A fast and efficient CNN model for B‐ALL diagnosis and its subtypes classification using peripheral blood smear images

Utilizing Deep Feature Fusion for Automatic Leukemia Classification: An Internet of Medical Things-Enabled Deep Learning Framework

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, commonly referred to as ALL, is a type of cancer that can affect both the blood and the bone marrow. The process of diagnosis is a difficult one since it often calls for specialist testing, such as blood tests, bone marrow aspiration, and biopsy, all of which are highly time-consuming and expensive. It is essential to obtain an early diagnosis of ALL in order to start therapy in a timely and suitable manner. In recent medical diagnostics, substantial progress has been achieved through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Our proposal introduces a new AI-based Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) framework designed to automatically identify leukemia from peripheral blood smear (PBS) images. In this study, we present a novel deep learning-based fusion model to detect ALL types of leukemia. The system seamlessly delivers the diagnostic reports to the centralized database, inclusive of patient-specific devices. After collecting blood samples from the hospital, the PBS images are transmitted to the cloud server through a WiFi-enabled microscopic device. In the cloud server, a new fusion model that is capable of classifying ALL from PBS images is configured. The fusion model is trained using a dataset including 6512 original and segmented images from 89 individuals. Two input channels are used for the purpose of feature extraction in the fusion model. These channels include both the original and the segmented images. VGG16 is responsible for extracting features from the original images, whereas DenseNet-121 is responsible for extracting features from the segmented images. The two output features are merged together, and dense layers are used for the categorization of leukemia. The fusion model that has been suggested obtains an accuracy of 99.89%, a precision of 99.80%, and a recall of 99.72%, which places it in an excellent position for the categorization of leukemia. The proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models in terms of performance. Consequently, this proposed model has the potential to save lives and effort. For a more comprehensive simulation of the entire methodology, a web application (Beta Version) has been developed in this study. This application is designed to determine the presence or absence of leukemia in individuals. The findings of this study hold significant potential for application in biomedical research, particularly in enhancing the accuracy of computer-aided leukemia detection.

Hematologic cancer diagnosis and classification using machine and deep learning: State-of-the-art techniques and emerging research directives

Hematology is the study of diagnosis and treatment options for blood diseases, including cancer. Cancer is considered one of the deadliest diseases across all age categories. Diagnosing such a deadly disease at the initial stage is essential to cure the disease. Hematologists and pathologists rely on microscopic evaluation of blood or bone marrow smear images to diagnose blood-related ailments. The abundance of overlapping cells, cells of varying densities among platelets, non-illumination levels, and the amount of red and white blood cells make it more difficult to diagnose illness using blood cell images. Pathologists are required to put more effort into the traditional, time-consuming system. Nowadays, it becomes possible with machine learning and deep learning techniques, to automate the diagnostic processes, categorize microscopic blood cells, and improve the accuracy of the procedure and its speed as the models developed using these methods may guide an assisting tool. In this article, we have acquired, analyzed, scrutinized, and finally selected around 57 research papers from various machine learning and deep learning methodologies that have been employed in the diagnosis of leukemia and its classification over the past 20 years, which have been published between the years 2003 and 2023 by PubMed, IEEE, Science Direct, Google Scholar and other pertinent sources. Our primary emphasis is on evaluating the advantages and limitations of analogous research endeavors to provide a concise and valuable research directive that can be of significant utility to fellow researchers in the field.

ALL classification using neural ensemble and memetic deep feature optimization

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a fatal blood disorder characterized by the excessive proliferation of immature white blood cells, originating in the bone marrow. An effective prognosis and treatment of ALL calls for its accurate and timely detection. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in digital pathology. However, they face challenges in classifying different subtypes of leukemia due to their subtle morphological differences. This study proposes an improved pipeline for binary detection and sub-type classification of ALL from blood smear images. At first, a customized, 88 layers deep CNN is proposed and trained using transfer learning along with GoogleNet CNN to create an ensemble of features. Furthermore, this study models the feature selection problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and proposes a memetic version of binary whale optimization algorithm, incorporating Differential Evolution-based local search method to enhance the exploration and exploitation of feature search space. The proposed approach is validated using publicly available standard datasets containing peripheral blood smear images of various classes of ALL. An overall best average accuracy of 99.15% is achieved for binary classification of ALL with an 85% decrease in the feature vector, together with 99% precision and 98.8% sensitivity. For B-ALL sub-type classification, the best accuracy of 98.69% is attained with 98.7% precision and 99.57% specificity. The proposed methodology shows better performance metrics as compared with several existing studies.

An efficient decision support system for leukemia identification utilizing nature-inspired deep feature optimization

In the field of medicine, decision support systems play a crucial role by harnessing cutting-edge technology and data analysis to assist doctors in disease diagnosis and treatment. Leukemia is a malignancy that emerges from the uncontrolled growth of immature white blood cells within the human body. An accurate and prompt diagnosis of leukemia is desired due to its swift progression to distant parts of the body. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is an aggressive type of leukemia that affects both children and adults. Computer vision-based identification of leukemia is challenging due to structural irregularities and morphological similarities of blood entities. Deep neural networks have shown promise in extracting valuable information from image datasets, but they have high computational costs due to their extensive feature sets. This work presents an efficient pipeline for binary and subtype classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The proposed method first unveils a novel neighborhood pixel transformation method using differential evolution to improve the clarity and discriminability of blood cell images for better analysis. Next, a hybrid feature extraction approach is presented leveraging transfer learning from selected deep neural network models, InceptionV3 and DenseNet201, to extract comprehensive feature sets. To optimize feature selection, a customized binary Grey Wolf Algorithm is utilized, achieving an impressive 80% reduction in feature size while preserving key discriminative information. These optimized features subsequently empower multiple classifiers, potentially capturing diverse perspectives and amplifying classification accuracy. The proposed pipeline is validated on publicly available standard datasets of ALL images. For binary classification, the best average accuracy of 98.1% is achieved with 98.1% sensitivity and 98% precision. For ALL subtype classifications, the best accuracy of 98.14% was attained with 78.5% sensitivity and 98% precision. The proposed feature selection method shows a better convergence behavior as compared to classical population-based meta-heuristics. The suggested solution also demonstrates comparable or better performance in comparison to several existing techniques.

A comparative study of CNN-capsule-net, CNN-transformer encoder, and Traditional machine learning algorithms to classify epileptic seizure

INTRODUCTION

Epilepsy is a disease characterized by an excessive discharge in neurons generally provoked without any external stimulus, known as convulsions. About 2 million people are diagnosed each year in the world. This process is carried out by a neurological doctor using an electroencephalogram (EEG), which is lengthy.

METHOD

To optimize these processes and make them more efficient, we have resorted to innovative artificial intelligence methods essential in classifying EEG signals. For this, comparing traditional models, such as machine learning or deep learning, with cutting-edge models, in this case, using Capsule-Net architectures and Transformer Encoder, has a crucial role in finding the most accurate model and helping the doctor to have a faster diagnosis.

RESULT

In this paper, a comparison was made between different models for binary and multiclass classification of the epileptic seizure detection database, achieving a binary accuracy of 99.92% with the Capsule-Net model and a multiclass accuracy with the Transformer Encoder model of 87.30%.

CONCLUSION

Artificial intelligence is essential in diagnosing pathology. The comparison between models is helpful as it helps to discard those that are not efficient. State-of-the-art models overshadow conventional models, but data processing also plays an essential role in evaluating the higher accuracy of the models.

Non-invasive fractional flow reserve estimation using deep learning on intermediate left anterior descending coronary artery lesion angiography images

This study aimed to design an end-to-end deep learning model for estimating the value of fractional flow reserve (FFR) using angiography images to classify left anterior descending (LAD) branch angiography images with average stenosis between 50 and 70% into two categories: FFR > 80 and FFR ≤ 80. In this study 3625 images were extracted from 41 patients' angiography films. Nine pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNN), including DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50V2, Xception, MobileNetV3Large, DenseNet201, and DenseNet169, were used to extract the features of images. DenseNet169 indicated higher performance compared to other networks. AUC, Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, and F1-score of the proposed DenseNet169 network were 0.81, 0.81, 0.86, 0.75, 0.82, and 0.84, respectively. The deep learning-based method proposed in this study can non-invasively and consistently estimate FFR from angiographic images, offering significant clinical potential for diagnosing and treating coronary artery disease by combining anatomical and physiological parameters.

An ensemble-acute lymphoblastic leukemia model for acute lymphoblastic leukemia image classification

The timely diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is of paramount importance for enhancing the treatment efficacy and the survival rates of patients. In this study, we seek to introduce an ensemble-ALL model for the image classification of ALL, with the goal of enhancing early diagnostic capabilities and streamlining the diagnostic and treatment processes for medical practitioners. In this study, a publicly available dataset is partitioned into training, validation, and test sets. A diverse set of convolutional neural networks, including InceptionV3, EfficientNetB4, ResNet50, CONV_POOL-CNN, ALL-CNN, Network in Network, and AlexNet, are employed for training. The top-performing four individual models are meticulously chosen and integrated with the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) module. Furthermore, the two most effective SE-embedded models are harmoniously combined to create the proposed ensemble-ALL model. This model leverages the Bayesian optimization algorithm to enhance its performance. The proposed ensemble-ALL model attains remarkable accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and kappa scores, registering at 96.26, 96.26, 96.26, 96.25, and 91.36%, respectively. These results surpass the benchmarks set by state-of-the-art studies in the realm of ALL image classification. This model represents a valuable contribution to the field of medical image recognition, particularly in the diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and it offers the potential to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of medical professionals in the diagnostic and treatment processes.

Application of ImageJ in Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A): A Literature Review

Background

This study aimed to review the literature on the application of ImageJ in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) images.

Methods

A general search was performed in PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus databases. The authors evaluated each of the selected articles in order to assess the implementation of ImageJ in OCT-A images.

Results

ImageJ can aid in reducing artifacts, enhancing image quality to increase the accuracy of the process and analysis, processing and analyzing images, generating comparable parameters such as the parameters that assess perfusion of the layers (vessel density (VD), skeletonized density (SD), and vessel length density (VLD)) and the parameters that evaluate the structure of the layers (fractal dimension (FD), vessel density index (VDI), and lacunarity (LAC)), and the foveal avascular zone (FAZ) that are used widely in the retinal and choroidal studies), and establishing diagnostic criteria. It can help to save time when the dataset is huge with numerous plugins and options for image processing and analysis with reliable results. Diverse studies implemented distinct binarization and thresholding techniques, resulting in disparate outcomes and incomparable parameters. Uniformity in methodology is required to acquire comparable data from studies employing diverse processing and analysis techniques that yield varied outcomes.

Conclusion

Researchers and professionals might benefit from using ImageJ because of how quickly and correctly it processes and analyzes images. It is highly adaptable and potent software, allowing users to evaluate images in a variety of ways. There exists a diverse range of methodologies for analyzing OCTA images through the utilization of ImageJ. However, it is imperative to establish a standardized strategy to ensure the reliability and consistency of the method for research purposes.

Two-Stage Model-Based Predicting PV Generation with the Conjugation of IoT Sensor Data

This paper proposes a novel short-term photovoltaic voltage (PV) prediction scheme using IoT sensor data with the two-stage neural network model. It is efficient to use environmental data provided by the meteorological agency to predict future PV generation. However, such environmental data represent the average value of the wide area, and there is a limitation in detecting environmental changes in the specific area where the solar panel is installed. In order to solve such issues, it is essential to establish IoT sensor data to detect environmental changes in the specific area. However, most conventional research focuses only on the efficiency of IoT sensor data without taking into account the timing of data acquisition from the sensors. In real-world scenarios, IoT sensor data is not available precisely when needed for predictions. Therefore, it is necessary to predict the IoT data first and then use it to forecast PV generation. In this paper, we propose a two-stage model to achieve high-accuracy prediction results. In the first stage, we use predicted environmental data to access IoT sensor data in the desired future time point. In the second stage, the predicted IoT sensors and environmental data are used to predict PV generation. Here, we determine the appropriate prediction scheme at each stage by analyzing the model characteristics to increase prediction accuracy. In addition, we show that the proposed prediction scheme could increase prediction accuracy by more than 12% compared to the baseline scheme that only uses a meteorological agency to predict PV generation.

Skeletal Fracture Detection with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Review

Deep learning models have shown great promise in diagnosing skeletal fractures from X-ray images. However, challenges remain that hinder progress in this field. Firstly, a lack of clear definitions for recognition, classification, detection, and localization tasks hampers the consistent development and comparison of methodologies. The existing reviews often lack technical depth or have limited scope. Additionally, the absence of explainable facilities undermines the clinical application and expert confidence in results. To address these issues, this comprehensive review analyzes and evaluates 40 out of 337 recent papers identified in prestigious databases, including WOS, Scopus, and EI. The objectives of this review are threefold. Firstly, precise definitions are established for the bone fracture recognition, classification, detection, and localization tasks within deep learning. Secondly, each study is summarized based on key aspects such as the bones involved, research objectives, dataset sizes, methods employed, results obtained, and concluding remarks. This process distills the diverse approaches into a generalized processing framework or workflow. Moreover, this review identifies the crucial areas for future research in deep learning models for bone fracture diagnosis. These include enhancing the network interpretability, integrating multimodal clinical information, providing therapeutic schedule recommendations, and developing advanced visualization methods for clinical application. By addressing these challenges, deep learning models can be made more intelligent and specialized in this domain. In conclusion, this review fills the gap in precise task definitions within deep learning for bone fracture diagnosis and provides a comprehensive analysis of the recent research. The findings serve as a foundation for future advancements, enabling improved interpretability, multimodal integration, clinical decision support, and advanced visualization techniques.

Dementia death rates prediction

BACKGROUND

Prevalence of dementia illness, causing certain morbidity and mortality globally, places burden on global public health. This study primary goal was to assess future risks of dying from severe dementia, given specific return period, within selected group of regions or nations.

METHODS

Traditional statistical approaches do not have benefits of effectively handling large regional dimensionality, along with nonlinear cross-correlations between various regional observations. In order to produce reliable long-term projections of excessive dementia death rate risks, this study advocates novel bio-system reliability technique, that being particularly suited for multi-regional environmental, biological, and health systems.

DATA

Raw clinical data has been used as an input to the suggested population-based, bio-statistical technique using data from medical surveys and several centers.

RESULTS

Novel spatiotemporal health system reliability methodology has been developed and applied to dementia death rates raw clinical data. Suggested methodology shown to be capable of dealing efficiently with spatiotemporal clinical observations of multi-regional nature. Accurate disease risks multi-regional spatiotemporal prediction being done, relevant confidence intervals have been presented as well.

CONCLUSIONS

Based on available clinical survey dataset, the proposed approach may be applied in a variety of clinical public health applications. Confidence bands, given for predicted dementia-associated death rate levels with return periods of interest, have been reasonably narrow, indicating practical values of advocated prognostics.

Evaluation of Camera Recognition Performance under Blockage Using Virtual Test Drive Toolchain

This study is the first to develop technology to evaluate the object recognition performance of camera sensors, which are increasingly important in autonomous vehicles owing to their relatively low price, and to verify the efficiency of camera recognition algorithms in obstruction situations. To this end, the concentration and color of the blockage and the type and color of the object were set as major factors, with their effects on camera recognition performance analyzed using a camera simulator based on a virtual test drive toolkit. The results show that the blockage concentration has the largest impact on object recognition, followed in order by the object type, blockage color, and object color. As for the blockage color, black exhibited better recognition performance than gray and yellow. In addition, changes in the blockage color affected the recognition of object types, resulting in different responses to each object. Through this study, we propose a blockage-based camera recognition performance evaluation method using simulation, and we establish an algorithm evaluation environment for various manufacturers through an interface with an actual camera. By suggesting the necessity and timing of future camera lens cleaning, we provide manufacturers with technical measures to improve the cleaning timing and camera safety.

Automated Diagnosis for Colon Cancer Diseases Using Stacking Transformer Models and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Colon cancer is the third most common cancer type worldwide in 2020, almost two million cases were diagnosed. As a result, providing new, highly accurate techniques in detecting colon cancer leads to early and successful treatment of this disease. This paper aims to propose a heterogenic stacking deep learning model to predict colon cancer. Stacking deep learning is integrated with pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) models with a metalearner to enhance colon cancer prediction performance. The proposed model is compared with VGG16, InceptionV3, Resnet50, and DenseNet121 using different evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the proposed models are evaluated using the LC25000 and WCE binary and muticlassified colon cancer image datasets. The results show that the stacking models recorded the highest performance for the two datasets. For the LC25000 dataset, the stacked model recorded the highest performance accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score (100). For the WCE colon image dataset, the stacked model recorded the highest performance accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score (98). Stacking-SVM achieved the highest performed compared to existing models (VGG16, InceptionV3, Resnet50, and DenseNet121) because it combines the output of multiple single models and trains and evaluates a metalearner using the output to produce better predictive results than any single model. Black-box deep learning models are represented using explainable AI (XAI).

Chest X-ray Foreign Objects Detection Using Artificial Intelligence

Diagnostic imaging has become an integral part of the healthcare system. In recent years, scientists around the world have been working on artificial intelligence-based tools that help in achieving better and faster diagnoses. Their accuracy is crucial for successful treatment, especially for imaging diagnostics. This study used a deep convolutional neural network to detect four categories of objects on digital chest X-ray images. The data were obtained from the publicly available National Institutes of Health (NIH) Chest X-ray (CXR) Dataset. In total, 112,120 CXRs from 30,805 patients were manually checked for foreign objects: vascular port, shoulder endoprosthesis, necklace, and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). Then, they were annotated with the use of a computer program, and the necessary image preprocessing was performed, such as resizing, normalization, and cropping. The object detection model was trained using the You Only Look Once v8 architecture and the Ultralytics framework. The results showed not only that the obtained average precision of foreign object detection on the CXR was 0.815 but also that the model can be useful in detecting foreign objects on the CXR images. Models of this type may be used as a tool for specialists, in particular, with the growing popularity of radiology comes an increasing workload. We are optimistic that it could accelerate and facilitate the work to provide a faster diagnosis.

DSCNet: Deep Skip Connections-Based Dense Network for ALL Diagnosis Using Peripheral Blood Smear Images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a life-threatening hematological malignancy that requires early and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment. However, the manual diagnosis of ALL is time-consuming and can delay critical treatment decisions. To address this challenge, researchers have turned to advanced technologies such as deep learning (DL) models. These models leverage the power of artificial intelligence to analyze complex patterns and features in medical images and data, enabling faster and more accurate diagnosis of ALL. However, the existing DL-based ALL diagnosis suffers from various challenges, such as computational complexity, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and difficulties with noisy or low-quality input images. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Deep Skip Connections-Based Dense Network (DSCNet) tailored for ALL diagnosis using peripheral blood smear images. The DSCNet architecture integrates skip connections, custom image filtering, Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss, and dropout regularization to enhance its performance and generalization abilities. DSCNet leverages skip connections to address the vanishing gradient problem and capture long-range dependencies, while custom image filtering enhances relevant features in the input data. KL divergence loss serves as the optimization objective, enabling accurate predictions. Dropout regularization is employed to prevent overfitting during training, promoting robust feature representations. The experiments conducted on an augmented dataset for ALL highlight the effectiveness of DSCNet. The proposed DSCNet outperforms competing methods, showcasing significant enhancements in accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC), achieving increases of 1.25%, 1.32%, 1.12%, 1.24%, and 1.23%, respectively. The proposed approach demonstrates the potential of DSCNet as an effective tool for early and accurate ALL diagnosis, with potential applications in clinical settings to improve patient outcomes and advance leukemia detection research.

Hybrid Feature-Learning-Based PSO-PCA Feature Engineering Approach for Blood Cancer Classification

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a lethal blood cancer that is characterized by an abnormal increased number of immature lymphocytes in the blood or bone marrow. For effective treatment of ALL, early assessment of the disease is essential. Manual examination of stained blood smear images is current practice for initially screening ALL. This practice is time-consuming and error-prone. In order to effectively diagnose ALL, numerous deep-learning-based computer vision systems have been developed for detecting ALL in blood peripheral images (BPIs). Such systems extract a huge number of image features and use them to perform the classification task. The extracted features may contain irrelevant or redundant features that could reduce classification accuracy and increase the running time of the classifier. Feature selection is considered an effective tool to mitigate the curse of the dimensionality problem and alleviate its corresponding shortcomings. One of the most effective dimensionality-reduction tools is principal component analysis (PCA), which maps input features into an orthogonal space and extracts the features that convey the highest variability from the data. Other feature selection approaches utilize evolutionary computation (EC) to search the feature space and localize optimal features. To profit from both feature selection approaches in improving the classification performance of ALL, in this study, a new hybrid deep-learning-based feature engineering approach is proposed. The introduced approach integrates the powerful capability of PCA and particle swarm optimization (PSO) approaches in selecting informative features from BPI mages with the power of pre-trained CNNs of feature extraction. Image features are first extracted through the feature-transfer capability of the GoogleNet convolutional neural network (CNN). PCA is utilized to generate a feature set of the principal components that covers 95% of the variability in the data. In parallel, bio-inspired particle swarm optimization is used to search for the optimal image features. The PCA and PSO-derived feature sets are then integrated to develop a hybrid set of features that are then used to train a Bayesian-based optimized support vector machine (SVM) and subspace discriminant ensemble-learning (SDEL) classifiers. The obtained results show improved classification performance for the ML classifiers trained by the proposed hybrid feature set over the original PCA, PSO, and all extracted feature sets for ALL multi-class classification. The Bayesian-optimized SVM trained with the proposed hybrid PCA-PSO feature set achieves the highest classification accuracy of 97.4%. The classification performance of the proposed feature engineering approach competes with the state of the art.

Digital assessment of peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirate smears

The diagnosis of benign and neoplastic hematologic disorders relies on analysis of peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirate smears. As demonstrated by the widespread laboratory adoption of hematology analyzers for automated assessment of peripheral blood, digital analysis of these samples provides many significant benefits compared to relying solely on manual review. Nonetheless, analogous instruments for digital bone marrow aspirate smear assessment have yet to be clinically implemented. In this review, we first provide a historical overview detailing the implementation of hematology analyzers for digital peripheral blood assessment in the clinical laboratory, including the improvements in accuracy, scope, and throughput of current instruments over prior generations. We also describe recent research in digital peripheral blood assessment, particularly in the development of advanced machine learning models that may soon be incorporated into commercial instruments. Next, we provide an overview of recent research in digital assessment of bone marrow aspirate smears and how these approaches could soon lead to development and clinical adoption of instrumentation for automated bone marrow aspirate smear analysis. Finally, we describe the relative advantages and provide our vision for the future of digital assessment of peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirate smears, including what improvements we can soon expect in the hematology laboratory.

Deep Learning Methods for Interpretation of Pulmonary CT and X-ray Images in Patients with COVID-19-Related Lung Involvement: A Systematic Review

SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus that has been affecting the global population by spreading rapidly and causing severe complications, which require prompt and elaborate emergency treatment. Automatic tools to diagnose COVID-19 could potentially be an important and useful aid. Radiologists and clinicians could potentially rely on interpretable AI technologies to address the diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19 patients. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for COVID-19 classification. The previous studies are methodically evaluated, and a summary of the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification approaches is presented. The reviewed papers have presented a variety of CNN models and architectures that were developed to provide an accurate and quick automatic tool to diagnose the COVID-19 virus based on presented CT scan or X-ray images. In this systematic review, we focused on the critical components of the deep learning approach, such as network architecture, model complexity, parameter optimization, explainability, and dataset/code availability. The literature search yielded a large number of studies over the past period of the virus spread, and we summarized their past efforts. State-of-the-art CNN architectures, with their strengths and weaknesses, are discussed with respect to diverse technical and clinical evaluation metrics to safely implement current AI studies in medical practice.

An Evolutionary Attention-Based Network for Medical Image Classification

Deep learning has become a primary choice in medical image analysis due to its powerful representation capability. However, most existing deep learning models designed for medical image classification can only perform well on a specific disease. The performance drops dramatically when it comes to other diseases. Generalizability remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary attention-based network (EDCA-Net), which is an effective and robust network for medical image classification tasks. To extract task-related features from a given medical dataset, we first propose the densely connected attentional network (DCA-Net) where feature maps are automatically channel-wise weighted, and the dense connectivity pattern is introduced to improve the efficiency of information flow. To improve the model capability and generalizability, we introduce two types of evolution: intra- and inter-evolution. The intra-evolution optimizes the weights of DCA-Net, while the inter-evolution allows two instances of DCA-Net to exchange training experience during training. The evolutionary DCA-Net is referred to as EDCA-Net. The EDCA-Net is evaluated on four publicly accessible medical datasets of different diseases. Experiments showed that the EDCA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three datasets and achieves comparable performance on the last dataset, demonstrating good generalizability for medical image classification.

Deep self-supervised transformation learning for leukocyte classification

The scarcity of training annotation is one of the major challenges for the application of deep learning technology in medical image analysis. Recently, self-supervised learning provides a powerful solution to alleviate this challenge by extracting useful features from a large number of unlabeled training data. In this article, we propose a simple and effective self-supervised learning method for leukocyte classification by identifying the different transformations of leukocyte images, without requiring a large batch of negative sampling or specialized architectures. Specifically, a convolutional neural network backbone takes different transformations of leukocyte image as input for feature extraction. Then, a pretext task of self-supervised transformation recognition on the extracted feature is conducted by a classifier, which helps the backbone learn useful representations that generalize well across different leukocyte types and datasets. In the experiment, we systematically study the effect of different transformation compositions on useful leukocyte feature extraction. Compared with five typical baselines of self-supervised image classification, experimental results demonstrate that our method performs better in different evaluation protocols including linear evaluation, domain transfer, and finetuning, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.

AMTLDC: a new adversarial multi-source transfer learning framework to diagnosis of COVID-19

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been widely used to diagnose diseases. However, in some tasks, such as the diagnosis of COVID-19 disease, due to insufficient data, the model is not properly trained and as a result, the generalizability of the model decreases. For example, if the model is trained on a CT scan dataset and tested on another CT scan dataset, it predicts near-random results. To address this, data from several different sources can be combined using transfer learning, taking into account the intrinsic and natural differences in existing datasets obtained with different medical imaging tools and approaches. In this paper, to improve the transfer learning technique and better generalizability between multiple data sources, we propose a multi-source adversarial transfer learning model, namely AMTLDC. In AMTLDC, representations are learned that are similar among the sources. In other words, extracted representations are general and not dependent on the particular dataset domain. We apply the AMTLDC to predict Covid-19 from medical images using a convolutional neural network. We show that accuracy can be improved using the AMTLDC framework, and surpass the results of current successful transfer learning approaches. In particular, we show that the AMTLDC works well when using different dataset domains, or when there is insufficient data.

Integration of Machine Learning and Structural Analysis for Predicting Peptide Antibiofilm Effects: Advancements in Drug Discovery for Biofilm-Related Infections

Background

The rise of antibiotic resistance has become a major concern, signaling the end of the golden age of antibiotics. Bacterial biofilms, which exhibit high resistance to antibiotics, significantly contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, there is an urgent need to discover new therapeutic agents with specific characteristics to effectively combat biofilm-related infections. Studies have shown the promising potential of peptides as antimicrobial agents.

Objectives

This study aimed to establish a cost-effective and streamlined computational method for predicting the antibiofilm effects of peptides. This method can assist in addressing the intricate challenge of designing peptides with strong antibiofilm properties, a task that can be both challenging and costly.

Methods

A positive library, consisting of peptide sequences with antibiofilm activity exceeding 50%, was assembled, along with a negative library containing quorum-sensing peptides. For each peptide sequence, feature vectors were calculated, while considering the primary structure, the order of amino acids, their physicochemical properties, and their distributions. Multiple supervised learning algorithms were used to classify peptides with significant antibiofilm effects for subsequent experimental evaluations.

Results

The computational approach exhibited high accuracy in predicting the antibiofilm effects of peptides, with accuracy, precision, Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC), and F1 score of 99%, 99%, 0.97, and 0.99, respectively. The performance level of this computational approach was comparable to that of previous methods. This study introduced a novel approach by combining the feature space with high antibiofilm activity.

Conclusions

In this study, a reliable and cost-effective method was developed for predicting the antibiofilm effects of peptides using a computational approach. This approach allows for the identification of peptide sequences with substantial antibiofilm activities for further experimental investigations. Accessible source codes and raw data of this study can be found online (hiABF), providing easy access and enabling future updates.

Automatic Detection of Horner Syndrome by Using Facial Images

Horner syndrome is a clinical constellation that presents with miosis, ptosis, and facial anhidrosis. It is important as a warning sign of the damaged oculosympathetic chain, potentially with serious causes. However, the diagnosis of Horner syndrome is operator dependent and subjective. This study aims to present an objective method that can recognize Horner sign from facial photos and verify its accuracy. A total of 173 images were collected, annotated, and divided into training and testing groups. Two types of classifiers were trained (two-stage classifier and one-stage classifier). The two-stage method utilized the MediaPipe face mesh to estimate the coordinates of landmarks and generate facial geometric features accordingly. Then, ten machine learning classifiers were trained based on this. The one-stage classifier was trained based on one of the latest algorithms, YOLO v5. The performance of the classifier was evaluated by the diagnosis accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. For the two-stage model, the MediaPipe successfully detected 92.2% of images in the testing group, and the Decision Tree Classifier presented the highest accuracy (0.790). The sensitivity and specificity of this classifier were 0.432 and 0.970, respectively. As for the one-stage classifier, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were 0.65, 0.51, and 0.84, respectively. The results of this study proved the possibility of automatic detection of Horner syndrome from images. This tool could work as a second advisor for neurologists by reducing subjectivity and increasing accuracy in diagnosing Horner syndrome.

Customized Deep Learning Classifier for Detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Using Blood Smear Images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a rare type of blood cancer caused due to the overproduction of lymphocytes by the bone marrow in the human body. It is one of the common types of cancer in children, which has a fair chance of being cured. However, this may even occur in adults, and the chances of a cure are slim if diagnosed at a later stage. To aid in the early detection of this deadly disease, an intelligent method to screen the white blood cells is proposed in this study. The proposed intelligent deep learning algorithm uses the microscopic images of blood smears as the input data. This algorithm is implemented with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the leukemic cells from the healthy blood cells. The custom ALLNET model was trained and tested using the microscopic images available as open-source data. The model training was carried out on Google Collaboratory using the Nvidia Tesla P-100 GPU method. Maximum accuracy of 95.54%, specificity of 95.81%, sensitivity of 95.91%, F1-score of 95.43%, and precision of 96% were obtained by this accurate classifier. The proposed technique may be used during the pre-screening to detect the leukemia cells during complete blood count (CBC) and peripheral blood tests.

CRANet: a comprehensive residual attention network for intracranial aneurysm image classification

Rupture of intracranial aneurysm is the first cause of subarachnoid hemorrhage, second only to cerebral thrombosis and hypertensive cerebral hemorrhage, and the mortality rate is very high. MRI technology plays an irreplaceable role in the early detection and diagnosis of intracranial aneurysms and supports evaluating the size and structure of aneurysms. The increase in many aneurysm images, may be a massive workload for the doctors, which is likely to produce a wrong diagnosis. Therefore, we proposed a simple and effective comprehensive residual attention network (CRANet) to improve the accuracy of aneurysm detection, using a residual network to extract the features of an aneurysm. Many experiments have shown that the proposed CRANet model could detect aneurysms effectively. In addition, on the test set, the accuracy and recall rates reached 97.81% and 94%, which significantly improved the detection rate of aneurysms.

Efficient Framework for Detection of COVID-19 Omicron and Delta Variants Based on Two Intelligent Phases of CNN Models

Introduction

While the COVID-19 pandemic was waning in most parts of the world, a new wave of COVID-19 Omicron and Delta variants in Central Asia and the Middle East caused a devastating crisis and collapse of health-care systems. As the diagnostic methods for this COVID-19 variant became more complex, health-care centers faced a dramatic increase in patients. Thus, the need for less expensive and faster diagnostic methods led researchers and specialists to work on improving diagnostic testing.

Method

Inspired by the COVID-19 diagnosis methods, the latest and most efficient deep learning algorithms in the field of extracting X-ray and CT scan image features were used to identify COVID-19 in the early stages of the disease.

Results

We presented a general framework consisting of two models which are developed by convolutional neural network (CNN) using the concept of transfer learning and parameter optimization. The proposed phase of the framework was evaluated on the test dataset and yielded remarkable results and achieved a detection sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.99, 0.986, and 0.988, for the first phase and 0.997, 0.9976, and 0.997 for the second phase, respectively. In all cases, the whole framework was able to successfully classify COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases from CT scans and X-ray images.

Conclusion

Since the proposed framework was based on two deep learning models that used two radiology modalities, it was able to significantly assist radiologists in detecting COVID-19 in the early stages. The use of models with this feature can be considered as a powerful and reliable tool, compared to the previous models used in the past pandemics.