can help clinicians to detect kidney stones accurately. In this work, a novel transfer learning-based image classification method (ExDark19) has been proposed to detect kidney stones using CT images. The iterative neighborhood component analysis (INCA) is employed to select the most informative feature vectors and these selected features vectors are fed to the k nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier to detect kidney stones with a ten-fold cross-validation (CV) strategy. The proposed ExDark19 model yielded an accuracy of 99.22% with 10-fold CV and 99.71% using the hold-out validation method. Our results demonstrate that the proposed ExDark19 detect kidney stones over 99% accuracies for two validation techniques. This developed automated system can assist the urologists to validate their manual screening of kidney stones and hence reduce the possible human error.

Automatic COVID-19 Detection Using Exemplar Hybrid Deep Features with X-ray Images.

COVID-19 and pneumonia detection using medical images is a topic of immense interest in medical and healthcare research. Various advanced medical imaging and machine learning techniques have been presented to detect these respiratory disorders accurately. In this work, we have proposed a novel COVID-19 detection system using an exemplar and hybrid fused deep feature generator with X-ray images. The proposed Exemplar COVID-19FclNet9 comprises three basic steps: exemplar deep feature generation, iterative feature selection and classification. The novelty of this work is the feature extraction using three pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the presented feature extraction phase. The common aspects of these pre-trained CNNs are that they have three fully connected layers, and these networks are AlexNet, VGG16 and VGG19. The fully connected layer of these networks is used to generate deep features using an exemplar structure, and a nine-feature generation method is obtained. The loss values of these feature extractors are computed, and the best three extractors are selected. The features of the top three fully connected features are merged. An iterative selector is used to select the most informative features. The chosen features are classified using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed COVID-19FclNet9 applied nine deep feature extraction methods by using three deep networks together. The most appropriate deep feature generation model selection and iterative feature selection have been employed to utilise their advantages together. By using these techniques, the image classification ability of the used three deep networks has been improved. The presented model is developed using four X-ray image corpora (DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4) with two, three and four classes. The proposed Exemplar COVID-19FclNet9 achieved a classification accuracy of 97.60%, 89.96%, 98.84% and 99.64% using the SVM classifier with 10-fold cross-validation for four datasets, respectively. Our developed Exemplar COVID-19FclNet9 model has achieved high classification accuracy for all four databases and may be deployed for clinical application.

Automated Parkinson's disease recognition based on statistical pooling method using acoustic features.

Parkinson's disease is one of the mostly seen neurological disease. It affects to nervous system and hinders people's vital activities. The majority of Parkinson's patients lose their ability to speak, write and balance. Many machine learning methods have been proposed to automatically diagnose Parkinson's disease using acoustic, hand writing and gaits. In this study, a statistical pooling method is proposed to recognize Parkinson's disease using the vowels. The used Parkinson's disease dataset contains the features of vowels. In the proposed method, the features of dataset are increased by applying statistical pooling method. Then, the most weighted features are selected from increased feature vector by using ReliefF. The classification is applied using the most weighted feature vector obtained. In the proposed method, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithms are used. The success rate was calculated as 91.25% and 91.23% with by using SVM and KNN respectively. The proposed method has two main contributions. The first is to obtain new features from the Parkinson's acoustic dataset using the statistical pooling method. The second one is the selection of the most significant features from the many feature vectors obtained. Thus, successful results were obtained for both KNN and SVM algorithms. The comparatively results clearly show that the proposed method achieved the best success rate among the selected state-of-art methods. Considering the proposed method and the results obtained, it proposed method is successful for Parkinson's disease recognition.

Evaluation of prehospital emergency care in the field and during the ambulance drive to the hospital.

This study was conducted to evaluate the appropriateness of ambulance procedures and interventions in the management of patients dispatched to 2 emergency departments (EDs) of urban hospitals in Izmir. Use of trauma boards and cervical collars, airway patency, breathing, and circulation problems were recorded in both EDs. Eighty-one patients with a mean age of 47.54 +/- 2.36 years (range, 4-89) brought into the ED via ambulances were enrolled in the study. Airway maneuvers were performed in patients with airway and breathing problems. There was no significant relationship between administration of IV fluids and the presence of circulatory impairment (P=.053). A trauma board was used in 9 of 30 trauma cases (30%) and a cervical collar in 6 of 30 (20%). It was concluded that basic procedures used in the management of patients brought into the ED via ambulances were inadequate.