Modified cuckoo search algorithm in microscopic image segmentation of hippocampus

An Unsupervised Fuzzy Clustering Approach for Early Screening of COVID-19 From Radiological Images

A global pandemic scenario is witnessed worldwide owing to the menace of the rapid outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 virus. To save mankind from this apocalyptic onslaught, it is essential to curb the fast spreading of this dreadful virus. Moreover, the absence of specialized drugs has made the scenario even more badly and thus an early-stage adoption of necessary precautionary measures would provide requisite supportive treatment for its prevention. The prime objective of this article is to use radiological images as a tool to help in early diagnosis. The interval type 2 fuzzy clustering is blended with the concept of superpixels, and metaheuristics to efficiently segment the radiological images. Despite noise sensitivity of watershed-based approach, it is adopted for superpixel computation owing to its simplicity where the noise problem is handled by the important edge information of the gradient image is preserved with the help of morphological opening and closing based reconstruction operations. The traditional objective function of the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is modified to incorporate the spatial information from the neighboring superpixel-based local window. The computational overhead associated with the processing of a huge amount of spatial information is reduced by incorporating the concept of superpixels and the optimal clusters are determined by a modified version of the flower pollination algorithm. Although the proposed approach performs well but should not be considered as an alternative to gold standard detection tests of COVID-19. Experimental results are found to be promising enough to deploy this approach for real-life applications.

A novel enhanced cuckoo search algorithm for global optimization

Cuckoo search algorithm (CS) is an excellent nature-inspired algorithm that has been widely introduced to solve complex, multi-dimensional global optimization problems. However, the traditional CS algorithm has a low convergence speed and a poor balance between exploration and exploitation. In other words, the single search strategy of CS may make it easier to trap into local optimum and end in premature convergence. In this paper, we proposed a new variant of CS called Novel Enhanced CS Algorithm (NECSA) to overcome these drawbacks mentioned above inspired by the cuckoos’ behaviors in nature and other excellent search strategies employed in intelligent optimization algorithms. NECSA introduces several enhancement strategies, namely self-evaluation operation and modified greedy selection operation, to improve the searchability of the original CS algorithm. The former is proposed to enhance the exploration ability and ensure population diversity, and the latter is employed to enhance the exploitation ability and increase search efficiency. Besides, we introduced adaptive control parameter settings based on the fitness and iteration number to increase the convergence speed and the accuracy of the search process. The experimental results and analysis on the CEC2014 test have demonstrated the reliable performance of NECSA in comparison with the other five CS algorithm variants.

SUFMACS: A machine learning-based robust image segmentation framework for COVID-19 radiological image interpretation

The absence of dedicated vaccines or drugs makes the COVID-19 a global pandemic, and early diagnosis can be an effective prevention mechanism. RT-PCR test is considered as one of the gold standards worldwide to confirm the presence of COVID-19 infection reliably. Radiological images can also be used for the same purpose to some extent. Easy and no contact acquisition of the radiological images makes it a suitable alternative and this work can help to locate and interpret some prominent features for the screening purpose. One major challenge of this domain is the absence of appropriately annotated ground truth data. Motivated from this, a novel unsupervised machine learning-based method called SUFMACS (SUperpixel based Fuzzy Memetic Advanced Cuckoo Search) is proposed to efficiently interpret and segment the COVID-19 radiological images. This approach adapts the superpixel approach to reduce a large amount of spatial information. The original cuckoo search approach is modified and the Luus-Jaakola heuristic method is incorporated with McCulloch's approach. This modified cuckoo search approach is used to optimize the fuzzy modified objective function. This objective function exploits the advantages of the superpixel. Both CT scan and X-ray images are investigated in detail. Both qualitative and quantitative outcomes are quite promising and prove the efficiency and the real-life applicability of the proposed approach.

A morphology-based radiological image segmentation approach for efficient screening of COVID-19

Computer-aided radiological image interpretation systems can be helpful to reshape the overall workflow of the COVID-19 diagnosis process. This article describes an unsupervised CT scan image segmentation approach. This approach begins by performing a morphological reconstruction operation that is useful to remove the effect of the external disturbances on the infected regions and to locate different regions of interest precisely. The optimal size of the structuring element is selected using the Edge Content-based contrast matrix approach. After performing the opening by using the morphological reconstruction operation, further noise is eliminated using the closing-based morphological reconstruction operation. The original pixel space is restored and the obtained image is divided into some non-overlapping smaller blocks and the mean intensity value for each block is computed that is used as the local threshold value for the binarization purpose. It is preferable to manually determine the range of the infected region. If a region is greater than the upper bound then that region will be considered as an exceptional region and processed separately. Three standard metrics MSE, PSNR, and SSIM are used to quantify the outcomes. Both quantitative and qualitative comparisons prove the efficiency and real-life adaptability of this approach. The proposed approach is evaluated with the help of 400 different images and on average, the proposed approach achieves MSE 307.1888625, PSNR 23.7246505, and SSIM 0.831718459. Moreover, the comparative study shows that the proposed approach outperforms some of the standard methods and obtained results are encouraging to support the battle against the COVID-19.

SuFMoFPA: A superpixel and meta-heuristic based fuzzy image segmentation approach to explicate COVID-19 radiological images

Coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 is one of the biggest challenges which are being faced by mankind. Researchers are continuously trying to discover a vaccine or medicine for this highly infectious disease but, proper success is not achieved to date. Many countries are suffering from this disease and trying to find some solution that can prevent the dramatic spread of this virus. Although the mortality rate is not very high, the highly infectious nature of this virus makes it a global threat. RT-PCR test is the only means to confirm the presence of this virus to date. Only precautionary measures like early screening, frequent hand wash, social distancing use of masks, and other protective equipment can prevent us from this virus. Some researches show that the radiological images can be quite helpful for the early screening purpose because some features of the radiological images indicate the presence of the COVID-19 virus and therefore, it can serve as an effective screening tool. Automated analysis of these radiological images can help the physicians and other domain experts to study and screen the suspected patients easily and reliably within the stipulated amount of time. This method may not replace the traditional RT-PCR method for detection but, it can be helpful to filter the suspected patients from the rest of the community that can effectively reduce the spread in the of this virus. A novel method is proposed in this work to segment the radiological images for the better explication of the COVID-19 radiological images. The proposed method will be known as SuFMoFPA (Superpixel based Fuzzy Modified Flower Pollination Algorithm). The type 2 fuzzy clustering system is blended with this proposed approach to get the better-segmented outcome. Obtained results are quite promising and outperforming some of the standard approaches which are encouraging for the practical uses of the proposed approach to screening the COVID-19 patients.

Fuzzy Electromagnetism Optimization (FEMO) and its application in biomedical image segmentation

In this work, a new unsupervised classification approach is proposed for the biomedical image segmentation. The proposed method will be known as Fuzzy Electromagnetism Optimization (FEMO). As the name suggests, the proposed approach is based on the electromagnetism-like optimization (EMO) method. The EMO method is extended, modified, and combined with the modified type 2 fuzzy C-Means algorithm to improve its efficiency especially for biomedical image segmentation. The proposed FEMO method uses fuzzy membership and the electromagnetism-like optimization method to locate the optimal positions for the cluster centers. The proposed FEMO approach does not have any dependency on the initial selection of the cluster centers. Moreover, this method is suitable for the biomedical images of different modalities. This method is compared with some standard metaheuristics and evolutionary methods (e.g. Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Electromagnetism-like optimization (EMO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), etc.) based image segmentation approaches. Four different indices Davies–Bouldin, Xie–Beni, Dunn and β index are used for the comparison and evaluation purpose. For the GA, PSO, ACO, EMO and the proposed FEMO approach, the optimal average value of the Davies–Bouldin index is 1.833578359 (8 clusters), 1.669359475 (3 clusters), 1.623119284 (3 clusters), 1.647743907 (4 clusters) and 1.456889343 (3 clusters) respectively. It shows that the proposed approach can efficiently determine the optimal clusters. Moreover, the results of the other quantitative indices are quite promising for the proposed approach compared to the other approaches The detailed comparison is performed in both qualitative and quantitative manner and it is found that the proposed method outperforms some of the existing methods concerning some standard evaluation parameters.

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FEMO removes the dependency on the choice of the initial cluster centers.

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Several standard metaheuristic methods are outperformed by the proposed approach.

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FEMO can efficiently find the global optima for the higher number of clusters.

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The convergence of the FEMO is better than some other metaheuristic methods.

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Experiments are carried out using both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Environmental Adaption Method

This article describes how optimization is a process of finding out the best solutions among all available solutions for a problem. Many randomized algorithms have been designed to identify optimal solutions in optimization problems. Among these algorithms evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategy, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization and genetic programming are widely accepted for the optimization problems. Although a number of randomized algorithms are available in literature for solving optimization problems yet their design objectives are same. Each algorithm has been designed to meet certain goals like minimizing total number of fitness evaluations to capture nearly optimal solutions, to capture diverse optimal solutions in multimodal solutions when needed and also to avoid the local optimal solution in multi modal problems. This article discusses a novel optimization algorithm named as Environmental Adaption Method (EAM) foable 3r solving the optimization problems. EAM is designed to reduce the overall processing time for retrieving optimal solution of the problem, to improve the quality of solutions and particularly to avoid being trapped in local optima. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the latest version of existing algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO-TVAC), and differential evolution (SADE) on benchmark functions and the proposed algorithm proves its effectiveness over the existing algorithms in all the taken cases.

Medical Image Segmentation Using Fruit Fly Optimization and Density Peaks Clustering

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for medical image segmentation, which combines the density peaks clustering (DPC) with the fruit fly optimization algorithm, and it has the following advantages. Firstly, it avoids the problem of DPC that needs to artificially select parameters (such as the number of clusters) in its decision graph and thus can automatically determine their values. Secondly, our algorithm uses random step size, instead of the fixed step size as in the fruit fly optimization algorithm, which helps avoid falling into local optima. Thirdly, our algorithm selects the cut-off distance and the cluster centers using the image entropy value and can better capture the structures of the image. Experiments on benchmark dataset and proprietary dataset show that our algorithm can adaptively segment medical images with faster convergence and better robustness.

Clinical application of modified bag-of-features coupled with hybrid neural-based classifier in dengue fever classification using gene expression data

Dengue fever detection and classification have a vital role due to the recent outbreaks of different kinds of dengue fever. Recently, the advancement in the microarray technology can be employed for such classification process. Several studies have established that the gene selection phase takes a significant role in the classifier performance. Subsequently, the current study focused on detecting two different variations, namely, dengue fever (DF) and dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF). A modified bag-of-features method has been proposed to select the most promising genes in the classification process. Afterward, a modified cuckoo search optimization algorithm has been engaged to support the artificial neural (ANN-MCS) to classify the unknown subjects into three different classes namely, DF, DHF, and another class containing convalescent and normal cases. The proposed method has been compared with other three well-known classifiers, namely, multilayer perceptron feed-forward network (MLP-FFN), artificial neural network (ANN) trained with cuckoo search (ANN-CS), and ANN trained with PSO (ANN-PSO). Experiments have been carried out with different number of clusters for the initial bag-of-features-based feature selection phase. After obtaining the reduced dataset, the hybrid ANN-MCS model has been employed for the classification process. The results have been compared in terms of the confusion matrix-based performance measuring metrics. The experimental results indicated a highly statistically significant improvement with the proposed classifier over the traditional ANN-CS model.

Evaluation of Recurrent Neural Network and its Variants for Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

This article describes how sequential data modeling is a relevant task in Cybersecurity. Sequences are attributed temporal characteristics either explicitly or implicitly. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a subset of artificial neural networks (ANNs) which have appeared as a powerful, principle approach to learn dynamic temporal behaviors in an arbitrary length of large-scale sequence data. Furthermore, stacked recurrent neural networks (S-RNNs) have the potential to learn complex temporal behaviors quickly, including sparse representations. To leverage this, the authors model network traffic as a time series, particularly transmission control protocol / internet protocol (TCP/IP) packets in a predefined time range with a supervised learning method, using millions of known good and bad network connections. To find out the best architecture, the authors complete a comprehensive review of various RNN architectures with its network parameters and network structures. Ideally, as a test bed, they use the existing benchmark Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency / Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (DARPA) / (KDD) Cup ‘99' intrusion detection (ID) contest data set to show the efficacy of these various RNN architectures. All the experiments of deep learning architectures are run up to 1000 epochs with a learning rate in the range [0.01-0.5] on a GPU-enabled TensorFlow and experiments of traditional machine learning algorithms are done using Scikit-learn. Experiments of families of RNN architecture achieved a low false positive rate in comparison to the traditional machine learning classifiers. The primary reason is that RNN architectures are able to store information for long-term dependencies over time-lags and to adjust with successive connection sequence information. In addition, the effectiveness of RNN architectures are shown for the UNSW-NB15 data set.