Automated detection of COVID-19 cases using deep neural networks with X-ray images

Ensemble Technique Coupled with Deep Transfer Learning Framework for Automatic Detection of Tuberculosis from Chest X-ray Radiographs

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease affecting humans' lungs and is currently ranked the 13th leading cause of death globally. Due to advancements in technology and the availability of medical datasets, automatic analysis and classification of chest X-rays (CXRs) into TB and non-TB can be a reliable alternative for early TB screening. We propose an automatic TB detection system using advanced deep learning (DL) models. A substantial part of a CXR image is dark, with no relevant information for diagnosis and potentially confusing DL models. In this work, the U-Net model extracts the region of interest from CXRs and the segmented images are fed to the DL models for feature extraction. Eight different convolutional neural networks (CNN) models are employed in our experiments, and their classification performance is compared based on three publicly available CXR datasets. The U-Net model achieves segmentation accuracy of 98.58%, intersection over union (IoU) of 93.10, and a Dice coefficient score of 96.50. Our proposed stacked ensemble algorithm performed better by achieving accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity values of 98.38%, 98.89%, and 98.70%, respectively. Experimental results confirm that segmented lung CXR images with ensemble learning produce a better result than un-segmented lung CXR images.

Variational Autoencoder Based Imbalanced COVID-19 Detection Using Chest X-Ray Images

Early and fast detection of disease is essential for the fight against COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers have focused on developing robust and cost-effective detection methods using Deep learning based chest X-Ray image processing. However, such prediction models are often not well suited to address the challenge of highly imabalanced datasets. The current work is an attempt to address the issue by utilizing unsupervised Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs). Firstly, chest X-Ray images are converted to a latent space by learning the most important features using VAEs. Secondly, a wide range of well established data resampling techniques are used to balance the preexisting imbalanced classes in the latent vector form of the dataset. Finally, the modified dataset in the new feature space is used to train well known classification models to classify chest X-Ray images into three different classes viz., "COVID-19", "Pneumonia", and "Normal". In order to capture the quality of resampling methods, 10-folds cross validation technique is applied on the dataset. Extensive experimental analysis have been carried out and results so obtained indicate significant improvement in COVID-19 detection using the proposed VAE based method. Furthermore, the ingenuity of the results have been established by performing Wilcoxon rank test with 95% level of significance.

An implementation of a hybrid method based on machine learning to identify biomarkers in the Covid-19 diagnosis using DNA sequences

Although some people do not have any chronic disease or are not in the risky age group for Covid-19, they are more vulnerable to the coronavirus. As the reason for this situation, some experts focus on the immune system of the person, while others think that the genetic history of patients may play a role. It is critical to detect corona from DNA signals as early as possible to determine the relationship between Covid-19 and genes. Thus, the effect on the severe course of the disease of variations in the genes associated with the corona disease will be revealed. In this study, a novel intelligent computer approach is proposed to identify coronavirus from nucleotide signals for the first time. The proposed method presents a multilayered feature extraction structure to extract the most effective features using an Entropy-based mapping technique, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), statistical feature extractor, and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), together. Then 94 distinctive features are selected by the ReliefF technique. Support vector machine (SVM) and k nearest neighborhood (k-NN) are chosen as classifiers. The method achieved the highest classification accuracy rate of 98.84% with an SVM classifier to detect Covid-19 from DNA signals. The proposed method is ready to be tested with a different database in the diagnosis of Covid-19 using RNA or other signals.

Generative adversarial network based data augmentation for CNN based detection of Covid-19

Covid-19 has been a global concern since 2019, crippling the world economy and health. Biological diagnostic tools have since been developed to identify the virus from bodily fluids and since the virus causes pneumonia, which results in lung inflammation, the presence of the virus can also be detected using medical imaging by expert radiologists. The success of each diagnostic method is measured by the hit rate for identifying Covid infections. However, the access for people to each diagnosis tool can be limited, depending on the geographic region and, since Covid treatment denotes a race against time, the diagnosis duration plays an important role. Hospitals with X-ray opportunities are widely distributed all over the world, so a method investigating lung X-ray images for possible Covid-19 infections would offer itself. Promising results have been achieved in the literature in automatically detecting the virus using medical images like CT scans and X-rays using supervised artificial neural network algorithms. One of the major drawbacks of supervised learning models is that they require enormous amounts of data to train, and generalize on new data. In this study, we develop a Swish activated, Instance and Batch normalized Residual U-Net GAN with dense blocks and skip connections to create synthetic and augmented data for training. The proposed GAN architecture, due to the presence of instance normalization and swish activation, can deal with the randomness of luminosity, that arises due to different sources of X-ray images better than the classical architecture and generate realistic-looking synthetic data. Also, the radiology equipment is not generally computationally efficient. They cannot efficiently run state-of-the-art deep neural networks such as DenseNet and ResNet effectively. Hence, we propose a novel CNN architecture that is 40% lighter and more accurate than state-of-the-art CNN networks. Multi-class classification of the three classes of chest X-rays (CXR), ie Covid-19, healthy and Pneumonia, is performed using the proposed model which had an extremely high test accuracy of 99.2% which has not been achieved in any previous studies in the literature. Based on the mentioned criteria for developing Corona infection diagnosis, in the present study, an Artificial Intelligence based method is proposed, resulting in a rapid diagnostic tool for Covid infections based on generative adversarial and convolutional neural networks. The benefit will be a high accuracy of lung infection identification with 99% accuracy. This could lead to a support tool that helps in rapid diagnosis, and an accessible Covid identification method using CXR images.

Multi-Stage Temporal Convolution Network for COVID-19 Variant Classification

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has developed into a global epidemic. Due to the pathogenic virus’s high transmission rate, accurate identification and early prediction are required for subsequent therapy. Moreover, the virus’s polymorphic nature allows it to evolve and adapt to various environments, making prediction difficult. However, other diseases, such as dengue, MERS-CoV, Ebola, SARS-CoV-1, and influenza, necessitate the employment of a predictor based on their genomic information. To alleviate the situation, we propose a deep learning-based mechanism for the classification of various SARS-CoV-2 virus variants, including the most recent, Omicron. Our model uses a neural network with a temporal convolution neural network to accurately identify different variants of COVID-19. The proposed model first encodes the sequences in the numerical descriptor, and then the convolution operation is applied for discriminative feature extraction from the encoded sequences. The sequential relations between the features are collected using a temporal convolution network to classify COVID-19 variants accurately. We collected recent data from the NCBI, on which the proposed method outperforms various baselines with a high margin.

COVIDX-LwNet: A Lightweight Network Ensemble Model for the Detection of COVID-19 Based on Chest X-ray Images

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic coronavirus has put a lot of pressure on health systems around the world. One of the most common ways to detect COVID-19 is to use chest X-ray images, which have the advantage of being cheap and fast. However, in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, most studies applied pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) models, and the features produced by the last convolutional layer were directly passed into the classification head. In this study, the proposed ensemble model consists of three lightweight networks, Xception, MobileNetV2 and NasNetMobile as three original feature extractors, and then three base classifiers are obtained by adding the coordinated attention module, LSTM and a new classification head to the original feature extractors. The classification results from the three base classifiers are then fused by a confidence fusion method. Three publicly available chest X-ray datasets for COVID-19 testing were considered, with ternary (COVID-19, normal and other pneumonia) and quaternary (COVID-19, normal) analyses performed on the first two datasets, bacterial pneumonia and viral pneumonia classification, and achieved high accuracy rates of 95.56% and 91.20%, respectively. The third dataset was used to compare the performance of the model compared to other models and the generalization ability on different datasets. We performed a thorough ablation study on the first dataset to understand the impact of each proposed component. Finally, we also performed visualizations. These saliency maps not only explain key prediction decisions of the model, but also help radiologists locate areas of infection. Through extensive experiments, it was finally found that the results obtained by the proposed method are comparable to the state-of-the-art methods.

CCT: Lightweight compact convolutional transformer for lung disease CT image classification

Computed tomography (CT) imaging results are an important criterion for the diagnosis of lung disease. CT images can clearly show the characteristics of lung lesions. Early and accurate detection of lung diseases helps clinicians to improve patient care effectively. Therefore, in this study, we used a lightweight compact convolutional transformer (CCT) to build a prediction model for lung disease classification using chest CT images. We added a position offset term and changed the attention mechanism of the transformer encoder to an axial attention mechanism module. As a result, the classification performance of the model was improved in terms of height and width. We show that the model effectively classifies COVID-19, community pneumonia, and normal conditions on the CC-CCII dataset. The proposed model outperforms other comparable models in the test set, achieving an accuracy of 98.5% and a sensitivity of 98.6%. The results show that our method achieves a larger field of perception on CT images, which positively affects the classification of CT images. Thus, the method can provide adequate assistance to clinicians.

COVID-19 detection based on pre-trained deep networks and LSTM model using X-ray images enhanced contrast with artificial bee colony algorithm

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is an infectious disease that has spread across the world within a short period of time and is causing rapid casualties. The main symptoms of this virus are shortness of breath, fever, cough, and a sore throat. The virus is detected through samples, such as throat swabs and sputum, taken from people who meet the possible case definition and the results are usually obtained within a few hours or a day. The development of test kits to detect the COVID-19 virus is still an open research topic, and automated and faster diagnostic tools are needed. Recent studies have shown that biomedical images can be used for COVID-19 testing. This study proposes the hybrid use of pre-trained deep networks and the long short-term memory (LSTM) for the classification of COVID-19 from contrast-enhanced chest X-rays. In the proposed system, a transformation function is applied to X-ray images first. Then, the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used to optimize the parameters obtained from the transformation function. The pre-trained deep network models and LSTM are preferred to extract features from the contrast-enhanced chest X-rays. At the final stage, COVID-19, normal (healthy), and pneumonia chest X-ray are classified using softmax. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the "COVID-19 radiography" dataset, which is widely used in the literature, is preferred. From the proposed model, 98.97% accuracy, 98.80% precision, and 98.70% sensitivity rates are obtained. Experimental results reveal that the proposed model provides efficient results compared to other methods. Thanks to the application of ABC-based image enhancement, increased classification of 2.5% has been achieved against other state-of-the-art models.

Federated learning based Covid-19 detection

The world is affected by COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Tests are necessary for everyone as the number of COVID-19 affected individual's increases. So, the authors developed a basic sequential CNN model based on deep and federated learning that focuses on user data security while simultaneously enhancing test accuracy. The proposed model helps users detect COVID-19 in a few seconds by uploading a single chest X-ray image. A deep learning-aided architecture that can handle client and server sides efficiently has been proposed in this work. The front-end part has been developed using StreamLit, and the back-end uses a Flower framework. The proposed model has achieved a global accuracy of 99.59% after being trained for three federated communication rounds. The detailed analysis of this paper provides the robustness of this work. In addition, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) will improve the ease of access to the aforementioned health services. IoMT tools and services are rapidly changing healthcare operations for the better. Hopefully, it will continue to do so in this difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic and will help to push the envelope of this work to a different extent.

A novel deep learning-based method for COVID-19 pneumonia detection from CT images

Background

The sensitivity of RT-PCR in diagnosing COVID-19 is only 60–70%, and chest CT plays an indispensable role in the auxiliary diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia, but the results of CT imaging are highly dependent on professional radiologists.

Aims

This study aimed to develop a deep learning model to assist radiologists in detecting COVID-19 pneumonia.

Methods

The total study population was 437. The training dataset contained 26,477, 2468, and 8104 CT images of normal, CAP, and COVID-19, respectively. The validation dataset contained 14,076, 1028, and 3376 CT images of normal, CAP, and COVID-19 patients, respectively. The test set included 51 normal cases, 28 CAP patients, and 51 COVID-19 patients. We designed and trained a deep learning model to recognize normal, CAP, and COVID-19 patients based on U-Net and ResNet-50. Moreover, the diagnoses of the deep learning model were compared with different levels of radiologists.

Results

In the test set, the sensitivity of the deep learning model in diagnosing normal cases, CAP, and COVID-19 patients was 98.03%, 89.28%, and 92.15%, respectively. The diagnostic accuracy of the deep learning model was 93.84%. In the validation set, the accuracy was 92.86%, which was better than that of two novice doctors (86.73% and 87.75%) and almost equal to that of two experts (94.90% and 93.88%). The AI model performed significantly better than all four radiologists in terms of time consumption (35 min vs. 75 min, 93 min, 79 min, and 82 min).

Conclusion

The AI model we obtained had strong decision-making ability, which could potentially assist doctors in detecting COVID-19 pneumonia.

A review about COVID-19 in the MENA region: environmental concerns and machine learning applications

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has delayed global economic growth, which has affected the economic life globally. On the one hand, numerous elements in the environment impact the transmission of this new coronavirus. Every country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area has a different population density, air quality and contaminants, and water- and land-related conditions, all of which influence coronavirus transmission. The World Health Organization (WHO) has advocated fast evaluations to guide policymakers with timely evidence to respond to the situation. This review makes four unique contributions. One, many data about the transmission of the new coronavirus in various sorts of settings to provide clear answers to the current dispute over the virus's transmission were reviewed. Two, highlight the most significant application of machine learning to forecast and diagnose severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Three, our insights provide timely and accurate information along with compelling suggestions and methodical directions for investigators. Four, the present study provides decision-makers and community leaders with information on the effectiveness of environmental controls for COVID-19 dissemination.

SUFEMO: A superpixel based fuzzy image segmentation method for COVID-19 radiological image elucidation

COVID-19 causes an ongoing worldwide pandemic situation. The non-discovery of specialized drugs and/or any other kind of medicines makes the situation worse. Early diagnosis of this disease will be certainly helpful to start the treatment early and also to bring down the dire spread of this highly infectious virus. This article describes the proposed novel unsupervised segmentation method to segment the radiological image samples of the chest area that are accumulated from the COVID-19 infected patients. The proposed approach is helpful for physicians, medical technologists, and other related experts in the quick and early diagnosis of COVID-19 infection. The proposed approach will be the SUFEMO (SUperpixel based Fuzzy Electromagnetism-like Optimization). This approach is developed depending on some well-known theories like the Electromagnetism-like optimization algorithm, the type-2 fuzzy logic, and the superpixels. The proposed approach brings down the processing burden that is required to deal with a considerably large amount of spatial information by assimilating the notion of the superpixel. In this work, the EMO approach is modified by utilizing the type 2 fuzzy framework. The EMO approach updates the cluster centers without using the cluster center updation equation. This approach is independent of the choice of the initial cluster centers. To decrease the related computational overhead of handling a lot of spatial data, a novel superpixel-based approach is proposed in which the noise-sensitiveness of the watershed-based superpixel formation approach is dealt with by computing the nearby minima from the gradient image. Also, to take advantage of the superpixels, the fuzzy objective function is modified. The proposed approach was evaluated using both qualitatively and quantitatively using 310 chest CT scan images that are gathered from various sources. Four standard cluster validity indices are taken into consideration to quantify the results. It is observed that the proposed approach gives better performance compared to some of the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. On average, the proposed approach attains Davies-Bouldin index value of 1.812008792, Xie-Beni index value of 1.683281, Dunn index value 2.588595748, and β index value 3.142069236 for 5 clusters. Apart from this, the proposed approach is also found to be superior with regard to the rate of convergence. Rigorous experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach and establish the real-life applicability of the proposed method for the initial filtering of the COVID-19 patients.

COVID-19 Diagnosis on Chest Radiograph Using Artificial Intelligence

BACKGROUND

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has disrupted the world since 2019, causing significant morbidity and mortality in developed and developing countries alike. Although substantial resources have been diverted to developing diagnostic, preventative, and treatment measures, disparities in the availability and efficacy of these tools vary across countries. We seek to assess the ability of commercial artificial intelligence (AI) technology to diagnose COVID-19 by analyzing chest radiographs.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Chest radiographs taken from symptomatic patients within two days of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests were assessed for COVID-19 infection by board-certified radiologists and commercially available AI software. Sixty patients with negative and 60 with positive COVID reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests were chosen. Results were compared against results of the PCR test for accuracy and statistically analyzed by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves along with area under the curve (AUC) values.

RESULTS

A total of 120 chest radiographs (60 positive and 60 negative RT-PCR tests) radiographs were analyzed. The AI software performed significantly better than chance (p = 0.001) and did not differ significantly from the radiologist ROC curve (p = 0.78).

CONCLUSION

Commercially available AI software was not inferior compared with trained radiologists in accurately identifying COVID-19 cases by analyzing radiographs. While RT-PCR testing remains the standard, current advances in AI help correctly analyze chest radiographs to diagnose COVID-19 infection.

A self-supervised COVID-19 CT recognition system with multiple regularizations

The diagnosis of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) exploiting machine learning algorithms based on chest computed tomography (CT) images has become an important technology. Though many excellent computer-aided methods leveraging CT images have been designed, they do not possess sufficiently high recognition accuracy. Besides, these methods entail vast amounts of training data, which might be difficult to be satisfied in some real-world applications. To address these two issues, this paper proposes a novel COVID-19 recognition system based on CT images, which has high recognition accuracy, while only requiring a small amount of training data. Specifically, the system possesses the following three improvements: 1) Data: a novel redesigned BCELoss that incorporates Label Smoothing, Focal Loss, and Label Weighting Regularization (LSFLLW-R) technique for optimizing the solution space and preventing overfitting, 2) Model: a backbone network processed by two-phase contrastive self-supervised learning for classifying multiple labels, and 3) Method: a decision-fusing ensemble learning method for getting a more stable system, with balanced metric values. Our proposed system is evaluated on the small-scale expanded COVID-CT dataset, achieving an accuracy of 94.3%, a precision of 94.1%, a recall (sensitivity) of 93.4%, an F1-score of 94.7%, and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 98.9%, for COVID-19 diagnosis, respectively. These experimental results verify that our system can not only identify pathological locations effectively, but also achieve better performance in terms of accuracy, generalizability, and stability, compared with several other state-of-the-art COVID-19 diagnosis methods.

Dynamic feature learning for COVID-19 segmentation and classification

Since December 2019, coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has rapidly developed into a global epidemic, with millions of patients affected worldwide. As part of the diagnostic pathway, computed tomography (CT) scans are used to help patient management. However, parenchymal imaging findings in COVID-19 are non-specific and can be seen in other diseases. In this work, we propose to first segment lesions from CT images, and further, classify COVID-19 patients from healthy persons and common pneumonia patients. In detail, a novel Dynamic Fusion Segmentation Network (DFSN) that automatically segments infection-related pixels is first proposed. Within this network, low-level features are aggregated to high-level ones to effectively capture context characteristics of infection regions, and high-level features are dynamically fused to model multi-scale semantic information of lesions. Based on DFSN, Dynamic Transfer-learning Classification Network (DTCN) is proposed to distinguish COVID-19 patients. Within DTCN, a pre-trained DFSN is transferred and used as the backbone to extract pixel-level information. Then the pixel-level information is dynamically selected and used to make a diagnosis. In this way, the pre-trained DFSN is utilized through transfer learning, and clinical significance of segmentation results is comprehensively considered. Thus DTCN becomes more sensitive to typical signs of COVID-19. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed DFSN and DTCN frameworks. The corresponding results indicate that these two models achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of segmentation and classification.

SVD-CLAHE boosting and balanced loss function for Covid-19 detection from an imbalanced Chest X-Ray dataset

Covid-19 disease has had a disastrous effect on the health of the global population, for the last two years. Automatic early detection of Covid-19 disease from Chest X-Ray (CXR) images is a very crucial step for human survival against Covid-19. In this paper, we propose a novel data-augmentation technique, called SVD-CLAHE Boosting and a novel loss function Balanced Weighted Categorical Cross Entropy (BWCCE), in order to detect Covid 19 disease efficiently from a highly class-imbalanced Chest X-Ray image dataset. Our proposed SVD-CLAHE Boosting method is comprised of both oversampling and under-sampling methods. First, a novel Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based contrast enhancement and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) methods are employed for oversampling the data in minor classes. Simultaneously, a Random Under Sampling (RUS) method is incorporated in major classes, so that the number of images per class will be more balanced. Thereafter, Balanced Weighted Categorical Cross Entropy (BWCCE) loss function is proposed in order to further reduce small class imbalance after SVD-CLAHE Boosting. Experimental results reveal that ResNet-50 model on the augmented dataset (by SVD-CLAHE Boosting), along with BWCCE loss function, achieved 95% F1 score, 94% accuracy, 95% recall, 96% precision and 96% AUC, which is far better than the results by other conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models like InceptionV3, DenseNet-121, Xception etc. as well as other existing models like Covid-Lite and Covid-Net. Hence, our proposed framework outperforms other existing methods for Covid-19 detection. Furthermore, the same experiment is conducted on VGG-19 model in order to check the validity of our proposed framework. Both ResNet-50 and VGG-19 model are pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. We publicly shared our proposed augmented dataset on Kaggle website (https://www.kaggle.com/tr1gg3rtrash/balanced-augmented-covid-cxr-dataset), so that any research community can widely utilize this dataset. Our code is available on GitHub website online (https://github.com/MrinalTyagi/SVD-CLAHE-and-BWCCE).

Deep viewing for the identification of Covid-19 infection status from chest X-Ray image using CNN based architecture

In recent years, coronavirus (Covid-19) has evolved into one of the world’s leading life-threatening severe viral illnesses. A self-executing accord system might be a better option to stop Covid-19 from spreading due to its quick diagnostic option. Many researches have already investigated various deep learning techniques, which have a significant impact on the quick and precise early detection of Covid-19. Most of the existing techniques, though, have not been trained and tested using a significant amount of data. In this paper, we purpose a deep learning technique enabled Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to automatically diagnose Covid-19 from chest x-rays. To train and test our model, 10,293 x-rays, including 2875 x-rays of Covid-19, were collected as a data set. The applied dataset consists of three groups of chest x-rays: Covid-19, pneumonia, and normal patients. The proposed approach achieved 98.5% accuracy, 98.9% specificity, 99.2% sensitivity, 99.2% precision, and 98.3% F1-score. Distinguishing Covid-19 patients from pneumonia patients using chest x-ray, particularly for human eyes is crucial since both diseases have nearly identical characteristics. To address this issue, we have categorized Covid-19 and pneumonia using x-rays, achieving a 99.60% accuracy rate. Our findings show that the proposed model might aid clinicians and researchers in rapidly detecting Covid-19 patients, hence facilitating the treatment of Covid-19 patients.

COVID-19 Detection on Chest X-Ray Images Using Homomorphic Transformation and VGG Inspired Deep Convolutional Neural Network

COVID-19 had caused the whole world to come to a standstill. The current detection methods are time consuming as well as costly. Using Chest X-rays (CXRs) is a solution to this problem, however, manual examination of CXRs is a cumbersome and difficult process needing specialization in the domain. Most of existing methods used for this application involve the usage of pretrained models such as VGG19, ResNet, DenseNet, Xception, and EfficeintNet which were trained on RGB image datasets. X-rays are fundamentally single channel images, hence using RGB trained model is not appropriate since it increases the operations by involving three channels instead of one. A way of using pretrained model for grayscale images is by replicating the one channel image data to three channel which introduces redundancy and another way is by altering the input layer of pretrained model to take in one channel image data, which comprises the weights in the forward layers that were trained on three channel images which weakens the use of pre-trained weights in a transfer learning approach. A novel approach for identification of COVID-19 using CXRs, Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) along with Homomorphic Transformation Filter which is used to process the pixel data in images and extract features from the CXRs is suggested in this paper. These processed images are then provided as input to a VGG inspired deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model which takes one channel image data as input (grayscale images) to categorize CXRs into three class labels, namely, No-Findings, COVID-19, and Pneumonia. Evaluation of the suggested model is done with the help of two publicly available datasets; one to obtain COVID-19 and No-Finding images and the other to obtain Pneumonia CXRs. The dataset comprises 6750 images in total; 2250 images for each class. Results obtained show that the model has achieved 96.56% for multi-class classification and 98.06% accuracy for binary classification using 5-fold stratified cross validation (CV) method. This result is competitive and up to the mark when compared with the performance shown by existing approaches for COVID-19 classification.

Application of explainable artificial intelligence for healthcare: A systematic review of the last decade (2011-2022)

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Artificial intelligence (AI) has branched out to various applications in healthcare, such as health services management, predictive medicine, clinical decision-making, and patient data and diagnostics. Although AI models have achieved human-like performance, their use is still limited because they are seen as a black box. This lack of trust remains the main reason for their low use in practice, especially in healthcare. Hence, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has been introduced as a technique that can provide confidence in the model's prediction by explaining how the prediction is derived, thereby encouraging the use of AI systems in healthcare. The primary goal of this review is to provide areas of healthcare that require more attention from the XAI research community.

METHODS

Multiple journal databases were thoroughly searched using PRISMA guidelines 2020. Studies that do not appear in Q1 journals, which are highly credible, were excluded.

RESULTS

In this review, we surveyed 99 Q1 articles covering the following XAI techniques: SHAP, LIME, GradCAM, LRP, Fuzzy classifier, EBM, CBR, rule-based systems, and others.

CONCLUSION

We discovered that detecting abnormalities in 1D biosignals and identifying key text in clinical notes are areas that require more attention from the XAI research community. We hope this is review will encourage the development of a holistic cloud system for a smart city.

A Review Study of the Deep Learning Techniques used for the Classification of Chest Radiological Images for COVID-19 Diagnosis

In the fight against COVID-19, the immediate and accurate screening of infected patients is of great significance. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computed Tomography (CT) screening play an important role in the diagnosis of COVID-19. Studies showed that changes occur in Chest Radiological images before the beginning of COVID-19 symptoms for some patients, and the symptoms of COVID-19 and other lung diseases can be similar in their very early stages. Further, it is crucial to effectively distinguish COVID-19 patients from healthy people, and patients with other lung diseases as soon as possible, otherwise inaccurate diagnosis may expose more people to the coronavirus. Many researchers have developed end-to-end deep learning techniques for the classification of COVID-19 patients without manual feature engineering. In this paper, we review the different deep learning techniques that have been used to analyze Chest X-Ray and Computed Tomography scans to classify patients with Covid-19. In addition, we also summarize the common public datasets, challenges, limitations, and possible future work. This review paper is extremely valuable as it confirms that (1) Deep Learning models are effective in classifying chest X-Ray images provided the training dataset is sufficiently large. (2) Data augmentation and generative adversarial networks (GANs) solve the small training dataset problem. (3) Transfer learning methods greatly enhanced the extraction and selection of features that were important for chest image classification. (4) Hyperparameter tuning was valuable for increasing the deep learning model accuracies to generally more than 97%. Our review study helps new researchers identify the gaps and opportunities for further or new research.

An evaluation of lightweight deep learning techniques in medical imaging for high precision COVID-19 diagnostics

Timely and rapid diagnoses are core to informing on optimum interventions that curb the spread of COVID-19. The use of medical images such as chest X-rays and CTs has been advocated to supplement the Reverse-Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test, which in turn has stimulated the application of deep learning techniques in the development of automated systems for the detection of infections. Decision support systems relax the challenges inherent to the physical examination of images, which is both time consuming and requires interpretation by highly trained clinicians. A review of relevant reported studies to date shows that most deep learning algorithms utilised approaches are not amenable to implementation on resource-constrained devices. Given the rate of infections is increasing, rapid, trusted diagnoses are a central tool in the management of the spread, mandating a need for a low-cost and mobile point-of-care detection systems, especially for middle- and low-income nations. The paper presents the development and evaluation of the performance of lightweight deep learning technique for the detection of COVID-19 using the MobileNetV2 model. Results demonstrate that the performance of the lightweight deep learning model is competitive with respect to heavyweight models but delivers a significant increase in the efficiency of deployment, notably in the lowering of the cost and memory requirements of computing resources.

NSCGCN: A novel deep GCN model to diagnosis COVID-19

AIM

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was a lung disease with high mortality and was highly contagious. Early diagnosis of COVID-19 and distinguishing it from pneumonia was beneficial for subsequent treatment.

OBJECTIVES

Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has driven a significant contribution to disease diagnosis. However, limited by the nature of the graph convolution algorithm, deep GCN has an over-smoothing problem. Most of the current GCN models are shallow neural networks, which do not exceed five layers. Furthermore, the objective of this study is to develop a novel deep GCN model based on the DenseGCN and the pre-trained model of deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to complete the diagnosis of chest X-ray (CXR) images.

METHODS

We apply the pre-trained model of deep CNN to perform feature extraction on the data to complete the extraction of pixel-level features in the image. And then, to extract the potential relationship between the obtained features, we propose Neighbourhood Feature Reconstruction Algorithm to reconstruct them into graph-structured data. Finally, we design a deep GCN model that exploits the graph-structured data to diagnose COVID-19 effectively. In the deep GCN model, we propose a Node-Self Convolution Algorithm (NSC) based on feature fusion to construct a deep GCN model called NSCGCN (Node-Self Convolution Graph Convolutional Network).

RESULTS

Experiments were carried out on the Computed Tomography (CT) and CXR datasets. The results on the CT dataset confirmed that: compared with the six state-of-the-art (SOTA) shallow GCN models, the accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed NSCGCN had improve 8% as sensitivity (Sen.) = 87.50%, F1 score = 97.37%, precision (Pre.) = 89.10%, accuracy (Acc.) = 97.50%, area under the ROC curve (AUC) = 97.09%. Moreover, the results on the CXR dataset confirmed that: compared with the fourteen SOTA GCN models, sixteen SOTA CNN transfer learning models and eight SOTA COVID-19 diagnosis methods on the COVID-19 dataset. Our proposed method had best performances as Sen. = 96.45%, F1 score = 96.45%, Pre. = 96.61%, Acc. = 96.45%, AUC = 99.22%.

CONCLUSION

Our proposed NSCGCN model is effective and performed better than the thirty-eight SOTA methods. Thus, the proposed NSC could help build deep GCN models. Our proposed COVID-19 diagnosis method based on the NSCGCN model could help radiologists detect pneumonia from CXR images and distinguish COVID-19 from Ordinary Pneumonia (OPN). The source code of this work will be publicly available at https://github.com/TangChaosheng/NSCGCN.

SARS-CoV-2 Morphometry Analysis and Prediction of Real Virus Levels Based on Full Recurrent Neural Network Using TEM Images

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is responsible for the rapid global spread of the COVID-19 disease. As a result, it is critical to understand and collect primary data on the virus, infection epidemiology, and treatment. Despite the speed with which the virus was detected, studies of its cell biology and architecture at the ultrastructural level are still in their infancy. Therefore, we investigated and analyzed the viral morphometry of SARS-CoV-2 to extract important key points of the virus's characteristics. Then, we proposed a prediction model to identify the real virus levels based on the optimization of a full recurrent neural network (RNN) using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images. Consequently, identification of virus levels depends on the size of the morphometry of the area (width, height, circularity, roundness, aspect ratio, and solidity). The results of our model were an error score of training network performance 3.216 × 10^-11 at 639 epoch, regression of -1.6 × 10^-9, momentum gain (Mu) 1 × 10^-9, and gradient value of 9.6852 × 10^-8, which represent a network with a high ability to predict virus levels. The fully automated system enables virologists to take a high-accuracy approach to virus diagnosis, prevention of mutations, and life cycle and improvement of diagnostic reagents and drugs, adding a point of view to the advancement of medical virology.

COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-rays Using Trained Output Based Transfer Learning Approach

The recent Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which started in 2019, has spread across the globe and become a global pandemic. The efficient and effective COVID-19 detection using chest X-rays helps in early detection and curtailing the spread of the disease. In this paper, we propose a novel Trained Output-based Transfer Learning (TOTL) approach for COVID-19 detection from chest X-rays. We start by preprocessing the Chest X-rays of the patients with techniques like denoising, contrasting, segmentation. These processed images are then fed to several pre-trained transfer learning models like InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, Xception, MobileNet, ResNet50, ResNet50V2, VGG16, and VGG19. We fine-tune these models on the processed chest X-rays. Then we further train the outputs of these models using a deep neural network architecture to achieve enhanced performance and aggregate the capabilities of each of them. The proposed model has been tested on four recent COVID-19 chest X-rays datasets by computing several popular evaluation metrics. The performance of our model has also been compared with various deep transfer learning models and several contemporary COVID-19 detection methods. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our proposed model.

Graph-based Fusion Modeling and Explanation for Disease Trajectory Prediction

We propose a relational graph to incorporate clinical similarity between patients while building personalized clinical event predictors with a focus on hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Our graph formation process fuses heterogeneous data, i.e., chest X-rays as node features and non-imaging EHR for edge formation. While node represents a snap-shot in time for a single patient, weighted edge structure encodes complex clinical patterns among patients. While age and gender have been used in the past for patient graph formation, our method incorporates complex clinical history while avoiding manual feature selection. The model learns from the patient's own data as well as patterns among clinically-similar patients. Our visualization study investigates the effects of 'neighborhood' of a node on its predictiveness and showcases the model's tendency to focus on edge-connected patients with highly suggestive clinical features common with the node. The proposed model generalizes well by allowing edge formation process to adapt to an external cohort.

Radiomics-Based Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Using Interpretable Soft Label-Driven TSK Fuzzy Classifier

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant global public health threat with an escalating number of new cases and death toll daily. The early detection of COVID-related CXR abnormality potentially allows the early isolation of suspected cases. Chest X-Ray (CXR) is a fast and highly accessible imaging modality. Recently, a number of CXR-based AI models have been developed for the automated detection of COVID-19. However, most existing models are difficult to interpret due to the use of incomprehensible deep features in their models. Confronted with this, we developed an interpretable TSK fuzzy system in this study for COVID-19 detection using radiomics features extracted from CXR images. There are two main contributions. (1) When TSK fuzzy systems are applied to classification tasks, the commonly used binary label matrix of training samples is transformed into a soft one in order to learn a more discriminant transformation matrix and hence improve classification accuracy. (2) Based on the assumption that the samples in the same class should be kept as close as possible when they are transformed into the label space, the compactness class graph is introduced to avoid overfitting caused by label matrix relaxation. Our proposed model for a multi-categorical classification task (COVID-19 vs. No-Findings vs. Pneumonia) was evaluated using 600 CXR images from publicly available datasets and compared against five state-of-the-art AI models in aspects of classification accuracy. Experimental findings showed that our model achieved classification accuracy of over 83%, which is better than the state-of-the-art models, while maintaining high interpretability.

A CNN-transformer fusion network for COVID-19 CXR image classification

The global health crisis due to the fast spread of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has caused great danger to all aspects of healthcare, economy, and other aspects. The highly infectious and insidious nature of the new coronavirus greatly increases the difficulty of outbreak prevention and control. The early and rapid detection of Covid-19 is an effective way to reduce the spread of Covid-19. However, detecting Covid-19 accurately and quickly in large populations remains to be a major challenge worldwide. In this study, A CNN-transformer fusion framework is proposed for the automatic classification of pneumonia on chest X-ray. This framework includes two parts: data processing and image classification. The data processing stage is to eliminate the differences between data from different medical institutions so that they have the same storage format; in the image classification stage, we use a multi-branch network with a custom convolution module and a transformer module, including feature extraction, feature focus, and feature classification sub-networks. Feature extraction subnetworks extract the shallow features of the image and interact with the information through the convolution and transformer modules. Both the local and global features are extracted by the convolution module and transformer module of feature-focus subnetworks, and are classified by the feature classification subnetworks. The proposed network could decide whether or not a patient has pneumonia, and differentiate between Covid-19 and bacterial pneumonia. This network was implemented on the collected benchmark datasets and the result shows that accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score are 97.09%, 97.16%, 96.93%, and 97.04%, respectively. Our network was compared with other researchers' proposed methods and achieved better results in terms of accuracy, precision, and F1 score, proving that it is superior for Covid-19 detection. With further improvements to this network, we hope that it will provide doctors with an effective tool for diagnosing Covid-19.

Learning effective embedding for automated COVID-19 prediction from chest X-ray images

The pandemic that the SARS-CoV-2 originated in 2019 is continuing to cause serious havoc on the global population's health, economy, and livelihood. A critical way to suppress and restrain this pandemic is the early detection of COVID-19, which will help to control the virus. Chest X-rays are one of the more straightforward ways to detect the COVID-19 virus compared to the standard methods like CT scans and RT-PCR diagnosis, which are very complex, expensive, and take much time. Our research on various papers shows that the currently researchers are actively working for an efficient Deep Learning model to produce an unbiased detection of COVID-19 through chest X-ray images. In this work, we propose a novel convolution neural network model based on supervised classification that simultaneously computes identification and verification loss. We adopt a transfer learning approach using pretrained models trained on imagenet dataset such as Alex Net and VGG16 as back-bone models and use data augmentation techniques to solve class imbalance and boost the classifier's performance. Finally, our proposed classifier architecture model ensures unbiased and high accuracy results, outperforming existing deep learning models for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray images producing State of the Art performance. It shows strong and robust performance and proves to be easily deployable and scalable, therefore increasing the efficiency of analyzing chest X-ray images with high accuracy in detection of Coronavirus.

EVAE-Net: An Ensemble Variational Autoencoder Deep Learning Network for COVID-19 Classification Based on Chest X-ray Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on many lives and the economies of many countries since late December 2019. Early detection with high accuracy is essential to help break the chain of transmission. Several radiological methodologies, such as CT scan and chest X-ray, have been employed in diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 disease. Still, these methodologies are time-consuming and require trial and error. Machine learning techniques are currently being applied by several studies to deal with COVID-19. This study exploits the latent embeddings of variational autoencoders combined with ensemble techniques to propose three effective EVAE-Net models to detect COVID-19 disease. Two encoders are trained on chest X-ray images to generate two feature maps. The feature maps are concatenated and passed to either a combined or individual reparameterization phase to generate latent embeddings by sampling from a distribution. The latent embeddings are concatenated and passed to a classification head for classification. The COVID-19 Radiography Dataset from Kaggle is the source of chest X-ray images. The performances of the three models are evaluated. The proposed model shows satisfactory performance, with the best model achieving 99.19% and 98.66% accuracy on four classes and three classes, respectively.

Classification and Detection of COVID-19 and Other Chest-Related Diseases Using Transfer Learning

COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide over the past few years. The main technique used for COVID-19 detection is reverse transcription, which is expensive, sensitive, and requires medical expertise. X-ray imaging is an alternative and more accessible technique. This study aimed to improve detection accuracy to create a computer-aided diagnostic tool. Combining other artificial intelligence applications techniques with radiological imaging can help detect different diseases. This study proposes a technique for the automatic detection of COVID-19 and other chest-related diseases using digital chest X-ray images of suspected patients by applying transfer learning (TL) algorithms. For this purpose, two balanced datasets, Dataset-1 and Dataset-2, were created by combining four public databases and collecting images from recently published articles. Dataset-1 consisted of 6000 chest X-ray images with 1500 for each class. Dataset-2 consisted of 7200 images with 1200 for each class. To train and test the model, TL with nine pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was used with augmentation as a preprocessing method. The network was trained to classify using five classifiers: two-class classifier (normal and COVID-19); three-class classifier (normal, COVID-19, and viral pneumonia), four-class classifier (normal, viral pneumonia, COVID-19, and tuberculosis (Tb)), five-class classifier (normal, bacterial pneumonia, COVID-19, Tb, and pneumothorax), and six-class classifier (normal, bacterial pneumonia, COVID-19, viral pneumonia, Tb, and pneumothorax). For two, three, four, five, and six classes, our model achieved a maximum accuracy of 99.83, 98.11, 97.00, 94.66, and 87.29%, respectively.

Automated diagnosis of COVID-19 using radiological modalities and Artificial Intelligence functionalities: A retrospective study based on chest HRCT database

Background and Objective

: The spread of coronavirus has been challenging for the healthcare system's proper management and diagnosis during the rapid spread and control of the infection. Real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), though considered the standard testing measure, has low sensitivity and is time-consuming, which restricts the fast screening of individuals. Therefore, computer tomography (CT) is used to complement the traditional approaches and provide fast and effective screening over other diagnostic methods. This work aims to appraise the importance of chest CT findings of COVID-19 and post-COVID in the diagnosis and prognosis of infected patients and to explore the ways and means to integrate CT findings for the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool-based predictive diagnostic techniques.

Methods

: The retrospective study includes a 188 patient database with COVID-19 infection confirmed by RT-PCR testing, including post-COVID patients. Patients underwent chest high-resolution computer tomography (HRCT), where the images were evaluated for common COVID-19 findings and involvement of the lung and its lobes based on the coverage region. The radiological modalities analyzed in this study may help the researchers in generating a predictive model based on AI tools for further classification with a high degree of reliability.

Results

: Mild to moderate ground glass opacities (GGO) with or without consolidation, crazy paving patterns, and halo signs were common COVID-19 related findings. A CT score is assigned to every patient based on the severity of lung lobe involvement.

Conclusion

: Typical multifocal, bilateral, and peripheral distributions of GGO are the main characteristics related to COVID-19 pneumonia. Chest HRCT can be considered a standard method for timely and efficient assessment of disease progression and management severity. With its fusion with AI tools, chest HRCT can be used as a one-stop platform for radiological investigation and automated diagnosis system.

COVID-AleXception: A Deep Learning Model Based on a Deep Feature Concatenation Approach for the Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) spread rapidly around the world and its outbreak has become a pandemic. Due to an increase in afflicted cases, the quantity of COVID-19 tests kits available in hospitals has decreased. Therefore, an autonomous detection system is an essential tool for reducing infection risks and spreading of the virus. In the literature, various models based on machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are introduced to detect many pneumonias using chest X-ray images. The cornerstone in this paper is the use of pretrained deep learning CNN architectures to construct an automated system for COVID-19 detection and diagnosis. In this work, we used the deep feature concatenation (DFC) mechanism to combine features extracted from input images using the two modern pre-trained CNN models, AlexNet and Xception. Hence, we propose COVID-AleXception: a neural network that is a concatenation of the AlexNet and Xception models for the overall improvement of the prediction capability of this pandemic. To evaluate the proposed model and build a dataset of large-scale X-ray images, there was a careful selection of multiple X-ray images from several sources. The COVID-AleXception model can achieve a classification accuracy of 98.68%, which shows the superiority of the proposed model over AlexNet and Xception that achieved a classification accuracy of 94.86% and 95.63%, respectively. The performance results of this proposed model demonstrate its pertinence to help radiologists diagnose COVID-19 more quickly.

RESCOVIDTCNnet: A residual neural network-based framework for COVID-19 detection using TCN and EWT with chest X-ray images

Since the advent of COVID-19, the number of deaths has increased exponentially, boosting the requirement for various research studies that may correctly diagnose the illness at an early stage. Using chest X-rays, this study presents deep learning-based algorithms for classifying patients with COVID illness, healthy controls, and pneumonia classes. Data gathering, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification are the four primary aspects of the approach. The pictures of chest X-rays utilized in this investigation came from various publicly available databases. The pictures were filtered to increase image quality in the pre-processing stage, and the chest X-ray images were de-noised using the empirical wavelet transform (EWT). Following that, four deep learning models were used to extract features. The first two models, Inception-V3 and Resnet-50, are based on transfer learning models. The Resnet-50 is combined with a temporal convolutional neural network (TCN) to create the third model. The fourth model is our suggested RESCOVIDTCNNet model, which integrates EWT, Resnet-50, and TCN. Finally, an artificial neural network (ANN) and a support vector machine were used to classify the data (SVM). Using five-fold cross-validation for 3-class classification, our suggested RESCOVIDTCNNet achieved a 99.5 percent accuracy. Our prototype can be utilized in developing nations where radiologists are in low supply to acquire a diagnosis quickly.

Deploying deep learning models on unseen medical imaging using adversarial domain adaptation

The fundamental challenge in machine learning is ensuring that trained models generalize well to unseen data. We developed a general technique for ameliorating the effect of dataset shift using generative adversarial networks (GANs) on a dataset of 149,298 handwritten digits and dataset of 868,549 chest radiographs obtained from four academic medical centers. Efficacy was assessed by comparing area under the curve (AUC) pre- and post-adaptation. On the digit recognition task, the baseline CNN achieved an average internal test AUC of 99.87% (95% CI, 99.87-99.87%), which decreased to an average external test AUC of 91.85% (95% CI, 91.82-91.88%), with an average salvage of 35% from baseline upon adaptation. On the lung pathology classification task, the baseline CNN achieved an average internal test AUC of 78.07% (95% CI, 77.97-78.17%) and an average external test AUC of 71.43% (95% CI, 71.32-71.60%), with a salvage of 25% from baseline upon adaptation. Adversarial domain adaptation leads to improved model performance on radiographic data derived from multiple out-of-sample healthcare populations. This work can be applied to other medical imaging domains to help shape the deployment toolkit of machine learning in medicine.

A novel abnormality annotation database for COVID-19 affected frontal lung X-rays

Consistent clinical observations of characteristic findings of COVID-19 pneumonia on chest X-rays have attracted the research community to strive to provide a fast and reliable method for screening suspected patients. Several machine learning algorithms have been proposed to find the abnormalities in the lungs using chest X-rays specific to COVID-19 pneumonia and distinguish them from other etiologies of pneumonia. However, despite the enormous magnitude of the pandemic, there are very few instances of public databases of COVID-19 pneumonia, and to the best of our knowledge, there is no database with annotation of abnormalities on the chest X-rays of COVID-19 affected patients. Annotated databases of X-rays can be of significant value in the design and development of algorithms for disease prediction. Further, explainability analysis for the performance of existing or new deep learning algorithms will be enhanced significantly with access to ground-truth abnormality annotations. The proposed COVID Abnormality Annotation for X-Rays (CAAXR) database is built upon the BIMCV-COVID19+ database which is a large-scale dataset containing COVID-19+ chest X-rays. The primary contribution of this study is the annotation of the abnormalities in over 1700 frontal chest X-rays. Further, we define protocols for semantic segmentation as well as classification for robust evaluation of algorithms. We provide benchmark results on the defined protocols using popular deep learning models such as DenseNet, ResNet, MobileNet, and VGG for classification, and UNet, SegNet, and Mask-RCNN for semantic segmentation. The classwise accuracy, sensitivity, and AUC-ROC scores are reported for the classification models, and the IoU and DICE scores are reported for the segmentation models.

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Assisted Rapid Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Chest Radiographical Images: A Survey

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied successfully in many real-life domains for solving complex problems. With the invention of Machine Learning (ML) paradigms, it becomes convenient for researchers to predict the outcome based on past data. Nowadays, ML is acting as the biggest weapon against the COVID-19 pandemic by detecting symptomatic cases at an early stage and warning people about its futuristic effects. It is observed that COVID-19 has blown out globally so much in a short period because of the shortage of testing facilities and delays in test reports. To address this challenge, AI can be effectively applied to produce fast as well as cost-effective solutions. Plenty of researchers come up with AI-based solutions for preliminary diagnosis using chest CT Images, respiratory sound analysis, voice analysis of symptomatic persons with asymptomatic ones, and so forth. Some AI-based applications claim good accuracy in predicting the chances of being COVID-19-positive. Within a short period, plenty of research work is published regarding the identification of COVID-19. This paper has carefully examined and presented a comprehensive survey of more than 110 papers that came from various reputed sources, that is, Springer, IEEE, Elsevier, MDPI, arXiv, and medRxiv. Most of the papers selected for this survey presented candid work to detect and classify COVID-19, using deep-learning-based models from chest X-Rays and CT scan images. We hope that this survey covers most of the work and provides insights to the research community in proposing efficient as well as accurate solutions for fighting the pandemic.

Multi-texture features and optimized DeepNet for COVID-19 detection using chest x-ray images

The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has a severe influence on population health all over the world. Various methods are developed for detecting the COVID-19, but the process of diagnosing this problem from radiology and radiography images is one of the effective procedures for diagnosing the affected patients. Therefore, a robust and effective multi-local texture features (MLTF)-based feature extraction approach and Improved Weed Sea-based DeepNet (IWS-based DeepNet) approach is proposed for detecting the COVID-19 at an earlier stage. The developed IWS-based DeepNet is developed for detecting COVID-19to optimize the structure of the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (Deep CNN). The IWS is devised by incorporating the Improved Invasive Weed Optimization (IIWO) and Sea Lion Optimization (SLnO), respectively. The noises present in the input chest x-ray (CXR) image are discarded using Region of Interest (RoI) extraction by adaptive thresholding technique. For feature extraction, the proposed MLFT is newly developed by considering various texture features for extracting the best features. Finally, the COVID-19 detection is performed using the proposed IWS-based DeepNet. Furthermore, the proposed technique achieved effective performance in terms of True Positive Rate (TPR), True Negative Rate (TNR), and accuracy with the maximum values of 0.933%, 0.890%, and 0.919%.

nn-TransUNet: An Automatic Deep Learning Pipeline for Heart MRI Segmentation

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a disease with high mortality in modern times. The segmentation task for MRI to extract the related organs for CVD is essential for diagnosis. Currently, a large number of deep learning methods are designed for medical image segmentation tasks. However, the design of segmentation algorithms tends to have more focus on deepening the network architectures and tuning the parameters and hyperparameters manually, which not only leads to a high time and effort consumption, but also causes the problem that the architectures and setting designed for a single task only performs well in a single dataset, but have low performance in other cases. In this paper, nn-TransUNet, an automatic deep learning pipeline for MRI segmentation of the heart is proposed to combine the experiment planning of nnU-net and the network architecture of TransUNet. nn-TransUNet uses vision transformers and convolution layers in the design of the encoder and takes up convolution layers as decoder. With the adaptive preprocessing and network training plan generated by the proposed automatic experiment planning pipeline, nn-TransUNet is able to fulfill the target of medical image segmentation in heart MRI tasks. nn-TransUNet achieved state-of-the-art level in heart MRI segmentation task on Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) Dataset. It also saves the effort and time to manually tune the parameters and hyperparameters, which can reduce the burden on researchers.

Deep learning models for COVID-19 chest x-ray classification: Preventing shortcut learning using feature disentanglement

In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, recent research has proposed creating deep learning based models that use chest radiographs (CXRs) in a variety of clinical tasks to help manage the crisis. However, the size of existing datasets of CXRs from COVID-19+ patients are relatively small, and researchers often pool CXR data from multiple sources, for example, using different x-ray machines in various patient populations under different clinical scenarios. Deep learning models trained on such datasets have been shown to overfit to erroneous features instead of learning pulmonary characteristics in a phenomenon known as shortcut learning. We propose adding feature disentanglement to the training process. This technique forces the models to identify pulmonary features from the images and penalizes them for learning features that can discriminate between the original datasets that the images come from. We find that models trained in this way indeed have better generalization performance on unseen data; in the best case we found that it improved AUC by 0.13 on held out data. We further find that this outperforms masking out non-lung parts of the CXRs and performing histogram equalization, both of which are recently proposed methods for removing biases in CXR datasets.

ADL-CDF: A Deep Learning Framework for COVID-19 Detection from CT Scans Towards an Automated Clinical Decision Support System

The emergence of deep learning has paved to solve many problems in the real world. COVID-19 pandemic, since the late 2019, has been affecting lives of people across the globe. Chest CT scan images are used to detect it and know its severity in patients. The problem with many existing solutions in COVID-19 detection using CT scan images is that inability to detect the infection when it is in initial stages. As the infection can exist on varied scales, there is need for more comprehensive approach that can ascertain the disease at all scales. Towards this end, we proposed a deep learning-based framework known as Automated Deep Learning-based COVID-19 Detection Framework (ADL-CDF). It does not need a human medical expert in diagnosis as it is capable of detecting automatically. The framework is assisted by two algorithms that involve image processing and deep learning. The first algorithm known as Region of Interest (ROI)-based Image Filtering (ROI-IF) which analyses given input CT scan images of a patient and discards the ones where ROI is missing. This algorithm minimizes time taken for processing besides reducing false positive rate. The second algorithm is known as Multi-Scale Feature Selection algorithm that fits into the deep learning framework's pipeline to leverage detection performance of the ADL-CDF. The proposed framework is evaluated against ResNet50V2 and Xception. Our empirical study revealed that our model outperforms the state of the art.

An Intelligent Sensor Based Decision Support System for Diagnosing Pulmonary Ailment through Standardized Chest X-ray Scans

Academics and the health community are paying much attention to developing smart remote patient monitoring, sensors, and healthcare technology. For the analysis of medical scans, various studies integrate sophisticated deep learning strategies. A smart monitoring system is needed as a proactive diagnostic solution that may be employed in an epidemiological scenario such as COVID-19. Consequently, this work offers an intelligent medicare system that is an IoT-empowered, deep learning-based decision support system (DSS) for the automated detection and categorization of infectious diseases (COVID-19 and pneumothorax). The proposed DSS system was evaluated using three independent standard-based chest X-ray scans. The suggested DSS predictor has been used to identify and classify areas on whole X-ray scans with abnormalities thought to be attributable to COVID-19, reaching an identification and classification accuracy rate of 89.58% for normal images and 89.13% for COVID-19 and pneumothorax. With the suggested DSS system, a judgment depending on individual chest X-ray scans may be made in approximately 0.01 s. As a result, the DSS system described in this study can forecast at a pace of 95 frames per second (FPS) for both models, which is near to real-time.

LMNet: Lightweight multi-scale convolutional neural network architecture for COVID-19 detection in IoMT environment

The COVID-19 disease, initially known as SARS-CoV-2, was first reported in early December 2019 and has caused immense damage to humans globally. The most widely used clinical screening method for COVID-19 is Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). RT-PCR uses respiratory samples for testing, because of which, this manual technique becomes complicated, laborious and time-consuming. Even though it has a low sensitivity, it carries a considerable risk for the testing medical staff. Hence, there is a need for an automated diagnosis system that can provide quick and efficient diagnosis results. This research proposed a multi-scale lightweight CNN (LMNet) architecture for COVID-19 detection. The proposed model is computationally less expensive than previously available models and requires less memory space. The performance of the proposed LMNet model ensemble with DenseNet169 and MobileNetV2 is higher than the other state-of-the-art models. The ensemble model can be integrated at the backend of the smart devices; hence it is useful for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) environment.

COVID-19 diagnosis using chest CT scans and deep convolutional neural networks evolved by IP-based sine-cosine algorithm

The prevalence of the COVID-19 virus and its variants has influenced all aspects of our life, and therefore, the precise diagnosis of this disease is vital. If a polymerase chain reaction test for a subject is negative, but he/she cannot easily breathe, taking a computed tomography (CT) image from his/her lung is urgently recommended. This study aims to optimize a deep convolution neural network (DCNN) structure to increase the COVID-19 diagnosis accuracy in lung CT images. This paper employs the sine-cosine algorithm (SCA) to optimize the structure of DCNN to take raw CT images and determine their status. Three improvements based on regular SCA are proposed to enhance both the accuracy and speed of the results. First, a new encoding approach is proposed based on the internet protocol (IP) address. Then, an enfeebled layer is proposed to generate a variable-length DCNN. The suggested model is examined over the COVID-CT and SARS-CoV-2 datasets. The proposed method is compared to a standard DCNN and seven variable-length models in terms of five known metrics, including sensitivity, accuracy, specificity, F1-score, precision, and receiver operative curve (ROC) and precision-recall curves. The results demonstrate that the proposed DCNN-IPSCA surpasses other benchmarks, achieving final accuracy of (98.32% and 98.01%), the sensitivity of (97.22% and 96.23%), and specificity of (96.77% and 96.44%) on the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-CT datasets, respectively. Also, the proposed DCNN-IPSCA performs much better than the standard DCNN, with GPU and CPU training times, which are 387.69 and 63.10 times faster, respectively.

Ensemble multimodal deep learning for early diagnosis and accurate classification of COVID-19

Over the past few years, the awful COVID-19 pandemic effect has become a lethal sickness. The processing of the gathered samples requires extra time due to the use of medical diagnostic equipment, methodologies, and clinical testing procedures for the early diagnosis of infected individuals. An innovative multimodal paradigm for the early diagnosis and precise categorization of COVID-19 is put up as a solution to this issue. To extract distinguishing features from the prepared chest X-ray picture and cough (audio) database, chest X-ray-based and cough-based model are used here. Other public chest X-ray image datasets, and the Coswara cough (audio) dataset containing 92 COVID-19 positive, and 1079 healthy subjects (people) using the deep Uniform-Net, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The weighted sum-rule fusion method and ensemble deep learning algorithms are utilized to further combine the extracted features. For the early diagnosis of patients, the framework offers an accuracy of 98.67%.

AI for COVID-19 Detection from Radiographs: Incisive Analysis of State of the Art Techniques, Key Challenges and Future Directions

Background and objective

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has had an evident impact on the way research addresses challenges in different domains. It has proven to be a huge asset, especially in the medical field, allowing for time-efficient and reliable solutions. This research aims to spotlight the impact of deep learning and machine learning models in the detection of COVID-19 from medical images. This is achieved by conducting a review of the state-of-the-art approaches proposed by the recent works in this field.

Methods

The main focus of this study is the recent developments of classification and segmentation approaches to image-based COVID-19 detection. The study reviews 140 research papers published in different academic research databases. These papers have been screened and filtered based on specified criteria, to acquire insights prudent to image-based COVID-19 detection.

Results

The methods discussed in this review include different types of imaging modality, predominantly X-rays and CT scans. These modalities are used for classification and segmentation tasks as well. This review seeks to categorize and discuss the different deep learning and machine learning architectures employed for these tasks, based on the imaging modality utilized. It also hints at other possible deep learning and machine learning architectures that can be proposed for better results towards COVID-19 detection. Along with that, a detailed overview of the emerging trends and breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence-based COVID-19 detection has been discussed as well.

Conclusion

This work concludes by stipulating the technical and non-technical challenges faced by researchers and illustrates the advantages of image-based COVID-19 detection with Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Chest X ray and cough sample based deep learning framework for accurate diagnosis of COVID-19

All witnessed the terrible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and work lives of the population across the world. It is hard to diagnose all infected people in real time since the conventional medical diagnosis of COVID-19 patients takes a couple of days for accurate diagnosis results. In this paper, a novel learning framework is proposed for the early diagnosis of COVID-19 patients using hybrid deep fusion learning models. The proposed framework performs early classification of patients based on collected samples of chest X-ray images and Coswara cough (sound) samples of possibly infected people. The captured cough samples are pre-processed using speech signal processing techniques and Mel frequency cepstral coefficient features are extracted using deep convolutional neural networks. Finally, the proposed system fuses extracted features to provide 98.70% and 82.7% based on Chest-X ray images and cough (audio) samples for early diagnosis using the weighted sum-rule fusion method.

Comprehensive Survey of Machine Learning Systems for COVID-19 Detection

The last two years are considered the most crucial and critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting most life aspects worldwide. This virus spreads quickly within a short period, increasing the fatality rate associated with the virus. From a clinical perspective, several diagnosis methods are carried out for early detection to avoid virus propagation. However, the capabilities of these methods are limited and have various associated challenges. Consequently, many studies have been performed for COVID-19 automated detection without involving manual intervention and allowing an accurate and fast decision. As is the case with other diseases and medical issues, Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the medical community with potential technical solutions that help doctors and radiologists diagnose based on chest images. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the mentioned AI-based detection solution proposals is conducted. More than 200 papers are reviewed and analyzed, and 145 articles have been extensively examined to specify the proposed AI mechanisms with chest medical images. A comprehensive examination of the associated advantages and shortcomings is illustrated and summarized. Several findings are concluded as a result of a deep analysis of all the previous works using machine learning for COVID-19 detection, segmentation, and classification.

A deep learning approach for classification of COVID and pneumonia using DenseNet-201

In the present paper, our model consists of deep learning approach: DenseNet201 for detection of COVID and Pneumonia using the Chest X-ray Images. The model is a framework consisting of the modeling software which assists in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Compliance which protects and secures the Protected Health Information . The need of the proposed framework in medical facilities shall give the feedback to the radiologist for detecting COVID and pneumonia though the transfer learning methods. A Graphical User Interface tool allows the technician to upload the chest X-ray Image. The software then uploads chest X-ray radiograph (CXR) to the developed detection model for the detection. Once the radiographs are processed, the radiologist shall receive the Classification of the disease which further aids them to verify the similar CXR Images and draw the conclusion. Our model consists of the dataset from Kaggle and if we observe the results, we get an accuracy of 99.1%, sensitivity of 98.5%, and specificity of 98.95%. The proposed Bio-Medical Innovation is a user-ready framework which assists the medical providers in providing the patients with the best-suited medication regimen by looking into the previous CXR Images and confirming the results. There is a motivation to design more such applications for Medical Image Analysis in the future to serve the community and improve the patient care.

Coagulation parameters predict COVID-19-related thrombosis in a neural network with a positive predictive value of 98%

Thrombosis is a major clinical complication of COVID-19 infection. COVID-19 patients show changes in coagulation factors that indicate an important role for the coagulation system in the pathogenesis of COVID-19. However, the multifactorial nature of thrombosis complicates the prediction of thrombotic events based on a single hemostatic variable. We developed and validated a neural net for the prediction of COVID-19-related thrombosis. The neural net was developed based on the hemostatic and general (laboratory) variables of 149 confirmed COVID-19 patients from two cohorts: at the time of hospital admission (cohort 1 including 133 patients) and at ICU admission (cohort 2 including 16 patients). Twenty-six patients suffered from thrombosis during their hospital stay: 19 patients in cohort 1 and 7 patients in cohort 2. The neural net predicts COVID-19 related thrombosis based on C-reactive protein (relative importance 14%), sex (10%), thrombin generation (TG) time-to-tail (10%), α₂-Macroglobulin (9%), TG curve width (9%), thrombin-α₂-Macroglobulin complexes (9%), plasmin generation lag time (8%), serum IgM (8%), TG lag time (7%), TG time-to-peak (7%), thrombin-antithrombin complexes (5%), and age (5%). This neural net can predict COVID-19-thrombosis at the time of hospital admission with a positive predictive value of 98%-100%.