Medical imaging and computational image analysis in COVID-19 diagnosis: A review

Data pyramid structure for optimizing EUS-based GISTs diagnosis in multi-center analysis with missing label

This study introduces the Data Pyramid Structure (DPS) to address data sparsity and missing labels in medical image analysis. The DPS optimizes multi-task learning and enables sustainable expansion of multi-center data analysis. Specifically, It facilitates attribute prediction and malignant tumor diagnosis tasks by implementing a segmentation and aggregation strategy on data with absent attribute labels. To leverage multi-center data, we propose the Unified Ensemble Learning Framework (UELF) and the Unified Federated Learning Framework (UFLF), which incorporate strategies for data transfer and incremental learning in scenarios with missing labels. The proposed method was evaluated on a challenging EUS patient dataset from five centers, achieving promising diagnostic performance. The average accuracy was 0.984 with an AUC of 0.927 for multi-center analysis, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches. The interpretability of the predictions further highlights the potential clinical relevance of our method.

Advanced slime mould algorithm incorporating differential evolution and Powell mechanism for engineering design

The slime mould algorithm (SMA) is a population-based swarm intelligence optimization algorithm that simulates the oscillatory foraging behavior of slime moulds. To overcome its drawbacks of slow convergence speed and premature convergence, this paper proposes an improved algorithm named PSMADE, which integrates the differential evolution algorithm (DE) and the Powell mechanism. PSMADE utilizes crossover and mutation operations of DE to enhance individual diversity and improve global search capability. Additionally, it incorporates the Powell mechanism with a taboo table to strengthen local search and facilitate convergence toward better solutions. The performance of PSMADE is evaluated by comparing it with 14 metaheuristic algorithms (MA) and 15 improved MAs on the CEC 2014 benchmarks, as well as solving four constrained real-world engineering problems. Experimental results demonstrate that PSMADE effectively compensates for the limitations of SMA and exhibits outstanding performance in solving various complex problems, showing potential as an effective problem-solving tool.

An enhanced decision-making framework for predicting future trends of sharing economy

This work aims to provide a reliable and intelligent prediction model for future trends in sharing economy. Moreover, it presents valuable insights for decision-making and policy development by relevant governmental bodies. Furthermore, the study introduces a predictive system that incorporates an enhanced Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO) algorithm and a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) forecasting framework. The method utilizes an improved simulated annealing mechanism and a Gaussian bare bone structure to improve the original HHO, termed SGHHO. To achieve optimal prediction performance and identify essential features, a refined simulated annealing mechanism is employed to mitigate the susceptibility of the original HHO algorithm to local optima. The algorithm employs a mechanism that boosts its global search ability by generating fresh solution sets at a specific likelihood. This mechanism dynamically adjusts the equilibrium between the exploration and exploitation phases, incorporating the Gaussian bare bone strategy. The best classification model (SGHHO-KNN) is developed to mine the key features with the improvement of both strategies. To assess the exceptional efficacy of the SGHHO algorithm, this investigation conducted a series of comparative trials employing the function set of IEEE CEC 2014. The outcomes of these experiments unequivocally demonstrate that the SGHHO algorithm outperforms the original HHO algorithm on 96.7% of the functions, substantiating its remarkable superiority. The algorithm can achieve the optimal value of the function on 67% of the tested functions and significantly outperforms other competing algorithms. In addition, the key features selected by the SGHHO-KNN model in the prediction experiment, including " Form of sharing economy in your region " and " Attitudes to the sharing economy ", are important for predicting the future trends of the sharing economy in this study. The results of the prediction demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy rate of 99.70% and a specificity rate of 99.38%. Consequently, the SGHHO-KNN model holds great potential as a reliable tool for forecasting the forthcoming trajectory of the sharing economy.

Synergizing the enhanced RIME with fuzzy K-nearest neighbor for diagnose of pulmonary hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is an uncommon yet severe condition characterized by sustained elevation of blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries. The delaying treatment can result in disease progression, right ventricular failure, increased risk of complications, and even death. Early recognition and timely treatment are crucial in halting PH progression, improving cardiac function, and reducing complications. Within this study, we present a highly promising hybrid model, known as bERIME_FKNN, which constitutes a feature selection approach integrating the enhanced rime algorithm (ERIME) and fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (FKNN) technique. The ERIME introduces the triangular game search strategy, which augments the algorithm's capacity for global exploration by judiciously electing distinct search agents across the exploratory domain. This approach fosters both competitive rivalry and collaborative synergy among these agents. Moreover, an random follower search strategy is incorporated to bestow a novel trajectory upon the principal search agent, thereby enriching the spectrum of search directions. Initially, ERIME is meticulously compared to 11 state-of-the-art algorithms using the IEEE CEC2017 benchmark functions across diverse dimensionalities such as 10, 30, 50, and 100, ultimately validating its exceptional optimization capability within the model. Subsequently, employing the color moment and grayscale co-occurrence matrix methodologies, a total of 118 features are extracted from 63 PH patients' and 60 healthy individuals' images, alongside an analysis of 14,514 recordings obtained from these patients utilizing the developed bERIME_FKNN model. The outcomes manifest that the bERIME_FKNN model exhibits a conspicuous prowess in the realm of PH classification, attaining an accuracy and specificity exceeding 99%. This implies that the model serves as a valuable computer-aided tool, delivering an advanced warning system for diagnosis and prognosis evaluation of PH.

An optimized machine learning model for predicting hospitalization for COVID-19 infection in the maintenance dialysis population

COVID-19 has a high rate of infection in dialysis patients and poses a serious risk to human health. Currently, there are no dialysis centers in China that have analyzed the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in dialysis patients and the mortality rate. Although machine learning-based disease prediction methods have proven to be effective, redundant attributes in the data and the interpretability of the predictive models are still worth investigating. Therefore, this paper proposed a wrapper feature selection classification model to achieve the prediction of the risk of COVID-19 infection in dialysis patients. The method was used to optimize the feature set of the sample through an enhanced JAYA optimization algorithm based on the dispersed foraging strategy and the greedy levy mutation strategy. Then, the proposed method combines fuzzy K-nearest neighbor for classification prediction. IEEE CEC2014 benchmark function experiments as well as prediction experiments on the uremia dataset are used to validate the proposed model. The experimental results showed that the proposed method has a high prediction accuracy of 95.61% for the prevalence risk of COVID-19 infection in dialysis patients. Furthermore, it was shown that proalbumin, CRP, direct bilirubin, hemoglobin, albumin, and phosphorus are of great value for clinical diagnosis. Therefore, the proposed method can be considered as a promising method.

Anti-sine-cosine atom search optimization (ASCASO): a novel approach for parameter estimation of PV models

Nowadays, solar power generation has gradually become a part of electric energy sharing. How to effectively enhance the energy conversion efficiency of solar cells and components has gradually emerged as a focal point of research. This paper presents a boosted atomic search optimization (ASO) with a new anti-sine-cosine mechanism (ASCASO) to realize the parameter estimation of photovoltaic (PV) models. The anti-sine-cosine mechanism is inspired by the update principle of sine cosine algorithm (SCA) and the mutation strategy of linear population size reduction adaptive differential evolution (LSHADE). The working principle of anti-sine-cosine mechanism is to utilize two mutation formulas containing arcsine and arccosine functions to further update the position of atoms. The introduction of anti-sine-cosine mechanism achieves the populations' random handover and promotes the neighbors' information communication. For better evaluation, the proposed ASCASO is devoted to estimate parameters of three PV models of R.T.C France, one Photowat-PWP201 PV module model, and two commercial polycrystalline PV panels including STM6-40/36 and STM6-120/36 with monocrystalline cells. The proposed ASCASO is compared with nine reported comparative algorithms to assess the performance. The results of parameter estimation for different PV models of various methods demonstrate that ASCASO performs more accurately and reliably than other reported comparative methods. Thus, ASCASO can be considered a highly effective approach for accurately estimating the parameters of PV models.

Improved Colony Predation Algorithm Optimized Convolutional Neural Networks for Electrocardiogram Signal Classification

Recently, swarm intelligence algorithms have received much attention because of their flexibility for solving complex problems in the real world. Recently, a new algorithm called the colony predation algorithm (CPA) has been proposed, taking inspiration from the predatory habits of groups in nature. However, CPA suffers from poor exploratory ability and cannot always escape solutions known as local optima. Therefore, to improve the global search capability of CPA, an improved variant (OLCPA) incorporating an orthogonal learning strategy is proposed in this paper. Then, considering the fact that the swarm intelligence algorithm can go beyond the local optimum and find the global optimum solution, a novel OLCPA-CNN model is proposed, which uses the OLCPA algorithm to tune the parameters of the convolutional neural network. To verify the performance of OLCPA, comparison experiments are designed to compare with other traditional metaheuristics and advanced algorithms on IEEE CEC 2017 benchmark functions. The experimental results show that OLCPA ranks first in performance compared to the other algorithms. Additionally, the OLCPA-CNN model achieves high accuracy rates of 97.7% and 97.8% in classifying the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia and European ST-T datasets.

Collaborative training of medical artificial intelligence models with non-uniform labels

Due to the rapid advancements in recent years, medical image analysis is largely dominated by deep learning (DL). However, building powerful and robust DL models requires training with large multi-party datasets. While multiple stakeholders have provided publicly available datasets, the ways in which these data are labeled vary widely. For Instance, an institution might provide a dataset of chest radiographs containing labels denoting the presence of pneumonia, while another institution might have a focus on determining the presence of metastases in the lung. Training a single AI model utilizing all these data is not feasible with conventional federated learning (FL). This prompts us to propose an extension to the widespread FL process, namely flexible federated learning (FFL) for collaborative training on such data. Using 695,000 chest radiographs from five institutions from across the globe-each with differing labels-we demonstrate that having heterogeneously labeled datasets, FFL-based training leads to significant performance increase compared to conventional FL training, where only the uniformly annotated images are utilized. We believe that our proposed algorithm could accelerate the process of bringing collaborative training methods from research and simulation phase to the real-world applications in healthcare.

COVID-19 therapy optimization by AI-driven biomechanical simulations

The COVID-19 disease causes pneumonia in many patients that in the most serious cases evolves into the Acute Distress Respiratory Syndrome (ARDS), requiring assisted ventilation and intensive care. In this context, identification of patients at high risk of developing ARDS is a key point for early clinical management, better clinical outcome and optimization in using the limited resources available in the intensive care units. We propose an AI-based prognostic system that makes predictions of oxygen exchange with arterial blood by using as input lung Computed Tomography (CT), the air flux in lungs obtained from biomechanical simulations and Arterial Blood Gas (ABG) analysis. We developed and investigated the feasibility of this system on a small clinical database of proven COVID-19 cases where the initial CT and various ABG reports were available for each patient. We studied the time evolution of the ABG parameters and found correlation with the morphological information extracted from CT scans and disease outcome. Promising results of a preliminary version of the prognostic algorithm are presented. The ability to predict the evolution of patients' respiratory efficiency would be of crucial importance for disease management.

Novel neural network architecture using sharpened cosine similarity for robust classification of Covid-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis diseases from X-rays

COVID-19 is a rapidly proliferating transmissible virus that substantially impacts the world population. Consequently, there is an increasing demand for fast testing, diagnosis, and treatment. However, there is a growing need for quick testing, diagnosis, and treatment. In order to treat infected individuals, stop the spread of the disease, and cure severe pneumonia, early covid-19 detection is crucial. Along with covid-19, various pneumonia etiologies, including tuberculosis, provide additional difficulties for the medical system. In this study, covid-19, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other specific diseases are categorized using Sharpened Cosine Similarity Network (SCS-Net) rather than dot products in neural networks. In order to benchmark the SCS-Net, the model’s performance is evaluated on binary class (covid-19 and normal), and four-class (tuberculosis, covid-19, pneumonia, and normal) based X-ray images. The proposed SCS-Net for distinguishing various lung disorders has been successfully validated. In multiclass classification, the proposed SCS-Net succeeded with an accuracy of 94.05% and a Cohen’s kappa score of 90.70% ; in binary class, it achieved an accuracy of 96.67% and its Cohen’s kappa score of 93.70%. According to our investigation, SCS in deep neural networks significantly lowers the test error with lower divergence. SCS significantly increases classification accuracy in neural networks and speeds up training.

Application of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for COVID-19 Screening Using Radiological Imaging: A Comprehensive Review

Lung, being one of the most important organs in human body, is often affected by various SARS diseases, among which COVID-19 has been found to be the most fatal disease in recent times. In fact, SARS-COVID 19 led to pandemic that spreads fast among the community causing respiratory problems. Under such situation, radiological imaging-based screening [mostly chest X-ray and computer tomography (CT) modalities] has been performed for rapid screening of the disease as it is a non-invasive approach. Due to scarcity of physician/chest specialist/expert doctors, technology-enabled disease screening techniques have been developed by several researchers with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). It can be remarkably observed that the researchers have introduced several AI/ML/DL (deep learning) algorithms for computer-assisted detection of COVID-19 using chest X-ray and CT images. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been conducted to summarize the works related to applications of AI/ML/DL for diagnostic prediction of COVID-19, mainly using X-ray and CT images. Following the PRISMA guidelines, total 265 articles have been selected out of 1715 published articles till the third quarter of 2021. Furthermore, this review summarizes and compares varieties of ML/DL techniques, various datasets, and their results using X-ray and CT imaging. A detailed discussion has been made on the novelty of the published works, along with advantages and limitations.

Ultrafast PCR Detection of COVID-19 by Using a Microfluidic Chip-Based System

With the evolution of the pandemic caused by the Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19), reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reactions (RT-PCR) have invariably been a golden standard in clinical diagnosis. Nevertheless, the traditional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is not feasible for field application due to its drawbacks, such as time-consuming and laboratory-based dependence. To overcome these challenges, a microchip-based ultrafast PCR system called SWM-02 was proposed to make PCR assay in a rapid, portable, and low-cost strategy. This novel platform can perform 6-sample detection per run using multiple fluorescent channels and complete an ultrafast COVID-19 RT-PCR test within 40 min. Here, we evaluated the performance of the microdevice using the gradient-diluted COVID-19 reference samples and commercial PCR kit and determined its limit-of-detection (LoD) as 500 copies/mL, whose variation coefficients for the nucleocapsid (N) gene and open reading frame 1 ab region (ORF1ab) gene are 1.427% and 0.7872%, respectively. The system also revealed an excellent linear correlation between cycle threshold (Ct) values and dilution factors (R2 > 0.99). Additionally, we successfully detected the target RNAs and internal gene in the clinical samples by fast PCR, which shows strong consistency with conventional PCR protocol. Hence, with compact dimension, user-friendly design, and fast processing time, SWM-02 has the capability of offering timely and sensitive on-site molecular diagnosis for prevention and control of pathogen transmission.

Novel Crow Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Selection Approach for Optimal Deep Learning COVID-19 Diagnostic Model

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, computerized COVID-19 diagnosis studies are proliferating. The diversity of COVID-19 models raises the questions of which COVID-19 diagnostic model should be selected and which decision-makers of healthcare organizations should consider performance criteria. Because of this, a selection scheme is necessary to address all the above issues. This study proposes an integrated method for selecting the optimal deep learning model based on a novel crow swarm optimization algorithm for COVID-19 diagnosis. The crow swarm optimization is employed to find an optimal set of coefficients using a designed fitness function for evaluating the performance of the deep learning models. The crow swarm optimization is modified to obtain a good selected coefficient distribution by considering the best average fitness. We have utilized two datasets: the first dataset includes 746 computed tomography images, 349 of them are of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the other 397 are of healthy individuals, and the second dataset are composed of unimproved computed tomography images of the lung for 632 positive cases of COVID-19 with 15 trained and pretrained deep learning models with nine evaluation metrics are used to evaluate the developed methodology. Among the pretrained CNN and deep models using the first dataset, ResNet50 has an accuracy of 91.46% and a F1-score of 90.49%. For the first dataset, the ResNet50 algorithm is the optimal deep learning model selected as the ideal identification approach for COVID-19 with the closeness overall fitness value of 5715.988 for COVID-19 computed tomography lung images case considered differential advancement. In contrast, the VGG16 algorithm is the optimal deep learning model is selected as the ideal identification approach for COVID-19 with the closeness overall fitness value of 5758.791 for the second dataset. Overall, InceptionV3 had the lowest performance for both datasets. The proposed evaluation methodology is a helpful tool to assist healthcare managers in selecting and evaluating the optimal COVID-19 diagnosis models based on deep learning.

Let AI Perform Better Next Time—A Systematic Review of Medical Imaging-Based Automated Diagnosis of COVID-19: 2020–2022

The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused millions of infections, which has led to a great loss all over the world, socially and economically. Due to the false-negative rate and the time-consuming characteristic of the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests, diagnosing based on X-ray images and Computed Tomography (CT) images has been widely adopted to confirm positive COVID-19 RT-PCR tests. Since the very beginning of the pandemic, researchers in the artificial intelligence area have proposed a large number of automatic diagnosing models, hoping to assist radiologists and improve the diagnosing accuracy. However, after two years of development, there are still few models that can actually be applied in real-world scenarios. Numerous problems have emerged in the research of the automated diagnosis of COVID-19. In this paper, we present a systematic review of these diagnosing models. A total of 179 proposed models are involved. First, we compare the medical image modalities (CT or X-ray) for COVID-19 diagnosis from both the clinical perspective and the artificial intelligence perspective. Then, we classify existing methods into two types—image-level diagnosis (i.e., classification-based methods) and pixel-level diagnosis (i.e., segmentation-based models). For both types of methods, we define universal model pipelines and analyze the techniques that have been applied in each step of the pipeline in detail. In addition, we also review some commonly adopted public COVID-19 datasets. More importantly, we present an in-depth discussion of the existing automated diagnosis models and note a total of three significant problems: biased model performance evaluation; inappropriate implementation details; and a low reproducibility, reliability and explainability. For each point, we give corresponding recommendations on how we can avoid making the same mistakes and let AI perform better in the next pandemic.