Multi-Method Diagnosis of Blood Microscopic Sample for Early Detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Based on Deep Learning and Hybrid Techniques

Deep learning enhances acute lymphoblastic leukemia diagnosis and classification using bone marrow images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) poses a significant health challenge, particularly in pediatric cases, requiring precise and rapid diagnostic approaches. This comprehensive review explores the transformative capacity of deep learning (DL) in enhancing ALL diagnosis and classification, focusing on bone marrow image analysis. Examining ten studies conducted between 2013 and 2023 across various countries, including India, China, KSA, and Mexico, the synthesis underscores the adaptability and proficiency of DL methodologies in detecting leukemia. Innovative DL models, notably Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with Cat-Boosting, XG-Boosting, and Transfer Learning techniques, demonstrate notable approaches. Some models achieve outstanding accuracy, with one CNN reaching 100% in cancer cell classification. The incorporation of novel algorithms like Cat-Swarm Optimization and specialized CNN architectures contributes to superior classification accuracy. Performance metrics highlight these achievements, with models consistently outperforming traditional diagnostic methods. For instance, a CNN with Cat-Boosting attains 100% accuracy, while others hover around 99%, showcasing DL models' robustness in ALL diagnosis. Despite acknowledged challenges, such as the need for larger and more diverse datasets, these findings underscore DL's transformative potential in reshaping leukemia diagnostics. The high numerical accuracies accentuate a promising trajectory toward more efficient and accurate ALL diagnosis in clinical settings, prompting ongoing research to address challenges and refine DL models for optimal clinical integration.

Hybrid Methods for Fundus Image Analysis for Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy Development Stages Based on Fusion Features

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a complication of diabetes that damages the delicate blood vessels of the retina and leads to blindness. Ophthalmologists rely on diagnosing the retina by imaging the fundus. The process takes a long time and needs skilled doctors to diagnose and determine the stage of DR. Therefore, automatic techniques using artificial intelligence play an important role in analyzing fundus images for the detection of the stages of DR development. However, diagnosis using artificial intelligence techniques is a difficult task and passes through many stages, and the extraction of representative features is important in reaching satisfactory results. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models play an important and distinct role in extracting features with high accuracy. In this study, fundus images were used for the detection of the developmental stages of DR by two proposed methods, each with two systems. The first proposed method uses GoogLeNet with SVM and ResNet-18 with SVM. The second method uses Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) based on the hybrid features extracted by first using GoogLeNet, Fuzzy color histogram (FCH), Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), and Local Binary Pattern (LBP); followed by ResNet-18, FCH, GLCM and LBP. All the proposed methods obtained superior results. The FFNN network with hybrid features of ResNet-18, FCH, GLCM, and LBP obtained 99.7% accuracy, 99.6% precision, 99.6% sensitivity, 100% specificity, and 99.86% AUC.

DSCNet: Deep Skip Connections-Based Dense Network for ALL Diagnosis Using Peripheral Blood Smear Images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a life-threatening hematological malignancy that requires early and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment. However, the manual diagnosis of ALL is time-consuming and can delay critical treatment decisions. To address this challenge, researchers have turned to advanced technologies such as deep learning (DL) models. These models leverage the power of artificial intelligence to analyze complex patterns and features in medical images and data, enabling faster and more accurate diagnosis of ALL. However, the existing DL-based ALL diagnosis suffers from various challenges, such as computational complexity, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and difficulties with noisy or low-quality input images. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Deep Skip Connections-Based Dense Network (DSCNet) tailored for ALL diagnosis using peripheral blood smear images. The DSCNet architecture integrates skip connections, custom image filtering, Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss, and dropout regularization to enhance its performance and generalization abilities. DSCNet leverages skip connections to address the vanishing gradient problem and capture long-range dependencies, while custom image filtering enhances relevant features in the input data. KL divergence loss serves as the optimization objective, enabling accurate predictions. Dropout regularization is employed to prevent overfitting during training, promoting robust feature representations. The experiments conducted on an augmented dataset for ALL highlight the effectiveness of DSCNet. The proposed DSCNet outperforms competing methods, showcasing significant enhancements in accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC), achieving increases of 1.25%, 1.32%, 1.12%, 1.24%, and 1.23%, respectively. The proposed approach demonstrates the potential of DSCNet as an effective tool for early and accurate ALL diagnosis, with potential applications in clinical settings to improve patient outcomes and advance leukemia detection research.

Blood Slide Image Analysis to Classify WBC Types for Prediction Haematology Based on a Hybrid Model of CNN and Handcrafted Features

White blood cells (WBCs) are one of the main components of blood produced by the bone marrow. WBCs are part of the immune system that protects the body from infectious diseases and an increase or decrease in the amount of any type that causes a particular disease. Thus, recognizing the WBC types is essential for diagnosing the patient's health and identifying the disease. Analyzing blood samples to determine the amount and WBC types requires experienced doctors. Artificial intelligence techniques were applied to analyze blood samples and classify their types to help doctors distinguish between types of infectious diseases due to increased or decreased WBC amounts. This study developed strategies for analyzing blood slide images to classify WBC types. The first strategy is to classify WBC types by the SVM-CNN technique. The second strategy for classifying WBC types is by SVM based on hybrid CNN features, which are called VGG19-ResNet101-SVM, ResNet101-MobileNet-SVM, and VGG19-ResNet101-MobileNet-SVM techniques. The third strategy for classifying WBC types by FFNN is based on a hybrid model of CNN and handcrafted features. With MobileNet and handcrafted features, FFNN achieved an AUC of 99.43%, accuracy of 99.80%, precision of 99.75%, specificity of 99.75%, and sensitivity of 99.68%.

Automatic Analysis of MRI Images for Early Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Stages Based on Hybrid Features of CNN and Handcrafted Features

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is considered one of the challenges facing health care in the modern century; until now, there has been no effective treatment to cure it, but there are drugs to slow its progression. Therefore, early detection of Alzheimer's is vital to take needful measures before it develops into brain damage which cannot be treated. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have contributed to the diagnosis and prediction of its progression. MRI images require highly experienced doctors and radiologists, and the analysis of MRI images takes time to analyze each slice. Thus, deep learning techniques play a vital role in analyzing a huge amount of MRI images with high accuracy to detect Alzheimer's and predict its progression. Because of the similarities in the characteristics of the early stages of Alzheimer's, this study aimed to extract the features in several methods and integrate the features extracted from more than one method into the same features matrix. This study contributed to the development of three methodologies, each with two systems, with all systems aimed at achieving satisfactory accuracy for the detection of AD and predicting the stages of its progression. The first methodology is by Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) with the features of GoogLeNet and DenseNet-121 models separately. The second methodology is by FFNN network with combined features between GoogLeNet and Dense-121 models before and after high-dimensionality reduction of features using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm. The third methodology is by FFNN network with combined features between GoogLeNet and Dense-121 models separately and features extracted by Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) methods called handcrafted features. All systems yielded super results in detecting AD and predicting the stages of its progression. With the combined features of the DenseNet-121 and handcrafted, the FFNN achieved an accuracy of 99.7%, sensitivity of 99.64%, AUC of 99.56%, precision of 99.63%, and a specificity of 99.67%.

Hybrid Techniques for Diagnosing Endoscopy Images for Early Detection of Gastrointestinal Disease Based on Fusion Features

Gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, particularly tumours, are considered one of the most widespread and dangerous diseases and thus need timely health care for early detection to reduce deaths. Endoscopy technology is an effective technique for diagnosing GI diseases, thus producing a video containing thousands of frames. However, it is difficult to analyse all the images by a gastroenterologist, and it takes a long time to keep track of all the frames. Thus, artificial intelligence systems provide solutions to this challenge by analysing thousands of images with high speed and effective accuracy. Hence, systems with different methodologies are developed in this work. The first methodology for diagnosing endoscopy images of GI diseases is by using VGG-16 + SVM and DenseNet-121 + SVM. The second methodology for diagnosing endoscopy images of gastrointestinal diseases by artificial neural network (ANN) is based on fused features between VGG-16 and DenseNet-121 before and after high-dimensionality reduction by the principal component analysis (PCA). The third methodology is by ANN and is based on the fused features between VGG-16 and handcrafted features and features fused between DenseNet-121 and the handcrafted features. Herein, handcrafted features combine the features of gray level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fuzzy colour histogram (FCH), and local binary pattern (LBP) methods. All systems achieved promising results for diagnosing endoscopy images of the gastroenterology data set. The ANN network reached an accuracy, sensitivity, precision, specificity, and an AUC of 98.9%, 98.70%, 98.94%, 99.69%, and 99.51%, respectively, based on fused features of the VGG-16 and the handcrafted.

AI Techniques of Dermoscopy Image Analysis for the Early Detection of Skin Lesions Based on Combined CNN Features

Melanoma is one of the deadliest types of skin cancer that leads to death if not diagnosed early. Many skin lesions are similar in the early stages, which causes an inaccurate diagnosis. Accurate diagnosis of the types of skin lesions helps dermatologists save patients’ lives. In this paper, we propose hybrid systems based on the advantages of fused CNN models. CNN models receive dermoscopy images of the ISIC 2019 dataset after segmenting the area of lesions and isolating them from healthy skin through the Geometric Active Contour (GAC) algorithm. Artificial neural network (ANN) and Random Forest (Rf) receive fused CNN features and classify them with high accuracy. The first methodology involved analyzing the area of skin lesions and diagnosing their type early using the hybrid models CNN-ANN and CNN-RF. CNN models (AlexNet, GoogLeNet and VGG16) receive lesions area only and produce high depth feature maps. Thus, the deep feature maps were reduced by the PCA and then classified by ANN and RF networks. The second methodology involved analyzing the area of skin lesions and diagnosing their type early using the hybrid CNN-ANN and CNN-RF models based on the features of the fused CNN models. It is worth noting that the features of the CNN models were serially integrated after reducing their high dimensions by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Hybrid models based on fused CNN features achieved promising results for diagnosing dermatoscopic images of the ISIC 2019 data set and distinguishing skin cancer from other skin lesions. The AlexNet-GoogLeNet-VGG16-ANN hybrid model achieved an AUC of 94.41%, sensitivity of 88.90%, accuracy of 96.10%, precision of 88.69%, and specificity of 99.44%.

Hybrid Techniques for the Diagnosis of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Based on Fusion of CNN Features

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is one of the deadliest forms of leukemia due to the bone marrow producing many white blood cells (WBC). ALL is one of the most common types of cancer in children and adults. Doctors determine the treatment of leukemia according to its stages and its spread in the body. Doctors rely on analyzing blood samples under a microscope. Pathologists face challenges, such as the similarity between infected and normal WBC in the early stages. Manual diagnosis is prone to errors, differences of opinion, and the lack of experienced pathologists compared to the number of patients. Thus, computer-assisted systems play an essential role in assisting pathologists in the early detection of ALL. In this study, systems with high efficiency and high accuracy were developed to analyze the images of C-NMC 2019 and ALL-IDB2 datasets. In all proposed systems, blood micrographs were improved and then fed to the active contour method to extract WBC-only regions for further analysis by three CNN models (DenseNet121, ResNet50, and MobileNet). The first strategy for analyzing ALL images of the two datasets is the hybrid technique of CNN-RF and CNN-XGBoost. DenseNet121, ResNet50, and MobileNet models extract deep feature maps. CNN models produce high features with redundant and non-significant features. So, CNN deep feature maps were fed to the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method to select highly representative features and sent to RF and XGBoost classifiers for classification due to the high similarity between infected and normal WBC in early stages. Thus, the strategy for analyzing ALL images using serially fused features of CNN models. The deep feature maps of DenseNet121-ResNet50, ResNet50-MobileNet, DenseNet121-MobileNet, and DenseNet121-ResNet50-MobileNet were merged and then classified by RF classifiers and XGBoost. The RF classifier with fused features for DenseNet121-ResNet50-MobileNet reached an AUC of 99.1%, accuracy of 98.8%, sensitivity of 98.45%, precision of 98.7%, and specificity of 98.85% for the C-NMC 2019 dataset. With the ALL-IDB2 dataset, hybrid systems achieved 100% results for AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, precision, and specificity.

Multi-Techniques for Analyzing X-ray Images for Early Detection and Differentiation of Pneumonia and Tuberculosis Based on Hybrid Features

An infectious disease called tuberculosis (TB) exhibits pneumonia-like symptoms and traits. One of the most important methods for identifying and diagnosing pneumonia and tuberculosis is X-ray imaging. However, early discrimination is difficult for radiologists and doctors because of the similarities between pneumonia and tuberculosis. As a result, patients do not receive the proper care, which in turn does not prevent the disease from spreading. The goal of this study is to extract hybrid features using a variety of techniques in order to achieve promising results in differentiating between pneumonia and tuberculosis. In this study, several approaches for early identification and distinguishing tuberculosis from pneumonia were suggested. The first proposed system for differentiating between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses hybrid techniques, VGG16 + support vector machine (SVM) and ResNet18 + SVM. The second proposed system for distinguishing between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses an artificial neural network (ANN) based on integrating features of VGG16 and ResNet18, before and after reducing the high dimensions using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The third proposed system for distinguishing between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses ANN based on integrating features of VGG16 and ResNet18 separately with handcrafted features extracted by local binary pattern (LBP), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithms. All the proposed systems have achieved superior results in the early differentiation between pneumonia and tuberculosis. An ANN based on the features of VGG16 with LBP, DWT and GLCM (LDG) reached an accuracy of 99.6%, sensitivity of 99.17%, specificity of 99.42%, precision of 99.63%, and an AUC of 99.58%.

Gaussian Blurring Technique for Detecting and Classifying Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Cancer Cells from Microscopic Biopsy Images

Visual inspection of peripheral blood samples is a critical step in the leukemia diagnostic process. Automated solutions based on artificial vision approaches can accelerate this procedure, while also improving accuracy and uniformity of response in telemedicine applications. In this study, we propose a novel GBHSV-Leuk method to segment and classify Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) cancer cells. GBHSV-Leuk is a two staged process. The first stage involves pre-processing, which uses the Gaussian Blurring (GB) technique to blur the noise and reflections in the image. The second stage involves segmentation using the Hue Saturation Value (HSV) technique and morphological operations to differentiate between the foreground and background colors, which improve the accuracy of prediction. The proposed method attains 96.30% accuracy when applied on the private dataset, and 95.41% accuracy when applied on the ALL-IDB1 public dataset. This work would facilitate early detection of ALL cancer.

Brain Tumor Classification Using Meta-Heuristic Optimized Convolutional Neural Networks

The field of medical image processing plays a significant role in brain tumor classification. The survival rate of patients can be increased by diagnosing the tumor at an early stage. Several automatic systems have been developed to perform the tumor recognition process. However, the existing systems could be more efficient in identifying the exact tumor region and hidden edge details with minimum computation complexity. The Harris Hawks optimized convolution network (HHOCNN) is used in this work to resolve these issues. The brain magnetic resonance (MR) images are pre-processed, and the noisy pixels are eliminated to minimize the false tumor recognition rate. Then, the candidate region process is applied to identify the tumor region. The candidate region method investigates the boundary regions with the help of the line segments concept, which reduces the loss of hidden edge details. Various features are extracted from the segmented region, which is classified by applying a convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN computes the exact region of the tumor with fault tolerance. The proposed HHOCNN system was implemented using MATLAB, and performance was evaluated using pixel accuracy, error rate, accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity metrics. The nature-inspired Harris Hawks optimization algorithm minimizes the misclassification error rate and improves the overall tumor recognition accuracy to 98% achieved on the Kaggle dataset.

Hybrid Techniques of Analyzing MRI Images for Early Diagnosis of Brain Tumours Based on Hybrid Features

Brain tumours are considered one of the deadliest tumours in humans and have a low survival rate due to their heterogeneous nature. Several types of benign and malignant brain tumours need to be diagnosed early to administer appropriate treatment. Magnetic resonance (MR) images provide details of the brain’s internal structure, which allow radiologists and doctors to diagnose brain tumours. However, MR images contain complex details that require highly qualified experts and a long time to analyse. Artificial intelligence techniques solve these challenges. This paper presents four proposed systems, each with more than one technology. These techniques vary between machine, deep and hybrid learning. The first system comprises artificial neural network (ANN) and feedforward neural network (FFNN) algorithms based on the hybrid features between local binary pattern (LBP), grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) algorithms. The second system comprises pre-trained GoogLeNet and ResNet-50 models for dataset classification. The two models achieved superior results in distinguishing between the types of brain tumours. The third system is a hybrid technique between convolutional neural network and support vector machine. This system also achieved superior results in distinguishing brain tumours. The fourth proposed system is a hybrid of the features of GoogLeNet and ResNet-50 with the LBP, GLCM and DWT algorithms (handcrafted features) to obtain representative features and classify them using the ANN and FFNN. This method achieved superior results in distinguishing between brain tumours and performed better than the other methods. With the hybrid features of GoogLeNet and hand-crafted features, FFNN achieved an accuracy of 99.9%, a precision of 99.84%, a sensitivity of 99.95%, a specificity of 99.85% and an AUC of 99.9%.

An Explainable AI-Enabled Framework for Interpreting Pulmonary Diseases from Chest Radiographs

Explainable Artificial Intelligence is a key component of artificially intelligent systems that aim to explain the classification results. The classification results explanation is essential for automatic disease diagnosis in healthcare. The human respiration system is badly affected by different chest pulmonary diseases. Automatic classification and explanation can be used to detect these lung diseases. In this paper, we introduced a CNN-based transfer learning-based approach for automatically explaining pulmonary diseases, i.e., edema, tuberculosis, nodules, and pneumonia from chest radiographs. Among these pulmonary diseases, pneumonia, which COVID-19 causes, is deadly; therefore, radiographs of COVID-19 are used for the explanation task. We used the ResNet50 neural network and trained the network on extensive training with the COVID-CT dataset and the COVIDNet dataset. The interpretable model LIME is used for the explanation of classification results. Lime highlights the input image's important features for generating the classification result. We evaluated the explanation using radiologists' highlighted images and identified that our model highlights and explains the same regions. We achieved improved classification results with our fine-tuned model with an accuracy of 93% and 97%, respectively. The analysis of our results indicates that this research not only improves the classification results but also provides an explanation of pulmonary diseases with advanced deep-learning methods. This research would assist radiologists with automatic disease detection and explanations, which are used to make clinical decisions and assist in diagnosing and treating pulmonary diseases in the early stage.

Artificial intelligence applications in pediatric oncology diagnosis

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been applied in abundant medical tasks with high accuracy and efficiency. Physicians can improve their diagnostic efficiency with the assistance of AI techniques for improving the subsequent personalized treatment and surveillance. AI algorithms fundamentally capture data, identify underlying patterns, achieve preset endpoints, and provide decisions and predictions about real-world events with working principles of machine learning and deep learning. AI algorithms with sufficient graphic processing unit power have been demonstrated to provide timely diagnostic references based on preliminary training of large amounts of clinical and imaging data. The sample size issue is an inevitable challenge for pediatric oncology considering its low morbidity and individual heterogeneity. However, this problem may be solved in the near future considering the exponential advancements of AI algorithms technically to decrease the dependence of AI operation on the amount of data sets and the efficiency of computing power. For instance, it could be a feasible solution by shifting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from adults and sharing CNN algorithms across multiple institutions besides original data. The present review provides important insights into emerging AI applications for the diagnosis of pediatric oncology by systematically overviewing of up-to-date literature.

Identification of Anomalies in Mammograms through Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Diagnosis System

Breast cancer is the primary health issue that women may face at some point in their lifetime. This may lead to death in severe cases. A mammography procedure is used for finding suspicious masses in the breast. Teleradiology is employed for online treatment and diagnostics processes due to the unavailability and shortage of trained radiologists in backward and remote areas. The availability of online radiologists is uncertain due to inadequate network coverage in rural areas. In such circumstances, the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) framework is useful for identifying breast abnormalities without expert radiologists. This research presents a decision-making system based on IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) to identify breast anomalies. The proposed technique encompasses the region growing algorithm to segment tumor that extracts suspicious part. Then, texture and shape-based features are employed to characterize breast lesions. The extracted features include first and second-order statistics, center-symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP), a histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and shape-based techniques used to obtain various features from the mammograms. Finally, a fusion of machine learning algorithms including K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA are employed to classify breast cancer using composite feature vectors. The experimental results exhibit the proposed framework's efficacy that separates the cancerous lesions from the benign ones using 10-fold cross-validations. The accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity attained are 96.3%, 94.1%, and 98.2%, respectively, through shape-based features from the MIAS database. Finally, this research contributes a model with the ability for earlier and improved accuracy of breast tumor detection.

Customized Deep Learning Classifier for Detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Using Blood Smear Images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a rare type of blood cancer caused due to the overproduction of lymphocytes by the bone marrow in the human body. It is one of the common types of cancer in children, which has a fair chance of being cured. However, this may even occur in adults, and the chances of a cure are slim if diagnosed at a later stage. To aid in the early detection of this deadly disease, an intelligent method to screen the white blood cells is proposed in this study. The proposed intelligent deep learning algorithm uses the microscopic images of blood smears as the input data. This algorithm is implemented with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the leukemic cells from the healthy blood cells. The custom ALLNET model was trained and tested using the microscopic images available as open-source data. The model training was carried out on Google Collaboratory using the Nvidia Tesla P-100 GPU method. Maximum accuracy of 95.54%, specificity of 95.81%, sensitivity of 95.91%, F1-score of 95.43%, and precision of 96% were obtained by this accurate classifier. The proposed technique may be used during the pre-screening to detect the leukemia cells during complete blood count (CBC) and peripheral blood tests.

Early Diagnosis of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Based on Histopathological Images Using Deep and Hybrid Learning Approaches

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most common head and neck cancer types, which is ranked the seventh most common cancer. As OSCC is a histological tumor, histopathological images are the gold diagnosis standard. However, such diagnosis takes a long time and high-efficiency human experience due to tumor heterogeneity. Thus, artificial intelligence techniques help doctors and experts to make an accurate diagnosis. This study aimed to achieve satisfactory results for the early diagnosis of OSCC by applying hybrid techniques based on fused features. The first proposed method is based on a hybrid method of CNN models (AlexNet and ResNet-18) and the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. This method achieved superior results in diagnosing the OSCC data set. The second proposed method is based on the hybrid features extracted by CNN models (AlexNet and ResNet-18) combined with the color, texture, and shape features extracted using the fuzzy color histogram (FCH), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), local binary pattern (LBP), and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithms. Because of the high dimensionality of the data set features, the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm was applied to reduce the dimensionality and send it to the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm to diagnose it with promising accuracy. All the proposed systems achieved superior results in histological image diagnosis of OSCC, the ANN network based on the hybrid features using AlexNet, DWT, LBP, FCH, and GLCM achieved an accuracy of 99.1%, specificity of 99.61%, sensitivity of 99.5%, precision of 99.71%, and AUC of 99.52%.

Deep and Hybrid Learning Technique for Early Detection of Tuberculosis Based on X-ray Images Using Feature Fusion

Tuberculosis (TB) is a fatal disease in developing countries, with the infection spreading through direct contact or the air. Despite its seriousness, the early detection of tuberculosis by means of reliable techniques can save the patients’ lives. A chest X-ray is a recommended screening technique for locating pulmonary abnormalities. However, analyzing the X-ray images to detect abnormalities requires highly experienced radiologists. Therefore, artificial intelligence techniques come into play to help radiologists to perform an accurate diagnosis at the early stages of TB disease. Hence, this study focuses on applying two AI techniques, CNN and ANN. Furthermore, this study proposes two different approaches with two systems each to diagnose tuberculosis from two datasets. The first approach hybridizes two CNN models, which are Res-Net-50 and GoogLeNet techniques. Prior to the classification stage, the approach applies the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to reduce the features’ dimensionality, aiming to extract the deep features. Then, the SVM algorithm is used for classifying features with high accuracy. This hybrid approach achieved superior results in diagnosing tuberculosis based on X-ray images from both datasets. In contrast, the second approach applies artificial neural networks (ANN) based on the fused features extracted by ResNet-50 and GoogleNet models and combines them with the features extracted by the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and local binary pattern (LBP) algorithms. ANN achieved superior results for the two tuberculosis datasets. When using the first dataset, the ANN, with ResNet-50, GLCM, DWT and LBP features, achieved an accuracy of 99.2%, a sensitivity of 99.23%, a specificity of 99.41%, and an AUC of 99.78%. Meanwhile, with the second dataset, ANN, with the features of ResNet-50, GLCM, DWT and LBP, reached an accuracy of 99.8%, a sensitivity of 99.54%, a specificity of 99.68%, and an AUC of 99.82%. Thus, the proposed methods help doctors and radiologists to diagnose tuberculosis early and increase chances of survival.

The fractal and textural analysis of glomeruli in obese and non-obese patients

Background

Fractal dimension is an indirect indicator of signal complexity. The aim was to evaluate the fractal and textural analysis parameters of glomeruli in obese and non-obese patients with glomerular diseases and association of these parameters with clinical features.

Methods

The study included 125 patients mean age 46 ± 15.2 years: obese (BMI ≥ 27 kg/m²—63 patients) and non-obese (BMI < 27 kg/m²—62 patients). Serum concentration of creatinine, protein, albumin, cholesterol, trygliceride, and daily proteinuria were measured. Formula Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Colaboration (CKD-EPI) equation was calculated. Fractal (fractal dimension, lacunarity) and textural (angular second moment (ASM), textural correlation (COR), inverse difference moment (IDM), textural contrast (CON), variance) analysis parameters were compared between two groups.

Results

Obese patients had higher mean value of variance (t = 1.867), ASM (t = 1.532) and CON (t = 0.394) but without significant difference (P > 0.05) compared to non-obese. Mean value of COR (t = 0.108) and IDM (t = 0.185) were almost the same in two patient groups. Obese patients had higher value of lacunarity (t = 0.499) in comparison with non-obese, the mean value of fractal dimension (t = 0.225) was almost the same in two groups. Significantly positive association between variance and creatinine concentration (r = 0.499, P < 0.01), significantly negative association between variance and CKD-EPI (r = -0.448, P < 0.01), variance and sex (r = -0.339, P < 0.05) were found.

Conclusions

Variance showed significant correlation with serum creatinine concentration, CKD-EPI and sex. CON and IDM were significantly related to sex. Fractal and textural analysis parameters of glomeruli could become a supplement to histopathologic analysis of kidney tissue.

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Variance showed significant correlation with eGFR calculated by CKD- EPI formula.

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Significant correlation between variance and serum creatinine was found.

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Textural contrast and inverse difference moment were significantly related to sex.

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Fractal analysis of glomeruli could become supplement to histopathologic analysis.

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Textural analyses of kidney tissue should become useful to histopathologic analysis.