Mortality prediction of COVID-19 patients using soft voting classifier

Designing a sustainable-resilient-responsive supply chain network considering uncertainty in the COVID-19 era

Effective supply chain management is crucial for economic growth, and sustainability is becoming a key consideration for large companies. COVID-19 has presented significant challenges to supply chains, making PCR testing a vital product during the pandemic. It detects the presence of the virus if you are infected at the time and detects fragments of the virus even after you are no longer infected. This paper proposes a multi-objective mathematical linear model to optimize a sustainable, resilient, and responsive supply chain for PCR diagnostic tests. The model aims to minimize costs, negative societal impact caused by shortages, and environmental impact, using a scenario-based approach with stochastic programming. The model is validated by investigating a real-life case study in one of Iran's high-risk supply chain areas. The proposed model is solved using the revised multi-choice goal programming method. Lastly, sensitivity analyses based on effective parameters are conducted to analyze the behavior of the developed Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. According to the results, not only is the model capable of balancing three objective functions, but it is also capable of providing resilient and responsive networks. To enhance the design of the supply chain network, this paper has considered various COVID-19 variants and their infectious rates, in contrast to prior studies that did not consider the variations in demand and societal impact exhibited by different virus variants.

Revisiting Transfer Learning Method for Tuberculosis Diagnosis

Transfer learning (TL) has been proven to be a good strategy for solving domain-specific problems in many deep learning (DL) applications. Typically, in TL, a pre-trained DL model is used as a feature extractor and the extracted features are then fed to a newly trained classifier as the model head. In this study, we propose a new ensemble approach of transfer learning that uses multiple neural network classifiers at once in the model head. We compared the classification results of the proposed ensemble approach with the direct approach of several popular models, namely VGG-16, ResNet-50, and MobileNet, on two publicly available tuberculosis datasets, i.e., Montgomery County (MC) and Shenzhen (SZ) datasets. Moreover, we also compared the results when a fully pre-trained DL model was used for feature extraction versus the cases in which the features were obtained from a middle layer of the pre-trained DL model. Several metrics derived from confusion matrix results were used, namely the accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SNS), specificity (SPC), precision (PRC), and F1-score. We concluded that the proposed ensemble approach outperformed the direct approach. Best result was achieved by ResNet-50 when the features were extracted from a middle layer with an accuracy of 91.2698% on MC dataset.Clinical Relevance- The proposed ensemble approach could increase the detection accuracy of 7-8% for Montgomery County dataset and 4-5% for Shenzhen dataset.

Automatic COVID-19 prediction using explainable machine learning techniques

The coronavirus is considered this century's most disruptive catastrophe and global concern. This disease has prompted extreme social, psychological and economic impacts affecting millions of people around the globe. COVID-19 is transmitted from one infected person's body to another through respiratory droplets. This virus proliferates when people breathe in air-contaminated space with droplets and microscopic airborne particles. This research aims to analyze automatic COVID-19 detection using machine learning techniques to build an intelligent web application. The dataset has been preprocessed by dropping null values, feature engineering, and synthetic oversampling (SMOTE) techniques. Next, we trained and evaluated different classifiers, i.e., logistic regression, random forest, decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine (SVM), ensemble models (adaptive boosting and extreme gradient boosting) and deep learning (artificial neural network, convolutional neural network and long short-term memory) techniques. Explainable AI with the LIME framework has been applied to interpret the prediction results. The hybrid CNN-LSTM algorithm with the SMOTE approach performed better than the other models on the employed open-source dataset obtained from the Israeli Ministry of Health website, with 96.34% accuracy and a 0.98 F1 score. Finally, this model was chosen to deploy the proposed prediction system to a website, where users may acquire an instantaneous COVID-19 prognosis based on their symptoms.