A Novel Hybrid Approach Based on Deep CNN to Detect Glaucoma Using Fundus Imaging

Fly-LeNet: A deep learning-based framework for converting multilingual braille images

For many years, braille-assistive technologies have aided blind individuals in reading, writing, learning, and communicating with sighted individuals. These technologies have been instrumental in promoting inclusivity and breaking down communication barriers in the lives of blind people. One of these technologies is the Optical Braille Recognition (OBR) system, which facilitates communication between sighted and blind individuals. However, current OBR systems have a gap in their ability to convert braille documents into multilingual texts, making it challenging for sighted individuals to learn braille for self-learning-based uses. To address this gap, we recommend a segmentation and deep learning-based approach named Fly-LeNet that converts braille images into multilingual texts. The approach includes image acquisition, preprocessing, and segmentation using the Mayfly optimization approach with a thresholding method and a braille multilingual mapping step. It uses a deep learning model, LeNet-5, that recognizes braille cells. We evaluated the performance of the Fly-LeNet through several experiments on two datasets of braille images. Dataset-1 consists of 1404 labeled samples of 27 braille signs demonstrating the alphabet letters, while Dataset-2 comprises 5420 labeled samples of 37 braille symbols representing alphabets, numbers, and punctuations, among which we used 2000 samples for cross-validation. The suggested model achieved a high classification accuracy of 99.77% and 99.80% on the test sets of the first and second datasets, respectively. The results demonstrate the potential of Fly-LeNet for multilingual braille transformation, enabling effective communication with sighted individuals.

Automated Glaucoma Screening and Diagnosis Based on Retinal Fundus Images Using Deep Learning Approaches: A Comprehensive Review

Glaucoma is a chronic eye disease that may lead to permanent vision loss if it is not diagnosed and treated at an early stage. The disease originates from an irregular behavior in the drainage flow of the eye that eventually leads to an increase in intraocular pressure, which in the severe stage of the disease deteriorates the optic nerve head and leads to vision loss. Medical follow-ups to observe the retinal area are needed periodically by ophthalmologists, who require an extensive degree of skill and experience to interpret the results appropriately. To improve on this issue, algorithms based on deep learning techniques have been designed to screen and diagnose glaucoma based on retinal fundus image input and to analyze images of the optic nerve and retinal structures. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to provide a systematic analysis of 52 state-of-the-art relevant studies on the screening and diagnosis of glaucoma, which include a particular dataset used in the development of the algorithms, performance metrics, and modalities employed in each article. Furthermore, this review analyzes and evaluates the used methods and compares their strengths and weaknesses in an organized manner. It also explored a wide range of diagnostic procedures, such as image pre-processing, localization, classification, and segmentation. In conclusion, automated glaucoma diagnosis has shown considerable promise when deep learning algorithms are applied. Such algorithms could increase the accuracy and efficiency of glaucoma diagnosis in a better and faster manner.

A Robust Brain Tumor Detector Using BiLSTM and Mayfly Optimization and Multi-Level Thresholding

A brain tumor refers to an abnormal growth of cells in the brain that can be either benign or malignant. Oncologists typically use various methods such as blood or visual tests to detect brain tumors, but these approaches can be time-consuming, require additional human effort, and may not be effective in detecting small tumors. This work proposes an effective approach to brain tumor detection that combines segmentation and feature fusion. Segmentation is performed using the mayfly optimization algorithm with multilevel Kapur's threshold technique to locate brain tumors in MRI scans. Key features are achieved from tumors employing Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and ResNet-V2, and a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is used to classify tumors into three categories: pituitary, glioma, and meningioma. The suggested methodology is trained and tested on two datasets, Figshare and Harvard, achieving high accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the curve (AUC). The results of a comparative analysis with existing DL and ML methods demonstrate that the proposed approach offers superior outcomes. This approach has the potential to improve brain tumor detection, particularly for small tumors, but further validation and testing are needed before clinical use.

SCDet: A Robust Approach for the Detection of Skin Lesions

Red, blue, white, pink, or black spots with irregular borders and small lesions on the skin are known as skin cancer that is categorized into two types: benign and malignant. Skin cancer can lead to death in advanced stages, however, early detection can increase the chances of survival of skin cancer patients. There exist several approaches developed by researchers to identify skin cancer at an early stage, however, they may fail to detect the tiniest tumours. Therefore, we propose a robust method for the diagnosis of skin cancer, namely SCDet, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) having 32 layers for the detection of skin lesions. The images, having a size of 227 × 227, are fed to the image input layer, and then pair of convolution layers is utilized to withdraw the hidden patterns of the skin lesions for training. After that, batch normalization and ReLU layers are used. The performance of our proposed SCDet is computed using the evaluation matrices: precision 99.2%; recall 100%; sensitivity 100%; specificity 99.20%; and accuracy 99.6%. Moreover, the proposed technique is compared with the pre-trained models, i.e., VGG16, AlexNet, and SqueezeNet and it is observed that SCDet provides higher accuracy than these pre-trained models and identifies the tiniest skin tumours with maximum precision. Furthermore, our proposed model is faster than the pre-trained model as the depth of its architecture is not too high as compared to pre-trained models such as ResNet50. Additionally, our proposed model consumes fewer resources during training; therefore, it is better in terms of computational cost than the pre-trained models for the detection of skin lesions.

A framework for brain tumor detection based on segmentation and features fusion using MRI images

Irregular growth of cells in the skull is recognized as a brain tumor that can have two types such as benign and malignant. There exist various methods which are used by oncologists to assess the existence of brain tumors such as blood tests or visual assessments. Moreover, the noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique without ionizing radiation has been commonly utilized for diagnosis. However, the segmentation in 3-dimensional MRI is time-consuming and the outcomes mainly depend on the operator's experience. Therefore, a novel and robust automated brain tumor detector has been suggested based on segmentation and fusion of features. To improve the localization results, we pre-processed the images using Gaussian Filter (GF), and SynthStrip: a tool for brain skull stripping. We utilized two known benchmarks for training and testing i.e., Figshare and Harvard. The proposed methodology attained 99.8% accuracy, 99.3% recall, 99.4% precision, 99.5% F1 score, and 0.989 AUC. We performed the comparative analysis of our approach with prevailing DL, classical, and segmentation-based approaches. Additionally, we also performed the cross-validation using Harvard dataset attaining 99.3% identification accuracy. The outcomes exhibit that our approach offers significant outcomes than existing methods and outperforms them.

An Explainable Fully Dense Fusion Neural Network with Deep Support Vector Machine for Retinal Disease Determination

Retinal issues are crucial because they result in visual loss. Early diagnosis can aid physicians in initiating treatment and preventing visual loss. Optical coherence tomography (OCT), which portrays retinal morphology cross-sectionally and noninvasively, is used to identify retinal abnormalities. The process of analyzing OCT images, on the other hand, takes time. This study has proposed a hybrid approach based on a fully dense fusion neural network (FD-CNN) and dual preprocessing to identify retinal diseases, such as choroidal neovascularization, diabetic macular edema, drusen from OCT images. A dual preprocessing methodology, in other words, a hybrid speckle reduction filter was initially used to diminish speckle noise present in OCT images. Secondly, the FD-CNN architecture was trained, and the features obtained from this architecture were extracted. Then Deep Support Vector Machine (D-SVM) and Deep K-Nearest Neighbor (D-KNN) classifiers were proposed to reclassify those features and tested on University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Duke OCT datasets. D-SVM demonstrated the best performance in both datasets. D-SVM achieved 99.60% accuracy, 99.60% sensitivity, 99.87% specificity, 99.60% precision and 99.60% F1 score in the UCSD dataset. It achieved 97.50% accuracy, 97.64% sensitivity, 98.91% specificity, 96.61% precision, and 97.03% F1 score in Duke dataset. Additionally, the results were compared to state-of-the-art works on the both datasets. The D-SVM was demonstrated to be an efficient and productive strategy for improving the robustness of automatic retinal disease classification. Also, in this study, it is shown that the unboxing of how AI systems' black-box choices is made by generating heat maps using the local interpretable model-agnostic explanation method, which is an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) technique. Heat maps, in particular, may contribute to the development of more stable deep learning-based systems, as well as enhancing the confidence in the diagnosis of retinal disease in the analysis of OCT image for ophthalmologists.

Machine Learning Techniques, Applications, and Potential Future Opportunities in Pressure Injuries (Bedsores) Management: A Systematic Review

Pressure Injuries (PI) are one of the most common health conditions in the United States. Most acute or long-term care patients are at risk of developing PI. Machine Learning (ML) has been utilized to manage patients with PI, in which one systematic review describes how ML is used in PI management in 32 studies. This research, different from the previous systematic review, summarizes the previous contributions of ML in PI from January 2007 to July 2022, categorizes the studies according to medical specialties, analyzes gaps, and identifies opportunities for future research directions. PRISMA guidelines were adopted using the four most common databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Science Direct) and other resources, which result in 90 eligible studies. The reviewed articles are divided into three categories based on PI time of occurrence: before occurrence (48%); at time of occurrence (16%); and after occurrence (36%). Each category is further broken down into sub-fields based on medical specialties, which result in sixteen specialties. Each specialty is analyzed in terms of methods, inputs, and outputs. The most relevant and potentially useful applications and methods in PI management are outlined and discussed. This includes deep learning techniques and hybrid models, integration of existing risk assessment tools with ML that leads to a partnership between provider assessment and patients' Electronic Health Records (EHR).

A Player-Specific Framework for Cricket Highlights Generation Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Automatic ways to generate video summarization is a key technique to manage huge video content nowadays. The aim of video summaries is to provide important information in less time to viewers. There exist some techniques for video summarization in the cricket domain, however, to the best of our knowledge our proposed model is the first one to deal with specific player summaries in cricket videos successfully. In this study, we provide a novel framework and a valuable technique for cricket video summarization and classification. For video summary specific to the player, the proposed technique exploits the fact i.e., presence of Score Caption (SC) in frames. In the first stage, optical character recognition (OCR) is applied to extract text summary from SC to find all frames of the specific player such as the Start Frame (SF) to the Last Frame (LF). In the second stage, various frames of cricket videos are used in the supervised AlexNet classifier for training along with class labels such as positive and negative for binary classification. A pre-trained network is trained for binary classification of those frames which are attained from the first phase exhibiting the performance of a specific player along with some additional scenes. In the third phase, the person identification technique is employed to recognize frames containing the specific player. Then, frames are cropped and SIFT features are extracted from identified person to further cluster these frames using the fuzzy c-means clustering method. The reason behind the third phase is to further optimize the video summaries as the frames attained in the second stage included the partner player’s frame as well. The proposed framework successfully utilizes the cricket videoo dataset. Additionally, the technique is very efficient and useful in broadcasting cricket video highlights of a specific player. The experimental results signify that our proposed method surpasses the previously stated results, improving the overall accuracy of up to 95%.

Glaucoma Detection and Classification Using Improved U-Net Deep Learning Model

Glaucoma is prominent in a variety of nations, with the United States and Europe being two of the most famous. Glaucoma now affects around 78 million people throughout the world (2020). By the year 2040, it is expected that there will be 111.8 million cases of glaucoma worldwide. In countries that are still building enough healthcare infrastructure to cope with glaucoma, the ailment is misdiagnosed nine times out of ten. To aid in the early diagnosis of glaucoma, the creation of a detection system is necessary. In this work, the researchers propose using a technology known as deep learning to identify and predict glaucoma before symptoms appear. The glaucoma dataset is used in this deep learning algorithm that has been proposed for analyzing glaucoma images. To get the required results when using deep learning principles for the job of segmenting the optic cup, pretrained transfer learning models are integrated with the U-Net architecture. For feature extraction, the DenseNet-201 deep convolution neural network (DCNN) is used. The DCNN approach is used to determine whether a person has glaucoma. The fundamental goal of this line of research is to recognize glaucoma in retinal fundus images, which will aid in assessing whether a patient has the condition. Because glaucoma can affect the model in both positive and negative ways, the model's outcome might be either positive or negative. Accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, the F-measure, and the F-score are some of the metrics used in the model evaluation process. An extra comparison study is performed as part of the process of establishing whether the suggested model is accurate. The findings are compared to convolution neural network classification methods based on deep learning. When used for training, the suggested model has an accuracy of 98.82 percent and an accuracy of 96.90 percent when used for testing. All assessments show that the new paradigm that has been proposed is more successful than the one that is currently in use.

Classification of dry and wet macular degeneration based on the ConvNeXT model

Purpose

To assess the value of an automated classification model for dry and wet macular degeneration based on the ConvNeXT model.

Methods

A total of 672 fundus images of normal, dry, and wet macular degeneration were collected from the Affiliated Eye Hospital of Nanjing Medical University and the fundus images of dry macular degeneration were expanded. The ConvNeXT three-category model was trained on the original and expanded datasets, and compared to the results of the VGG16, ResNet18, ResNet50, EfficientNetB7, and RegNet three-category models. A total of 289 fundus images were used to test the models, and the classification results of the models on different datasets were compared. The main evaluation indicators were sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, and kappa.

Results

Using 289 fundus images, three-category models trained on the original and expanded datasets were assessed. The ConvNeXT model trained on the expanded dataset was the most effective, with a diagnostic accuracy of 96.89%, kappa value of 94.99%, and high diagnostic consistency. The sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and AUC values for normal fundus images were 100.00, 99.41, 99.59, and 99.80%, respectively. The sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and AUC values for dry macular degeneration diagnosis were 87.50, 98.76, 90.32, and 97.10%, respectively. The sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and AUC values for wet macular degeneration diagnosis were 97.52, 97.02, 96.72, and 99.10%, respectively.

Conclusion

The ConvNeXT-based category model for dry and wet macular degeneration automatically identified dry and wet macular degeneration, aiding rapid, and accurate clinical diagnosis.

Skin Lesion Detection Using Hand-Crafted and DL-Based Features Fusion and LSTM

The abnormal growth of cells in the skin causes two types of tumor: benign and malignant. Various methods, such as imaging and biopsies, are used by oncologists to assess the presence of skin cancer, but these are time-consuming and require extra human effort. However, some automated methods have been developed by researchers based on hand-crafted feature extraction from skin images. Nevertheless, these methods may fail to detect skin cancers at an early stage if they are tested on unseen data. Therefore, in this study, a novel and robust skin cancer detection model was proposed based on features fusion. First, our proposed model pre-processed the images using a GF filter to remove the noise. Second, the features were manually extracted by employing local binary patterns (LBP), and Inception V3 for automatic feature extraction. Aside from this, an Adam optimizer was utilized for the adjustments of learning rate. In the end, LSTM network was utilized on fused features for the classification of skin cancer into malignant and benign. Our proposed system employs the benefits of both ML- and DL-based algorithms. We utilized the skin lesion DermIS dataset, which is available on the Kaggle website and consists of 1000 images, out of which 500 belong to the benign class and 500 to the malignant class. The proposed methodology attained 99.4% accuracy, 98.7% precision, 98.66% recall, and a 98% F-score. We compared the performance of our features fusion-based method with existing segmentation-based and DL-based techniques. Additionally, we cross-validated the performance of our proposed model using 1000 images from International Skin Image Collection (ISIC), attaining 98.4% detection accuracy. The results show that our method provides significant results compared to existing techniques and outperforms them.

Machine Learning in Electronic and Biomedical Engineering

In recent years, machine learning (ML) algorithms have become of paramount importance in computer science research, both in the electronic and biomedical fields [...]

Segmenting Retinal Vessels Using a Shallow Segmentation Network to Aid Ophthalmic Analysis

Retinal blood vessels possess a complex structure in the retina and are considered an important biomarker for several retinal diseases. Ophthalmic diseases result in specific changes in the retinal vasculature; for example, diabetic retinopathy causes the retinal vessels to swell, and depending upon disease severity, fluid or blood can leak. Similarly, hypertensive retinopathy causes a change in the retinal vasculature due to the thinning of these vessels. Central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) is a phenomenon in which the main vein causes drainage of the blood from the retina and this main vein can close completely or partially with symptoms of blurred vision and similar eye problems. Considering the importance of the retinal vasculature as an ophthalmic disease biomarker, ophthalmologists manually analyze retinal vascular changes. Manual analysis is a tedious task that requires constant observation to detect changes. The deep learning-based methods can ease the problem by learning from the annotations provided by an expert ophthalmologist. However, current deep learning-based methods are relatively inaccurate, computationally expensive, complex, and require image preprocessing for final detection. Moreover, existing methods are unable to provide a better true positive rate (sensitivity), which shows that the model can predict most of the vessel pixels. Therefore, this study presents the so-called vessel segmentation ultra-lite network (VSUL-Net) to accurately extract the retinal vasculature from the background. The proposed VSUL-Net comprises only 0.37 million trainable parameters and uses an original image as input without preprocessing. The VSUL-Net uses a retention block that specifically maintains the larger feature map size and low-level spatial information transfer. This retention block results in better sensitivity of the proposed VSUL-Net without using expensive preprocessing schemes. The proposed method was tested on three publicly available datasets: digital retinal images for vessel extraction (DRIVE), structured analysis of retina (STARE), and children’s heart health study in England database (CHASE-DB1) for retinal vasculature segmentation. The experimental results demonstrated that VSUL-Net provides robust segmentation of retinal vasculature with sensitivity (Sen), specificity (Spe), accuracy (Acc), and area under the curve (AUC) values of 83.80%, 98.21%, 96.95%, and 98.54%, respectively, for DRIVE, 81.73%, 98.35%, 97.17%, and 98.69%, respectively, for CHASE-DB1, and 86.64%, 98.13%, 97.27%, and 99.01%, respectively, for STARE datasets. The proposed method provides an accurate segmentation mask for deep ophthalmic analysis.

CellNet: A Lightweight Model towards Accurate LOC-Based High-Speed Cell Detection

Label-free cell separation and sorting in a microfluidic system, an essential technique for modern cancer diagnosis, resulted in high-throughput single-cell analysis becoming a reality. However, designing an efficient cell detection model is challenging. Traditional cell detection methods are subject to occlusion boundaries and weak textures, resulting in poor performance. Modern detection models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results at the cost of a large number of both parameters and floating point operations (FLOPs). In this work, we present a lightweight, yet powerful cell detection model named CellNet, which includes two efficient modules, CellConv blocks and the h-swish nonlinearity function. CellConv is proposed as an effective feature extractor as a substitute to computationally expensive convolutional layers, whereas the h-swish function is introduced to increase the nonlinearity of the compact model. To boost the prediction and localization ability of the detection model, we re-designed the model’s multi-task loss function. In comparison with other efficient object detection methods, our approach achieved state-of-the-art 98.70% mean average precision (mAP) on our custom sea urchin embryos dataset with only 0.08 M parameters and 0.10 B FLOPs, reducing the size of the model by 39.5× and the computational cost by 4.6×. We deployed CellNet on different platforms to verify its efficiency. The inference speed on a graphics processing unit (GPU) was 500.0 fps compared with 87.7 fps on a CPU. Additionally, CellNet is 769.5-times smaller and 420 fps faster than YOLOv3. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CellNet can achieve an excellent efficiency/accuracy trade-off on resource-constrained platforms.

Deep Learning for Ocular Disease Recognition: An Inner-Class Balance

It can be challenging for doctors to identify eye disorders early enough using fundus pictures. Diagnosing ocular illnesses by hand is time-consuming, error-prone, and complicated. Therefore, an automated ocular disease detection system with computer-aided tools is necessary to detect various eye disorders using fundus pictures. Such a system is now possible as a consequence of deep learning algorithms that have improved image classification capabilities. A deep-learning-based approach to targeted ocular detection is presented in this study. For this study, we used state-of-the-art image classification algorithms, such as VGG-19, to classify the ODIR dataset, which contains 5000 images of eight different classes of the fundus. These classes represent different ocular diseases. However, the dataset within these classes is highly unbalanced. To resolve this issue, the work suggested converting this multiclass classification problem into a binary classification problem and taking the same number of images for both classifications. Then, the binary classifications were trained with VGG-19. The accuracy of the VGG-19 model was 98.13% for the normal (N) versus pathological myopia (M) class; the model reached an accuracy of 94.03% for normal (N) versus cataract (C), and the model provided an accuracy of 90.94% for normal (N) versus glaucoma (G). All of the other models also improve the accuracy when the data is balanced.

Evaluating the Diagnostic Accuracy of a Novel Bayesian Decision-Making Algorithm for Vision Loss

The current diagnostic aids for acute vision loss are static flowcharts that do not provide dynamic, stepwise workups. We tested the diagnostic accuracy of a novel dynamic Bayesian algorithm for acute vision loss. Seventy-nine “participants” with acute vision loss in Windsor, Canada were assessed by an emergency medicine or primary care provider who completed a questionnaire about ocular symptoms/findings (without requiring fundoscopy). An ophthalmologist then attributed an independent “gold-standard diagnosis”. The algorithm employed questionnaire data to produce a differential diagnosis. The referrer diagnostic accuracy was 30.4%, while the algorithm’s accuracy was 70.9%, increasing to 86.1% with the algorithm’s top two diagnoses included and 88.6% with the top three included. In urgent cases of vision loss (n = 54), the referrer diagnostic accuracy was 38.9%, while the algorithm’s top diagnosis was correct in 72.2% of cases, increasing to 85.2% (top two included) and 87.0% (top three included). The algorithm’s sensitivity for urgent cases using the top diagnosis was 94.4% (95% CI: 85–99%), with a specificity of 76.0% (95% CI: 55–91%). This novel algorithm adjusts its workup at each step using clinical symptoms. In doing so, it successfully improves diagnostic accuracy for vision loss using clinical data collected by non-ophthalmologists.

Segmentation and Classification of Glaucoma Using U-Net with Deep Learning Model

Glaucoma is the second most common cause for blindness around the world and the third most common in Europe and the USA. Around 78 million people are presently living with glaucoma (2020). It is expected that 111.8 million people will have glaucoma by the year 2040. 90% of glaucoma is undetected in developing nations. It is essential to develop a glaucoma detection system for early diagnosis. In this research, early prediction of glaucoma using deep learning technique is proposed. In this proposed deep learning model, the ORIGA dataset is used for the evaluation of glaucoma images. The U-Net architecture based on deep learning algorithm is implemented for optic cup segmentation and a pretrained transfer learning model; DenseNet-201 is used for feature extraction along with deep convolution neural network (DCNN). The DCNN approach is used for the classification, where the final results will be representing whether the glaucoma infected or not. The primary objective of this research is to detect the glaucoma using the retinal fundus images, which can be useful to determine if the patient was affected by glaucoma or not. The result of this model can be positive or negative based on the outcome detected as infected by glaucoma or not. The model is evaluated using parameters such as accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F-measure. Also, a comparative analysis is conducted for the validation of the model proposed. The output is compared to other current deep learning models used for CNN classification, such as VGG-19, Inception ResNet, ResNet 152v2, and DenseNet-169. The proposed model achieved 98.82% accuracy in training and 96.90% in testing. Overall, the performance of the proposed model is better in all the analysis.

Applying Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence Techniques for High Precision Measuring of the Two-Phase Flow’s Characteristics Independent of the Pipe’s Scale Layer

Scale formation inside oil and gas pipelines is always one of the main threats to the efficiency of equipment and their depreciation. In this study, an artificial intelligence method method is presented to provide the flow regime and volume percentage of a two-phase flow while considering the presence of scale inside the test pipe. In this non-invasive method, a dual-energy source of barium-133 and cesium-137 isotopes is irradiated, and the photons are absorbed by a detector as they pass through the test pipe on the other side of the pipe. The Monte Carlo N Particle Code (MCNP) simulates the structure and frequency features, such as the amplitudes of the first, second, third, and fourth dominant frequencies, which are extracted from the data recorded by the detector. These features use radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) inputs, where two neural networks are also trained to accurately determine the volume percentage and correctly classify all flow patterns, independent of scale thickness in the pipe. The advantage of the proposed system in this study compared to the conventional systems is that it has a better measuring precision as well as a simpler structure (using one detector instead of two).

Gulf Countries’ Citizens’ Acceptance of COVID-19 Vaccines—A Machine Learning Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic created a global emergency in many sectors. The spread of the disease can be subdued through timely vaccination. The COVID-19 vaccination process in various countries is ongoing and is slowing down due to multiple factors. Many studies on European countries and the USA have been conducted and have highlighted the public’s concern that over-vaccination results in slowing the vaccination rate. Similarly, we analyzed a collection of data from the gulf countries’ citizens’ COVID-19 vaccine-related discourse shared on social media websites, mainly via Twitter. The people’s feedback regarding different types of vaccines needs to be considered to increase the vaccination process. In this paper, the concerns of Gulf countries’ people are highlighted to lessen the vaccine hesitancy. The proposed approach emphasizes the Gulf region-specific concerns related to COVID-19 vaccination accurately using machine learning (ML)-based methods. The collected data were filtered and tokenized to analyze the sentiments extracted using three different methods: Ratio, TextBlob, and VADER methods. The sentiment-scored data were classified into positive and negative tweeted data using a proposed LSTM method. Subsequently, to obtain more confidence in classification, the in-depth features from the proposed LSTM were extracted and given to four different ML classifiers. The ratio, TextBlob, and VADER sentiment scores were separately provided to LSTM and four machine learning classifiers. The VADER sentiment scores had the best classification results using fine-KNN and Ensemble boost with 94.01% classification accuracy. Given the improved accuracy, the proposed scheme is robust and confident in classifying and determining sentiments in Twitter discourse.