Deep Learning Enables Accurate Diagnosis of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) With CT Images

Adaptation to CT Reconstruction Kernels by Enforcing Cross-Domain Feature Maps Consistency

Deep learning methods provide significant assistance in analyzing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in chest computed tomography (CT) images, including identification, severity assessment, and segmentation. Although the earlier developed methods address the lack of data and specific annotations, the current goal is to build a robust algorithm for clinical use, having a larger pool of available data. With the larger datasets, the domain shift problem arises, affecting the performance of methods on the unseen data. One of the critical sources of domain shift in CT images is the difference in reconstruction kernels used to generate images from the raw data (sinograms). In this paper, we show a decrease in the COVID-19 segmentation quality of the model trained on the smooth and tested on the sharp reconstruction kernels. Furthermore, we compare several domain adaptation approaches to tackle the problem, such as task-specific augmentation and unsupervised adversarial learning. Finally, we propose the unsupervised adaptation method, called F-Consistency, that outperforms the previous approaches. Our method exploits a set of unlabeled CT image pairs which differ only in reconstruction kernels within every pair. It enforces the similarity of the network's hidden representations (feature maps) by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) between paired feature maps. We show our method achieving a 0.64 Dice Score on the test dataset with unseen sharp kernels, compared to the 0.56 Dice Score of the baseline model. Moreover, F-Consistency scores 0.80 Dice Score between predictions on the paired images, which almost doubles the baseline score of 0.46 and surpasses the other methods. We also show F-Consistency to better generalize on the unseen kernels and without the presence of the COVID-19 lesions than the other methods trained on unlabeled data.

How much BiGAN and CycleGAN-learned hidden features are effective for COVID-19 detection from CT images? A comparative study

Bidirectional generative adversarial networks (BiGANs) and cycle generative adversarial networks (CycleGANs) are two emerging machine learning models that, up to now, have been used as generative models, i.e., to generate output data sampled from a target probability distribution. However, these models are also equipped with encoding modules, which, after weakly supervised training, could be, in principle, exploited for the extraction of hidden features from the input data. At the present time, how these extracted features could be effectively exploited for classification tasks is still an unexplored field. Hence, motivated by this consideration, in this paper, we develop and numerically test the performance of a novel inference engine that relies on the exploitation of BiGAN and CycleGAN-learned hidden features for the detection of COVID-19 disease from other lung diseases in computer tomography (CT) scans. In this respect, the main contributions of the paper are twofold. First, we develop a kernel density estimation (KDE)-based inference method, which, in the training phase, leverages the hidden features extracted by BiGANs and CycleGANs for estimating the (a priori unknown) probability density function (PDF) of the CT scans of COVID-19 patients and, then, in the inference phase, uses it as a target COVID-PDF for the detection of COVID diseases. As a second major contribution, we numerically evaluate and compare the classification accuracies of the implemented BiGAN and CycleGAN models against the ones of some state-of-the-art methods, which rely on the unsupervised training of convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) for attaining feature extraction. The performance comparisons are carried out by considering a spectrum of different training loss functions and distance metrics. The obtained classification accuracies of the proposed CycleGAN-based (resp., BiGAN-based) models outperform the corresponding ones of the considered benchmark CAE-based models of about 16% (resp., 14%).

SEL-COVIDNET: An intelligent application for the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays and CT-scans

COVID-19 detection from medical imaging is a difficult challenge that has piqued the interest of experts worldwide. Chest X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scanning are the essential imaging modalities for diagnosing COVID-19. All researchers focus their efforts on developing viable methods and rapid treatment procedures for this pandemic. Fast and accurate automated detection approaches have been devised to alleviate the need for medical professionals. Deep Learning (DL) technologies have successfully recognized COVID-19 situations. This paper proposes a developed set of nine deep learning models for diagnosing COVID-19 based on transfer learning and implementation in a novel architecture (SEL-COVIDNET). We include a global average pooling layer, flattening, and two dense layers that are fully connected. The model’s effectiveness is evaluated using balanced and unbalanced COVID-19 radiography datasets. After that, our model’s performance is analyzed using six evaluation measures: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1-score, and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC). Experiments demonstrated that the proposed SEL-COVIDNET with tuned DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, and MobileNetV3Large models outperformed the results of comparative SOTA for multi-class classification (COVID-19 vs. No-finding vs. Pneumonia) in terms of accuracy (98.52%), specificity (98.5%), sensitivity (98.5%), precision (98.7%), F1-score (98.7%), and MCC (97.5%). For the COVID-19 vs. No-finding classification, our method had an accuracy of 99.77%, a specificity of 99.85%, a sensitivity of 99.85%, a precision of 99.55%, an F1-score of 99.7%, and an MCC of 99.4%. The proposed model offers an accurate approach for detecting COVID-19 patients, which aids in the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 CT image segmentation method based on swin transformer

Owing to its significant contagion and mutation, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has caused more than 520 million infections worldwide and has brought irreversible effects on the society. Computed tomography (CT) images can clearly demonstrate lung lesions of patients. This study used deep learning techniques to assist doctors in the screening and quantitative analysis of this disease. Consequently, this study will help to improve the diagnostic efficiency and reduce the risk of infection. In this study, we propose a new method to improve U-Net for lesion segmentation in the chest CT images of COVID-19 patients. 750 annotated chest CT images of 150 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were selected to classify, identify, and segment the background area, lung area, ground glass opacity, and lung parenchyma. First, to address the problem of a loss of lesion detail during down sampling, we replaced part of the convolution operation with atrous convolution in the encoder structure of the segmentation network and employed convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to enhance the weighting of important feature information. Second, the Swin Transformer structure is introduced in the last layer of the encoder to reduce the number of parameters and improve network performance. We used the CC-CCII lesion segmentation dataset for training and validation of the model effectiveness. The results of ablation experiments demonstrate that this method achieved significant performance gain, in which the mean pixel accuracy is 87.62%, mean intersection over union is 80.6%, and dice similarity coefficient is 88.27%. Further, we verified that this model achieved superior performance in comparison to other models. Thus, the method proposed herein can better assist doctors in evaluating and analyzing the condition of COVID-19 patients.

SARS-CoV-2: Has artificial intelligence stood the test of time

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven time and time again to be a game-changer innovation in every walk of life, including medicine. Introduced by Dr. Gunn in 1976 to accurately diagnose acute abdominal pain and list potential differentials, AI has since come a long way. In particular, AI has been aiding in radiological diagnoses with good sensitivity and specificity by using machine learning algorithms. With the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, AI has proven to be more than just a tool to facilitate healthcare workers in decision making and limiting physician-patient contact during the pandemic. It has guided governments and key policymakers in formulating and implementing laws, such as lockdowns and travel restrictions, to curb the spread of this viral disease. This has been made possible by the use of social media to map severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 hotspots, laying the basis of the "smart lockdown" strategy that has been adopted globally. However, these benefits might be accompanied with concerns regarding privacy and unconsented surveillance, necessitating authorities to develop sincere and ethical government-public relations.

COVID-19 diagnosis using deep learning neural networks applied to CT images

COVID-19, a deadly and highly contagious virus, caused the deaths of millions of individuals around the world. Early detection of the virus can reduce the virus transmission and fatality rate. Many deep learning (DL) based COVID-19 detection methods have been proposed, but most are trained on either small, incomplete, noisy, or imbalanced datasets. Many are also trained on a small number of COVID-19 samples. This study tackles these concerns by introducing DL-based solutions for COVID-19 diagnosis using computerized tomography (CT) images and 12 cutting-edge DL pre-trained models with acceptable Top-1 accuracy. All the models are trained on 9,000 COVID-19 samples and 5,000 normal images, which is higher than the COVID-19 images used in most studies. In addition, while most of the research used X-ray images for training, this study used CT images. CT scans capture blood arteries, bones, and soft tissues more effectively than X-Ray. The proposed techniques were evaluated, and the results show that NASNetLarge produced the best classification accuracy, followed by InceptionResNetV2 and DenseNet169. The three models achieved an accuracy of 99.86, 99.79, and 99.71%, respectively. Moreover, DenseNet121 and VGG16 achieved the best sensitivity, while InceptionV3 and InceptionResNetV2 achieved the best specificity. DenseNet121 and VGG16 attained a sensitivity of 99.94%, while InceptionV3 and InceptionResNetV2 achieved a specificity of 100%. The models are compared to those designed in three existing studies, and they produce better results. The results show that deep neural networks have the potential for computer-assisted COVID-19 diagnosis. We hope this study will be valuable in improving the decisions and accuracy of medical practitioners when diagnosing COVID-19. This study will assist future researchers in minimizing the repetition of analysis and identifying the ideal network for their tasks.

CovMnet–Deep Learning Model for classifying Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Diagnosing COVID-19, current pandemic disease using Chest X-ray images is widely used to evaluate the lung disorders. As the spread of the disease is enormous many medical camps are being conducted to screen the patients and Chest X-ray is a simple imaging modality to detect presence of lung disorders. Manual lung disorder detection using Chest X-ray by radiologist is a tedious process and may lead to inter and intra-rate errors. Various deep convolution neural network techniques were tested for detecting COVID-19 abnormalities in lungs using Chest X-ray images. This paper proposes deep learning model to classify COVID-19 and normal chest X-ray images. Experiments are carried out for deep feature extraction, fine-tuning of convolutional neural networks (CNN) hyper parameters, and end-to-end training of four variants of the CNN model. The proposed CovMnet provide better classification accuracy of 97.4% for COVID-19 /normal than those reported in the previous studies. The proposed CovMnet model has potential to aid radiologist to monitor COVID-19 disease and proves to be an efficient non-invasive COVID-19 diagnostic tool for lung disorders.

AI-driven deep and handcrafted features selection approach for Covid-19 and chest related diseases identification

To identify various pneumonia types, a gap of 15% value is being created every five years. To fill this gap, accurate detection of chest disease is required in the healthcare department to avoid any serious issues in the future. Testing the affected lungs to detect a Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) using the same imaging modalities may detect some other chest diseases. This wrong diagnosis strongly needs a multidisciplinary approach to the right diagnosis of chest-related diseases. Only a few works till now are targeting pathological x-ray images. Many studies target only a single chest disease that is not enough to automate chest disease detection. Only a few studies regarding the observation of the COVID-19, but more cases are those where it can be misclassified as detecting techniques not providing any generic solution for all types of chest diseases. However, the existing studies can only detect if the person has COVID-19 or not. The proposed work significantly contributes to detecting COVID-19 and other chest diseases by providing useful analysis of chest-related diseases. One of our testing approaches achieves 90.22% accuracy for 15 types of chest disease with 100% correct classification of COVID-19. Though it analyzes the perfect detection as the accuracy level is high enough, but it would be an excellent decision to consider the proposed study until doctors can visually inspect the input images used by models that lead to its detection.

Integrating Digital Twins and Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis in the era of COVID-19

Digital twins is a virtual representation of a device and process that captures the physical properties of the environment and operational algorithms/techniques in the context of medical devices and technology. It may allow and facilitate healthcare organizations to determine ways to improve medical processes, enhance the patient experience, lower operating expenses, and extend the value of care. Considering the current pandemic situation of COVID-19, various medical devices, e.g., X-rays and CT scan machines and processes, are constantly being used to collect and analyze medical images. In this situation, while collecting and processing an extensive volume of data in the form of images, machines and processes sometimes suffer from system failures that can create critical issues for hospitals and patients. Thus, in this regard, we introduced a digital twin based smart healthcare system integrated with medical devices so that it can be utilized to collect information about the current health condition, configuration, and maintenance history of the device/machine/system. Furthermore, the medical images, i.e., X-rays, are further analyzed by a deep learning model to detect the infection of COVID-19. The designed system is based on Cascade RCNN architecture. In this architecture, detector stages are deeper and are more sequentially selective against close and small false positives. It is a multi stage extension of the Recurrent Convolution Neural Network (RCNN) model and sequentially trained using the output of one stage for the training of the other one. At each stage, the bounding boxes are adjusted in order to locate a suitable value of nearest false positives during training of the different stages. In this way, an arrangement of detectors is adjusted to increase Intersection over Union (IoU) that overcome the problem of overfitting. We trained the model for X-ray images as the model was previously trained on another data set. The developed system achieves good accuracy during the detection phase of the COVID-19. Experimental outcomes reveal the efficiency of the detection architecture, which gains a mean Average Precision (mAP) rate of 0.94.

A Comprehensive Review of Machine Learning Used to Combat COVID-19

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has had a significant impact on global health since the start of the pandemic in 2019. As of June 2022, over 539 million cases have been confirmed worldwide with over 6.3 million deaths as a result. Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions such as machine learning and deep learning have played a major part in this pandemic for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. In this research, we review these modern tools deployed to solve a variety of complex problems. We explore research that focused on analyzing medical images using AI models for identification, classification, and tissue segmentation of the disease. We also explore prognostic models that were developed to predict health outcomes and optimize the allocation of scarce medical resources. Longitudinal studies were conducted to better understand COVID-19 and its effects on patients over a period of time. This comprehensive review of the different AI methods and modeling efforts will shed light on the role that AI has played and what path it intends to take in the fight against COVID-19.

Application in medicine: Has artificial intelligence stood the test of time

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven time and time again to be a game-changer innovation in every walk of life, including medicine. Introduced by Dr. Gunn in 1976 to accurately diagnose acute abdominal pain and list potential differentials, AI has since come a long way. In particular, AI has been aiding in radiological diagnoses with good sensitivity and specificity by using machine learning algorithms. With the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, AI has proven to be more than just a tool to facilitate healthcare workers in decision making and limiting physician-patient contact during the pandemic. It has guided governments and key policymakers in formulating and implementing laws, such as lockdowns and travel restrictions, to curb the spread of this viral disease. This has been made possible by the use of social media to map severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 hotspots, laying the basis of the "smart lockdown" strategy that has been adopted globally. However, these benefits might be accompanied with concerns regarding privacy and unconsented surveillance, necessitating authorities to develop sincere and ethical government-public relations.

A Sustainable Deep Learning-Based Framework for Automated Segmentation of COVID-19 Infected Regions: Using U-Net with an Attention Mechanism and Boundary Loss Function

COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly, affecting billions of people globally, with significant public health impacts. Biomedical imaging, such as computed tomography (CT), has significant potential as a possible substitute for the screening process. Because of this, automatic segmentation of images is highly desirable as clinical decision support for an extensive evaluation of disease control and monitoring. It is a dynamic tool and performs a central role in precise or accurate segmentation of infected areas or regions in CT scans, thus helping in screening, diagnosing, and disease monitoring. For this purpose, we introduced a deep learning framework for automated segmentation of COVID-19 infected lesions/regions in lung CT scan images. Specifically, we adopted a segmentation model, i.e., U-Net, and utilized an attention mechanism to enhance the framework’s ability for the segmentation of virus-infected regions. Since all of the features extracted or obtained from the encoders are not valuable for segmentation; thus, we applied the U-Net architecture with a mechanism of attention for a better representation of the features. Moreover, we applied a boundary loss function to deal with small and unbalanced lesion segmentation’s. Using different public CT scan image data sets, we validated the framework’s effectiveness in contrast with other segmentation techniques. The experimental outcomes showed the improved performance of the presented framework for the automated segmentation of lungs and infected areas in CT scan images. We also considered both boundary loss and weighted binary cross-entropy dice loss function. The overall dice accuracies of the framework are 0.93 and 0.76 for lungs and COVID-19 infected areas/regions.

Topology optimization search of deep convolution neural networks for CT and X-ray image classification

Covid-19 is a disease that can lead to pneumonia, respiratory syndrome, septic shock, multiple organ failure, and death. This pandemic is viewed as a critical component of the fight against an enormous threat to the human population. Deep convolutional neural networks have recently proved their ability to perform well in classification and dimension reduction tasks. Selecting hyper-parameters is critical for these networks. This is because the search space expands exponentially in size as the number of layers increases. All existing approaches utilize a pre-trained or designed architecture as an input. None of them takes design and pruning into account throughout the process. In fact, there exists a convolutional topology for any architecture, and each block of a CNN corresponds to an optimization problem with a large search space. However, there are no guidelines for designing a specific architecture for a specific purpose; thus, such design is highly subjective and heavily reliant on data scientists’ knowledge and expertise. Motivated by this observation, we propose a topology optimization method for designing a convolutional neural network capable of classifying radiography images and detecting probable chest anomalies and infections, including COVID-19. Our method has been validated in a number of comparative studies against relevant state-of-the-art architectures.

Effectiveness evaluation of different feature extraction methods for classification of covid-19 from computed tomography images: A high accuracy classification study

Rapid diagnosis of the Covid-19 disease is the best way to prevent infection. In this paper, it is proposed to use machine learning methods to aid diagnoses quickly Covid-19 and focused on effect of several features on classification accuracy. In the proposed method 746 axial computed tomography (CT) images of the lung; 349 Covid-19 (positives) and 397 non-Covid-19 (negative) are used. Gray-level texture, shape and first order statistical features were extracted from the images. The feature vector for model training is constructed with one feature group or combination of more than one group. We then classified with Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, k-nearest neighbor and XGBoost classifier models. The hyperparameter of the models were controlled by the tuning test. Experimental results obtained with 10-fold cross-validation. The results of cross-validation verified with the additionally independent test. The best overall accuracy was 98.65% with first order statistics features classified with XGBoost. In the gray level features, the best individual results given by GLSZM as 81.25%, and the best combination result is with GLDM, GLRLM and GLSZM features as 85.52%. An important finding of this paper is that, for Covid-19 classification, the shape and first order statistics features are more valuable than gray level features. The proposed results compared with the literature studies under some Covid-19 dataset for accuracy, precision, sensitivity and F1-score metrics. Also, the literature studies which used the different Covid-19 dataset were compared with the proposed study. Our results have the significant superiority when compared with the literature studies.

A wavelet-based deep learning pipeline for efficient COVID-19 diagnosis via CT slices

The quick diagnosis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is vital to prevent its propagation and improve therapeutic outcomes. Computed tomography (CT) is believed to be an effective tool for diagnosing COVID-19, however, the CT scan contains hundreds of slices that are complex to be analyzed and could cause delays in diagnosis. Artificial intelligence (AI) especially deep learning (DL), could facilitate and speed up COVID-19 diagnosis from such scans. Several studies employed DL approaches based on 2D CT images from a single view, nevertheless, 3D multiview CT slices demonstrated an excellent ability to enhance the efficiency of COVID-19 diagnosis. The majority of DL-based studies utilized the spatial information of the original CT images to train their models, though, using spectral–temporal information could improve the detection of COVID-19. This article proposes a DL-based pipeline called CoviWavNet for the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19. CoviWavNet uses a 3D multiview dataset called OMNIAHCOV. Initially, it analyzes the CT slices using multilevel discrete wavelet decomposition (DWT) and then uses the heatmaps of the approximation levels to train three ResNet CNN models. These ResNets use the spectral–temporal information of such images to perform classification. Subsequently, it investigates whether the combination of spatial information with spectral–temporal information could improve the diagnostic accuracy of COVID-19. For this purpose, it extracts deep spectral–temporal features from such ResNets using transfer learning and integrates them with deep spatial features extracted from the same ResNets trained with the original CT slices. Then, it utilizes a feature selection step to reduce the dimension of such integrated features and use them as inputs to three support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. To further validate the performance of CoviWavNet, a publicly available benchmark dataset called SARS-COV-2-CT-Scan is employed. The results of CoviWavNet have demonstrated that using the spectral–temporal information of the DWT heatmap images to train the ResNets is superior to utilizing the spatial information of the original CT images. Furthermore, integrating deep spectral–temporal features with deep spatial features has enhanced the classification accuracy of the three SVM classifiers reaching a final accuracy of 99.33% and 99.7% for the OMNIAHCOV and SARS-COV-2-CT-Scan datasets respectively. These accuracies verify the outstanding performance of CoviWavNet compared to other related studies. Thus, CoviWavNet can help radiologists in the rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 diagnosis.

The Moderating Effect of Learning Experience on Learning Motivation and Learning Outcomes of International Students

With the increasing level of internationalization in higher education, the number of international students in mainland China is rapidly increasing. However, limited research has considered that student results may be affected by a reduced motivation to learn. Therefore, the aim of this research is to explore the effect of the learning motivation on the learning outcomes of international students and the moderating role of learning experience. A sample of 130 international students from 23 countries studying in mainland China was analyzed. The study found a significant correlation between the learning motivations and international students' learning outcomes. It was also determined that learning experience has significantly enhances the relationship between learning motivation and the learning outcomes of international students. This study contributes to the higher education literature on learning motivation by students and learning outcomes.

How Many Private Data Are Needed for Deep Learning in Lung Nodule Detection on CT Scans? A Retrospective Multicenter Study

Simple Summary

The early detection of lung nodules is important for patient treatment and follow-up. Many researchers are investigating deep-learning-based lung nodule detection to ease the burden of lung nodule detection by radiologists. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for collecting lung nodule data to facilitate research. We collected chest computed tomography scans reviewed by radiologists at three hospitals. In addition, several experiments were conducted using the large-scale open dataset, LUNA16. As a result of the experiment, it was possible to prove the value of using the collected data compared to using LUNA16. We also demonstrated the effectiveness of transfer learning from pre-trained learning weights in LUNA16. Finally, our study provides information on the amount of lung nodule data that must be collected to stabilize lung nodule detection performance.

Abstract

Early detection of lung nodules is essential for preventing lung cancer. However, the number of radiologists who can diagnose lung nodules is limited, and considerable effort and time are required. To address this problem, researchers are investigating the automation of deep-learning-based lung nodule detection. However, deep learning requires large amounts of data, which can be difficult to collect. Therefore, data collection should be optimized to facilitate experiments at the beginning of lung nodule detection studies. We collected chest computed tomography scans from 515 patients with lung nodules from three hospitals and high-quality lung nodule annotations reviewed by radiologists. We conducted several experiments using the collected datasets and publicly available data from LUNA16. The object detection model, YOLOX was used in the lung nodule detection experiment. Similar or better performance was obtained when training the model with the collected data rather than LUNA16 with large amounts of data. We also show that weight transfer learning from pre-trained open data is very useful when it is difficult to collect large amounts of data. Good performance can otherwise be expected when reaching more than 100 patients. This study offers valuable insights for guiding data collection in lung nodules studies in the future.

Federated Learning Approach with Pre-Trained Deep Learning Models for COVID-19 Detection from Unsegmented CT images

(1) Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) remains the current gold standard for detecting SARS-CoV-2 infections in nasopharyngeal swabs. In Romania, the first reported patient to have contracted COVID-19 was officially declared on 26 February 2020. (2) Methods: This study proposes a federated learning approach with pre-trained deep learning models for COVID-19 detection. Three clients were locally deployed with their own dataset. The goal of the clients was to collaborate in order to obtain a global model without sharing samples from the dataset. The algorithm we developed was connected to our internal picture archiving and communication system and, after running backwards, it encountered chest CT changes suggestive for COVID-19 in a patient investigated in our medical imaging department on the 28 January 2020. (4) Conclusions: Based on our results, we recommend using an automated AI-assisted software in order to detect COVID-19 based on the lung imaging changes as an adjuvant diagnostic method to the current gold standard (RT-PCR) in order to greatly enhance the management of these patients and also limit the spread of the disease, not only to the general population but also to healthcare professionals.

Automated Screening of COVID-19-Based Tongue Image on Chinese Medicine

Objective

Artificial intelligence-powered screening systems of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are urgently demanding since the ongoing outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. Chest CT or X-ray is not sufficient to support the large-scale screening of COVID-19 because mildly-infected patients do not have imaging features on these images. Therefore, it is imperative to exploit supplementary medical imaging strategies. Traditional Chinese medicine has played an essential role in the fight against COVID-19.

Methods

In this paper, we conduct two kinds of verification experiments based on a newly-collected multi-modality dataset, which consists of three types of modalities: tongue images, chest CT scans, and X-ray images. First, we study a binary classification experiment on tongue images to verify the discriminative ability between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19. Second, we design extensive multimodality experiments to validate whether introducing tongue image can improve the screening accuracy of COVID-19 based on chest CT or X-ray images.

Results

Tongue image screening of COVID-19 showed that the accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPEC), and Matthew correlation coefficient (MCC) of the improved AlexNet and Googlenet both reached 98.39%, 98.97%, 96.67%, and 99.11%. The fusion of chest CT and tongue images used a tandem multimodal classifier fusion strategy to achieve optimal classification, and the results and screening accuracy of COVID-19 reached 98.98%, resulting in a significant improvement of 4.75% the highest accuracy in 375 years compared with the single-modality model. The fusion of chest x-rays and tongue images also had good classification accuracy.

Conclusions

Both experimental results demonstrate that tongue image not only has an excellent discriminative ability for screening COVID-19 but also can improve the screening accuracy based on chest CT or X-rays. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that verifies the effectiveness of tongue image on screening COVID-19. This paper provides a new perspective and a novel solution that contributes to large-scale screening toward fast stopping the pandemic of COVID-19.

FLED-Block: Federated Learning Ensembled Deep Learning Blockchain Model for COVID-19 Prediction

With the SARS-CoV-2's exponential growth, intelligent and constructive practice is required to diagnose the COVID-19. The rapid spread of the virus and the shortage of reliable testing models are considered major issues in detecting COVID-19. This problem remains the peak burden for clinicians. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in image processing, the burden of diagnosing the COVID-19 cases has been reduced to acceptable thresholds. But traditional AI techniques often require centralized data storage and training for the predictive model development which increases the computational complexity. The real-world challenge is to exchange data globally across hospitals while also taking into account of the organizations' privacy concerns. Collaborative model development and privacy protection are critical considerations while training a global deep learning model. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework based on blockchain and the federated learning model. The federated learning model takes care of reduced complexity, and blockchain helps in distributed data with privacy maintained. More precisely, the proposed federated learning ensembled deep five learning blockchain model (FLED-Block) framework collects the data from the different medical healthcare centers, develops the model with the hybrid capsule learning network, and performs the prediction accurately, while preserving the privacy and shares among authorized persons. Extensive experimentation has been carried out using the lung CT images and compared the performance of the proposed model with the existing VGG-16 and 19, Alexnets, Resnets-50 and 100, Inception V3, Densenets-121, 119, and 150, Mobilenets, SegCaps in terms of accuracy (98.2%), precision (97.3%), recall (96.5%), specificity (33.5%), and F1-score (97%) in predicting the COVID-19 with effectively preserving the privacy of the data among the heterogeneous users.

Machine learning applications for COVID-19 outbreak management

Recently, the COVID-19 epidemic has resulted in millions of deaths and has impacted practically every area of human life. Several machine learning (ML) approaches are employed in the medical field in many applications, including detecting and monitoring patients, notably in COVID-19 management. Different medical imaging systems, such as computed tomography (CT) and X-ray, offer ML an excellent platform for combating the pandemic. Because of this need, a significant quantity of study has been carried out; thus, in this work, we employed a systematic literature review (SLR) to cover all aspects of outcomes from related papers. Imaging methods, survival analysis, forecasting, economic and geographical issues, monitoring methods, medication development, and hybrid apps are the seven key uses of applications employed in the COVID-19 pandemic. Conventional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), autoencoders, random forest, and other ML techniques are frequently used in such scenarios. Next, cutting-edge applications related to ML techniques for pandemic medical issues are discussed. Various problems and challenges linked with ML applications for this pandemic were reviewed. It is expected that additional research will be conducted in the upcoming to limit the spread and catastrophe management. According to the data, most papers are evaluated mainly on characteristics such as flexibility and accuracy, while other factors such as safety are overlooked. Also, Keras was the most often used library in the research studied, accounting for 24.4 percent of the time. Furthermore, medical imaging systems are employed for diagnostic reasons in 20.4 percent of applications.

A deep fuzzy model for diagnosis of COVID-19 from CT images

From early 2020, a novel coronavirus disease pneumonia has shown a global "pandemic" trend at an extremely fast speed. Due to the magnitude of its harm, it has become a major global public health event. In the face of dramatic increase in the number of patients with COVID-19, the need for quick diagnosis of suspected cases has become particularly critical. Therefore, this paper constructs a fuzzy classifier, which aims to detect infected subjects by observing and analyzing the CT images of suspected patients. Firstly, a deep learning algorithm is used to extract the low-level features of CT images in the COVID-CT dataset. Subsequently, we analyze the extracted feature information with attribute reduction algorithm to obtain features with high recognition. Then, some key features are selected as the input for the fuzzy diagnosis model to the training model. Finally, several images in the dataset are used as the test set to test the trained fuzzy classifier. The obtained accuracy rate is 94.2%, and the F1-score is 93.8%. Experimental results show that, compared with the deep learning diagnosis methods widely used in medical image analysis, the proposed fuzzy model improves the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis, which consequently helps to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Multi-branch fusion auxiliary learning for the detection of pneumonia from chest X-ray images

Lung infections caused by bacteria and viruses are infectious and require timely screening and isolation, and different types of pneumonia require different treatment plans. Therefore, finding a rapid and accurate screening method for lung infections is critical. To achieve this goal, we proposed a multi-branch fusion auxiliary learning (MBFAL) method for pneumonia detection from chest X-ray (CXR) images. The MBFAL method was used to perform two tasks through a double-branch network. The first task was to recognize the absence of pneumonia (normal), COVID-19, other viral pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia from CXR images, and the second task was to recognize the three types of pneumonia from CXR images. The latter task was used to assist the learning of the former task to achieve a better recognition effect. In the process of auxiliary parameter updating, the feature maps of different branches were fused after sample screening through label information to enhance the model’s ability to recognize case of pneumonia without impacting its ability to recognize normal cases. Experiments show that an average classification accuracy of 95.61% is achieved using MBFAL. The single class accuracy for normal, COVID-19, other viral pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia was 98.70%, 99.10%, 96.60% and 96.80%, respectively, and the recall was 97.20%, 98.60%, 96.10% and 89.20%, respectively, using the MBFAL method. Compared with the baseline model and the model constructed using the above methods separately, better results for the rapid screening of pneumonia were achieved using MBFAL.

A privacy-aware method for COVID-19 detection in chest CT images using lightweight deep conventional neural network and blockchain

With the global spread of the COVID-19 epidemic, a reliable method is required for identifying COVID-19 victims. The biggest issue in detecting the virus is a lack of testing kits that are both reliable and affordable. Due to the virus's rapid dissemination, medical professionals have trouble finding positive patients. However, the next real-life issue is sharing data with hospitals around the world while considering the organizations' privacy concerns. The primary worries for training a global Deep Learning (DL) model are creating a collaborative platform and personal confidentiality. Another challenge is exchanging data with health care institutions while protecting the organizations' confidentiality. The primary concerns for training a universal DL model are creating a collaborative platform and preserving privacy. This paper provides a model that receives a small quantity of data from various sources, like organizations or sections of hospitals, and trains a global DL model utilizing blockchain-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In addition, we use the Transfer Learning (TL) technique to initialize layers rather than initialize randomly and discover which layers should be removed before selection. Besides, the blockchain system verifies the data, and the DL method trains the model globally while keeping the institution's confidentiality. Furthermore, we gather the actual and novel COVID-19 patients. Finally, we run extensive experiments utilizing Python and its libraries, such as Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, to assess the proposed method. We evaluated works using five different datasets, including Boukan Dr. Shahid Gholipour hospital, Tabriz Emam Reza hospital, Mahabad Emam Khomeini hospital, Maragheh Dr.Beheshti hospital, and Miandoab Abbasi hospital datasets, and our technique outperform state-of-the-art methods on average in terms of precision (2.7%), recall (3.1%), F1 (2.9%), and accuracy (2.8%).

COVID-WideNet-A capsule network for COVID-19 detection

Ever since the outbreak of COVID-19, the entire world is grappling with panic over its rapid spread. Consequently, it is of utmost importance to detect its presence. Timely diagnostic testing leads to the quick identification, treatment and isolation of infected people. A number of deep learning classifiers have been proved to provide encouraging results with higher accuracy as compared to the conventional method of RT-PCR testing. Chest radiography, particularly using X-ray images, is a prime imaging modality for detecting the suspected COVID-19 patients. However, the performance of these approaches still needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a capsule network called COVID-WideNet for diagnosing COVID-19 cases using Chest X-ray (CXR) images. Experimental results have demonstrated that a discriminative trained, multi-layer capsule network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COVIDx dataset. In particular, COVID-WideNet performs better than any other CNN based approaches for diagnosis of COVID-19 infected patients. Further, the proposed COVID-WideNet has the number of trainable parameters that is 20 times less than that of other CNN based models. This results in fast and efficient diagnosing COVID-19 symptoms and with achieving the 0.95 of Area Under Curve (AUC), 91% of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity respectively. This may also assist radiologists to detect COVID and its variant like delta.

COVID-CCD-Net: COVID-19 and colon cancer diagnosis system with optimized CNN hyperparameters using gradient-based optimizer

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is a new types of coronavirus which have turned into a pandemic within a short time. Reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test is used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in national healthcare centers. Because the number of PCR test kits is often limited, it is sometimes difficult to diagnose the disease at an early stage. However, X-ray technology is accessible nearly all over the world, and it succeeds in detecting symptoms of COVID-19 more successfully. Another disease which affects people’s lives to a great extent is colorectal cancer. Tissue microarray (TMA) is a technological method which is widely used for its high performance in the analysis of colorectal cancer. Computer-assisted approaches which can classify colorectal cancer in TMA images are also needed. In this respect, the present study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) classification approach with optimized parameters using gradient-based optimizer (GBO) algorithm. Thanks to the proposed approach, COVID-19, normal, and viral pneumonia in various chest X-ray images can be classified accurately. Additionally, other types such as epithelial and stromal regions in epidermal growth factor receptor (EFGR) colon in TMAs can also be classified. The proposed approach was called COVID-CCD-Net. AlexNet, DarkNet-19, Inception-v3, MobileNet, ResNet-18, and ShuffleNet architectures were used in COVID-CCD-Net, and the hyperparameters of this architecture was optimized for the proposed approach. Two different medical image classification datasets, namely, COVID-19 and Epistroma, were used in the present study. The experimental findings demonstrated that proposed approach increased the classification performance of the non-optimized CNN architectures significantly and displayed a very high classification performance even in very low value of epoch.

Grayscale image statistics of COVID‐19 patient CT scans characterize lung condition with machine and deep learning

Background

Grayscale image attributes of computed tomography (CT) of pulmonary scans contain valuable information relating to patients with respiratory ailments. These attributes are used to evaluate the severity of lung conditions of patients confirmed to be with and without COVID‐19.

Method

Five hundred thirteen CT images relating to 57 patients (49 with COVID‐19; 8 free of COVID‐19) were collected at Namazi Medical Centre (Shiraz, Iran) in 2020 and 2021. Five visual scores (VS: 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) are clinically assigned to these images with the score increasing with the severity of COVID‐19‐related lung conditions. Eleven deep learning and machine learning techniques (DL/ML) are used to distinguish the VS class based on 12 grayscale image attributes.

Results

The convolutional neural network achieves 96.49% VS accuracy (18 errors from 513 images) successfully distinguishing VS Classes 0 and 1, outperforming clinicians’ visual inspections. An algorithmic score (AS), involving just five grayscale image attributes, is developed independently of clinicians’ assessments (99.81% AS accuracy; 1 error from 513 images).

Conclusion

Grayscale CT image attributes can be successfully used to distinguish the severity of COVID‐19 lung damage. The AS technique developed provides a suitable basis for an automated system using ML/DL methods and 12 image attributes.

Grayscale image statistics of CT scans can effectively classify lung abnormalities

Graphical trends of grayscale statistics distinguish visual assessments COVID‐19 classes

Machine/deep learning algorithms predict severity from image grayscale attributes

Algorithmic class systems can be established using just five grayscale attributes

Confusion matrices provide detailed insight to algorithm prediction capabilities

Deep learning in multimedia healthcare applications: a review

The increase in chronic diseases has affected the countries' health system and economy. With the recent COVID-19 virus, humanity has experienced a great challenge, which has led to make efforts to detect it and prevent its spread. Hence, it is necessary to develop new solutions that are based on technology and low cost, to satisfy the citizens' needs. Deep learning techniques is a technological solution that has been used in healthcare lately. Nowadays, with the increase in chips processing capabilities, increase size of data, and the progress in deep learning research, healthcare applications have been proposed to provide citizens' health needs. In addition, a big amount of data is generated every day. Development in Internet of Things, gadgets, and phones has allowed the access to multimedia data. Data such as images, video, audio and text are used as input of applications based on deep learning methods to support healthcare system to diagnose, predict, or treat patients. This review pretends to give an overview of proposed healthcare solutions based on deep learning techniques using multimedia data. We show the use of deep learning in healthcare, explain the different types of multimedia data, show some relevant deep learning multimedia applications in healthcare, and highlight some challenges in this research area.

A deep learning-based approach for diagnosing COVID-19 on chest x-ray images, and a test study with clinical experts

Pneumonia is among the common symptoms of the virus that causes COVID-19, which has turned into a worldwide pandemic. It is possible to diagnose pneumonia by examining chest radiographs. Chest x-ray (CXR) is a fast, low-cost, and practical method widely used in this field. The fact that different pathogens other than COVID-19 also cause pneumonia and the radiographic images of all are similar make it difficult to detect the source of the disease. In this study, automatic detection of COVID-19 cases over CXR images was tried to be performed using convolutional neural network (CNN), a deep learning technique. Classifications were carried out using six different architectures on the dataset consisting of 15,153 images of three different types: healthy, COVID-19, and other viral-induced pneumonia. In the classifications performed with five different state-of-art models, ResNet18, GoogLeNet, AlexNet, VGG16, and DenseNet161, and a minimal CNN architecture specific to this study, the most successful result was obtained with the ResNet18 architecture as 99.25% accuracy. Although the minimal CNN model developed for this study has a simpler structure, it was observed that it has a success to compete with more complex models. The performances of the models used in this study were compared with similar studies in the literature and it was revealed that they generally achieved higher success. The model with the highest success was transformed into a test application, tested by 10 volunteer clinicians, and it was concluded that it provides 99.06% accuracy in practical use. This result reveals that the conducted study can play the role of a successful decision support system for experts.

Machine Learning-Based Research for COVID-19 Detection, Diagnosis, and Prediction: A Survey

The year 2020 experienced an unprecedented pandemic called COVID-19, which impacted the whole world. The absence of treatment has motivated research in all fields to deal with it. In Computer Science, contributions mainly include the development of methods for the diagnosis, detection, and prediction of COVID-19 cases. Data science and Machine Learning (ML) are the most widely used techniques in this area. This paper presents an overview of more than 160 ML-based approaches developed to combat COVID-19. They come from various sources like Elsevier, Springer, ArXiv, MedRxiv, and IEEE Xplore. They are analyzed and classified into two categories: Supervised Learning-based approaches and Deep Learning-based ones. In each category, the employed ML algorithm is specified and a number of used parameters is given. The parameters set for each of the algorithms are gathered in different tables. They include the type of the addressed problem (detection, diagnosis, or detection), the type of the analyzed data (Text data, X-ray images, CT images, Time series, Clinical data,...) and the evaluated metrics (accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-Score, and AUC). The study discusses the collected information and provides a number of statistics drawing a picture about the state of the art. Results show that Deep Learning is used in 79% of cases where 65% of them are based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 17% use Specialized CNN. On his side, supervised learning is found in only 16% of the reviewed approaches and only Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Regression algorithms are employed.

Current Artificial Intelligence (AI) Techniques, Challenges, and Approaches in Controlling and Fighting COVID-19: A Review

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has been one of the worst global health crises in the 21st century. The currently available rollout vaccines are not 100% effective for COVID-19 due to the evolving nature of the virus. There is a real need for a concerted effort to fight the virus, and research from diverse fields must contribute. Artificial intelligence-based approaches have proven to be significantly effective in every branch of our daily lives, including healthcare and medical domains. During the early days of this pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) was utilized in the fight against this virus outbreak and it has played a major role in containing the spread of the virus. It provided innovative opportunities to speed up the development of disease interventions. Several methods, models, AI-based devices, robotics, and technologies have been proposed and utilized for diverse tasks such as surveillance, spread prediction, peak time prediction, classification, hospitalization, healthcare management, heath system capacity, etc. This paper attempts to provide a quick, concise, and precise survey of the state-of-the-art AI-based techniques, technologies, and datasets used in fighting COVID-19. Several domains, including forecasting, surveillance, dynamic times series forecasting, spread prediction, genomics, compute vision, peak time prediction, the classification of medical imaging-including CT and X-ray and how they can be processed-and biological data (genome and protein sequences) have been investigated. An overview of the open-access computational resources and platforms is given and their useful tools are pointed out. The paper presents the potential research areas in AI and will thus encourage researchers to contribute to fighting against the virus and aid global health by slowing down the spread of the virus. This will be a significant contribution to help minimize the high death rate across the globe.

COVID-19 Detection from Radiographs: Is Deep Learning Able to Handle the Crisis?

Deep learning in the last decade has been very successful in computer vision and machine learning applications. Deep learning networks provide state-of-the-art performance in almost all of the applications where they have been employed. In this review, we aim to summarize the essential deep learning techniques and then apply them to COVID-19, a highly contagious viral infection that wreaks havoc on everyone’s lives in various ways. According to the World Health Organization and scientists, more testing potentially helps contain the virus’s spread. The use of chest radiographs is one of the early screening tests for determining disease, as the infection affects the lungs severely. To detect the COVID-19 infection, this experimental survey investigates and automates the process of testing by employing state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers. Moreover, the viruses are of many types, such as influenza, hepatitis, and COVID. Here, our focus is on COVID-19. Therefore, we employ binary classification, where one class is COVID-19 while the other viral infection types are treated as non-COVID-19 in the radiographs. The classification task is challenging due to the limited number of scans available for COVID-19 and the minute variations in the viral infections. We aim to employ current state-of-the-art CNN architectures, compare their results, and determine whether deep learning algorithms can handle the crisis appropriately and accurately. We train and evaluate 34 models. We also provide the limitations and future direction.

Diagnosis of COVID-19 patients by adapting hyper parametertuned deep belief network using hosted cuckoo optimization algorithm

COVID-19 is an infection caused by recently discovered corona virus. The symptoms of COVID-19 are fever, cough and dumpiness of breathing. A quick and accurate identification is essential for an efficient fight against COVID-19. A machine learning technique is initiated for categorizing the chest x-ray images into two cases: COVID-19 positive case or negative case. In this manuscript, the categorization of COVID-19 can be determined by hyper parameter tuned deep belief network using hosted cuckoo optimization algorithm. At first, the input chest x-ray images are pre-processed for removing noises. In this manuscript, the deep belief network method is enhanced by hosted cuckoo optimization approach for getting optimum hyper tuning parameters. By this, exact categorization of COVID-19 is attained effectively. The proposed methodology is stimulated at MATLAB. The proposed approach attains 28.3% and 23.5% higher accuracy for Normal and 32.3% and 31.5% higher accuracy for COVID-19, 19.3% and 28.5% higher precision for Normal and 45.3% and 28.5% higher precision for COVID-19, 20.3% and 21.5% higher F-score for Normal and 40.3% and 21.5% higher F-score for COVID-19. The proposed methodology is analyzed using two existing methodologies, as Convolutional Neural Network with Social Mimic Optimization (CNN-SMO) and Support Vector Machine classifier using Bayesian Optimization algorithm (SVM-BOA).

Multimodal covid network: Multimodal bespoke convolutional neural network architectures for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray's and computerized tomography scans

AI-based tools were developed in the existing works, which focused on one type of image data; either CXR's or computerized tomography (CT) scans for COVID-19 prediction. There is a need for an AI-based tool that predicts COVID-19 detection from chest images such as Chest X-ray (CXR) and CT scans given as inputs. This research gap is considered the core objective of the proposed work. In the proposed work, multimodal CNN architectures were developed based on the parameters and hyperparameters of neural networks. Nine experiments evaluate optimizers, learning rates, and the number of epochs. Based on the experimental results, suitable parameters are fixed for multimodal architecture development for COVID-19 detection. We have constructed a bespoke convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture named multimodal covid network (MMCOVID-NET) by varying the number of layers from two to seven, which can predict covid or normal images from both CXR's and CT scans. In the proposed work, we have experimented by constructing 24 models for COVID-19 prediction. Among them, four models named MMCOVID-NET-I, MMCOVID-NET-II, MMCOVID-NET-III, and MMCOVID-NET-IV performed well by producing an accuracy of 100%. We obtained these results from a small dataset. So we repeated these experiments in a larger dataset. We inferred that MMCOVID-NET-III outperformed all the state-of-the-art methods by producing an accuracy of 99.75%. The experiments carried out in this work conclude that the parameters and hyperparameters play a vital role in increasing or decreasing the model's performance.

Cohesive Multi-Modality Feature Learning and Fusion for COVID-19 Patient Severity Prediction

The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been a nightmare to citizens, hospitals, healthcare practitioners, and the economy in 2020. The overwhelming number of confirmed cases and suspected cases put forward an unprecedented challenge to the hospital's capacity of management and medical resource distribution. To reduce the possibility of cross-infection and attend a patient according to his severity level, expertly diagnosis and sophisticated medical examinations are often required but hard to fulfil during a pandemic. To facilitate the assessment of a patient's severity, this paper proposes a multi-modality feature learning and fusion model for end-to-end covid patient severity prediction using the blood test supported electronic medical record (EMR) and chest computerized tomography (CT) scan images. To evaluate a patient's severity by the co-occurrence of salient clinical features, the High-order Factorization Network (HoFN) is proposed to learn the impact of a set of clinical features without tedious feature engineering. On the other hand, an attention-based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) using pre-trained parameters are used to process the lung CT images. Finally, to achieve cohesion of cross-modality representation, we design a loss function to shift deep features of both-modality into the same feature space which improves the model's performance and robustness when one modality is absent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-modality feature learning and fusion model achieves high performance in an authentic scenario.

Supervised and weakly supervised deep learning models for COVID-19 CT diagnosis: A systematic review

Artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision (CV) methods become reliable to extract features from radiological images, aiding COVID-19 diagnosis ahead of the pathogenic tests and saving critical time for disease management and control. Thus, this review article focuses on cascading numerous deep learning-based COVID-19 computerized tomography (CT) imaging diagnosis research, providing a baseline for future research. Compared to previous review articles on the topic, this study pigeon-holes the collected literature very differently (i.e., its multi-level arrangement). For this purpose, 71 relevant studies were found using a variety of trustworthy databases and search engines, including Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, PubMed, Science Direct, and Scopus. We classify the selected literature in multi-level machine learning groups, such as supervised and weakly supervised learning. Our review article reveals that weak supervision has been adopted extensively for COVID-19 CT diagnosis compared to supervised learning. Weakly supervised (conventional transfer learning) techniques can be utilized effectively for real-time clinical practices by reusing the sophisticated features rather than over-parameterizing the standard models. Few-shot and self-supervised learning are the recent trends to address data scarcity and model efficacy. The deep learning (artificial intelligence) based models are mainly utilized for disease management and control. Therefore, it is more appropriate for readers to comprehend the related perceptive of deep learning approaches for the in-progress COVID-19 CT diagnosis research.

Diagnosing and differentiating viral pneumonia and COVID-19 using X-ray images

Coronavirus-caused diseases are common worldwide and might worsen both human health and the world economy. Most people may instantly encounter coronavirus in their life and may result in pneumonia. Nowadays, the world is fighting against the new coronavirus: COVID-19. The rate of increase is high, and the world got caught the disease unprepared. In most regions of the world, COVID-19 test is not possible due to the absence of the diagnostic kit, even if the kit exists, its false-negative (giving a negative result for a person infected with COVID-19) rate is high. Also, early detection of COVID-19 is crucial to keep its morbidity and mortality rates low. The symptoms of pneumonia are alike, and COVID-19 is no exception. The chest X-ray is the main reference in diagnosing pneumonia. Thus, the need for radiologists has been increased considerably not only to detect COVID-19 but also to identify other abnormalities it caused. Herein, a transfer learning-based multi-class convolutional neural network model was proposed for the automatic detection of pneumonia and also for differentiating non-COVID-19 pneumonia and COVID-19. The model that inputs chest X-ray images is capable of extracting radiographic patterns on chest X-ray images to turn into valuable information and monitor structural differences in the lungs caused by the diseases. The model was developed by two public datasets: Cohen dataset and Kermany dataset. The model achieves an average training accuracy of 0.9886, an average training recall of 0.9829, and an average training precision of 0.9837. Moreover, the average training false-positive and false-negative rates are 0.0085 and 0.0171, respectively. Conversely, the model's test set metrics such as average accuracy, average recall, and average precision are 97.78%, 96.67%, and 96.67%, respectively. According to the simulation results, the proposed model is promising, can quickly and accurately classify chest images, and helps doctors as the second reader in their final decision.

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Mathematical Models to Analyze Forecasting and Epidemiology of COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

COVID-19 is a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 and has been declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization due to its rapid spread. Since the first case was identified in Wuhan, China, the battle against this deadly disease started and has disrupted almost every field of life. Medical staff and laboratories are leading from the front, but researchers from various fields and governmental agencies have also proposed healthy ideas to protect each other. In this article, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is presented to highlight the latest developments in analyzing the COVID-19 data using machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The number of studies related to Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and mathematical models discussed in this research has shown a significant impact on forecasting and the spread of COVID-19. The results and discussion presented in this study are based on the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. Out of 218 articles selected at the first stage, 57 met the criteria and were included in the review process. The findings are therefore associated with those 57 studies, which recorded that CNN (DL) and SVM (ML) are the most used algorithms for forecasting, classification, and automatic detection. The importance of the compartmental models discussed is that the models are useful for measuring the epidemiological features of COVID-19. Current findings suggest that it will take around 1.7 to 140 days for the epidemic to double in size based on the selected studies. The 12 estimates for the basic reproduction range from 0 to 7.1. The main purpose of this research is to illustrate the use of ML, DL, and mathematical models that can be helpful for the researchers to generate valuable solutions for higher authorities and the healthcare industry to reduce the impact of this epidemic.

Let AI Perform Better Next Time—A Systematic Review of Medical Imaging-Based Automated Diagnosis of COVID-19: 2020–2022

The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused millions of infections, which has led to a great loss all over the world, socially and economically. Due to the false-negative rate and the time-consuming characteristic of the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests, diagnosing based on X-ray images and Computed Tomography (CT) images has been widely adopted to confirm positive COVID-19 RT-PCR tests. Since the very beginning of the pandemic, researchers in the artificial intelligence area have proposed a large number of automatic diagnosing models, hoping to assist radiologists and improve the diagnosing accuracy. However, after two years of development, there are still few models that can actually be applied in real-world scenarios. Numerous problems have emerged in the research of the automated diagnosis of COVID-19. In this paper, we present a systematic review of these diagnosing models. A total of 179 proposed models are involved. First, we compare the medical image modalities (CT or X-ray) for COVID-19 diagnosis from both the clinical perspective and the artificial intelligence perspective. Then, we classify existing methods into two types—image-level diagnosis (i.e., classification-based methods) and pixel-level diagnosis (i.e., segmentation-based models). For both types of methods, we define universal model pipelines and analyze the techniques that have been applied in each step of the pipeline in detail. In addition, we also review some commonly adopted public COVID-19 datasets. More importantly, we present an in-depth discussion of the existing automated diagnosis models and note a total of three significant problems: biased model performance evaluation; inappropriate implementation details; and a low reproducibility, reliability and explainability. For each point, we give corresponding recommendations on how we can avoid making the same mistakes and let AI perform better in the next pandemic.

Automated COVID-19 Grading With Convolutional Neural Networks in Computed Tomography Scans: A Systematic Comparison

Amidst the ongoing pandemic, the assessment of computed tomography (CT) images for COVID-19 presence can exceed the workload capacity of radiologists. Several studies addressed this issue by automating COVID-19 classification and grading from CT images with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many of these studies reported initial results of algorithms that were assembled from commonly used components. However, the choice of the components of these algorithms was often pragmatic rather than systematic and systems were not compared to each other across papers in a fair manner. We systematically investigated the effectiveness of using 3-D CNNs instead of 2-D CNNs for seven commonly used architectures, including DenseNet, Inception, and ResNet variants. For the architecture that performed best, we furthermore investigated the effect of initializing the network with pretrained weights, providing automatically computed lesion maps as additional network input, and predicting a continuous instead of a categorical output. A 3-D DenseNet-201 with these components achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.930 on our test set of 105 CT scans and an AUC of 0.919 on a publicly available set of 742 CT scans, a substantial improvement in comparison with a previously published 2-D CNN. This article provides insights into the performance benefits of various components for COVID-19 classification and grading systems. We have created a challenge on grand-challenge.org to allow for a fair comparison between the results of this and future research.

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.

WMR-DepthwiseNet: A Wavelet Multi-Resolution Depthwise Separable Convolutional Neural Network for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Timely discovery of COVID-19 could aid in formulating a suitable treatment plan for disease mitigation and containment decisions. The widely used COVID-19 test necessitates a regular method and has a low sensitivity value. Computed tomography and chest X-ray are also other methods utilized by numerous studies for detecting COVID-19. In this article, we propose a CNN called depthwise separable convolution network with wavelet multiresolution analysis module (WMR-DepthwiseNet) that is robust to automatically learn details from both spatialwise and channelwise for COVID-19 identification with a limited radiograph dataset, which is critical due to the rapid growth of COVID-19. This model utilizes an effective strategy to prevent loss of spatial details, which is a prevalent issue in traditional convolutional neural network, and second, the depthwise separable connectivity framework ensures reusability of feature maps by directly connecting previous layer to all subsequent layers for extracting feature representations from few datasets. We evaluate the proposed model by utilizing a public domain dataset of COVID-19 confirmed case and other pneumonia illness. The proposed method achieves 98.63% accuracy, 98.46% sensitivity, 97.99% specificity, and 98.69% precision on chest X-ray dataset, whereas using the computed tomography dataset, the model achieves 96.83% accuracy, 97.78% sensitivity, 96.22% specificity, and 97.02% precision. According to the results of our experiments, our model achieves up-to-date accuracy with only a few training cases available, which is useful for COVID-19 screening. This latest paradigm is expected to contribute significantly in the battle against COVID-19 and other life-threatening diseases.

An adaptive feature extraction method for classification of Covid-19 X-ray images

This study aims to detect Covid-19 disease in the fastest and most accurate way from X-ray images by developing a new feature extraction method and deep learning model . Partitioned Tridiagonal Enhanced Multivariance Products Representation (PTMEMPR) method is proposed as a new feature extraction method by using matrix partition in TMEMPR method which is known as matrix decomposition method in the literature. The proposed method which provides 99.9% data reduction is used as a preprocessing method in the scheme of the Covid-19 diagnosis. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it is compared with the state-of-the-art feature extraction methods which are Singular Value Decomposition(SVD), Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT). Also new deep learning models which are called FSMCov, FSMCov-N and FSMCov-L are developed in this study. The experimental results indicate that the combination of newly proposed feature extraction method and deep learning models yield an overall accuracy 99.8%.

COVID-19 Diagnosis from Chest X-ray Images Using a Robust Multi-Resolution Analysis Siamese Neural Network with Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network

Chest X-ray (CXR) is becoming a useful method in the evaluation of coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19). Despite the global spread of COVID-19, utilizing a computer-aided diagnosis approach for COVID-19 classification based on CXR images could significantly reduce the clinician burden. There is no doubt that low resolution, noise and irrelevant annotations in chest X-ray images are a major constraint to the performance of AI-based COVID-19 diagnosis. While a few studies have made huge progress, they underestimate these bottlenecks. In this study, we propose a super-resolution-based Siamese wavelet multi-resolution convolutional neural network called COVID-SRWCNN for COVID-19 classification using chest X-ray images. Concretely, we first reconstruct high-resolution (HR) counterparts from low-resolution (LR) CXR images in order to enhance the quality of the dataset for improved performance of our model by proposing a novel enhanced fast super-resolution convolutional neural network (EFSRCNN) to capture texture details in each given chest X-ray image. Exploiting a mutual learning approach, the HR images are passed to the proposed Siamese wavelet multi-resolution convolutional neural network to learn the high-level features for COVID-19 classification. We validate the proposed COVID-SRWCNN model on public-source datasets, achieving accuracy of 98.98%. Our screening technique achieves 98.96% AUC, 99.78% sensitivity, 98.53% precision, and 98.86% specificity. Owing to the fact that COVID-19 chest X-ray datasets are low in quality, experimental results show that our proposed algorithm obtains up-to-date performance that is useful for COVID-19 screening.

Machine-Learning-Based Disease Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Review

Globally, there is a substantial unmet need to diagnose various diseases effectively. The complexity of the different disease mechanisms and underlying symptoms of the patient population presents massive challenges in developing the early diagnosis tool and effective treatment. Machine learning (ML), an area of artificial intelligence (AI), enables researchers, physicians, and patients to solve some of these issues. Based on relevant research, this review explains how machine learning (ML) is being used to help in the early identification of numerous diseases. Initially, a bibliometric analysis of the publication is carried out using data from the Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) databases. The bibliometric study of 1216 publications was undertaken to determine the most prolific authors, nations, organizations, and most cited articles. The review then summarizes the most recent trends and approaches in machine-learning-based disease diagnosis (MLBDD), considering the following factors: algorithm, disease types, data type, application, and evaluation metrics. Finally, in this paper, we highlight key results and provides insight into future trends and opportunities in the MLBDD area.

Fine-Tuned Siamese Network with Modified Enhanced Super-Resolution GAN Plus Based on Low-Quality Chest X-ray Images for COVID-19 Identification

Coronavirus disease has rapidly spread globally since early January of 2020. With millions of deaths, it is essential for an automated system to be utilized to aid in the clinical diagnosis and reduce time consumption for image analysis. This article presents a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based deep learning application for precisely regaining high-resolution (HR) CXR images from low-resolution (LR) CXR correspondents for COVID-19 identification. Respectively, using the building blocks of GAN, we introduce a modified enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial network plus (MESRGAN+) to implement a connected nonlinear mapping collected from noise-contaminated low-resolution input images to produce deblurred and denoised HR images. As opposed to the latest trends of network complexity and computational costs, we incorporate an enhanced VGG19 fine-tuned twin network with the wavelet pooling strategy in order to extract distinct features for COVID-19 identification. We demonstrate our proposed model on a publicly available dataset of 11,920 samples of chest X-ray images, with 2980 cases of COVID-19 CXR, healthy, viral and bacterial cases. Our proposed model performs efficiently both on the binary and four-class classification. The proposed method achieves accuracy of 98.8%, precision of 98.6%, sensitivity of 97.5%, specificity of 98.9%, an F1 score of 97.8% and ROC AUC of 98.8% for the multi-class task, while, for the binary class, the model achieves accuracy of 99.7%, precision of 98.9%, sensitivity of 98.7%, specificity of 99.3%, an F1 score of 98.2% and ROC AUC of 99.7%. Our method obtains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, according to the experimental results, which is helpful for COVID-19 screening. This new conceptual framework is proposed to play an influential role in addressing the issues facing COVID-19 examination and other diseases.

The Role of 3D CT Imaging in the Accurate Diagnosis of Lung Function in Coronavirus Patients

Early grading of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), as well as ventilator support machines, are prime ways to help the world fight this virus and reduce the mortality rate. To reduce the burden on physicians, we developed an automatic Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) system to grade COVID-19 from Computed Tomography (CT) images. This system segments the lung region from chest CT scans using an unsupervised approach based on an appearance model, followed by 3D rotation invariant Markov-Gibbs Random Field (MGRF)-based morphological constraints. This system analyzes the segmented lung and generates precise, analytical imaging markers by estimating the MGRF-based analytical potentials. Three Gibbs energy markers were extracted from each CT scan by tuning the MGRF parameters on each lesion separately. The latter were healthy/mild, moderate, and severe lesions. To represent these markers more reliably, a Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) was generated, then statistical markers were extracted from it, namely, 10th through 90th CDF percentiles with 10% increments. Subsequently, the three extracted markers were combined together and fed into a backpropagation neural network to make the diagnosis. The developed system was assessed on 76 COVID-19-infected patients using two metrics, namely, accuracy and Kappa. In this paper, the proposed system was trained and tested by three approaches. In the first approach, the MGRF model was trained and tested on the lungs. This approach achieved 95.83% accuracy and 93.39% kappa. In the second approach, we trained the MGRF model on the lesions and tested it on the lungs. This approach achieved 91.67% accuracy and 86.67% kappa. Finally, we trained and tested the MGRF model on lesions. It achieved 100% accuracy and 100% kappa. The results reported in this paper show the ability of the developed system to accurately grade COVID-19 lesions compared to other machine learning classifiers, such as k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), decision tree, naïve Bayes, and random forest.

COVID-Net CT-2: Enhanced Deep Neural Networks for Detection of COVID-19 From Chest CT Images Through Bigger, More Diverse Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on, with multiple waves causing substantial harm to health and economies around the world. Motivated by the use of computed tomography (CT) imaging at clinical institutes around the world as an effective complementary screening method to RT-PCR testing, we introduced COVID-Net CT, a deep neural network tailored for detection of COVID-19 cases from chest CT images, along with a large curated benchmark dataset comprising 1,489 patient cases as part of the open-source COVID-Net initiative. However, one potential limiting factor is restricted data quantity and diversity given the single nation patient cohort used in the study. To address this limitation, in this study we introduce enhanced deep neural networks for COVID-19 detection from chest CT images which are trained using a large, diverse, multinational patient cohort. We accomplish this through the introduction of two new CT benchmark datasets, the largest of which comprises a multinational cohort of 4,501 patients from at least 16 countries. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest, most diverse multinational cohort for COVID-19 CT images in open-access form. Additionally, we introduce a novel lightweight neural network architecture called COVID-Net CT S, which is significantly smaller and faster than the previously introduced COVID-Net CT architecture. We leverage explainability to investigate the decision-making behavior of the trained models and ensure that decisions are based on relevant indicators, with the results for select cases reviewed and reported on by two board-certified radiologists with over 10 and 30 years of experience, respectively. The best-performing deep neural network in this study achieved accuracy, COVID-19 sensitivity, positive predictive value, specificity, and negative predictive value of 99.0%/99.1%/98.0%/99.4%/99.7%, respectively. Moreover, explainability-driven performance validation shows consistency with radiologist interpretation by leveraging correct, clinically relevant critical factors. The results are promising and suggest the strong potential of deep neural networks as an effective tool for computer-aided COVID-19 assessment. While not a production-ready solution, we hope the open-source, open-access release of COVID-Net CT-2 and the associated benchmark datasets will continue to enable researchers, clinicians, and citizen data scientists alike to build upon them.