Explainable COVID-19 Detection Using Chest CT Scans and Deep Learning

AI for biofabrication

Biofabrication is an advanced technology that holds great promise for constructing highly biomimeticin vitrothree-dimensional human organs. Such technology would help address the issues of immune rejection and organ donor shortage in organ transplantation, aiding doctors in formulating personalized treatments for clinical patients and replacing animal experiments. Biofabrication typically involves the interdisciplinary application of biology, materials science, mechanical engineering, and medicine to generate large amounts of data and correlations that require processing and analysis. Artificial intelligence (AI), with its excellent capabilities in big data processing and analysis, can play a crucial role in handling and processing interdisciplinary data and relationships and in better integrating and applying them in biofabrication. In recent years, the development of the semiconductor and integrated circuit industries has propelled the rapid advancement of computer processing power. An AI program can learn and iterate multiple times within a short period, thereby gaining strong automation capabilities for a specific research content or issue. To date, numerous AI programs have been applied to various processes around biofabrication, such as extracting biological information, designing and optimizing structures, intelligent cell sorting, optimizing biomaterials and processes, real-time monitoring and evaluation of models, accelerating the transformation and development of these technologies, and even changing traditional research patterns. This article reviews and summarizes the significant changes and advancements brought about by AI in biofabrication, and discusses its future application value and direction.

A comparative analysis of different augmentations for brain images

Deep learning (DL) requires a large amount of training data to improve performance and prevent overfitting. To overcome these difficulties, we need to increase the size of the training dataset. This can be done by augmentation on a small dataset. The augmentation approaches must enhance the model's performance during the learning period. There are several types of transformations that can be applied to medical images. These transformations can be applied to the entire dataset or to a subset of the data, depending on the desired outcome. In this study, we categorize data augmentation methods into four groups: Absent augmentation, where no modifications are made; basic augmentation, which includes brightness and contrast adjustments; intermediate augmentation, encompassing a wider array of transformations like rotation, flipping, and shifting in addition to brightness and contrast adjustments; and advanced augmentation, where all transformation layers are employed. We plan to conduct a comprehensive analysis to determine which group performs best when applied to brain CT images. This evaluation aims to identify the augmentation group that produces the most favorable results in terms of improving model accuracy, minimizing diagnostic errors, and ensuring the robustness of the model in the context of brain CT image analysis.

DeepCSFusion: Deep Compressive Sensing Fusion for Efficient COVID-19 Classification

Worldwide, the COVID-19 epidemic, which started in 2019, has resulted in millions of deaths. The medical research community has widely used computer analysis of medical data during the pandemic, specifically deep learning models. Deploying models on devices with constrained resources is a significant challenge due to the increased storage demands associated with larger deep learning models. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a novel compression strategy that compresses deep features with a compression ratio of 10 to 90% to accurately classify the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 computed tomography scans. Additionally, we extensively validated the compression using various available deep learning methods to extract the most suitable features from different models. Finally, the suggested DeepCSFusion model compresses the extracted features and applies fusion to achieve the highest classification accuracy with fewer features. The proposed DeepCSFusion model was validated on the publicly available dataset "SARS-CoV-2 CT" scans composed of 1252 CT. This study demonstrates that the proposed DeepCSFusion reduced the computational time with an overall accuracy of 99.3%. Also, it outperforms state-of-the-art pipelines in terms of various classification measures.

Transformaer-based model for lung adenocarcinoma subtypes

BACKGROUND

Lung cancer has the highest morbidity and mortality rate among all types of cancer. Histological subtypes serve as crucial markers for the development of lung cancer and possess significant clinical values for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction of treatment responses. However, existing studies only dichotomize normal and cancerous tissues, failing to capture the unique characteristics of tissue sections and cancer types.

PURPOSE

Therefore, we have pioneered the classification of lung adenocarcinoma (LAD) cancer tissues into five subtypes (acinar, lepidic, micropapillary, papillary, and solid) based on section data in whole-slide image sections. In addition, a novel model called HybridNet was designed to improve the classification performance.

METHODS

HybridNet primarily consists of two interactive streams: a Transformer and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The Transformer stream captures rich global representations using a self-attention mechanism, while the CNN stream extracts local semantic features to optimize image details. Specifically, during the dual-stream parallelism, the feature maps of the Transformer stream as weights are weighted and summed with those of the CNN stream backbone; at the end of the parallelism, the respective final features are concatenated to obtain more discriminative semantic information.

RESULTS

Experimental results on a private dataset of LAD showed that HybridNet achieved 95.12% classification accuracy, and the accuracy of five histological subtypes (acinar, lepidic, micropapillary, papillary, and solid) reached 94.5%, 97.1%, 94%, 91%, and 99% respectively; the experimental results on the public BreakHis dataset show that HybridNet achieves the best results in three evaluation metrics: accuracy, recall and F1-score, with 92.40%, 90.63%, and 91.43%, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The process of classifying LAD into five subtypes assists pathologists in selecting appropriate treatments and enables them to predict tumor mutation burden (TMB) and analyze the spatial distribution of immune checkpoint proteins based on this and other clinical data. In addition, the proposed HybridNet fuses CNN and Transformer information several times and is able to improve the accuracy of subtype classification, and also shows satisfactory performance on public datasets with some generalization ability.

Lung Ultrasonography in the Evaluation of Late Sequelae of COVID-19 Pneumonia-A Comparison with Chest Computed Tomography: A Prospective Study

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed physicians to gain experience in lung ultrasound (LUS) during the acute phase of the disease. However, limited data are available on LUS findings during the recovery phase. The aim of this study was to evaluate the utility of LUS to assess lung involvement in patients with post-COVID-19 syndrome. This study prospectively enrolled 72 patients who underwent paired LUS and chest CT scans (112 pairs including follow-up). The most frequent CT findings were ground glass opacities (83.3%), subpleural lines (72.2%), traction bronchiectasis (37.5%), and consolidations (31.9%). LUS revealed irregular pleural lines as a common abnormality initially (56.9%), along with subpleural consolidation >2.5 mm ≤10 mm (26.5%) and B-lines (26.5%). A strong correlation was found between LUS score, calculated by artificial intelligence percentage involvement in ground glass opacities described in CT (r = 0.702, p < 0.05). LUS score was significantly higher in the group with fibrotic changes compared to the non-fibrotic group with a mean value of 19.4 ± 5.7 to 11 ± 6.6, respectively (p < 0.0001). LUS might be considered valuable for examining patients with persistent symptoms after recovering from COVID-19 pneumonia. Abnormalities identified through LUS align with CT scan findings; thus, LUS might potentially reduce the need for frequent chest CT examinations.

DeepChestGNN: A Comprehensive Framework for Enhanced Lung Disease Identification through Advanced Graphical Deep Features

Lung diseases are the third-leading cause of mortality in the world. Due to compromised lung function, respiratory difficulties, and physiological complications, lung disease brought on by toxic substances, pollution, infections, or smoking results in millions of deaths every year. Chest X-ray images pose a challenge for classification due to their visual similarity, leading to confusion among radiologists. To imitate those issues, we created an automated system with a large data hub that contains 17 datasets of chest X-ray images for a total of 71,096, and we aim to classify ten different disease classes. For combining various resources, our large datasets contain noise and annotations, class imbalances, data redundancy, etc. We conducted several image pre-processing techniques to eliminate noise and artifacts from images, such as resizing, de-annotation, CLAHE, and filtering. The elastic deformation augmentation technique also generates a balanced dataset. Then, we developed DeepChestGNN, a novel medical image classification model utilizing a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to extract 100 significant deep features indicative of various lung diseases. This model, incorporating Batch Normalization, MaxPooling, and Dropout layers, achieved a remarkable 99.74% accuracy in extensive trials. By combining graph neural networks (GNNs) with feedforward layers, the architecture is very flexible when it comes to working with graph data for accurate lung disease classification. This study highlights the significant impact of combining advanced research with clinical application potential in diagnosing lung diseases, providing an optimal framework for precise and efficient disease identification and classification.

COVID-19 diagnostic prediction on chest CT scan images using hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural network

Notwithstanding the extensive research efforts directed towards devising a dependable approach for the diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the inherent complexity and capriciousness of the virus continue to pose a formidable challenge to the precise identification of affected individuals. In light of this predicament, it is essential to devise a model for COVID-19 prediction utilizing chest computed tomography (CT) scans. To this end, we present a hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural network (HQCNN) model, which is founded on stochastic quantum circuits that can discern COVID-19 patients from chest CT images. Two publicly available chest CT image datasets were employed to evaluate the performance of our model. The experimental outcomes evinced diagnostic accuracies of 99.39% and 97.91%, along with precisions of 99.19% and 98.52%, respectively. These findings are indicative of the fact that the proposed model surpasses recently published works in terms of performance, thus providing a superior ability to precisely predict COVID-19 positive instances.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.

Multi-modal deep learning methods for classification of chest diseases using different medical imaging and cough sounds

Chest disease refers to a wide range of conditions affecting the lungs, such as COVID-19, lung cancer (LC), consolidation lung (COL), and many more. When diagnosing chest disorders medical professionals may be thrown off by the overlapping symptoms (such as fever, cough, sore throat, etc.). Additionally, researchers and medical professionals make use of chest X-rays (CXR), cough sounds, and computed tomography (CT) scans to diagnose chest disorders. The present study aims to classify the nine different conditions of chest disorders, including COVID-19, LC, COL, atelectasis (ATE), tuberculosis (TB), pneumothorax (PNEUTH), edema (EDE), pneumonia (PNEU). Thus, we suggested four novel convolutional neural network (CNN) models that train distinct image-level representations for nine different chest disease classifications by extracting features from images. Furthermore, the proposed CNN employed several new approaches such as a max-pooling layer, batch normalization layers (BANL), dropout, rank-based average pooling (RBAP), and multiple-way data generation (MWDG). The scalogram method is utilized to transform the sounds of coughing into a visual representation. Before beginning to train the model that has been developed, the SMOTE approach is used to calibrate the CXR and CT scans as well as the cough sound images (CSI) of nine different chest disorders. The CXR, CT scan, and CSI used for training and evaluating the proposed model come from 24 publicly available benchmark chest illness datasets. The classification performance of the proposed model is compared with that of seven baseline models, namely Vgg-19, ResNet-101, ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, EfficientNetB0, DenseNet-201, and Inception-V3, in addition to state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers. The effectiveness of the proposed model is further demonstrated by the results of the ablation experiments. The proposed model was successful in achieving an accuracy of 99.01%, making it superior to both the baseline models and the SOTA classifiers. As a result, the proposed approach is capable of offering significant support to radiologists and other medical professionals.

Potential diagnostic application of a novel deep learning- based approach for COVID-19

COVID-19 is a highly communicable respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which has had a significant impact on global public health and the economy. Detecting COVID-19 patients during a pandemic with limited medical facilities can be challenging, resulting in errors and further complications. Therefore, this study aims to develop deep learning models to facilitate automated diagnosis of COVID-19 from CT scan records of patients. The study also introduced COVID-MAH-CT, a new dataset that contains 4442 CT scan images from 133 COVID-19 patients, as well as 133 CT scan 3D volumes. We proposed and evaluated six different transfer learning models for slide-level analysis that are responsible for detecting COVID-19 in multi-slice spiral CT. Additionally, multi-head attention squeeze and excitation residual (MASERes) neural network, a novel 3D deep model was developed for patient-level analysis, which analyzes all the CT slides of a given patient as a whole and can accurately diagnose COVID-19. The codes and dataset developed in this study are available at https://github.com/alrzsdgh/COVID . The proposed transfer learning models for slide-level analysis were able to detect COVID-19 CT slides with an accuracy of more than 99%, while MASERes was able to detect COVID-19 patients from 3D CT volumes with an accuracy of 100%. These achievements demonstrate that the proposed models in this study can be useful for automatically detecting COVID-19 in both slide-level and patient-level from patients' CT scan records, and can be applied for real-world utilization, particularly in diagnosing COVID-19 cases in areas with limited medical facilities.

A scoping review of interpretability and explainability concerning artificial intelligence methods in medical imaging

PURPOSE

To review eXplainable Artificial Intelligence/(XAI) methods available for medical imaging/(MI).

METHOD

A scoping review was conducted following the Joanna Briggs Institute's methodology. The search was performed on Pubmed, Embase, Cinhal, Web of Science, BioRxiv, MedRxiv, and Google Scholar. Studies published in French and English after 2017 were included. Keyword combinations and descriptors related to explainability, and MI modalities were employed. Two independent reviewers screened abstracts, titles and full text, resolving differences through discussion.

RESULTS

228 studies met the criteria. XAI publications are increasing, targeting MRI (n = 73), radiography (n = 47), CT (n = 46). Lung (n = 82) and brain (n = 74) pathologies, Covid-19 (n = 48), Alzheimer's disease (n = 25), brain tumors (n = 15) are the main pathologies explained. Explanations are presented visually (n = 186), numerically (n = 67), rule-based (n = 11), textually (n = 11), and example-based (n = 6). Commonly explained tasks include classification (n = 89), prediction (n = 47), diagnosis (n = 39), detection (n = 29), segmentation (n = 13), and image quality improvement (n = 6). The most frequently provided explanations were local (78.1 %), 5.7 % were global, and 16.2 % combined both local and global approaches. Post-hoc approaches were predominantly employed. The used terminology varied, sometimes indistinctively using explainable (n = 207), interpretable (n = 187), understandable (n = 112), transparent (n = 61), reliable (n = 31), and intelligible (n = 3).

CONCLUSION

The number of XAI publications in medical imaging is increasing, primarily focusing on applying XAI techniques to MRI, CT, and radiography for classifying and predicting lung and brain pathologies. Visual and numerical output formats are predominantly used. Terminology standardisation remains a challenge, as terms like "explainable" and "interpretable" are sometimes being used indistinctively. Future XAI development should consider user needs and perspectives.

A Systematic Review on Deep Structured Learning for COVID-19 Screening Using Chest CT from 2020 to 2022

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2019 led to the discovery of a novel coronavirus. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated it as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its rapid and widespread transmission. Its impact has had profound implications, particularly in the realm of public health. Extensive scientific endeavors have been directed towards devising effective treatment strategies and vaccines. Within the healthcare and medical imaging domain, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought significant advantages. This study delves into peer-reviewed research articles spanning the years 2020 to 2022, focusing on AI-driven methodologies for the analysis and screening of COVID-19 through chest CT scan data. We assess the efficacy of deep learning algorithms in facilitating decision making processes. Our exploration encompasses various facets, including data collection, systematic contributions, emerging techniques, and encountered challenges. However, the comparison of outcomes between 2020 and 2022 proves intricate due to shifts in dataset magnitudes over time. The initiatives aimed at developing AI-powered tools for the detection, localization, and segmentation of COVID-19 cases are primarily centered on educational and training contexts. We deliberate on their merits and constraints, particularly in the context of necessitating cross-population train/test models. Our analysis encompassed a review of 231 research publications, bolstered by a meta-analysis employing search keywords (COVID-19 OR Coronavirus) AND chest CT AND (deep learning OR artificial intelligence OR medical imaging) on both the PubMed Central Repository and Web of Science platforms.

Lightweight deep CNN-based models for early detection of COVID-19 patients from chest X-ray images

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have recently been infected by the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), causing significant damage to the health, economy, and welfare of the world's population. Moreover, the unprecedented number of patients with COVID-19 has placed a massive burden on healthcare centers, making timely and rapid diagnosis challenging. A crucial step in minimizing the impact of such problems is to automatically detect infected patients and place them under special care as quickly as possible. Deep learning algorithms, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), can be used to meet this need. Despite the desired results, most of the existing deep learning-based models were built on millions of parameters (weights), which are not applicable to devices with limited resources. Inspired by such fact, in this research, we developed two new lightweight CNN-based diagnostic models for the automatic and early detection of COVID-19 subjects from chest X-ray images. The first model was built for binary classification (COVID-19 and Normal), whereas the second one was built for multiclass classification (COVID-19, viral pneumonia, or normal). The proposed models were tested on a relatively large dataset of chest X-ray images, and the results showed that the accuracy rates of the 2- and 3-class-based classification models are 98.55% and 96.83%, respectively. The results also revealed that our models achieved competitive performance compared with the existing heavyweight models while significantly reducing cost and memory requirements for computing resources. With these findings, we can indicate that our models are helpful to clinicians in making insightful diagnoses of COVID-19 and are potentially easily deployable on devices with limited computational power and resources.

Ensemble Deep Learning Derived from Transfer Learning for Classification of COVID-19 Patients on Hybrid Deep-Learning-Based Lung Segmentation: A Data Augmentation and Balancing Framework

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

Lung computed tomography (CT) techniques are high-resolution and are well adopted in the intensive care unit (ICU) for COVID-19 disease control classification. Most artificial intelligence (AI) systems do not undergo generalization and are typically overfitted. Such trained AI systems are not practical for clinical settings and therefore do not give accurate results when executed on unseen data sets. We hypothesize that ensemble deep learning (EDL) is superior to deep transfer learning (TL) in both non-augmented and augmented frameworks.

METHODOLOGY

The system consists of a cascade of quality control, ResNet-UNet-based hybrid deep learning for lung segmentation, and seven models using TL-based classification followed by five types of EDL's. To prove our hypothesis, five different kinds of data combinations (DC) were designed using a combination of two multicenter cohorts-Croatia (80 COVID) and Italy (72 COVID and 30 controls)-leading to 12,000 CT slices. As part of generalization, the system was tested on unseen data and statistically tested for reliability/stability.

RESULTS

Using the K5 (80:20) cross-validation protocol on the balanced and augmented dataset, the five DC datasets improved TL mean accuracy by 3.32%, 6.56%, 12.96%, 47.1%, and 2.78%, respectively. The five EDL systems showed improvements in accuracy of 2.12%, 5.78%, 6.72%, 32.05%, and 2.40%, thus validating our hypothesis. All statistical tests proved positive for reliability and stability.

CONCLUSION

EDL showed superior performance to TL systems for both (a) unbalanced and unaugmented and (b) balanced and augmented datasets for both (i) seen and (ii) unseen paradigms, validating both our hypotheses.

Deep learning techniques for detection and prediction of pandemic diseases: a systematic literature review

Deep learning (DL) is becoming a fast-growing field in the medical domain and it helps in the timely detection of any infectious disease (IDs) and is essential to the management of diseases and the prediction of future occurrences. Many scientists and scholars have implemented DL techniques for the detection and prediction of pandemics, IDs and other healthcare-related purposes, these outcomes are with various limitations and research gaps. For the purpose of achieving an accurate, efficient and less complicated DL-based system for the detection and prediction of pandemics, therefore, this study carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) on the detection and prediction of pandemics using DL techniques. The survey is anchored by four objectives and a state-of-the-art review of forty-five papers out of seven hundred and ninety papers retrieved from different scholarly databases was carried out in this study to analyze and evaluate the trend of DL techniques application areas in the detection and prediction of pandemics. This study used various tables and graphs to analyze the extracted related articles from various online scholarly repositories and the analysis showed that DL techniques have a good tool in pandemic detection and prediction. Scopus and Web of Science repositories are given attention in this current because they contain suitable scientific findings in the subject area. Finally, the state-of-the-art review presents forty-four (44) studies of various DL technique performances. The challenges identified from the literature include the low performance of the model due to computational complexities, improper labeling and the absence of a high-quality dataset among others. This survey suggests possible solutions such as the development of improved DL-based techniques or the reduction of the output layer of DL-based architecture for the detection and prediction of pandemic-prone diseases as future considerations.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in radiology and nuclear medicine: a literature review

Rational

Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated a remarkable performance in diagnostic imaging for various diseases and modalities and therefore has a high potential to be used as a clinical tool. However, current practice shows low deployment of these algorithms in clinical practice, because DL algorithms lack transparency and trust due to their underlying black-box mechanism. For successful employment, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) could be introduced to close the gap between the medical professionals and the DL algorithms. In this literature review, XAI methods available for magnetic resonance (MR), computed tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET) imaging are discussed and future suggestions are made.

Methods

PubMed, Embase.com and Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science Core Collection were screened. Articles were considered eligible for inclusion if XAI was used (and well described) to describe the behavior of a DL model used in MR, CT and PET imaging.

Results

A total of 75 articles were included of which 54 and 17 articles described post and ad hoc XAI methods, respectively, and 4 articles described both XAI methods. Major variations in performance is seen between the methods. Overall, post hoc XAI lacks the ability to provide class-discriminative and target-specific explanation. Ad hoc XAI seems to tackle this because of its intrinsic ability to explain. However, quality control of the XAI methods is rarely applied and therefore systematic comparison between the methods is difficult.

Conclusion

There is currently no clear consensus on how XAI should be deployed in order to close the gap between medical professionals and DL algorithms for clinical implementation. We advocate for systematic technical and clinical quality assessment of XAI methods. Also, to ensure end-to-end unbiased and safe integration of XAI in clinical workflow, (anatomical) data minimization and quality control methods should be included.

Ensemble deep honey architecture for COVID-19 prediction using CT scan and chest X-ray images

Recently, the infectious disease COVID-19 remains to have a catastrophic effect on the lives of human beings all over the world. To combat this deadliest disease, it is essential to screen the affected people quickly and least inexpensively. Radiological examination is considered the most feasible step toward attaining this objective; however, chest X-ray (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) are the most easily accessible and inexpensive options. This paper proposes a novel ensemble deep learning-based solution to predict the COVID-19-positive patients using CXR and CT images. The main aim of the proposed model is to provide an effective COVID-19 prediction model with a robust diagnosis and increase the prediction performance. Initially, pre-processing, like image resizing and noise removal, is employed using image scaling and median filtering techniques to enhance the input data for further processing. Various data augmentation styles, such as flipping and rotation, are applied to capable the model to learn the variations during training and attain better results on a small dataset. Finally, a new ensemble deep honey architecture (EDHA) model is introduced to effectively classify the COVID-19-positive and -negative cases. EDHA combines three pre-trained architectures like ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, and DenseNet-201, to detect the class value. Moreover, a new optimization algorithm, the honey badger algorithm (HBA), is adapted in EDHA to determine the best values for the hyper-parameters of the proposed model. The proposed EDHA is implemented in the Python platform and evaluates the performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, f1-score, AUC, and MCC. The proposed model has utilized the publicly available CXR and CT datasets to test the solution's efficiency. As a result, the simulated outcomes showed that the proposed EDHA had achieved better performance than the existing techniques in terms of Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, F1-Score, MCC, AUC, and Computation time are 99.1%, 99%, 98.6%, 99.6%, 98.9%, 99.2%, 0.98, and 820 s using the CXR dataset.

Survey of explainable artificial intelligence techniques for biomedical imaging with deep neural networks

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques of deep learning have revolutionized the disease diagnosis with their outstanding image classification performance. In spite of the outstanding results, the widespread adoption of these techniques in clinical practice is still taking place at a moderate pace. One of the major hindrance is that a trained Deep Neural Networks (DNN) model provides a prediction, but questions about why and how that prediction was made remain unanswered. This linkage is of utmost importance for the regulated healthcare domain to increase the trust in the automated diagnosis system by the practitioners, patients and other stakeholders. The application of deep learning for medical imaging has to be interpreted with caution due to the health and safety concerns similar to blame attribution in the case of an accident involving autonomous cars. The consequences of both a false positive and false negative cases are far reaching for patients' welfare and cannot be ignored. This is exacerbated by the fact that the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms comprise of complex interconnected structures, millions of parameters, and a 'black box' nature, offering little understanding of their inner working unlike the traditional machine learning algorithms. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques help to understand model predictions which help develop trust in the system, accelerate the disease diagnosis, and meet adherence to regulatory requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the promising field of XAI for biomedical imaging diagnostics. We also provide a categorization of the XAI techniques, discuss the open challenges, and provide future directions for XAI which would be of interest to clinicians, regulators and model developers.

Challenges, opportunities, and advances related to COVID-19 classification based on deep learning

The novel coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, is a hazardous disease. It is endangering the lives of many people living in more than two hundred countries. It directly affects the lungs. In general, two main imaging modalities: - computed tomography (CT) and chest x-ray (CXR) are used to achieve a speedy and reliable medical diagnosis. Identifying the coronavirus in medical images is exceedingly difficult for diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. It is demanding, time-consuming, and subject to human mistakes. In biological disciplines, excellent performance can be achieved by employing artificial intelligence (AI) models. As a subfield of AI, deep learning (DL) networks have drawn considerable attention than standard machine learning (ML) methods. DL models automatically carry out all the steps of feature extraction, feature selection, and classification. This study has performed comprehensive analysis of coronavirus classification using CXR and CT imaging modalities using DL architectures. Additionally, we have discussed how transfer learning is helpful in this regard. Finally, the problem of designing and implementing a system using computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) to find COVID-19 using DL approaches is highlighted a future research possibility.

Medical image data augmentation: techniques, comparisons and interpretations

Designing deep learning based methods with medical images has always been an attractive area of research to assist clinicians in rapid examination and accurate diagnosis. Those methods need a large number of datasets including all variations in their training stages. On the other hand, medical images are always scarce due to several reasons, such as not enough patients for some diseases, patients do not want to allow their images to be used, lack of medical equipment or equipment, inability to obtain images that meet the desired criteria. This issue leads to bias in datasets, overfitting, and inaccurate results. Data augmentation is a common solution to overcome this issue and various augmentation techniques have been applied to different types of images in the literature. However, it is not clear which data augmentation technique provides more efficient results for which image type since different diseases are handled, different network architectures are used, and these architectures are trained and tested with different numbers of data sets in the literature. Therefore, in this work, the augmentation techniques used to improve performances of deep learning based diagnosis of the diseases in different organs (brain, lung, breast, and eye) from different imaging modalities (MR, CT, mammography, and fundoscopy) have been examined. Also, the most commonly used augmentation methods have been implemented, and their effectiveness in classifications with a deep network has been discussed based on quantitative performance evaluations. Experiments indicated that augmentation techniques should be chosen carefully according to image types.

Explainability of deep learning models in medical video analysis: a survey

Deep learning methods have proven to be effective for multiple diagnostic tasks in medicine and have been performing significantly better in comparison to other traditional machine learning methods. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks has restricted their use in real-world applications, especially in healthcare. Therefore, explainability of the machine learning models, which focuses on providing of the comprehensible explanations of model outputs, may affect the possibility of adoption of such models in clinical use. There are various studies reviewing approaches to explainability in multiple domains. This article provides a review of the current approaches and applications of explainable deep learning for a specific area of medical data analysis-medical video processing tasks. The article introduces the field of explainable AI and summarizes the most important requirements for explainability in medical applications. Subsequently, we provide an overview of existing methods, evaluation metrics and focus more on those that can be applied to analytical tasks involving the processing of video data in the medical domain. Finally we identify some of the open research issues in the analysed area.

Data augmentation based semi-supervised method to improve COVID-19 CT classification

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak of December 2019 has become a serious threat to people around the world, creating a health crisis that infected millions of lives, as well as destroying the global economy. Early detection and diagnosis are essential to prevent further transmission. The detection of COVID-19 computed tomography images is one of the important approaches to rapid diagnosis. Many different branches of deep learning methods have played an important role in this area, including transfer learning, contrastive learning, ensemble strategy, etc. However, these works require a large number of samples of expensive manual labels, so in order to save costs, scholars adopted semi-supervised learning that applies only a few labels to classify COVID-19 CT images. Nevertheless, the existing semi-supervised methods focus primarily on class imbalance and pseudo-label filtering rather than on pseudo-label generation. Accordingly, in this paper, we organized a semi-supervised classification framework based on data augmentation to classify the CT images of COVID-19. We revised the classic teacher-student framework and introduced the popular data augmentation method Mixup, which widened the distribution of high confidence to improve the accuracy of selected pseudo-labels and ultimately obtain a model with better performance. For the COVID-CT dataset, our method makes precision, F1 score, accuracy and specificity 21.04%, 12.95%, 17.13% and 38.29% higher than average values for other methods respectively, For the SARS-COV-2 dataset, these increases were 8.40%, 7.59%, 9.35% and 12.80% respectively. For the Harvard Dataverse dataset, growth was 17.64%, 18.89%, 19.81% and 20.20% respectively. The codes are available at https://github.com/YutingBai99/COVID-19-SSL.

AMTLDC: a new adversarial multi-source transfer learning framework to diagnosis of COVID-19

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been widely used to diagnose diseases. However, in some tasks, such as the diagnosis of COVID-19 disease, due to insufficient data, the model is not properly trained and as a result, the generalizability of the model decreases. For example, if the model is trained on a CT scan dataset and tested on another CT scan dataset, it predicts near-random results. To address this, data from several different sources can be combined using transfer learning, taking into account the intrinsic and natural differences in existing datasets obtained with different medical imaging tools and approaches. In this paper, to improve the transfer learning technique and better generalizability between multiple data sources, we propose a multi-source adversarial transfer learning model, namely AMTLDC. In AMTLDC, representations are learned that are similar among the sources. In other words, extracted representations are general and not dependent on the particular dataset domain. We apply the AMTLDC to predict Covid-19 from medical images using a convolutional neural network. We show that accuracy can be improved using the AMTLDC framework, and surpass the results of current successful transfer learning approaches. In particular, we show that the AMTLDC works well when using different dataset domains, or when there is insufficient data.

Deep SVDD and Transfer Learning for COVID-19 Diagnosis Using CT Images

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which appeared in Wuhan, China, is spreading rapidly worldwide. Health systems in many countries have collapsed as a result of this pandemic, and hundreds of thousands of people have died due to acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by this virus. As a result, diagnosing COVID-19 in the early stages of infection is critical in the fight against the disease because it saves the patient's life and prevents the disease from spreading. In this study, we proposed a novel approach based on transfer learning and deep support vector data description (DSVDD) to distinguish among COVID-19, non-COVID-19 pneumonia, and intact CT images. Our approach consists of three models, each of which can classify one specific category as normal and the other as anomalous. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use the one-class DSVDD and transfer learning to diagnose lung disease. For the proposed approach, we used two scenarios: one with pretrained VGG16 and one with ResNet50. The proposed models were trained using data gathered with the assistance of an expert radiologist from three internet-accessible sources in end-to-end fusion using three split data ratios. Based on training with 70%, 50%, and 30% of the data, the proposed VGG16 models achieved (0.8281, 0.9170, and 0.9294) for the F1 score, while the proposed ResNet50 models achieved (0.9109, 0.9188, and 0.9333).

Recent advances of nanotechnology in COVID 19: A critical review and future perspective

The global anxiety and economic crisis causes the deadly pandemic coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID 19) affect millions of people right now. Subsequently, this life threatened viral disease is caused due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, morbidity and mortality of infected patients are due to cytokines storm syndrome associated with lung injury and multiorgan failure caused by COVID 19. Thereafter, several methodological advances have been approved by WHO and US-FDA for the detection, diagnosis and control of this wide spreadable communicable disease but still facing multi-challenges to control. Herein, we majorly emphasize the current trends and future perspectives of nano-medicinal based approaches for the delivery of anti-COVID 19 therapeutic moieties. Interestingly, Nanoparticles (NPs) loaded with drug molecules or vaccines resemble morphological features of SARS-CoV-2 in their size (60–140 nm) and shape (circular or spherical) that particularly mimics the virus facilitating strong interaction between them. Indeed, the delivery of anti-COVID 19 cargos via a nanoparticle such as Lipidic nanoparticles, Polymeric nanoparticles, Metallic nanoparticles, and Multi-functionalized nanoparticles to overcome the drawbacks of conventional approaches, specifying the site-specific targeting with reduced drug loading and toxicities, exhibit their immense potential. Additionally, nano-technological based drug delivery with their peculiar characteristics of having low immunogenicity, tunable drug release, multidrug delivery, higher selectivity and specificity, higher efficacy and tolerability switch on the novel pathway for the prevention and treatment of COVID 19.

A hybrid CNN-KNN approach for identification of COVID-19 with 5-fold cross validation

The novel coronavirus is the new member of the SARS family, which can cause mild to severe infection in the lungs and other vital organs like the heart, kidney and liver. For detecting COVID-19 from images, traditional ANN can be employed. This method begins by extracting the features and then feeding the features into a suitable classifier. The classification rate is not so high as feature extraction is dependent on the experimenters' expertise. To solve this drawback, a hybrid CNN-KNN-based model with 5-fold cross-validation is proposed to classify covid-19 or non-covid19 from CT scans of patients. At first, some pre-processing steps like contrast enhancement, median filtering, data augmentation, and image resizing are performed. Secondly, the entire dataset is divided into five equal sections or folds for training and testing. By doing 5-fold cross-validation, the generalization of the dataset is ensured and the overfitting of the network is prevented. The proposed CNN model consists of four convolutional layers, four max-pooling layers, and two fully connected layers combined with 23 layers. The CNN architecture is used as a feature extractor in this case. The features are taken from the CNN model's fourth convolutional layer and finally, the features are classified using K Nearest Neighbor rather than softmax for better accuracy. The proposed method is conducted over an augmented dataset of 4085 CT scan images. The average accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score of the proposed method after performing a 5-fold cross-validation is 98.26%, 99.42%,97.2% and 98.19%, respectively. The proposed method's accuracy is comparable with the existing works described further, where the state of the art and the custom CNN models were used. Hence, this proposed method can diagnose the COVID-19 patients with higher efficiency.

Improving COVID-19 CT classification of CNNs by learning parameter-efficient representation

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread rapidly over the world and causes a tremendous crisis in global human health and the economy. Its early detection and diagnosis are crucial for controlling the further spread. Many deep learning-based methods have been proposed to assist clinicians in automatic COVID-19 diagnosis based on computed tomography imaging. However, challenges still remain, including low data diversity in existing datasets, and unsatisfied detection resulting from insufficient accuracy and sensitivity of deep learning models. To enhance the data diversity, we design augmentation techniques of incremental levels and apply them to the largest open-access benchmark dataset, COVIDx CT-2A. Meanwhile, similarity regularization (SR) derived from contrastive learning is proposed in this study to enable CNNs to learn more parameter-efficient representations, thus improve the accuracy and sensitivity of CNNs. The results on seven commonly used CNNs demonstrate that CNN performance can be improved stably through applying the designed augmentation and SR techniques. In particular, DenseNet121 with SR achieves an average test accuracy of 99.44% in three trials for three-category classification, including normal, non-COVID-19 pneumonia, and COVID-19 pneumonia. The achieved precision, sensitivity, and specificity for the COVID-19 pneumonia category are 98.40%, 99.59%, and 99.50%, respectively. These statistics suggest that our method has surpassed the existing state-of-the-art methods on the COVIDx CT-2A dataset. Source code is available at https://github.com/YujiaKCL/COVID-CT-Similarity-Regularization.

Preliminary Stages for COVID-19 Detection Using Image Processing

COVID-19 was first discovered in December 2019 in Wuhan. There have been reports of thousands of illnesses and hundreds of deaths in almost every region of the world. Medical images, when combined with cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence, have the potential to improve the efficiency of the public health system and deliver faster and more reliable findings in the detection of COVID-19. The process of developing the COVID-19 diagnostic system begins with image accusation and proceeds via preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. According to literature review, several attempts to develop taxonomies for COVID-19 detection using image processing methods have been introduced. However, most of these adhere to a standard category that exclusively considers classification methods. Therefore, in this study a new taxonomy for the early stages of COVID-19 detection is proposed. It attempts to offer a full grasp of image processing in COVID-19 while considering all phases required prior to classification. The survey concludes with a discussion of outstanding concerns and future directions.

Diagnosis of COVID-19 Disease in Chest CT-Scan Images Based on Combination of Low-Level Texture Analysis and MobileNetV2 Features

Since two years ago, the COVID-19 virus has spread strongly in the world and has killed more than 6 million people directly and has affected the lives of more than 500 million people. Early diagnosis of the virus can help to break the chain of transmission and reduce the death rate. In most cases, the virus spreads in the infected person's chest. Therefore, the analysis of a chest CT scan is one of the most efficient methods for diagnosing a patient. Until now, various methods have been presented to diagnose COVID-19 disease in chest CT-scan images. Most recent studies have proposed deep learning-based methods. But handcrafted features provide acceptable results in some studies too. In this paper, an innovative approach is proposed based on the combination of low-level and deep features. First of all, local neighborhood difference patterns are performed to extract handcrafted texture features. Next, deep features are extracted using MobileNetV2. Finally, a two-level decision-making algorithm is performed to improve the detection rate especially when the proposed decisions based on the two different feature set are not the same. The proposed approach is evaluated on a collected dataset of chest CT scan images from June 1, 2021, to December 20, 2021, of 238 cases in two groups of patient and healthy in different COVID-19 variants. The results show that the combination of texture and deep features can provide better performance than using each feature set separately. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides higher accuracy in comparison with some state-of-the-art methods in this scope.

Multi-modal approach for COVID-19 detection using coughs and self-reported symptoms

 COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease of 2019) is one of the most challenging healthcare crises of the twenty-first century. The pandemic causes many negative impacts on all aspects of life and livelihoods. Although recent developments of relevant vaccines, such as Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA, AstraZeneca, or Moderna, the emergence of new virus mutations and their fast infection rate yet pose significant threats to public health. In this context, early detection of the disease is an important factor to reduce its effect and quickly control the spread of pandemic. Nevertheless, many countries still rely on methods that are either expensive and time-consuming (i.e., Reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction) or uncomfortable and difficult for self-testing (i.e., Rapid Antigen Test Nasal). Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed as a potential solution for COVID-19 analysis. However, previous works usually focus on a single symptom, which can omit critical information for disease diagnosis. Therefore, in this study, we propose a multi-modal method to detect COVID-19 using cough sounds and self-reported symptoms. The proposed method consists of five neural networks to deal with different input features, including CNN-biLSTM for MFCC features, EfficientNetV2 for Mel spectrogram images, MLP for self-reported symptoms, C-YAMNet for cough detection, and RNNoise for noise-canceling. Experimental results demonstrated that our method outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods with a high AUC, accuracy, and F1-score of 98.6%, 96.9%, and 96.9% on the testing set.

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.

Diverse COVID-19 CT Image-to-Image Translation with Stacked Residual Dropout

Machine learning models are renowned for their high dependency on a large corpus of data in solving real-world problems, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In practice, data acquisition is an onerous process, especially in medical applications, due to lack of data availability for newly emerged diseases and privacy concerns. This study introduces a data synthesization framework (sRD-GAN) that generates synthetic COVID-19 CT images using a novel stacked-residual dropout mechanism (sRD). sRD-GAN aims to alleviate the problem of data paucity by generating synthetic lung medical images that contain precise radiographic annotations. The sRD mechanism is designed using a regularization-based strategy to facilitate perceptually significant instance-level diversity without content-style attribute disentanglement. Extensive experiments show that sRD-GAN can generate exceptional perceptual realism on COVID-19 CT images examined by an experiment radiologist, with an outstanding Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 58.68 and Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) of 0.1370 on the test set. In a benchmarking experiment, sRD-GAN shows superior performance compared to GAN, CycleGAN, and one-to-one CycleGAN. The encouraging results achieved by sRD-GAN in different clinical cases, such as community-acquired pneumonia CT images and COVID-19 in X-ray images, suggest that the proposed method can be easily extended to other similar image synthetization problems.

COVID-19 classification using chest X-ray images based on fusion-assisted deep Bayesian optimization and Grad-CAM visualization

The COVID-19 virus's rapid global spread has caused millions of illnesses and deaths. As a result, it has disastrous consequences for people's lives, public health, and the global economy. Clinical studies have revealed a link between the severity of COVID-19 cases and the amount of virus present in infected people's lungs. Imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) and chest x-rays can detect COVID-19 (CXR). Manual inspection of these images is a difficult process, so computerized techniques are widely used. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) are a type of machine learning that is frequently used in computer vision applications, particularly in medical imaging, to detect and classify infected regions. These techniques can assist medical personnel in the detection of patients with COVID-19. In this article, a Bayesian optimized DCNN and explainable AI-based framework is proposed for the classification of COVID-19 from the chest X-ray images. The proposed method starts with a multi-filter contrast enhancement technique that increases the visibility of the infected part. Two pre-trained deep models, namely, EfficientNet-B0 and MobileNet-V2, are fine-tuned according to the target classes and then trained by employing Bayesian optimization (BO). Through BO, hyperparameters have been selected instead of static initialization. Features are extracted from the trained model and fused using a slicing-based serial fusion approach. The fused features are classified using machine learning classifiers for the final classification. Moreover, visualization is performed using a Grad-CAM that highlights the infected part in the image. Three publically available COVID-19 datasets are used for the experimental process to obtain improved accuracies of 98.8, 97.9, and 99.4%, respectively.

E-GCS: Detection of COVID-19 through classification by attention bottleneck residual network

Background

Recently,  the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)  has caused mortality of many people globally. Thus, there existed a need to detect this disease to prevent its further spread. Hence, the study aims to predict COVID-19 infected patients based on deep learning (DL) and image processing.

Objectives

The study intends to classify the normal and abnormal cases of COVID-19 by considering three different medical imaging modalities namely ultrasound imaging, X-ray images and CT scan images through introduced attention bottleneck residual network (AB-ResNet). It also aims to segment the abnormal infected area from normal images for localizing localising the disease infected area through the proposed edge based graph cut segmentation (E-GCS).

Methodology

AB-ResNet is used for classifying images whereas E-GCS segment the abnormal images. The study possess various advantages as it rely on DL and possess capability for accelerating the training speed of deep networks. It also enhance the network depth leading to minimum parameters, minimising the impact of vanishing gradient issue and attaining effective network performance with respect to better accuracy.

Results/Conclusion

Performance and comparative analysis is undertaken to evaluate the efficiency of the introduced system and results explores the efficiency of the proposed system in COVID-19 detection with high accuracy (99%).

Deep viewing for the identification of Covid-19 infection status from chest X-Ray image using CNN based architecture

In recent years, coronavirus (Covid-19) has evolved into one of the world’s leading life-threatening severe viral illnesses. A self-executing accord system might be a better option to stop Covid-19 from spreading due to its quick diagnostic option. Many researches have already investigated various deep learning techniques, which have a significant impact on the quick and precise early detection of Covid-19. Most of the existing techniques, though, have not been trained and tested using a significant amount of data. In this paper, we purpose a deep learning technique enabled Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to automatically diagnose Covid-19 from chest x-rays. To train and test our model, 10,293 x-rays, including 2875 x-rays of Covid-19, were collected as a data set. The applied dataset consists of three groups of chest x-rays: Covid-19, pneumonia, and normal patients. The proposed approach achieved 98.5% accuracy, 98.9% specificity, 99.2% sensitivity, 99.2% precision, and 98.3% F1-score. Distinguishing Covid-19 patients from pneumonia patients using chest x-ray, particularly for human eyes is crucial since both diseases have nearly identical characteristics. To address this issue, we have categorized Covid-19 and pneumonia using x-rays, achieving a 99.60% accuracy rate. Our findings show that the proposed model might aid clinicians and researchers in rapidly detecting Covid-19 patients, hence facilitating the treatment of Covid-19 patients.

Efficacy of drug regimen with and without oseltamivir in hospitalized patients with COVID-19: A retrospective study

Introduction

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the most critical issue in nowadays medicine. We aimed to evaluate the use and therapeutic outcomes of oseltamivir, an antiviral drug for patients with COVID-19.

Materials and method

In an observational study conducted at Imam Khomeini Hospital in Amol, Iran, data for 544 patients with laboratory and CT scan result confirmed COVID-19 were retrospectively collected between February 24th and April 13th 2020. To compare the characteristics of patients based on gender, the chi-square test was used. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the effect of oseltamivir on the outcome of treatment. Logrank test were used to compare the length of hospital stay in people treated with oseltamivir and drugs other than oseltamivir.

Results

Kaplan–Meier and logrank test showed no significant reduction in hospitalization time and survival rate following treatment with oseltamivir. However, a significant increase in lymphocytes count and reduction of C-reactive protein (CRP) level detected.

Conclusion

Administration of oseltamivir for patients with COVID-19 didn't show any improvement in hospitalization duration and survival rate.

COVID-19 Detection on Chest X-ray and CT Scan: A Review of the Top-100 Most Cited Papers

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many works have been published proposing solutions to the problems that arose in this scenario. In this vein, one of the topics that attracted the most attention is the development of computer-based strategies to detect COVID-19 from thoracic medical imaging, such as chest X-ray (CXR) and computerized tomography scan (CT scan). By searching for works already published on this theme, we can easily find thousands of them. This is partly explained by the fact that the most severe worldwide pandemic emerged amid the technological advances recently achieved, and also considering the technical facilities to deal with the large amount of data produced in this context. Even though several of these works describe important advances, we cannot overlook the fact that others only use well-known methods and techniques without a more relevant and critical contribution. Hence, differentiating the works with the most relevant contributions is not a trivial task. The number of citations obtained by a paper is probably the most straightforward and intuitive way to verify its impact on the research community. Aiming to help researchers in this scenario, we present a review of the top-100 most cited papers in this field of investigation according to the Google Scholar search engine. We evaluate the distribution of the top-100 papers taking into account some important aspects, such as the type of medical imaging explored, learning settings, segmentation strategy, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and finally, the dataset and code availability.

Detecting COVID-19 infection status from chest X-ray and CT scan via single transfer learning-driven approach

COVID-19 has caused over 528 million infected cases and over 6.25 million deaths since its outbreak in 2019. The uncontrolled transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has caused human suffering and the death of uncountable people. Despite the continuous effort by the researchers and laboratories, it has been difficult to develop reliable efficient and stable vaccines to fight against the rapidly evolving virus strains. Therefore, effectively preventing the transmission in the community and globally has remained an urgent task since its outbreak. To avoid the rapid spread of infection, we first need to identify the infected individuals and isolate them. Therefore, screening computed tomography (CT scan) and X-ray can better separate the COVID-19 infected patients from others. However, one of the main challenges is to accurately identify infection from a medical image. Even experienced radiologists often have failed to do it accurately. On the other hand, deep learning algorithms can tackle this task much easier, faster, and more accurately. In this research, we adopt the transfer learning method to identify the COVID-19 patients from normal individuals when there is an inadequacy of medical image data to save time by generating reliable results promptly. Furthermore, our model can perform both X-rays and CT scan. The experimental results found that the introduced model can achieve 99.59% accuracy for X-rays and 99.95% for CT scan images. In summary, the proposed method can effectively identify COVID-19 infected patients, could be a great way which will help to classify COVID-19 patients quickly and prevent the viral transmission in the community.

COVID-19 classification using chest X-ray images: A framework of CNN-LSTM and improved max value moth flame optimization

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly contagious disease that has claimed the lives of millions of people worldwide in the last 2 years. Because of the disease's rapid spread, it is critical to diagnose it at an early stage in order to reduce the rate of spread. The images of the lungs are used to diagnose this infection. In the last 2 years, many studies have been introduced to help with the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-Ray images. Because all researchers are looking for a quick method to diagnose this virus, deep learning-based computer controlled techniques are more suitable as a second opinion for radiologists. In this article, we look at the issue of multisource fusion and redundant features. We proposed a CNN-LSTM and improved max value features optimization framework for COVID-19 classification to address these issues. The original images are acquired and the contrast is increased using a combination of filtering algorithms in the proposed architecture. The dataset is then augmented to increase its size, which is then used to train two deep learning networks called Modified EfficientNet B0 and CNN-LSTM. Both networks are built from scratch and extract information from the deep layers. Following the extraction of features, the serial based maximum value fusion technique is proposed to combine the best information of both deep models. However, a few redundant information is also noted; therefore, an improved max value based moth flame optimization algorithm is proposed. Through this algorithm, the best features are selected and finally classified through machine learning classifiers. The experimental process was conducted on three publically available datasets and achieved improved accuracy than the existing techniques. Moreover, the classifiers based comparison is also conducted and the cubic support vector machine gives better accuracy.

A walk in the black-box: 3D visualization of large neural networks in virtual reality

Within the last decade Deep Learning has become a tool for solving challenging problems like image recognition. Still, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are considered black-boxes, which are difficult to understand by humans. Hence, there is an urge to visualize CNN architectures, their internal processes and what they actually learn. Previously, virtual realityhas been successfully applied to display small CNNs in immersive 3D environments. In this work, we address the problem how to feasibly render large-scale CNNs, thereby enabling the visualization of popular architectures with ten thousands of feature maps and branches in the computational graph in 3D. Our software ”DeepVisionVR” enables the user to freely walk through the layered network, pick up and place images, move/scale layers for better readability, perform feature visualization and export the results. We also provide a novel Pytorch module to dynamically link PyTorch with Unity, which gives developers and researchers a convenient interface to visualize their own architectures. The visualization is directly created from the PyTorch class that defines the Pytorch model used for training and testing. This approach allows full access to the network’s internals and direct control over what exactly is visualized. In a use-case study, we apply the module to analyze models with different generalization abilities in order to understand how networks memorize images. We train two recent architectures, CovidResNet and CovidDenseNet on the Caltech101 and the SARS-CoV-2 datasets and find that bad generalization is driven by high-frequency features and the susceptibility to specific pixel arrangements, leading to implications for the practical application of CNNs. The code is available on Github https://github.com/Criscraft/DeepVisionVR.

Novel Coronavirus and Common Pneumonia Detection from CT Scans Using Deep Learning-Based Extracted Features

COVID-19 which was announced as a pandemic on 11 March 2020, is still infecting millions to date as the vaccines that have been developed do not prevent the disease but rather reduce the severity of the symptoms. Until a vaccine is developed that can prevent COVID-19 infection, the testing of individuals will be a continuous process. Medical personnel monitor and treat all health conditions; hence, the time-consuming process to monitor and test all individuals for COVID-19 becomes an impossible task, especially as COVID-19 shares similar symptoms with the common cold and pneumonia. Some off-the-counter tests have been developed and sold, but they are unreliable and add an additional burden because false-positive cases have to visit hospitals and perform specialized diagnostic tests to confirm the diagnosis. Therefore, the need for systems that can automatically detect and diagnose COVID-19 automatically without human intervention is still an urgent priority and will remain so because the same technology can be used for future pandemics and other health conditions. In this paper, we propose a modified machine learning (ML) process that integrates deep learning (DL) algorithms for feature extraction and well-known classifiers that can accurately detect and diagnose COVID-19 from chest CT scans. Publicly available datasets were made available by the China Consortium for Chest CT Image Investigation (CC-CCII). The highest average accuracy obtained was 99.9% using the modified ML process when 2000 features were extracted using GoogleNet and ResNet18 and using the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The results obtained using the modified ML process were higher when compared to similar methods reported in the extant literature using the same datasets or different datasets of similar size; thus, this study is considered of added value to the current body of knowledge. Further research in this field is required to develop methods that can be applied in hospitals and can better equip mankind to be prepared for any future pandemics.

COVID-19 Classification from Chest X-Ray Images: A Framework of Deep Explainable Artificial Intelligence

COVID-19 detection and classification using chest X-ray images is a current hot research topic based on the important application known as medical image analysis. To halt the spread of COVID-19, it is critical to identify the infection as soon as possible. Due to time constraints and the expertise of radiologists, manually diagnosing this infection from chest X-ray images is a difficult and time-consuming process. Artificial intelligence techniques have had a significant impact on medical image analysis and have also introduced several techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. Deep learning and explainable AI have shown significant popularity among AL techniques for COVID-19 detection and classification. In this work, we propose a deep learning and explainable AI technique for the diagnosis and classification of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. Initially, a hybrid contrast enhancement technique is proposed and applied to the original images that are later utilized for the training of two modified deep learning models. The deep transfer learning concept is selected for the training of pretrained modified models that are later employed for feature extraction. Features of both deep models are fused using improved canonical correlation analysis that is further optimized using a hybrid algorithm named Whale-Elephant Herding. Through this algorithm, the best features are selected and classified using an extreme learning machine (ELM). Moreover, the modified deep models are utilized for Grad-CAM visualization. The experimental process was conducted on three publicly available datasets and achieved accuracies of 99.1, 98.2, and 96.7%, respectively. Moreover, the ablation study was performed and showed that the proposed accuracy is better than the other methods.

Triplet Loss-Based Models for COVID-19 Detection from Vocal Sounds

This work focuses on the automatic detection of COVID-19 from the analysis of vocal sounds, including sustained vowels, coughs, and speech while reading a short text. Specifically, we use the Mel-spectrogram representations of these acoustic signals to train neural network-based models for the task at hand. The extraction of deep learnt representations from the Mel-spectrograms is performed with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In an attempt to guide the training of the embedded representations towards more separable and robust inter-class representations, we explore the use of a triplet loss function. The experiments performed are conducted using the Your Voice Counts dataset, a new dataset containing German speakers collected using smartphones. The results obtained support the suitability of using triplet loss-based models to detect COVID-19 from vocal sounds. The best Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) of 66.5 % is obtained using a triplet loss-based model exploiting vocal sounds recorded while reading.

Review of COVID-19 testing and diagnostic methods

More than six billion tests for COVID-19 has been already performed in the world. The testing for SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2) virus and corresponding human antibodies is essential not only for diagnostics and treatment of the infection by medical institutions, but also as a pre-requisite for major semi-normal economic and social activities such as international flights, off line work and study in offices, access to malls, sport and social events. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, time to results and cost per test are essential parameters of those tests and even minimal improvement in any of them may have noticeable impact on life in the many countries of the world. We described, analyzed and compared methods of COVID-19 detection, while representing their parameters in 22 tables. Also, we compared test performance of some FDA approved test kits with clinical performance of some non-FDA approved methods just described in scientific literature. RT-PCR still remains a golden standard in detection of the virus, but a pressing need for alternative less expensive, more rapid, point of care methods is evident. Those methods that may eventually get developed to satisfy this need are explained, discussed, quantitatively compared. The review has a bioanalytical chemistry prospective, but it may be interesting for a broader circle of readers who are interested in understanding and improvement of COVID-19 testing, helping eventually to leave COVID-19 pandemic in the past.

A survey on the interpretability of deep learning in medical diagnosis

Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable performance in the medical domain, with accuracy that rivals or even exceeds that of human experts. However, it has a significant problem that these models are "black-box" structures, which means they are opaque, non-intuitive, and difficult for people to understand. This creates a barrier to the application of deep learning models in clinical practice due to lack of interpretability, trust, and transparency. To overcome this problem, several studies on interpretability have been proposed. Therefore, in this paper, we comprehensively review the interpretability of deep learning in medical diagnosis based on the current literature, including some common interpretability methods used in the medical domain, various applications with interpretability for disease diagnosis, prevalent evaluation metrics, and several disease datasets. In addition, the challenges of interpretability and future research directions are also discussed here. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that various applications of interpretability methods for disease diagnosis have been summarized.

Explainable artificial intelligence approach in combating real-time surveillance of COVID19 pandemic from CT scan and X-ray images using ensemble model

Population size has made disease monitoring a major concern in the healthcare system, due to which auto-detection has become a top priority. Intelligent disease detection frameworks enable doctors to recognize illnesses, provide stable and accurate results, and lower mortality rates. An acute and severe disease known as Coronavirus (COVID19) has suddenly become a global health crisis. The fastest way to avoid the spreading of Covid19 is to implement an automated detection approach. In this study, an explainable COVID19 detection in CT scan and chest X-ray is established using a combination of deep learning and machine learning classification algorithms. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) collects deep features from collected images, and these features are then fed into a machine learning ensemble for COVID19 assessment. To identify COVID19 disease from images, an ensemble model is developed which includes, Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Random Forest (RF). The overall performance of the proposed method is interpreted using Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), and t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). The proposed method is evaluated using two datasets containing 1,646 and 2,481 CT scan images gathered from COVID19 patients, respectively. Various performance comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches were also shown. The proposed approach beats existing models, with scores of 98.5% accuracy, 99% precision, and 99% recall, respectively. Further, the t-SNE and explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) experiments are conducted to validate the proposed approach.

A privacy-aware method for COVID-19 detection in chest CT images using lightweight deep conventional neural network and blockchain

With the global spread of the COVID-19 epidemic, a reliable method is required for identifying COVID-19 victims. The biggest issue in detecting the virus is a lack of testing kits that are both reliable and affordable. Due to the virus's rapid dissemination, medical professionals have trouble finding positive patients. However, the next real-life issue is sharing data with hospitals around the world while considering the organizations' privacy concerns. The primary worries for training a global Deep Learning (DL) model are creating a collaborative platform and personal confidentiality. Another challenge is exchanging data with health care institutions while protecting the organizations' confidentiality. The primary concerns for training a universal DL model are creating a collaborative platform and preserving privacy. This paper provides a model that receives a small quantity of data from various sources, like organizations or sections of hospitals, and trains a global DL model utilizing blockchain-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In addition, we use the Transfer Learning (TL) technique to initialize layers rather than initialize randomly and discover which layers should be removed before selection. Besides, the blockchain system verifies the data, and the DL method trains the model globally while keeping the institution's confidentiality. Furthermore, we gather the actual and novel COVID-19 patients. Finally, we run extensive experiments utilizing Python and its libraries, such as Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, to assess the proposed method. We evaluated works using five different datasets, including Boukan Dr. Shahid Gholipour hospital, Tabriz Emam Reza hospital, Mahabad Emam Khomeini hospital, Maragheh Dr.Beheshti hospital, and Miandoab Abbasi hospital datasets, and our technique outperform state-of-the-art methods on average in terms of precision (2.7%), recall (3.1%), F1 (2.9%), and accuracy (2.8%).

Complex features extraction with deep learning model for the detection of COVID19 from CT scan images using ensemble based machine learning approach

Recently the most infectious disease is the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID 19) creates a devastating effect on public health in more than 200 countries in the world. Since the detection of COVID19 using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is time-consuming and error-prone, the alternative solution of detection is Computed Tomography (CT) images. In this paper, Contrast Limited Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) was applied to CT images as a preprocessing step for enhancing the quality of the images. After that, we developed a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that extracted 100 prominent features from a total of 2482 CT scan images. These extracted features were then deployed to various machine learning algorithms - Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), and Random Forest (RF). Finally, we proposed an ensemble model for the COVID19 CT image classification. We also showed various performance comparisons with the state-of-art methods. Our proposed model outperforms the state-of-art models and achieved an accuracy, precision, and recall score of 99.73%, 99.46%, and 100%, respectively.

A Secure Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Critical Sars Crisis Management Using Random Sigmoidal Artificial Neural Networks

Since December 2019, the pandemic COVID-19 has been connected to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Early identification and diagnosis are essential goals for health practitioners because early symptoms correlate with those of other common illnesses including the common cold and flu. RT-PCR is frequently used to identify SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. Although this procedure can take up to 2 days to complete and sequential monitoring may be essential to figure out the potential of false-negative findings, RT-PCR test kits are apparently in low availability, highlighting the urgent need for more efficient methods of diagnosing COVID-19 patients. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based healthcare models are more effective at diagnosing and controlling large groups of people. Hence, this paper proposes a novel AI-enabled SARS detection framework. Here, the input CT images are collected and preprocessed using a block-matching filter and histogram equalization (HE). Segmentation is performed using Compact Entropy Rate Superpixel (CERS) technique. Features of segmented output are extracted using Histogram of Gradient (HOG). Feature selection is done using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The suggested Random Sigmoidal Artificial Neural Networks (RS-ANN) based classification approach effectively diagnoses the existence of the disease. The performance of the suggested Artificial intelligence model is analyzed and related to existing approaches. The suggested AI system may help identify COVID-19 patients more quickly than conventional approaches.

Machine Learning-Based Research for COVID-19 Detection, Diagnosis, and Prediction: A Survey

The year 2020 experienced an unprecedented pandemic called COVID-19, which impacted the whole world. The absence of treatment has motivated research in all fields to deal with it. In Computer Science, contributions mainly include the development of methods for the diagnosis, detection, and prediction of COVID-19 cases. Data science and Machine Learning (ML) are the most widely used techniques in this area. This paper presents an overview of more than 160 ML-based approaches developed to combat COVID-19. They come from various sources like Elsevier, Springer, ArXiv, MedRxiv, and IEEE Xplore. They are analyzed and classified into two categories: Supervised Learning-based approaches and Deep Learning-based ones. In each category, the employed ML algorithm is specified and a number of used parameters is given. The parameters set for each of the algorithms are gathered in different tables. They include the type of the addressed problem (detection, diagnosis, or detection), the type of the analyzed data (Text data, X-ray images, CT images, Time series, Clinical data,...) and the evaluated metrics (accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-Score, and AUC). The study discusses the collected information and provides a number of statistics drawing a picture about the state of the art. Results show that Deep Learning is used in 79% of cases where 65% of them are based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 17% use Specialized CNN. On his side, supervised learning is found in only 16% of the reviewed approaches and only Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Regression algorithms are employed.

COVID-19 Detection from Radiographs: Is Deep Learning Able to Handle the Crisis?

Deep learning in the last decade has been very successful in computer vision and machine learning applications. Deep learning networks provide state-of-the-art performance in almost all of the applications where they have been employed. In this review, we aim to summarize the essential deep learning techniques and then apply them to COVID-19, a highly contagious viral infection that wreaks havoc on everyone’s lives in various ways. According to the World Health Organization and scientists, more testing potentially helps contain the virus’s spread. The use of chest radiographs is one of the early screening tests for determining disease, as the infection affects the lungs severely. To detect the COVID-19 infection, this experimental survey investigates and automates the process of testing by employing state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers. Moreover, the viruses are of many types, such as influenza, hepatitis, and COVID. Here, our focus is on COVID-19. Therefore, we employ binary classification, where one class is COVID-19 while the other viral infection types are treated as non-COVID-19 in the radiographs. The classification task is challenging due to the limited number of scans available for COVID-19 and the minute variations in the viral infections. We aim to employ current state-of-the-art CNN architectures, compare their results, and determine whether deep learning algorithms can handle the crisis appropriately and accurately. We train and evaluate 34 models. We also provide the limitations and future direction.