Automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 disease using deep convolutional neural network with multi-feature channel from respiratory sound data: Cough, voice, and breath

Artificial intelligence-based framework to identify the abnormalities in the COVID-19 disease and other common respiratory diseases from digital stethoscope data using deep CNN

The utilization of lung sounds to diagnose lung diseases using respiratory sound features has significantly increased in the past few years. The Digital Stethoscope data has been examined extensively by medical researchers and technical scientists to diagnose the symptoms of respiratory diseases. Artificial intelligence-based approaches are applied in the real universe to distinguish respiratory disease signs from human pulmonary auscultation sounds. The Deep CNN model is implemented with combined multi-feature channels (Modified MFCC, Log Mel, and Soft Mel) to obtain the sound parameters from lung-based Digital Stethoscope data. The model analysis is observed with max-pooling and without max-pool operations using multi-feature channels on respiratory digital stethoscope data. In addition, COVID-19 sound data and enriched data, which are recently acquired data to enhance model performance using a combination of L2 regularization to overcome the risk of overfitting because of less respiratory sound data, are included in the work. The suggested DCNN with Max-Pooling on the improved dataset demonstrates cutting-edge performance employing a multi-feature channels spectrogram. The model has been developed with different convolutional filter sizes (1 × 12 , 1 × 24 , 1 × 36 , 1 × 48 , and 1 × 60 ) that helped to test the proposed neural network. According to the experimental findings, the suggested DCNN architecture with a max-pooling function performs better to identify respiratory disease symptoms than DCNN without max-pooling. In order to demonstrate the model's effectiveness in categorization, it is trained and tested with the DCNN model that extract several modalities of respiratory sound data.

Polyphonic sound event localization and detection based on Multiple Attention Fusion ResNet

Sound event localization and detection have been applied in various fields. Due to the polyphony and noise interference, it becomes challenging to accurately predict the sound event and their occurrence locations. Aiming at this problem, we propose a Multiple Attention Fusion ResNet, which uses ResNet34 as the base network. Given the situation that the sound duration is not fixed, and there are multiple polyphonic and noise, we introduce the Gated Channel Transform to enhance the residual basic block. This enables the model to capture contextual information, evaluate channel weights, and reduce the interference caused by polyphony and noise. Furthermore, Split Attention is introduced to the model for capturing cross-channel information, which enhances the ability to distinguish the polyphony. Finally, Coordinate Attention is introduced to the model so that the model can focus on both the channel information and spatial location information of sound events. Experiments were conducted on two different datasets, TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2020, and TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2021. The results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under multiple polyphonic and noise-directional interference environments and it achieves competitive performance under a single polyphonic environment.

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.

Real-time counting of wheezing events from lung sounds using deep learning algorithms: Implications for disease prediction and early intervention

This pioneering study aims to revolutionize self-symptom management and telemedicine-based remote monitoring through the development of a real-time wheeze counting algorithm. Leveraging a novel approach that includes the detailed labeling of one breathing cycle into three types: break, normal, and wheeze, this study not only identifies abnormal sounds within each breath but also captures comprehensive data on their location, duration, and relationships within entire respiratory cycles, including atypical patterns. This innovative strategy is based on a combination of a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network model, enabling real-time analysis of respiratory sounds. Notably, it stands out for its capacity to handle continuous data, distinguishing it from conventional lung sound classification algorithms. The study utilizes a substantial dataset consisting of 535 respiration cycles from diverse sources, including the Child Sim Lung Sound Simulator, the EMTprep Open-Source Database, Clinical Patient Records, and the ICBHI 2017 Challenge Database. Achieving a classification accuracy of 90%, the exceptional result metrics encompass the identification of each breath cycle and simultaneous detection of the abnormal sound, enabling the real-time wheeze counting of all respirations. This innovative wheeze counter holds the promise of revolutionizing research on predicting lung diseases based on long-term breathing patterns and offers applicability in clinical and non-clinical settings for on-the-go detection and remote intervention of exacerbated respiratory symptoms.

Screening COVID-19 by Swaasa AI platform using cough sounds: a cross-sectional study

The Advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the use of auditory data for detecting various diseases, including COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 infection has claimed more than six million lives to date and therefore, needs a robust screening technique to control the disease spread. In the present study we created and validated the Swaasa AI platform, which uses the signature cough sound and symptoms presented by patients to screen and prioritize COVID-19 patients. We collected cough data from 234 COVID-19 suspects to validate our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and Feedforward Artificial Neural Network (FFANN) (tabular features) based algorithm. The final output from both models was combined to predict the likelihood of having the disease. During the clinical validation phase, our model showed a 75.54% accuracy rate in detecting the likely presence of COVID-19, with 95.45% sensitivity and 73.46% specificity. We conducted pilot testing on 183 presumptive COVID subjects, of which 58 were truly COVID-19 positive, resulting in a Positive Predictive Value of 70.73%. Due to the high cost and technical expertise required for currently available rapid screening methods, there is a need for a cost-effective and remote monitoring tool that can serve as a preliminary screening method for potential COVID-19 subjects. Therefore, Swaasa would be highly beneficial in detecting the disease and could have a significant impact in reducing its spread.

CovidCoughNet: A new method based on convolutional neural networks and deep feature extraction using pitch-shifting data augmentation for covid-19 detection from cough, breath, and voice signals

This study proposes a new deep learning-based method that demonstrates high performance in detecting Covid-19 disease from cough, breath, and voice signals. This impressive method, named CovidCoughNet, consists of a deep feature extraction network (InceptionFireNet) and a prediction network (DeepConvNet). The InceptionFireNet architecture, based on Inception and Fire modules, was designed to extract important feature maps. The DeepConvNet architecture, which is made up of convolutional neural network blocks, was developed to predict the feature vectors obtained from the InceptionFireNet architecture. The COUGHVID dataset containing cough data and the Coswara dataset containing cough, breath, and voice signals were used as the data sets. The pitch-shifting technique was used to data augmentation the signal data, which significantly contributed to improving performance. Additionally, Chroma features (CF), Root mean square energy (RMSE), Spectral centroid (SC), Spectral bandwidth (SB), Spectral rolloff (SR), Zero crossing rate (ZCR), and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature extraction techniques were used to extract important features from voice signals. Experimental studies have shown that using the pitch-shifting technique improved performance by around 3% compared to raw signals. When the proposed model was used with the COUGHVID dataset (Healthy, Covid-19, and Symptomatic), a high performance of 99.19% accuracy, 0.99 precision, 0.98 recall, 0.98 F1-Score, 97.77% specificity, and 98.44% AUC was achieved. Similarly, when the voice data in the Coswara dataset was used, higher performance was achieved compared to the cough and breath studies, with 99.63% accuracy, 100% precision, 0.99 recall, 0.99 F1-Score, 99.24% specificity, and 99.24% AUC. Moreover, when compared with current studies in the literature, the proposed model was observed to exhibit highly successful performance. The codes and details of the experimental studies can be accessed from the relevant Github page: (https://github.com/GaffariCelik/CovidCoughNet).

Automatic Detection of Dyspnea in Real Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios

A respiratory distress estimation technique for telephony previously proposed by the authors is adapted and evaluated in real static and dynamic HRI scenarios. The system is evaluated with a telephone dataset re-recorded using the robotic platform designed and implemented for this study. In addition, the original telephone training data are modified using an environmental model that incorporates natural robot-generated and external noise sources and reverberant effects using room impulse responses (RIRs). The results indicate that the average accuracy and AUC are just 0.4% less than those obtained with matched training/testing conditions with simulated data. Quite surprisingly, there is not much difference in accuracy and AUC between static and dynamic HRI conditions. Moreover, the beamforming methods delay-and-sum and MVDR lead to average improvement in accuracy and AUC equal to 8% and 2%, respectively, when applied to training and testing data. Regarding the complementarity of time-dependent and time-independent features, the combination of both types of classifiers provides the best joint accuracy and AUC score.

Classification of Parkinson's Disease in Patch-Based MRI of Substantia Nigra

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic and progressive neurological disease that mostly shakes and compromises the motor system of the human brain. Patients with PD can face resting tremors, loss of balance, bradykinesia, and rigidity problems. Complex patterns of PD, i.e., with relevance to other neurological diseases and minor changes in brain structure, make the diagnosis of this disease a challenge and cause inaccuracy of about 25% in the diagnostics. The research community utilizes different machine learning techniques for diagnosis using handcrafted features. This paper proposes a computer-aided diagnostic system using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to diagnose PD. CNN is one of the most suitable models to extract and learn the essential features of a problem. The dataset is obtained from Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), which provides different datasets (benchmarks), such as T2-weighted MRI for PD and other healthy controls (HC). The mid slices are collected from each MRI. Further, these slices are registered for alignment. Since the PD can be found in substantia nigra (i.e., the midbrain), the midbrain region of the registered T2-weighted MRI slice is selected using the freehand region of interest technique with a 33 × 33 sized window. Several experiments have been carried out to ensure the validity of the CNN. The standard measures, such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve, are used to evaluate the proposed system. The evaluation results show that CNN provides better accuracy than machine learning techniques, such as naive Bayes, decision tree, support vector machine, and artificial neural network.

Risk factors identification of COVID-19 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: A retrospective study in Punjab-Pakistan

BACKGROUND

Accessibility to the immense collection of studies on noncommunicable diseases related to coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an immediate focus of researchers. However, there is a scarcity of information about chronic obstructed pulmonary disease (COPD), which is associated with a high rate of infection in COVID-19 patients. Moreover, by combining the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 on COPD patients, we may be able to overcome formidable obstacles factors, and diagnosis influencers.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A retrospective study of 280 patients was conducted at DHQ Hospital Muzaffargarh in Punjab, Pakistan. Negative binomial regression describes the risk of fixed successive variables. The association is described by the Cox proportional hazard model and the model coefficient is determined through log-likelihood observation. Patients with COPD had their survival and mortality plotted on Kaplan-Meier curves.

RESULTS

The increased risk of death in COPD patients was due to the effects of variables such as cough, lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI), tuberculosis (TB), and body-aches being 1.369, 0.693, 0.170, and 0.217 times higher at (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.747-1.992), (95% CI: 0.231-1.156), (95% CI: 0.008-0.332), and (95% CI: -0.07 to 0.440) while it decreased 0.396 in normal condition.

CONCLUSION

We found that the symptoms of COPD (cough, LRTI, TB, and bodyaches) are statistically significant in patients who were most infected by SARS-CoV-2.

Coswara: A respiratory sounds and symptoms dataset for remote screening of SARS-CoV-2 infection

This paper presents the Coswara dataset, a dataset containing diverse set of respiratory sounds and rich meta-data, recorded between April-2020 and February-2022 from 2635 individuals (1819 SARS-CoV-2 negative, 674 positive, and 142 recovered subjects). The respiratory sounds contained nine sound categories associated with variants of breathing, cough and speech. The rich metadata contained demographic information associated with age, gender and geographic location, as well as the health information relating to the symptoms, pre-existing respiratory ailments, comorbidity and SARS-CoV-2 test status. Our study is the first of its kind to manually annotate the audio quality of the entire dataset (amounting to 65 hours) through manual listening. The paper summarizes the data collection procedure, demographic, symptoms and audio data information. A COVID-19 classifier based on bi-directional long short-term (BLSTM) architecture, is trained and evaluated on the different population sub-groups contained in the dataset to understand the bias/fairness of the model. This enabled the analysis of the impact of gender, geographic location, date of recording, and language proficiency on the COVID-19 detection performance.

Optimized DEC: An effective cough detection framework using optimal weighted Features-aided deep Ensemble classifier for COVID-19

Since the year 2019, the entire world has been facing the most hazardous and contagious disease as Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Based on the symptoms, the virus can be identified and diagnosed. Amongst, cough is the primary syndrome to detect COVID-19. Existing method requires a long processing time. Early screening and detection is a complex task. To surmount the research drawbacks, a novel ensemble-based deep learning model is designed on heuristic development. The prime intention of the designed work is to detect COVID-19 disease using cough audio signals. At the initial stage, the source signals are fetched and undergo for signal decomposition phase by Empirical Mean Curve Decomposition (EMCD). Consequently, the decomposed signal is called "Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), spectral features, and statistical features". Further, all three features are fused and provide the optimal weighted features with the optimal weight value with the help of "Modified Cat and Mouse Based Optimizer (MCMBO)". Lastly, the optimal weighted features are fed as input to the Optimized Deep Ensemble Classifier (ODEC) that is fused together with various classifiers such as "Radial Basis Function (RBF), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Deep Neural Network (DNN)". In order to attain the best detection results, the parameters in ODEC are optimized by the MCMBO algorithm. Throughout the validation, the designed method attains 96% and 92% concerning accuracy and precision. Thus, result analysis elucidates that the proposed work achieves the desired detective value that aids practitioners to early diagnose COVID-19 ailments.

Intelligent Microsystem for Sound Event Recognition in Edge Computing Using End-to-End Mesh Networking

Wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) and intelligent microsystems are crucial components of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. In various IoT applications, small, lightweight, and low-power microsystems are essential to enable autonomous edge computing and networked cooperative work. This study presents an innovative intelligent microsystem with wireless networking capabilities, sound sensing, and sound event recognition. The microsystem is designed with optimized sensing, energy supply, processing, and transceiver modules to achieve small size and low power consumption. Additionally, a low-computational sound event recognition algorithm based on a Convolutional Neural Network has been designed and integrated into the microsystem. Multiple microsystems are connected using low-power Bluetooth Mesh wireless networking technology to form a meshed WASN, which is easily accessible, flexible to expand, and straightforward to manage with smartphones. The microsystem is 7.36 cm³ in size and weighs 8 g without housing. The microsystem can accurately recognize sound events in both trained and untrained data tests, achieving an average accuracy of over 92.50% for alarm sounds above 70 dB and water flow sounds above 55 dB. The microsystems can communicate wirelessly with a direct range of 5 m. It can be applied in the field of home IoT and border security.

Combating Covid-19 using machine learning and deep learning: Applications, challenges, and future perspectives

COVID-19, a worldwide pandemic that has affected many people and thousands of individuals have died due to COVID-19, during the last two years. Due to the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in X-ray image interpretation, sound analysis, diagnosis, patient monitoring, and CT image identification, it has been further researched in the area of medical science during the period of COVID-19. This study has assessed the performance and investigated different machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and combinations of various ML, DL, and AI approaches that have been employed in recent studies with diverse data formats to combat the problems that have arisen due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this study shows the comparison among the stand-alone ML and DL-based research works regarding the COVID-19 issues with the combinations of ML, DL, and AI-based research works. After in-depth analysis and comparison, this study responds to the proposed research questions and presents the future research directions in this context. This review work will guide different research groups to develop viable applications based on ML, DL, and AI models, and will also guide healthcare institutes, researchers, and governments by showing them how these techniques can ease the process of tackling the COVID-19.

Dyspnea Severity Assessment Based on Vocalization Behavior with Deep Learning on the Telephone

In this paper, a system to assess dyspnea with the mMRC scale, on the phone, via deep learning, is proposed. The method is based on modeling the spontaneous behavior of subjects while pronouncing controlled phonetization. These vocalizations were designed, or chosen, to deal with the stationary noise suppression of cellular handsets, to provoke different rates of exhaled air, and to stimulate different levels of fluency. Time-independent and time-dependent engineered features were proposed and selected, and a k-fold scheme with double validation was adopted to select the models with the greatest potential for generalization. Moreover, score fusion methods were also investigated to optimize the complementarity of the controlled phonetizations and features that were engineered and selected. The results reported here were obtained from 104 participants, where 34 corresponded to healthy individuals and 70 were patients with respiratory conditions. The subjects' vocalizations were recorded with a telephone call (i.e., with an IVR server). The system provided an accuracy of 59% (i.e., estimating the correct mMRC), a root mean square error equal to 0.98, false positive rate of 6%, false negative rate of 11%, and an area under the ROC curve equal to 0.97. Finally, a prototype was developed and implemented, with an ASR-based automatic segmentation scheme, to estimate dyspnea on line.

X-ray Cherenkov-luminescence tomography reconstruction with a three-component deep learning algorithm: Swin transformer, convolutional neural network, and locality module

SIGNIFICANCE

X-ray Cherenkov-luminescence tomography (XCLT) produces fast emission data from megavoltage (MV) x-ray scanning, in which the excitation location of molecules within tissue is reconstructed. However standard filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithms for XCLT sinogram reconstruction can suffer from insufficient data due to dose limitations, so there are limits in the reconstruction quality with some artifacts. We report a deep learning algorithm for XCLT with high image quality and improved quantitative accuracy.

AIM

To directly reconstruct the distribution of emission quantum yield for x-ray Cherenkov-luminescence tomography, we proposed a three-component deep learning algorithm that includes a Swin transformer, convolution neural network, and locality module model.

APPROACH

A data-to-image model x-ray Cherenkov-luminescence tomography is developed based on a Swin transformer, which is used to extract pixel-level prior information from the sinogram domain. Meanwhile, a convolutional neural network structure is deployed to transform the extracted pixel information from the sinogram domain to the image domain. Finally, a locality module is designed between the encoder and decoder connection structures for delivering features. Its performance was validated with simulation, physical phantom, and in vivo experiments.

RESULTS

This approach can better deal with the limits to data than conventional FBP methods. The method was validated with numerical and physical phantom experiments, with results showing that it improved the reconstruction performance mean square error ( > 94.1 % ), peak signal-to-noise ratio ( > 41.7 % ), and Pearson correlation ( > 19 % ) compared with the FBP algorithm. The Swin-CNN also achieved a 32.1% improvement in PSNR over the deep learning method AUTOMAP.

CONCLUSIONS

This study shows that the three-component deep learning algorithm provides an effective reconstruction method for x-ray Cherenkov-luminescence tomography.

An Explainable AI-Enabled Framework for Interpreting Pulmonary Diseases from Chest Radiographs

Explainable Artificial Intelligence is a key component of artificially intelligent systems that aim to explain the classification results. The classification results explanation is essential for automatic disease diagnosis in healthcare. The human respiration system is badly affected by different chest pulmonary diseases. Automatic classification and explanation can be used to detect these lung diseases. In this paper, we introduced a CNN-based transfer learning-based approach for automatically explaining pulmonary diseases, i.e., edema, tuberculosis, nodules, and pneumonia from chest radiographs. Among these pulmonary diseases, pneumonia, which COVID-19 causes, is deadly; therefore, radiographs of COVID-19 are used for the explanation task. We used the ResNet50 neural network and trained the network on extensive training with the COVID-CT dataset and the COVIDNet dataset. The interpretable model LIME is used for the explanation of classification results. Lime highlights the input image's important features for generating the classification result. We evaluated the explanation using radiologists' highlighted images and identified that our model highlights and explains the same regions. We achieved improved classification results with our fine-tuned model with an accuracy of 93% and 97%, respectively. The analysis of our results indicates that this research not only improves the classification results but also provides an explanation of pulmonary diseases with advanced deep-learning methods. This research would assist radiologists with automatic disease detection and explanations, which are used to make clinical decisions and assist in diagnosing and treating pulmonary diseases in the early stage.

Deep Survival Analysis With Clinical Variables for COVID-19

OBJECTIVE

Millions of people have been affected by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has caused millions of deaths around the world. Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasing role in all areas of patient care, including prognostics. This paper proposes a novel predictive model based on one dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D CNN) to use clinical variables in predicting the survival outcome of COVID-19 patients.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

We have considered two scenarios for survival analysis, 1) uni-variate analysis using the Log-rank test and Kaplan-Meier estimator and 2) combining all clinical variables ([Formula: see text]=44) for predicting the short-term from long-term survival. We considered the random forest (RF) model as a baseline model, comparing to our proposed 1D CNN in predicting survival groups.

RESULTS

Our experiments using the univariate analysis show that nine clinical variables are significantly associated with the survival outcome with corrected p < 0.05. Our approach of 1D CNN shows a significant improvement in performance metrics compared to the RF and the state-of-the-art techniques (i.e., 1D CNN) in predicting the survival group of patients with COVID-19.

CONCLUSION

Our model has been tested using clinical variables, where the performance is found promising. The 1D CNN model could be a useful tool for detecting the risk of mortality and developing treatment plans in a timely manner.

CLINICAL IMPACT

The findings indicate that using both Heparin and Exnox for treatment is typically the most useful factor in predicting a patient's chances of survival from COVID-19. Moreover, our predictive model shows that the combination of AI and clinical data can be applied to point-of-care services through fast-learning healthcare systems.

Cough Audio Analysis for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Humanity has suffered catastrophically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most reliable diagnoses of COVID-19 is RT-PCR (reverse-transcription polymer chain reaction) testing. This method, however, has its limitations. It is time consuming and requires scalability. This research work carries out a preliminary prognosis of COVID-19, which is scalable and less time consuming. The research carried out a competitive analysis of four machine-learning models namely, Multilayer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory, and VGG-19 with Support Vector Machines. Out of these models, Multilayer Perceptron outperformed with higher specificity of 94.5% and accuracy of 96.8%. The results show that Multilayer Perceptron was able to distinguish between positive and negative COVID-19 coughs by a robust feature embedding technique.

COVID-19 activity screening by a smart-data-driven multi-band voice analysis

COVID-19 is a disease caused by the new coronavirus SARS-COV-2 which can lead to severe respiratory infections. Since its first detection it caused more than six million worldwide deaths. COVID-19 diagnosis non-invasive and low-cost methods with faster and accurate results are still needed for a fast disease control. In this research, 3 different signal analyses have been applied (per broadband, per sub-bands and per broadband & sub-bands) to Cough, Breathing & Speech signals of Coswara dataset to extract non-linear patterns (Energy, Entropies, Correlation Dimension, Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, Lyapunov Exponent & Fractal Dimensions) for feeding a XGBoost classifier to discriminate COVID-19 activity on its different stages. Classification accuracies ranged between 83.33% and 98.46% have been achieved, surpassing the state-of-art methods in some comparisons. It should be empathized the 98.46% of accuracy reached on pair Healthy Controls vs all COVID-19 stages. The results shows that the method may be adequate for COVID-19 diagnosis screening assistance.

Design and development of hybrid optimization enabled deep learning model for COVID-19 detection with comparative analysis with DCNN, BIAT-GRU, XGBoost

The recent investigation has started for evaluating the human respiratory sounds, like voice recorded, cough, and breathing from hospital confirmed Covid-19 tools, which differs from healthy person's sound. The cough-based detection of Covid-19 also considered with non-respiratory and respiratory sounds data related with all declared situations. Covid-19 is respiratory disease, which is usually produced by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, it is more indispensable to detect the positive cases for reducing further spread of virus, and former treatment of affected patients. With constant rise in the COVID-19 cases, there has been a constant rise in the need of efficient and safe ways to detect an infected individual. With the cases multiplying constantly, the current detecting devices like RT-PCR and fast testing kits have become short in supply. An effectual Covid-19 detection model using devised hybrid Honey Badger Optimization-based Deep Neuro Fuzzy Network (HBO-DNFN) is developed in this paper. Here, the audio signal is considered as input for detecting Covid-19. The gaussian filter is applied to input signal for removing the noises and then feature extraction is performed. The substantial features, like spectral roll-off, spectral bandwidth, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), spectral flatness, zero crossing rate, spectral centroid, mean square energy and spectral contract are extracted for further processing. Finally, DNFN is applied for detecting Covid-19 and the deep leaning model is trained by designed hybrid HBO algorithm. Accordingly, the developed Hybrid HBO method is newly designed by incorporating Honey Badger optimization Algorithm (HBA) and Jaya algorithm. The performance of developed Covid-19 detection model is evaluated using three metrics, like testing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The developed Hybrid HBO-based DNFN is outpaced than other existing approaches in terms of testing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of "0.9176, 0.9218 and 0. 9219". All the test results are validated with the k-fold cross validation method in order to make an assessment of the generalizability of these results. When k-fold value is 9, sensitivity of existing techniques and developed JHBO-based DNFN is 0.8982, 0.8816, 0.8938, and 0.9207. The sensitivity of developed approach is improved by means of gaussian filtering model. The specificity of DCNN is 0.9125, BI-AT-GRU is 0.8926, and XGBoost is 0.9014, while developed JHBO-based DNFN is 0.9219 in k-fold value 9.

Wide-Bandwidth Nanocomposite-Sensor Integrated Smart Mask for Tracking Multiphase Respiratory Activities

Wearing masks has been a recommended protective measure due to the risks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) even in its coming endemic phase. Therefore, deploying a "smart mask" to monitor human physiological signals is highly beneficial for personal and public health. This work presents a smart mask integrating an ultrathin nanocomposite sponge structure-based soundwave sensor (≈400 µm), which allows the high sensitivity in a wide-bandwidth dynamic pressure range, i.e., capable of detecting various respiratory sounds of breathing, speaking, and coughing. Thirty-one subjects test the smart mask in recording their respiratory activities. Machine/deep learning methods, i.e., support vector machine and convolutional neural networks, are used to recognize these activities, which show average macro-recalls of ≈95% in both individual and generalized models. With rich high-frequency (≈4000 Hz) information recorded, the two-/tri-phase coughs can be mapped while speaking words can be identified, demonstrating that the smart mask can be applicable as a daily wearable Internet of Things (IoT) device for respiratory disease identification, voice interaction tool, etc. in the future. This work bridges the technological gap between ultra-lightweight but high-frequency response sensor material fabrication, signal transduction and processing, and machining/deep learning to demonstrate a wearable device for potential applications in continual health monitoring in daily life.

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.

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.

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.

Challenges and Opportunities of Deep Learning for Cough-Based COVID-19 Diagnosis: A Scoping Review

In the past two years, medical researchers and data scientists worldwide have focused their efforts on containing the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Deep learning models have been proven to be capable of efficient medical diagnosis and prognosis in cancer, common lung diseases, and COVID-19. On the other hand, artificial neural networks have demonstrated their potential in pattern recognition and classification in various domains, including healthcare. This literature review aims to report the state of research on developing neural network models to diagnose COVID-19 from cough sounds to create a cost-efficient and accessible testing tool in the fight against the pandemic. A total of 35 papers were included in this review following a screening of the 161 outputs of the literature search. We extracted information from articles on data resources, model structures, and evaluation metrics and then explored the scope of experimental studies and methodologies and analyzed their outcomes and limitations. We found that cough is a biomarker, and its associated information can determine an individual’s health status. Convolutional neural networks were predominantly used, suggesting they are particularly suitable for feature extraction and classification. The reported accuracy values ranged from 73.1% to 98.5%. Moreover, the dataset sizes ranged from 16 to over 30,000 cough audio samples. Although deep learning is a promising prospect in identifying COVID-19, we identified a gap in the literature on research conducted over large and diversified data sets.

COVID-19: respiratory disease diagnosis with regularized deep convolutional neural network using human respiratory sounds

Human respiratory sound auscultation (HRSA) parameters have been the real choice for detecting human respiratory diseases in the last few years. It is a challenging task to extract the respiratory sound features from the breath, voice, and cough sounds. The existing methods failed to extract the sound features to diagnose respiratory diseases. We proposed and evaluated a new regularized deep convolutional neural network (RDCNN) architecture to accept COVID-19 sound data and essential sound features. The proposed architecture is trained with the COVID-19 sound data sets and gives a better learning curve than any other state-of-the-art model. We examine the performance of RDCNN with Max-Pooling (Model-1) and without Max-Pooling (Model-2) functions. In this work, we observed that RDCNN model performance with three sound feature extraction methods [Soft-Mel frequency channel, Log-Mel frequency spectrum, and Modified Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MMFCC) spectrum] for COVID-19 sound data sets (KDD-data, ComParE2021-CCS-CSS-Data, and NeurlPs2021-data). To amplify the models' performance, we applied the augmentation technique along with regularization. We have also carried out this work to estimate the mutation of SARS-CoV-2 in the five waves using prognostic models (fractal-based). The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COVID-19 sound data set to identify COVID-19 disease symptoms. The model's learnable parameter gradients have vanished in the intermediate layers while optimizing the prediction error which is addressed with our proposed RDCNN model. Our experiments suggested that 3 × 3 kernel size for regularized deep CNN (without max-pooling) shows 2-3% better classification accuracy compared to RDCNN with max-pooling. The experimental results suggest that this new approach may achieve the finest results on respiratory diseases.

An automated diagnosis and classification of COVID-19 from chest CT images using a transfer learning-based convolutional neural network

Researchers have developed more intelligent, highly responsive, and efficient detection methods owing to the COVID-19 demands for more widespread diagnosis. The work done deals with developing an AI-based framework that can help radiologists and other healthcare professionals diagnose COVID-19 cases at a high level of accuracy. However, in the absence of publicly available CT datasets, the development of such AI tools can prove challenging. Therefore, an algorithm for performing automatic and accurate COVID-19 classification using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), pre-trained model, and Sparrow search algorithm (SSA) on CT lung images was proposed. The pre-trained CNN models used are SeresNext50, SeresNext101, SeNet154, MobileNet, MobileNetV2, MobileNetV3Small, and MobileNetV3Large. In addition, the SSA will be used to optimize the different CNN and transfer learning(TL) hyperparameters to find the best configuration for the pre-trained model used and enhance its performance. Two datasets are used in the experiments. There are two classes in the first dataset, while three in the second. The authors combined two publicly available COVID-19 datasets as the first dataset, namely the COVID-19 Lung CT Scans and COVID-19 CT Scan Dataset. In total, 14,486 images were included in this study. The authors analyzed the Large COVID-19 CT scan slice dataset in the second dataset, which utilized 17,104 images. Compared to other pre-trained models on both classes datasets, MobileNetV3Large pre-trained is the best model. As far as the three-classes dataset is concerned, a model trained on SeNet154 is the best available. Results show that, when compared to other CNN models like LeNet-5 CNN, COVID faster R–CNN, Light CNN, Fuzzy + CNN, Dynamic CNN, CNN and Optimized CNN, the proposed Framework achieves the best accuracy of 99.74% (two classes) and 98% (three classes).

Analysis of factors influencing public attention to masks during the COVID-19 epidemic-Data from Sina Weibo

As we all know, vaccination still does not protect people from novel coronavirus infections, and wearing masks remains essential. Research on mask attention is helpful to understand the public's cognition and willingness to wear masks, but there are few studies on mask attention in the existing literature. The health belief model used to study disease prevention behaviors is rarely applied to the research on mask attention, and the research on health belief models basically entails the use of a questionnaire survey. This study was purposed to establish a health belief model affecting mask attention to explore the relationship between perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, self-efficacy, perceived impairment, action cues and mask attention. On the basis of the establishment of the hypothesis model, the Baidu index of epidemic and mask attention, the number of likes and comments on Weibo, and the historical weather temperature data were retrieved by using software. Keyword extraction and manual screening were carried out for Weibo comments, and then the independent variables and dependent variables were coded. Finally, through binomial logistic regression analysis, it was concluded that perceived susceptibility, perceived severity and action cues have significant influences on mask attention, and that the accuracy rate for predicting low attention is 93.4%, and the global accuracy is 84.3%. These conclusions can also help suppliers make production decisions.

A systematic review on cough sound analysis for Covid-19 diagnosis and screening: is my cough sound COVID-19?

For COVID-19, the need for robust, inexpensive, and accessible screening becomes critical. Even though symptoms present differently, cough is still taken as one of the primary symptoms in severe and non-severe infections alike. For mass screening in resource-constrained regions, artificial intelligence (AI)-guided tools have progressively contributed to detect/screen COVID-19 infections using cough sounds. Therefore, in this article, we review state-of-the-art works in both years 2020 and 2021 by considering AI-guided tools to analyze cough sound for COVID-19 screening primarily based on machine learning algorithms. In our study, we used PubMed central repository and Web of Science with key words: (Cough OR Cough Sounds OR Speech) AND (Machine learning OR Deep learning OR Artificial intelligence) AND (COVID-19 OR Coronavirus). For better meta-analysis, we screened for appropriate dataset (size and source), algorithmic factors (both shallow learning and deep learning models) and corresponding performance scores. Further, in order not to miss up-to-date experimental research-based articles, we also included articles outside of PubMed and Web of Science, but pre-print articles were strictly avoided as they are not peer-reviewed.

Attention-based hybrid CNN-LSTM and spectral data augmentation for COVID-19 diagnosis from cough sound

COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the interest in artificial intelligence tools for quick diagnosis to limit virus spreading. Over 60% of people who are infected complain of a dry cough. Cough and other respiratory sounds were used to build diagnosis models in much recent research. We propose in this work, an augmentation pipeline which is applied on the pre-filtered data and uses i) pitch-shifting technique to augment the raw signal and, ii) spectral data augmentation technique SpecAugment to augment the computed mel-spectrograms. A deep learning based architecture that hybridizes convolution neural networks and long-short term memory with an attention mechanism is proposed for building the classification model. The feasibility of the proposed is demonstrated through a set of testing scenarios using the large-scale COUGHVID cough dataset and through a comparison with three baselines models. We have shown that our classification model achieved 91.13% of testing accuracy, 90.93% of sensitivity and an area under the curve of receiver operating characteristic of 91.13%.

Lung Sound Classification Using Co-tuning and Stochastic Normalization

Computational methods for lung sound analysis are beneficial for computer-aided diagnosis support, storage and monitoring in critical care. In this paper, we use pre-trained ResNet models as backbone architectures for classification of adventitious lung sounds and respiratory diseases. The learned representation of the pre-trained model is transferred by using vanilla fine-tuning, co-tuning, stochastic normalization and the combination of the co-tuning and stochastic normalization techniques. Furthermore, data augmentation in both time domain and time-frequency domain is used to account for the class imbalance of the ICBHI and our multi-channel lung sound dataset. Additionally, we introduce spectrum correction to account for the variations of the recording device properties on the ICBHI dataset. Empirically, our proposed systems mostly outperform all state-of-the-art lung sound classification systems for the adventitious lung sounds and respiratory diseases of both datasets.

Artificial Intelligence for Detecting COVID-19 With the Aid of Human Cough, Breathing and Speech Signals: Scoping Review

Goal: Official tests for COVID-19 are time consuming, costly, can produce high false negatives, use up vital chemicals and may violate social distancing laws. Therefore, a fast and reliable additional solution using recordings of cough, breathing and speech data for preliminary screening may help alleviate these issues. Objective: This scoping review explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology aims to detect COVID-19 disease by using cough, breathing and speech recordings, as reported in the literature. Here, we describe and summarize attributes of the identified AI techniques and datasets used for their implementation. Methods: A scoping review was conducted following the guidelines of PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews). Electronic databases (Google Scholar, Science Direct, and IEEE Xplore) were searched between 1st April 2020 and 15th August 2021. Terms were selected based on the target intervention (i.e., AI), the target disease (i.e., COVID-19) and acoustic correlates of the disease (i.e., speech, breathing and cough). A narrative approach was used to summarize the extracted data. Results: 24 studies and 8 Apps out of the 86 retrieved studies met the inclusion criteria. Half of the publications and Apps were from the USA. The most prominent AI architecture used was a convolutional neural network, followed by a recurrent neural network. AI models were mainly trained, tested and run-on websites and personal computers, rather than on phone apps. More than half of the included studies reported area-under-the-curve performance of greater than 0.90 on symptomatic and negative datasets while one study achieved 100% sensitivity in predicting asymptomatic COVID-19 from cough-, breathing- or speech-based acoustic features. Conclusions: The included studies show that AI has the potential to help detect COVID-19 using cough, breathing and speech samples. The proposed methods (with some time and appropriate clinical testing) could prove to be an effective method in detecting various diseases related to respiratory and neurophysiological changes in the human body.

Project Achoo: A Practical Model and Application for COVID-19 Detection From Recordings of Breath, Voice, and Cough

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant interest and demand for infection detection and monitoring solutions. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method to quickly detect COVID-19 using audio recordings made on consumer devices. The approach combines signal processing and noise removal methods with an ensemble of fine-tuned deep learning networks and enables COVID detection on coughs. We have also developed and deployed a mobile application that uses a symptoms checker together with voice, breath, and cough signals to detect COVID-19 infection. The application showed robust performance on both openly sourced datasets and the noisy data collected during beta testing by the end users.

COVID-19 disease diagnosis with light-weight CNN using modified MFCC and enhanced GFCC from human respiratory sounds

In the last 2 years, medical researchers and clinical scientists have paid close attention to the problem of respiratory sound classification to classify COVID-19 disease symptoms. In the physical world, very few AI-based (Artificial Intelligence) techniques are often used to detect COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease symptoms from the human respiratory system-generated acoustic sounds such as acoustic voice sound, breathing (inhale and exhale) sounds, and cough sound. We propose a light-weight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Modified-Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (M-MFCC) using different depths and kernel sizes to classify COVID-19 and other respiratory sound disease symptoms such as Asthma, Pertussis, and Bronchitis. The proposed network outperforms conventional feature extraction models and existing Deep Learning (DL) models for COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 classification accuracy in the range of 4-10%. The model's performance is compared with the COVID-19 crowdsourced benchmark dataset and gives a competitive performance. We applied different receptive fields and depths in the proposed model to get different contextual information that should aid in classification. And our experiments suggested 1 × 12 receptive fields and a depth of 5-Layer for the light-weight CNN to extract and identify the features from respiratory sound data. The model is also trained and tested with different modalities of data to showcase its effectiveness in classification.

Fake or real news about COVID-19? Pretrained transformer model to detect potential misleading news

The World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease 2019 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Along with the coronavirus pandemic, a new crisis has emerged, characterized by widespread fear and panic caused by a lack of information or, in some cases, outright fake messages. In these circumstances, Twitter is one of the most eminent and trusted social media platforms. Fake tweets, on the other hand, are challenging to detect and differentiate. The primary goal of this paper is to educate society about the importance of accurate information and prevent the spread of fake information. This paper has investigated COVID-19 fake data from various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The objective of this paper is to categorize given tweets as either fake or real news. The authors have tested various deep learning models on the COVID-19 fake dataset. Finally, the CT-BERT and RoBERTa deep learning models outperformed other deep learning models like BERT, BERTweet, AlBERT, and DistlBERT. The proposed ensemble deep learning architecture outperformed CT-BERT and RoBERTa on the COVID-19 fake news dataset using the multiplicative fusion technique. The proposed model's performance in this technique was determined by the multiplicative product of the final predictive values of CT-BERT and RoBERTa. This technique overcomes the disadvantage of these CT-BERT and RoBERTa models' incorrect predictive nature. The proposed architecture outperforms both well-known ML and DL models, with 98.88% accuracy and a 98.93% F1-score.

CovNet: A Transfer Learning Framework for Automatic COVID-19 Detection From Crowd-Sourced Cough Sounds

Since the COronaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, developing a digital diagnostic tool to detect COVID-19 from respiratory sounds with computer audition has become an essential topic due to its advantages of being swift, low-cost, and eco-friendly. However, prior studies mainly focused on small-scale COVID-19 datasets. To build a robust model, the large-scale multi-sound FluSense dataset is utilised to help detect COVID-19 from cough sounds in this study. Due to the gap between FluSense and the COVID-19-related datasets consisting of cough only, the transfer learning framework (namely CovNet) is proposed and applied rather than simply augmenting the training data with FluSense. The CovNet contains (i) a parameter transferring strategy and (ii) an embedding incorporation strategy. Specifically, to validate the CovNet's effectiveness, it is used to transfer knowledge from FluSense to COUGHVID, a large-scale cough sound database of COVID-19 negative and COVID-19 positive individuals. The trained model on FluSense and COUGHVID is further applied under the CovNet to another two small-scale cough datasets for COVID-19 detection, the COVID-19 cough sub-challenge (CCS) database in the INTERSPEECH Computational Paralinguistics challengE (ComParE) challenge and the DiCOVA Track-1 database. By training four simple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the transfer learning framework, our approach achieves an absolute improvement of 3.57% over the baseline of DiCOVA Track-1 validation of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) and an absolute improvement of 1.73% over the baseline of ComParE CCS test unweighted average recall (UAR).

A novel explainable COVID-19 diagnosis method by integration of feature selection with random forest

Several Artificial Intelligence-based models have been developed for COVID-19 disease diagnosis. In spite of the promise of artificial intelligence, there are very few models which bridge the gap between traditional human-centered diagnosis and the potential future of machine-centered disease diagnosis. Under the concept of human-computer interaction design, this study proposes a new explainable artificial intelligence method that exploits graph analysis for feature visualization and optimization for the purpose of COVID-19 diagnosis from blood test samples. In this developed model, an explainable decision forest classifier is employed to COVID-19 classification based on routinely available patient blood test data. The approach enables the clinician to use the decision tree and feature visualization to guide the explainability and interpretability of the prediction model. By utilizing this novel feature selection phase, the proposed diagnosis model will not only improve diagnosis accuracy but decrease the execution time as well.

Cough/X-ray/CT (CXC) website for testing COVID-19 and auto-informing results

Despite the development of vaccines and the emergence of various treatments for COVID-19, the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is increasing worldwide, and it is unlikely that the disease will ever disappear completely. Having a non-contact remote testing system can improve the workload of health-care centers and contribute to reducing the infection by recommending early self-isolation for those who suffer from a cough. In the proposed system, patients can upload an audio cough recording via mobile phones through the suggested Cough/X-ray/CT website and then receive the diagnosis within seconds on the same phone. Moreover, in the case of infection, the health center and the community are informed in addition to automatically calling the mobile phones of the injured cases. The higher proposed accuracy with deep cough training was achieved on the ResNet152v2 model after converting the cough signal into an image using the Mel-spectrogram, where the accuracy was 99.95%, the sensitivity was 100%, and the specificity was 99%.

Boosting COVID-19 Image Classification Using MobileNetV3 and Aquila Optimizer Algorithm

Currently, the world is still facing a COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) classified as a highly infectious disease due to its rapid spreading. The shortage of X-ray machines may lead to critical situations and delay the diagnosis results, increasing the number of deaths. Therefore, the exploitation of deep learning (DL) and optimization algorithms can be advantageous in early diagnosis and COVID-19 detection. In this paper, we propose a framework for COVID-19 images classification using hybridization of DL and swarm-based algorithms. The MobileNetV3 is used as a backbone feature extraction to learn and extract relevant image representations as a DL model. As a swarm-based algorithm, the Aquila Optimizer (Aqu) is used as a feature selector to reduce the dimensionality of the image representations and improve the classification accuracy using only the most essential selected features. To validate the proposed framework, two datasets with X-ray and CT COVID-19 images are used. The obtained results from the experiments show a good performance of the proposed framework in terms of classification accuracy and dimensionality reduction during the feature extraction and selection phases. The Aqu feature selection algorithm achieves accuracy better than other methods in terms of performance metrics.