A Decision-Level Fusion Method for COVID-19 Patient Health Prediction

A Novel Multimodal Biometric Person Authentication System Based on ECG and Iris Data

Existing security issues like keys, pins, and passwords employed presently in almost all the fields that have certain limitations like passwords and pins can be easily forgotten; keys can be lost. To overcome such security issues, new biometric features have shown outstanding improvements in authentication systems as a result of significant developments in biological digital signal processing. Currently, the multimodal authentications have gained huge attention in biometric systems which can be either behavioural or physiological. A biometric system with multimodality club data from many biometric modalities increases each biometric system's performance and makes it more resistant to spoof attempts. Apart from electrocardiogram (ECG) and iris, there are a lot of other biometric traits that can be captured from the human body. They include face, fingerprint, gait, keystroke dynamics, voice, DNA, palm vein, and hand geometry recognition. Electrocardiograms (ECG) have recently been employed in unimodal and multimodal biometric recognition systems as a novel biometric technology. When compared to other biometric approaches, ECG has the intrinsic quality of a person's liveness, making it difficult to fake. Similarly, the iris also plays an important role in biometric authentication. Based on these assumptions, we present a multimodal biometric person authentication system. The projected method includes preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, feature fusion, and ensemble classifier where majority voting is presented to obtain the final outcome. The comparative analysis shows the overall performance as 96.55%, 96.2%, 96.2%, 96.5%, and 95.65% in terms of precision, F1-score, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.

Random forest regression for prediction of Covid-19 daily cases and deaths in Turkey

During pandemic periods, there is an intense flow of patients to hospitals. Depending on the disease, many patients may require hospitalization. In some cases, these patients must be taken to intensive care units and emergency interventions must be performed. However, finding a sufficient number of hospital beds or intensive care units during pandemic periods poses a big problem. In these periods, fast and effective planning is more important than ever. Another problem experienced during pandemic periods is the burial of the dead in case the number of deaths increases. This is also a situation that requires due planning. We can learn some lessons from Covid 19 pandemic and be prepared for the future ones. In this paper, statistical properties of the daily cases and daily deaths in Turkey, which is one of the most affected countries by the pandemic in the World, are studied. It is found that the characteristics are nonstationary. Then, random forest regression is applied to predict Covid-19 daily cases and deaths. In addition, seven other machine learning models, namely bagging, AdaBoost, gradient boosting, XGBoost, decision tree, LSTM and ARIMA regressors are built for comparison. The performance of the models are measured using accuracy, coefficient of variation, root-mean-square score and relative error metrics. When random forest regressors are employed, test data related to daily cases are predicted with an accuracy of 92.30% and with an r2 score of 0.9893. Besides, daily deaths are predicted with an accuracy of 91.39% and with an r2 score of 0.9834. The closest rival in predictions is the bagging regressor. Nevertheless, the results provided by this algoritm changed in different runs and this fact is shown in the study, as well. Comparisons are based on test data. Comparisons with the earlier works are also provided.

Snake-Efficient Feature Selection-Based Framework for Precise Early Detection of Chronic Kidney Disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) refers to impairment of the kidneys that may worsen over time. Early detection of CKD is crucial for saving millions of lives. As a result, several studies are currently focused on developing computer-aided systems to detect CKD in its early stages. Manual screening is time-consuming and subject to personal judgment. Therefore, methods based on machine learning (ML) and automatic feature selection are used to support graders. The goal of feature selection is to identify the most relevant and informative subset of features in a given dataset. This approach helps mitigate the curse of dimensionality, reduce dimensionality, and enhance model performance. The use of natural-inspired optimization algorithms has been widely adopted to develop appropriate representations of complex problems by conducting a blackbox optimization process without explicitly formulating mathematical formulations. Recently, snake optimization algorithms have been developed to identify optimal or near-optimal solutions to difficult problems by mimicking the behavior of snakes during hunting. The objective of this paper is to develop a novel snake-optimized framework named CKD-SO for CKD data analysis. To select and classify the most suitable medical data, five machine learning algorithms are deployed, along with the snake optimization (SO) algorithm, to create an extremely accurate prediction of kidney and liver disease. The end result is a model that can detect CKD with 99.7% accuracy. These results contribute to our understanding of the medical data preparation pipeline. Furthermore, implementing this method will enable health systems to achieve effective CKD prevention by providing early interventions that reduce the high burden of CKD-related diseases and mortality.

Artificial intelligence and discrete-event simulation for capacity management of intensive care units during the Covid-19 pandemic: A case study

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) into significant operational disruptions. The rapid evolution of this disease, the bed capacity constraints, the wide variety of patient profiles, and the imbalances within health supply chains still represent a challenge for policymakers. This paper aims to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) to support ICU bed capacity management during Covid-19. The proposed approach was validated in a Spanish hospital chain where we initially identified the predictors of ICU admission in Covid-19 patients. Second, we applied Random Forest (RF) to predict ICU admission likelihood using patient data collected in the Emergency Department (ED). Finally, we included the RF outcomes in a DES model to assist decision-makers in evaluating new ICU bed configurations responding to the patient transfer expected from downstream services. The results evidenced that the median bed waiting time declined between 32.42 and 48.03 min after intervention.

Early prediction of sepsis using double fusion of deep features and handcrafted features

Sepsis is a life-threatening medical condition that is characterized by the dysregulated immune system response to infections, having both high morbidity and mortality rates. Early prediction of sepsis is critical to the decrease of mortality. This paper presents a novel early warning model called Double Fusion Sepsis Predictor (DFSP) for sepsis onset. DFSP is a double fusion framework that combines the benefits of early and late fusion strategies. First, a hybrid deep learning model that combines both the convolutional and recurrent neural networks to extract deep features is proposed. Second, deep features and handcrafted features, such as clinical scores, are concatenated to build the joint feature representation (early fusion). Third, several tree-based models based on joint feature representation are developed to generate the risk scores of sepsis onset that are combined with an End-to-End neural network for final sepsis detection (late fusion). To evaluate DFSP, a retrospective study was conducted, which included patients admitted to the ICUs of a hospital in Shanghai China. The results demonstrate that the DFSP outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in early sepsis prediction.

Explaining COVID-19 diagnosis with Taylor decompositions

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the entire globe since its first appearance at the end of 2019. Although vaccines are now in production, the number of contaminations remains high, thus increasing the number of specialized personnel that can analyze clinical exams and points out the final diagnosis. Computed tomography and X-ray images are the primary sources for computer-aided COVID-19 diagnosis, but we still lack better interpretability of such automated decision-making mechanisms. This manuscript presents an insightful comparison of three approaches based on explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to light up interpretability in the context of COVID-19 diagnosis using deep networks: Composite Layer-wise Propagation, Single Taylor Decomposition, and Deep Taylor Decomposition. Two deep networks have been used as the backbones to assess the explanation skills of the XAI approaches mentioned above: VGG11 and VGG16. We hope that such work can be used as a basis for further research on XAI and COVID-19 diagnosis for each approach figures its own positive and negative points.

Content-based multiple evidence fusion on EEG and eye movements for mild depression recognition

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Depression is a serious neurological disorder that has become a major health problem worldwide. The detection of mild depression is important for the diagnosis of depression in early stages. This research seeks to find a more accurate fusion model which can be used for mild depression detection using Electroencephalography and eye movement data.

METHODS

This study proposes a content-based multiple evidence fusion (CBMEF) method, which fuses EEG and eye movement data at decision level. The method mainly includes two modules, the classification performance matrix module and the dual-weight fusion module. The classification performance matrices of different modalities are estimated by Bayesian rule based on confusion matrix and Mahalanobis distance, and the matrices were used to correct the classification results. Then the relative conflict degree of each modality is calculated, and different weights are assigned to the above modalities at the decision fusion layer according to this conflict degree.

RESULTS

The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other fusion methods as well as the single modality results. The highest accuracies achieved 91.12%, and sensitivity, specificity and precision were 89.20%, 93.03%, 92.76%.

CONCLUSIONS

The promising results showed the potential of the proposed approach for the detection of mild depression. The idea of introducing the classification performance matrix and the dual-weight model to multimodal biosignals fusion casts a new light on the researches of depression recognition.

Recurrent Neural Networks for Feature Extraction from Dengue Fever

Dengue fever modelling in endemic locations is critical to reducing outbreaks and improving vector-borne illness control. Early projections of dengue are a crucial tool for disease control because of the unavailability of treatments and universal vaccination. Neural networks have made significant contributions to public health in a variety of ways. In this paper, we develop a deep learning modelling using random forest (RF) that helps extract the features of the dengue fever from the text datasets. The proposed modelling involves the data collection, preprocessing of the input texts, and feature extraction. The extracted features are studied to test how well the feature extraction using RF is effective on dengue datasets. The simulation result shows that the proposed method achieves higher degree of accuracy that offers an improvement of more than 12% than the existing methods in extracting the features from the input datasets than the other feature extraction methods. Further, the study reduces the errors associated with feature extraction that is 10% lesser than the other existing methods, and this shows the efficacy of the model.