Smart monitoring and controlling of Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) using Social Network Analysis and cloud computing

Investigating the performance of machine learning algorithms in predicting the survival of COVID-19 patients: A cross section study of Iran

Background and Aims

Like early diagnosis, predicting the survival of patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is of great importance. Survival prediction models help doctors be more cautious to treat the patients who are at high risk of dying because of medical conditions. This study aims to predict the survival of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 by comparing the accuracy of machine learning (ML) models.

Methods

It is a cross-sectional study which was performed in 2022 in Fasa city in Iran country. The research data set was extracted from the period February 18, 2020 to February 10, 2021, and contains 2442 hospitalized patients' records with 84 features. A comparison was made between the efficiency of five ML algorithms to predict survival, includes Naive Bayes (NB), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). Modeling steps were done with Python language in the Anaconda Navigator 3 environment.

Results

Our findings show that NB algorithm had better performance than others with accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 97%, 96%, 96%, 96%, and 97%, respectively. Based on the analysis of factors affecting survival, heart disease, pulmonary diseases and blood related disease were the most important disease related to death.

Conclusion

The development of software systems based on NB will be effective to predict the survival of COVID-19 patients.

ICT Enabled Disease Diagnosis, Treatment and Management—A Holistic Cost-Effective Approach Through Data Management and Analysis in UAE and India

This concept paper addresses specific challenges identified in the UN 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as well as the National Health Policy of India (NHP-India) and the Ministry of Health Policy of UAE (MHP-UAE). This policy calls for a digital health technology ecosystem. SDG Goal 1 and its related objectives are conceptualized which serves as the foundation for Virtual Consultations, Tele-pharmacy, Virtual Storage, and Virtual Community (VCom). SDG Goals 2 and 3 are conceptualized as Data Management & Analytical (DMA) Architecture. Individual researchers and health care professionals in India and the UAE can use DMA to uncover and harness PHC and POC data into practical insights. In addition, the DMA would provide a set of core tools for cross-network initiatives, allowing researchers and other users to compare their data with DMA data. In rural, urban, and remote populations of the UAE and India, the concept augments the PHC system with ICT-based interventions. The ICT-based interventions may improve patient health outcomes. The open and flexible design allows users to access various digital materials. Extendable data/metadata format, scalable architecture for petabyte-scale federated discovery. The modular DMA is designed using existing technology and resources. Public health functions include population health assessment, policy development, and monitoring policy implementation. PHC and POC periodically conduct syndromic surveillance to identify population risk patterns. In addition, the PHC and POC deploy medical and non-medical preventive measures to prevent disease outbreaks. To assess the impact of social and economic factors on health, epidemiologists must first understand diseases. Improved health due to compliance with holistic disease treatment plans and access to scientific health information.

STAMINA: Bioinformatics Platform for Monitoring and Mitigating Pandemic Outbreaks

This paper presents the components and integrated outcome of a system that aims to achieve early detection, monitoring and mitigation of pandemic outbreaks. The architecture of the platform aims at providing a number of pandemic-response-related services, on a modular basis, that allows for the easy customization of the platform to address user’s needs per case. This customization is achieved through its ability to deploy only the necessary, loosely coupled services and tools for each case, and by providing a common authentication, data storage and data exchange infrastructure. This way, the platform can provide the necessary services without the burden of additional services that are not of use in the current deployment (e.g., predictive models for pathogens that are not endemic to the deployment area). All the decisions taken for the communication and integration of the tools that compose the platform adhere to this basic principle. The tools presented here as well as their integration is part of the project STAMINA.

Maintaining proper health records improves machine learning predictions for novel 2019-nCoV

Background

An ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia continues to affect the whole world including major countries such as China, USA, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. We present outcome (‘recovered’, ‘isolated’ or ‘death’) risk estimates of 2019-nCoV over ‘early’ datasets. A major consideration is the likelihood of death for patients with 2019-nCoV.

Method

Accounting for the impact of the variations in the reporting rate of 2019-nCoV, we used machine learning techniques (AdaBoost, bagging, extra-trees, decision trees and k-nearest neighbour classifiers) on two 2019-nCoV datasets obtained from Kaggle on March 30, 2020. We used ‘country’, ‘age’ and ‘gender’ as features to predict outcome for both datasets. We included the patient’s ‘disease’ history (only present in the second dataset) to predict the outcome for the second dataset.

Results

The use of a patient’s ‘disease’ history improves the prediction of ‘death’ by more than sevenfold. The models ignoring a patent’s ‘disease’ history performed poorly in test predictions.

Conclusion

Our findings indicate the potential of using a patient’s ‘disease’ history as part of the feature set in machine learning techniques to improve 2019-nCoV predictions. This development can have a positive effect on predictive patient treatment and can result in easing currently overburdened healthcare systems worldwide, especially with the increasing prevalence of second and third wave re-infections in some countries.

Internet of Things (IoT) enabled healthcare helps to take the challenges of COVID-19 Pandemic

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

The Internet of Things (IoT) can create disruptive innovation in healthcare. Thus, during COVID-19 Pandemic, there is a need to study different applications of IoT enabled healthcare. For this, a brief study is required for research directions.

METHODS

Research papers on IoT in healthcare and COVID-19 Pandemic are studied to identify this technology's capabilities. This literature-based study may guide professionals in envisaging solutions to related problems and fighting against the COVID-19 type pandemic.

RESULTS

Briefly studied the significant achievements of IoT with the help of a process chart. Then identifies seven major technologies of IoT that seem helpful for healthcare during COVID-19 Pandemic. Finally, the study identifies sixteen basic IoT applications for the medical field during the COVID-19 Pandemic with a brief description of them.

CONCLUSIONS

In the current scenario, advanced information technologies have opened a new door to innovation in our daily lives. Out of these information technologies, the Internet of Things is an emerging technology that provides enhancement and better solutions in the medical field, like proper medical record-keeping, sampling, integration of devices, and causes of diseases. IoT's sensor-based technology provides an excellent capability to reduce the risk of surgery during complicated cases and helpful for COVID-19 type pandemic. In the medical field, IoT's focus is to help perform the treatment of different COVID-19 cases precisely. It makes the surgeon job easier by minimising risks and increasing the overall performance. By using this technology, doctors can easily detect changes in critical parameters of the COVID-19 patient. This information-based service opens up new healthcare opportunities as it moves towards the best way of an information system to adapt world-class results as it enables improvement of treatment systems in the hospital. Medical students can now be better trained for disease detection and well guided for the future course of action. IoT's proper usage can help correctly resolve different medical challenges like speed, price, and complexity. It can easily be customised to monitor calorific intake and treatment like asthma, diabetes, and arthritis of the COVID-19 patient. This digitally controlled health management system can improve the overall performance of healthcare during COVID-19 pandemic days.

Information technology in emergency management of COVID-19 outbreak

Emergency management of the emerging infectious disease outbreak is critical for public health threats. Currently, control of the COVID-19 outbreak is an international concern and has become a crucial challenge in many countries. This article reviews significant information technologyIT) applications in emergency management of COVID-19 by considering the prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery phases of the crisis. This review was conducted using MEDLINE PubMed), Embase, IEEE, and Google Scholar. Expert opinions were collected to show existence gaps, useful technologies for each phase of emergency management, and future direction. Results indicated that various IT-based systems such as surveillance systems, artificial intelligence, computational methods, Internet of things, remote sensing sensor, online service, and GIS geographic information system) could have different outbreak management applications, especially in response phases. Information technology was applied in several aspects, such as increasing the accuracy of diagnosis, early detection, ensuring healthcare providers' safety, decreasing workload, saving time and cost, and drug discovery. We categorized these applications into four core topics, including diagnosis and prediction, treatment, protection, and management goals, which were confirmed by five experts. Without applying IT, the control and management of the crisis could be difficult on a large scale. For reducing and improving the hazard effect of disaster situations, the role of IT is inevitable. In addition to the response phase, communities should be considered to use IT capabilities in prevention, preparedness, and recovery phases. It is expected that IT will have an influential role in the recovery phase of COVID-19. Providing IT infrastructure and financial support by the governments should be more considered in facilitating IT capabilities.

Mitigation strategies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic—present, future and beyond

Purpose

The latest novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to have a significant social and financial impact globally. It is very essential to study, categorize and systematize published research on mitigation strategies adopted during previous pandemic scenario that could provide an insight into improving the current crisis. The goal of this paper is to systematize and identify gaps in previous research and suggest potential recommendations as a conceptual framework from a strategic point of view.

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic review of Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) core collection databases was performed based on strict keyword search selections followed by a bibliometric meta-analysis of the final dataset.

Findings

This study indicated that the traditional mitigation techniques adopted during past pandemics are in place but are not capable of managing the transmission capability and virulence of COVID-19. There is a greater need for rethinking and re-engineering short and long-term approaches to prevent, control and contain the current pandemic situation.

Practical implications

Integrating various mitigation approaches shall assist in flattening the pandemic curve and help in the long run.

Originality/value

Articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters and other references from two extensive databases (Scopus and WoS) were purposively considered for this study. The search was confined to the selected keywords outlined in the methodology section of this paper.

Automatic Semantic Description Extraction from Social Big Data for Emergency Management

Emergency events are unexpected and dangerous situations which the authorities must manage and respond to as quickly as possible. The main objectives of emergency management are to provide human safety and security, and Social Big Data (SBD) offers an important information source, created directly from eyewitness reports, to assist with these issues. However, the manual extraction of hidden meaning from SBD is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, which are major drawbacks for a process that needs accurate information to be produced in real-time. The solution is an automatic approach to knowledge discovery, and we propose a semantic description technique based on the use of triple store indexing for named entity recognition and relation extraction. Our technique can discover hidden SBD information more effectively than traditional approaches, and can be used for intelligent emergency management.

A re-organizing biosurveillance framework based on fog and mobile edge computing

Biological threats are becoming a serious security issue for many countries across the world. Effective biosurveillance systems can primarily support appropriate responses to biological threats and consequently save human lives. Nevertheless, biosurveillance systems are costly to implement and hard to operate. Furthermore, they rely on static infrastructures that might not cope with the evolving dynamics of the monitored environment. In this paper, we present a reorganizing biosurveillance framework for the detection and localization of biological threats with fog and mobile edge computing support. In the proposed framework, a hierarchy of fog nodes are responsible for aggregating monitoring data within their regions and detecting potential threats. Although fog nodes are deployed on a fixed base station infrastructure, the framework provides an innovative technique for reorganizing the monitored environment structure to adapt to the evolving environmental conditions and to overcome the limitations of the static base station infrastructure. Evaluation results illustrate the ability of the framework to localize biological threats and detect infected areas. Moreover, the results show the effectiveness of the reorganization mechanisms in adjusting the environment structure to cope with the highly dynamic environment.

Syndromic surveillance using web data: a systematic review

During the recent years, a lot of debate is taken place about the evolution of Smart Healthcare systems. Particularly, how these systems can help people improve human conditions of health, by taking advantages of the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), regarding early prediction and efficient treatment. The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the current literature available that focuses on information systems on syndromic surveillance using web data. All published items concern articles, books, reviews, reports, conference announcements, and dissertations. We used a variation of PRISMA Statements methodology to conduct a systematic review. The review identifies the relevant published papers from the year 2004 to 2018, systematically includes and explores them to extract similarities, gaps, and conclusions on the research that has been done so far. The results presented concern the year, the examined disease, the web data source, the geographic location/country, and the data analysis method used. The results show that influenza is the most examined infectious disease. The internet tools most used are Twitter and Google. Regarding the geographical areas explored in the published papers, the most examined country is the United States, since many scientists come from this country. There is a significant growth of articles since 2009. There are also various statistical methods used to correlate the data retrieved from the internet to the data from national authorities. The conclusion of all researches is that the Web can be a useful tool for the detection of serious epidemics and for a creation of a syndromic surveillance system using the Web, since we can predict epidemics from web data before they are officially detected in population. With the advance of ICT, Smart Healthcare can benefit from the monitoring of epidemics and the early prediction of such a system, improving national or international health strategies and policy decision. This can be achieved through the provision of new technology tools to enhance health monitoring systems toward the new innovations of Smart Health or eHealth, even with the emerging technologies of Internet of Things. The challenges and impacts of an electronic system based on internet data include the social, medical, and technological disciplines. These can be further extended to Smart Healthcare, as the data streaming can provide with real-time information, awareness on epidemics and alerts for both patients or medical scientists. Finally, these new systems can help improve the standards of human life.

A study on medical Internet of Things and Big Data in personalized healthcare system

Personalized healthcare systems deliver e-health services to fulfill the medical and assistive needs of the aging population. Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant advancement in the Big Data era, which supports many real-time engineering applications through enhanced services. Analytics over data streams from IoT has become a source of user data for the healthcare systems to discover new information, predict early detection, and makes decision over the critical situation for the improvement of the quality of life. In this paper, we have made a detailed study on the recent emerging technologies in the personalized healthcare systems with the focus towards cloud computing, fog computing, Big Data analytics, IoT and mobile based applications. We have analyzed the challenges in designing a better healthcare system to make early detection and diagnosis of diseases and discussed the possible solutions while providing e-health services in secure manner. This paper poses a light on the rapidly growing needs of the better healthcare systems in real-time and provides possible future work guidelines.

Kyasanur Forest Disease Classification Framework Using Novel Extremal Optimization Tuned Neural Network in Fog Computing Environment

Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) is a life-threatening tick-borne viral infectious disease endemic to South Asia and has been taking so many lives every year in the past decade. But recently, this disease has been witnessed in other regions to a large extent and can become an epidemic very soon. In this paper, a new fog computing based e-Healthcare framework has been proposed to monitor the KFD infected patients in an early phase of infection and control the disease outbreak. For ensuring high prediction rate, a novel Extremal Optimization tuned Neural Network (EO-NN) classification algorithm has been developed using hybridization of the extremal optimization with the feed-forward neural network. Additionally, a location based alert system has also been suggested to provide the global positioning system (GPS)-based location information of each KFD infected user and the risk-prone zones as early as possible to prevent the outbreak. Furthermore, a comparative study of proposed EO-NN with state of art classification algorithms has been carried out and it can be concluded that EO-NN outperforms others with an average accuracy of 91.56%, a sensitivity of 91.53% and a specificity of 97.13% respectively in classification and accurate identification of risk-prone areas.

Fog computing and IoT based healthcare support service for dengue fever

Purpose

This paper has proposed a Fog architecture-based framework, which classifies dengue patients into uninfected, infected and severely infected using a data set built in 2010. The aim of this proposed framework is to developed a latency-aware system for classifying users into different categories based on their respective symptoms using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and audio and video files.

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve the aforesaid aim, a smart framework is proposed, which consist of three components, namely, IoT layer, Fog infrastructure and cloud computing. The latency of the system is reduced by using network devices located in the Fog infrastructure. Data generated by IoT layer will first be processed by Fog layer devices which are in closer proximity of the user. Raw data and data generated will later be stored on cloud infrastructure, from where it will be sent to different entities such as user, hospital, doctor and government healthcare agencies.

Findings

Experimental evaluation proved the hypothesis that using the Fog infrastructure can achieve better response time for latency sensitive applications with the least effect on accuracy of the system.

Originality/value

The proposed Fog-based architecture can be used with IoT to directly link it with the Fog layer.

Emphasis on Cloud Optimization and Security Gaps: A Literature Review

Cloud computing is emerging as a significant new paradigm in the fields of Service-oriented computing, software engineering, etc. The paper aims to characterize the cloud environment and to study the cloud optimization problems. About 50 papers are collected from the standard journals, and it is first reviewed chronologically to find out the contributions in cloud security. After reviewing, the various challenges addressed in the cloud environment and its performance analysis is discussed. In the next section, the exploration of the meta-heuristic study of cloud optimization is done. The algorithms used in the cloud security challenges are discussed and reviewed. The algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) are exploited for the finding the cloud security problems. As the research outcome, case studies are taken and reviewed. Cloud computing is a vast field, and a lot of problems in it had to be addressed and solved.