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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the importance of research on the spread of epidemic diseases. In this paper, we apply Artificial Intelligence and statistics techniques to build prediction models to estimate the SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in the United States, using multiple estimates of COVID-19 prevalence and other explanatory variables. We propose the use of stacking techniques based on multiple model building techniques (Linear and Beta Regression, Genetic Programming and Neural Networks) to obtain Predictive Ensemble Models. There has been extensive research on this field, but there has not been in-depth research on the application of stacking methods to estimate and forecast seroprevalence in the USA specifically. This paper provides a novel comparison of the behaviour and performance of different building techniques for stacking ensemble models and presents which methods are better for different scenarios. We find that Genetic Programming and Neural Networks are the best models with trained data within single states, and when multiple states are considered Genetic Programming is still better than the Regression models, but Neural Networks fail to estimate the seroprevalence accurately. Another novelty of our work is the use of cross-state validation to evaluate the models with new data, as well as temporal forecasting. Depending on how the data is processed, Linear Regression performs very well with cross-state validation and temporal forecasting, and Genetic Programming is very accurate with the former while Neural Networks work better with the latter. • COVID-19 seropositivity modelling in the USA. • Use of stacking and ensemble ML models. • Comparison of ML methods (linear regression, beta regression, genetic programming, neural network). • Trade-off between explainability and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 coronavirus disease outbreak, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome type-2 virus (SARS-CoV-2), was declared a pandemic in March 2020. Since its emergence to the present day, this disease has brought multiple countries to the brink of health care collapse during several waves of the disease. One of the most common tests performed on patients is chest x-ray imaging. These images show the severity of the patient's illness and whether it is indeed covid or another type of pneumonia. Automated assessment of this type of imaging could alleviate the time required for physicians to treat and diagnose each patient. To this end, in this paper we propose the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to carry out this process. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we present a pipeline adapted to this problem, covering all steps from the preprocessing of the datasets to the generation of classification models based on CNNs. Secondly, we have focused our study on the modification of the information fusion processes of this type of architectures, in the pooling layers. We propose a number of aggregation theory functions that are suitable to replace classical processes and have shown their benefits in past applications, and study their performance in the context of the x-ray classification problem. We find that replacing the feature reduction processes of CNNs leads to drastically different behaviours of the final model, which can be beneficial when prioritizing certain metrics such as precision or recall. • Convolutional Neural Networks are effective for detecting SARS-CoV-2 on x-ray images. • Intermediate extracted features can be fused through different aggregation functions. • Grouping functions are harder to train but can offer better classification accuracy. • An early restart policy eases training models which make use of grouping functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) caused a lot of mortality. The high mortality rate occurred because of the physicians' wrong or late identification of COVID-19 severity. So, developing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques is critical to help physicians correctly identify the severity of COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic and then decrease the COVID-19 mortality percentage. In this paper, we develop a new green CAD system using a new hybrid handcrafted feature extraction algorithm and two-stage neural network architecture to grade the COVID-19 patient based on Computed Tomography (CT) scan images as having a moderate, severe, or critical infection. Because the proposed system uses handcrafted feature extraction algorithms, it consumes minimum resources and time than recent works. The proposed system consists of three phases: lesion segmentation, feature extraction, and diagnosis. Firstly, lesions from the CT scan image are manually segmented, and then three schemes are applied to extract salient features from the segmented lesions. These schemes are the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), and a new hybrid method that consists of cascading Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM). Then, the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) is computed for each scheme to extract the statistical markers. In the grading phase, a two-stage neural network approach is used. First, the extracted features are individually trained and tested for each scheme in the first neural network stage, and then the results of the first stage are combined to train and test each patient in the second neural network stage. The performance of the proposed system was assessed on a CT image dataset of 300 COVID-19-positive patients collected from the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) website. The experimental results showed that our proposed system achieved 100% accuracy and kappa when the dataset was partitioned into 80% for training and 20% for testing. Also, it achieved 95.67% ± 0.47, 99.33% ± 0.77, and 100% ± 0 accuracies and 93.48% ± 0.74, 98.997% ± 1.16, and 100% ± 0 kappa values when the data was organized using 2, 4, and 10 folds, respectively. A green complexity algorithm analysis shows that this proposed system takes O(n) time complexity and 1 h and 20 min to train and test all cases. The performed green complexity analysis shows that the proposed system consumes 117.80 g Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e), 130.80 Wh, and 0.13 tree months for the carbon footprint, the energy needed, and the carbon sequestration, respectively. These results show that the proposed work consumes fewer resources and provides a green CAD system. • This paper proposes a CAD system for COVID-19 severity prediction. • The proposed system uses a two-stage neural network architecture. • The proposed system consists of two phases: feature extraction and severity identification. • A green complexity analysis is performed to prove the greenness of the proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

• Propose a hybrid IVIF framework to evaluate the EMW disposal modes. • Develop an innovative IVIF-GBWM to derive the global criteria weights. • Fuse IVIF regret theory and MABAC to evaluate alternatives. This article attempts to develop a hybrid heterogeneous framework to evaluate the disposal modes for emergency medical waste (EMW) by fusing GBWM (group best-worst method), RT (regret theory), and MABAC (multi-attributive border approximation area comparison). This hybrid framework tries to address three key challenges: (i) determining criteria weights, (ii) computing the regret-rejoice evaluation matrix, and (iii) identifying the optimal alternative. To address the first challenge, this paper innovates an innovative interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) GBWM, which considers multiplicatively consistent IVIF preference relation, to efficiently determine global criteria weights (GCWs). For the second challenge, RT is incorporated to compute the regret-rejoice evaluation matrix using experts' heterogeneous evaluations which consist of intervals, triangular fuzzy numbers, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and IVIF values. Regarding the third challenge, MABAC is applied to sort alternatives based on the obtained regret-rejoice evaluation matrix. Afterwards, the validity of the hybrid framework is verified by an illustrative example, and its advantages are demonstrated with some worthy sensitivity and comparative analyses. Some innovations of the proposed framework are highlighted below: (i) The IVIF GBWM streamlines calculation load, since it derives GCWs by solving the group weight assignment model only once; (ii) The introduction of RT into MABAC assists decision-makers in mitigating regret psychology, enhancing the quality of decision outcomes; (iii) The proposed framework's practicality is enhanced by leveraging heterogeneous evaluations which capture the inherent complexities of actual decision-making problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lungs are a vital organ of the human body. Malfunctioning of the lungs caused a direct threat to life. In recent years the world has witnessed massive medical insufficiency to handle the lung diseases caused by numerous agents including COVID-19. According to the recommended course of treatment, medical imaging tests including X-rays and CT scans have been very helpful in identifying multiple chest infections. Automatic detection of chest disease is the need of the modern time as it will speed up patient care and reduce doctors' workload. An Iterative Enhancement Fusion-based Cascaded (IEFCM) model to identify multiple diseases from chest X-ray images is suggested in the present paper. If a chest infection is discovered in the imaging, the suggested model additionally localizes the precise infected area on the CXR image. Experimental outcome clearly demonstrates that the performance of suggested model is significantly superior to the pre-trained model, that is the Golden standard dataset and data from the local population. In terms of sensitivity and specificity, IEFCM achieved 95.62 % sensitivity, which indicates an accurate diagnosis of lung disease, reducing the risk of missing any instances. Similarly, the specificity is 96.23 %, which denotes, the IEFCM model correctly identified the healthy people. It resulted decrease of misdiagnosis and unnecessary follow-up testings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of COVID-19 brings almost the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever. Facing such volume literature, it is hard for researches to find desired citation when carrying out COVID-19 related research, especially for junior researchers. This paper presents a novel neural network based method, called c itation r elational B ERT with h eterogeneous d eep g raph c onvolutional n etwork (CRB-HDGCN), for COVID-19 inline citation recommendation task. The CRB-HDGCN contains two main stages. The first stage is to enhance the representation learning of BERT model for COVID-19 inline citation recommendation task through CRB. To achieve the above goal, an augmented citation sentence corpus, which replaces the citation placeholder with the title of the cited papers, is used to lightly retrain BERT model. In addition, we extract three types of sentence pair according citation relation, and establish sentence prediction tasks to further fine-tune the BERT model. The second stage is to learn effective dense vector of nodes among COVID-19 bibliographic graph through HDGCN. The HDGCN contains four layers which are essentially all sub neural networks. The first layer is initial embedding layer which generates initial input vectors with fixed size through CRB and a multilayer perceptron. The second layer is a heterogeneous graph convolutional layer. In this layer, we expand traditional homogeneous graph convolutional network into heterogeneous by subtly adding heterogeneous nodes and relations. The third layer is a deep attention layer. This layer uses trainable project vectors to reweight the node importance simultaneously according to both node types and convolution layers, which further promotes the performance of learnt node vectors. The last decoder layer recovers the graph structure and let the whole network trainable. The recommendation is finally achieved by integrating the high performance heterogeneous vectors learnt from CRB-HDGCN with the query vectors. We conduct experiments on the CORD-19 and LitCovid datasets. The results show that compared with the second best method CO-Search, CRB-HDGCN improves MAP, MRR, P@100 and R@100 with 21.8%, 22.7%, 37.6% and 21.2% on CORD-19, and 29.1%, 25.9%, 15.3% and 11.3% on LitCovid, respectively. • A neural based citation recommendation method is proposed for COVID-19 papers. • A new solution to retrain and fine-tune PLMs is proposed. • A new heterogeneous deep graph convolutional network is proposed. • CRB-HDGCN achieves state-of-art on CORD-19 and LitCovid datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sputum deposition has always been a significant problem in patients with mechanical ventilation. If not handled in time, it can induce bacterial infection and even endanger the life safety of patients. Currently, the evaluation of sputum deposition heavily depends on the medical staff's clinical experience. This paper designs a sputum deposition monitoring system that realizes remote airway pressure and flow signals collection and management for mechanically ventilated patients. Forty-six patients in the intensive care unit were involved in this study. Meanwhile, a one-dimensional convolution neural networks model was proposed to classify four sputum deposition categories (no, slight, moderate, and severe). The experimental results showed that the overall classification accuracy could reach more than 78%. Moreover, the model has been optimized for practical application by setting thresholds for the output of the softmax layer. Finally, the classification accuracy of no sputum, slight, moderate, and severe deposition reaches 85.84%, 84.29%, 93.19%, and 93.38%, respectively. This study's proposed system and method could significantly increase the automation and intelligence of medical care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning (DL) has made its way into many disciplines ranging from health care to self-driving cars. In financial markets, we see a rich literature for DL applications. Particularly, investors require robust algorithms that can navigate and make sense of extremely noisy and volatile markets. In this work, we use deep learning to select a portfolio of stocks and use a genetic algorithm to optimize the hyperparameters of DL. The work analyzes the improvement in using genetic-based hyperparameter optimization over grid searches. The Genetic Algorithm brings 40% improvements in prediction when compared to a random-grid search. Novelty-wise, the work couples a genetic-based hyperparameter optimization with multiple Deep RankNet models to predict the behavior of financial assets. Our results show promising portfolio returns 20% better than the general market. In the highly volatile COVID 19 period, the models exceed market returns by more than double. Overall, this paper brings a comprehensive work that integrates hyperparameter optimization, Deep RankNet, LSTM, period size variations, input variable transformation, feature selection, training/evaluation ratio analysis, and multiple portfolio selection strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic's profound impact on global health and the economy underscores the need for new computational strategies to rapidly identify potential antiviral drugs against emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. AI-based drug repurposing methods have the potential to significantly shorten the drug discovery process, rendering them a crucial and efficacious approach for screening anti-SARS-CoV-2 compounds. In this paper, we proposed GINCM-DTA, an AI-based graph isomorphism network with protein contact map representation for drug–target affinity (DTA) prediction, and presented the COVID-DTA dataset for SARS-CoV-2-specific drug repurposing. Pre-training GINCM-DTA on large-scale Davis and KIBA datasets achieved state-of-the-art performance, while fine-tuning on the COVID-DTA dataset using transfer learning resulted in a mean square error of 0.026 and concordance index of 0.967. Utilizing the fine-tuned GINCM-DTA model, we predicted DTAs for drugs against SARS-CoV-2 main targets, focusing on key conserved proteins and unmutated spike proteins for virtual screening. We integrated GINCM-DTA predictions with molecular docking simulations to identify five candidates. In vitro assays revealed Hydralazine (5.737 nM) as a potential inhibitor of ACE2 and TMPRSS2, effectively blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, the results highlight the potential of Hydralazine as a broad-spectrum drug candidate, demonstrating its efficacy in obstructing the binding between ACE2 and spike proteins of multiple Omicron variants, including the currently dominant strains BQ.1, BQ.1.1, XBB.1.5, and XBB.1.16. Our method offers a novel computational strategy for COVID-19 antiviral screening and prepares for potential future epidemics incited by emerging viruses. • Proposed GINCM-DTA: a novel GIN model for DTA prediction with SOTA performance. • The fine-tuned GINCM-DTA achieved excellent performance: MSE=0.026, CI=0.967. • Identified Hydralazine as a potential inhibitor to block SARS-CoV-2 infection. • Potential effective against Omicron subvariants: BQ.1, BQ.1.1, XBB.1.5, XBB.1.16. • New computational strategy for COVID-19 antiviral screening & future virus epidemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper proposes a MOMHTS optimized HRFDL architecture for diagnosing the COVID-19 and pneumonia from chest CT and X-ray images via a collaborative edge framework to offer web services in underprivileged areas. • The hyperparameters of the HRFDL classifier are optimized using the MOMHTS algorithm which minimizes the complexity of the Deep learning model that prevents it from being deployed in the edge devices. COVID-19 is a global pandemic that mostly affects patients' respiratory systems, and the only way to protect oneself against the virus at present moment is to diagnose the illness, isolate the patient, and provide immunization. In the present situation, the testing used to predict COVID-19 is inefficient and results in more false positives. This difficulty can be solved by developing a remote medical decision support system that detects illness using CT scans or X-ray images with less manual interaction and is less prone to errors. The state-of-art techniques mainly used complex deep learning architectures which are not quite effective when deployed in resource-constrained edge devices. To overcome this problem, a Multi-Objective Modified Heat Transfer Search (MOMHTS) optimized Hybrid Random Forest Deep learning (HRFDL) classifier is proposed in this paper. The MOMHTS algorithm mainly optimizes the deep learning model in the HRFDL architecture by optimizing the hyperparameters associated with it to support the resource-constrained edge devices. To evaluate the efficiency of this technique, extensive experimentation is conducted on two real-time datasets namely the COVID19 lung CT scan dataset and the Chest X-ray images (Pneumonia) datasets. The proposed methodology mainly offers increased speed for communication between the IoT devices and COVID-19 detection via the MOMHTS optimized HRFDL classifier is modified to support the resources which can only support minimal computation and handle minimum storage. The proposed methodology offers an accuracy of 99% for both the COVID19 lung CT scan dataset and the Chest X-ray images (Pneumonia) datasets with minimal computational time, cost, and storage. Based on the simulation outcomes, we can conclude that the proposed methodology is an appropriate fit for edge computing detection to identify the COVID19 and pneumonia with higher detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 quickly became a global pandemic after only four months of its first detection. It is crucial to detect this disease as soon as possible to decrease its spread. The use of chest X-ray (CXR) images became an effective screening strategy, complementary to the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are often used for automatic image classification and they can be very useful in CXR diagnostics. In this paper, 21 different CNN architectures are tested and compared in the task of identifying COVID-19 in CXR images. They were applied to the COVIDx8B dataset, a large COVID-19 dataset with 16,352 CXR images coming from patients of at least 51 countries. Ensembles of CNNs were also employed and they showed better efficacy than individual instances. The best individual CNN instance results were achieved by DenseNet169, with an accuracy of 98.15% and an F1 score of 98.12%. These were further increased to 99.25% and 99.24%, respectively, through an ensemble with five instances of DenseNet169. These results are higher than those obtained in recent works using the same dataset. • This paper compares 21 CNN architectures for COVID-19 detection in CXR images. • DenseNet169 achieved an accuracy of 98.15% and an F1 score of 98.12%. • An ensemble of DenseNet169 instances increased the F1 score to 99.24%. • The training was repeated five times for each model to get more reliable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drone delivery is a fast and innovative method for delivering parcels, food, and medical supplies. Furthermore, this low-contact delivery mode contributes to reducing the spread of pandemic and vaccine-preventable diseases. Focusing on the delivery of medical supplies, this paper studies optimizing the distribution operations at a drone hub that dispatches drones to hospitals located at different geographic locations. Each hospital generates stochastic demands for medical supplies to be covered. This paper classifies stochastic demands based on the distance between hospitals and the drone hub. Satisfying the demands requires flying over different ranges, which is directly related to the amount of charge of the drone batteries. We develop a stochastic scheduling and allocation problem with multiple classes of demand and model the problem using a finite Markov decision process approach. We provide exact solutions for the modest sizes instances using backward induction and discuss that the problem suffers from the curses of dimensionality. Hence, we provide a reinforcement learning method capable of giving near-optimal solutions. We perform a set of computational tests using realistic data representing a prominent drone delivery company. Finally, we analyze the results to provide insights for managing drone hub operations and show that the reinforcement learning method has high performance compared with the exact and heuristic solution methods. • Creates stochastic scheduling and allocation problems with multiple classes of demand. • Uses a Markov Decision process to model distribution operations of a drone hub. • Classifies the demand based on the distance between the station and hospitals. • Applies a reinforcement learning method to overcome the curses of dimensionality. • Deduces managerial insights from the results of different sets of experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online social media platforms such as Twitter facilitate the exchange of information among people. However, the prevalence of "infodemic" such as online hate speech has exacerbated social rifts, discrimination, prejudice and even hate crimes. Timely and effective detection of the hate speech will help create a healthy public opinion environment. Most of the current COVID-19-related hate speech research focuses on a single language, such as English. In this paper, we introduce a cross-lingual transfer learning method, aiming to contribute to hate speech detection in low-resource languages. We propose a deep learning based model to classify hate speech with a pre-trained language model for multilingual text embedding. Data augmentation and cross-lingual contrastive learning are then utilized to further improve the performance of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. To evaluate our method, we collected three publicly available annotated COVID-19-related hate speech datasets on Twitter, i.e., two in English and one in German. Furthermore, a Chinese dataset based on Weibo is constructed to expand multilingual data. The experimental results across three languages illustrate the effectiveness of our method for cross-lingual hate speech detection. Test F1-scores of our method for English, Chinese, German as transfer target languages can reach up to 0.728, 0.799 and 0.612 respectively, which are on average better than other baselines. • Suggested a cross-lingual COVID-19-related hate speech detection problem. • Introduced cross-lingual contrastive learning. • Validated model performance on datasets in three languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To practice the evidence-based medicine, clinicians are interested to find the most suitable research for the clinical decision making. The use of knowledge graphs (KGs) in evidence-based clinical decision support systems is becoming increasingly popular. However, existing KG construction frameworks are not fully automated and contextualized, thus unable to adapt to new domains and incorporate constantly changing information into their knowledge base, resulting in loss of relevance over time. Furthermore, existing KGs construction frameworks don't generate KG that provide relevant information within an acceptable response time for evidence-based practitioners because the organization of constructed subgraphs is neither topic-specific nor evidence-based PICO (Participants/Problem P, Intervention-I, Comparison C, Outcome O) query-friendly. By employing concept extraction, semantic enrichment, optimized clustering, and state of art Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with BioBERT based encoded representation to categorize PICO elements and predict relationships between concepts using huge corpus of publicly available literature on COVID-19 and cerebral aneurysm, this paper proposes a topic specific, PICO enabled, and fully automated framework to curate information and create KG of different clinical domains. The evaluation shows that the proposed framework achieves significant improvement over baseline models and has 93 %, and 82 % accuracy on aneurysm and COVID data set respectively for PICO classification. Also, the relationship extraction module has an accuracy of 96 % with precision and recall being 92 %, and 90 % respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to predict the economic resilience to crises of territories based on local pre-existing socioeconomic characteristics. Specifically, we consider the case of Italian municipalities during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, leveraging a large-scale dataset of cardholders performing transactions in Point-of-Sales. Based on a set of machine learning classifiers, we show that network-based measures and variables related to the social, economic, demographic and environmental dimensions are relevant predictors of the economic resilience of Italian municipalities to the crisis. In particular, we find accurate classification performance both in balanced and un-balanced scenarios, as well as in the case we restrict the analysis to specific geographical areas. Our analysis predicts that territories with larger income per capita, soil consumption, concentration of real estate activities and commuting network centrality in terms of closeness and Pagerank constitute the set of most affected areas, experiencing the strongest reduction of economic activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, we provide an application of an early-warning system able to provide timely evidence to policymakers about the detrimental effects generated by natural disasters and severe crisis episodes, thus contributing to optimize public decision support systems. • We quantify economic resilience of Italian municipalities through bank transaction data. • We model territories with a set of socioeconomic and network-based covariates. • Machine learning classifiers accurately predict economic resilience. • We use SHAP values to identify most relevant predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a proliferation of online misinformation and disinformation about the virus. Combating this 'infodemic' has been identified as one of the top priorities of the World Health Organization, because false and misleading information can lead to a range of negative consequences, including the spread of false remedies, conspiracy theories, and xenophobia. This paper aims to combat the COVID-19 infodemic on multiple fronts, including determining the credibility of information, identifying its potential harm to society, and the necessity of intervention by relevant organizations. We present a prompt-based curriculum learning method to achieve this goal. The proposed method could overcome the challenges of data sparsity and class imbalance issues. Using online social media texts as input, the proposed model can verify content from multiple perspectives by answering a series of questions concerning the text's reliability. Experiments revealed the effectiveness of prompt tuning and curriculum learning in assessing the reliability of COVID-19-related text. The proposed method outperforms typical text classification methods, including fastText and BERT. In addition, the proposed method is robust to the hyperparameter settings, making it more applicable with limited infrastructure resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computed tomography is a powerful tool for medical examination, which plays a particularly important role in the investigation of acute diseases, such as COVID-19. A growing concern in relation to CT scans is the radiation to which the patients are exposed, and a lot of research is dedicated to methods and approaches to how to reduce the radiation dose in X-ray CT studies. In this paper, we propose a novel scanning protocol based on real-time monitored reconstruction for a helical chest CT using a pre-trained neural network model for COVID-19 detection as an expert. In a simulated study, for the first time, we proposed using per-slice stopping rules based on the COVID-19 detection neural network output to reduce the frequency of projection acquisition for portions of the scanning process. The proposed method allows reducing the total number of X-ray projections necessary for COVID-19 detection, and thus reducing the radiation dose, without a significant decrease in the prediction accuracy. The proposed protocol was evaluated on 163 patients from the COVID-CTset dataset, providing a mean dose reduction of 15.1% while the mean decrease in prediction accuracy amounted to only 1.9% achieving a Pareto improvement over a fixed protocol. • We aim to reduce X-ray dose using problem-oriented (COVID-19 diagnosis) approach. • Monitoring tomography reconstruction (MTR) treats CT as an anytime algorithm. • The proposed protocol is the first attempt to apply MTR to helical CT geometry. • A pre-trained COVID-19 detection NN was used as an "expert" within MTR protocol. • MTR achieves dose reduction of 14.2% for only 2.4% decrease in prediction quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to identify the behavior of interval data associated to its respective geospatial information with in the framework of Symbolic Data Analysis. The main idea is to extend Moran's autocorrelation index of Exploratory Spatial Analysis to interval data. Symbolic data analysis is a domain of research and application related to the areas of machine learning and statistics that provide tools to describe units (objects), enabling them to consider variability. Spatially correlated data are geospatial data with spatial autocorrelation, and the variability that comes from each region and neighborhood may be better expressed by intervals. Thus, this paper demonstrates the importance of considering the variability present in the interval variable and the variability present in geographical information. Experiments with synthetic interval data are performed to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach. We also, analyze two applications, dealing with COVID-19 and rent price interval data. • Spatial autocorrelation allows to verify the existence of spatial pattern. • Georeferenced data have variability inside each region. • Symbolic Data Analysis provides tools to describe individual classes. • Symbolic interval data expresses itself variability within the individual class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of the COronaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) from Computed Tomography (CT) scans has become a very important task in modern medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, typical resolutions of state-of-the-art CT scans are still not adequate for reliable and accurate automatic detection of COVID-19 disease. Motivated by this consideration, in this paper, we propose a novel architecture that jointly affords the Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) and the reliable classification problems from Low Resolution (LR) and noisy CT scans. Specifically, the proposed architecture is based on a couple of Twinned Residual Auto-Encoders (TRAE), which exploits the feature vectors and the SR images recovered by a Master AE for performing transfer learning and then improves the training of a "twinned" Follower AE. In addition, we also develop a Task-Aware (TA) version of the basic TRAE architecture, namely the TA-TRAE, which further utilizes the set of feature vectors generated by the Follower AE for the joint training of an additional auxiliary classifier, so to perform automated medical diagnosis on the basis of the available LR input images without human support. Experimental results and comparisons with a number of state-of-the-art CNN/GAN/CycleGAN benchmark SISR architectures, performed by considering × 2 , × 4 , and × 8 super-resolution (i.e., upscaling) factors, support the effectiveness of the proposed TRAE/TA-TRAE architectures. In particular, the detection accuracy attained by the proposed architectures outperforms the corresponding ones of the implemented CNN, GAN and CycleGAN baselines up to 9.0%, 6.5%, and 6.0% at upscaling factors as high as × 8. • High-performance automatic COVID-19 disease detection. • Twinned Residual Auto-Encoders for CT scans classification and super-resolution. • Task-aware architecture for joint CT scans classification and super-resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A deep learning COVID-19 diagnostic system is developed using state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. • A detailed analysis of different methods used for detecting COVID-19 is presented in this paper. • Chest X-rays from different sources are collected to build a robust classification model. • The developed diagnostic model provided efficient results, even with a limited number of input images. • The results produced in this work are validated by an expert radiologist. In recent months, a novel virus named Coronavirus has emerged to become a pandemic. The virus is spreading not only humans, but it is also affecting animals. First ever case of Coronavirus was registered in city of Wuhan, Hubei province of China on 31st of December in 2019. Coronavirus infected patients display very similar symptoms like pneumonia, and it attacks the respiratory organs of the body, causing difficulty in breathing. The disease is diagnosed using a Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain reaction (RT-PCR) kit and requires time in the laboratory to confirm the presence of the virus. Due to insufficient availability of the kits, the suspected patients cannot be treated in time, which in turn increases the chance of spreading the disease. To overcome this solution, radiologists observed the changes appearing in the radiological images such as X-ray and CT scans. Using deep learning algorithms, the suspected patients' X-ray or Computed Tomography (CT) scan can differentiate between the healthy person and the patient affected by Coronavirus. In this paper, popular deep learning architectures are used to develop a Coronavirus diagnostic systems. The architectures used in this paper are VGG16, DenseNet121, Xception, NASNet, and EfficientNet. Multiclass classification is performed in this paper. The classes considered are COVID-19 positive patients, normal patients, and other class. In other class, chest X-ray images of pneumonia, influenza, and other illnesses related to the chest region are included. The accuracies obtained for VGG16, DenseNet121, Xception, NASNet, and EfficientNet are 79.01%, 89.96%, 88.03%, 85.03% and 93.48% respectively. The need for deep learning with radiologic images is necessary for this critical condition as this will provide a second opinion to the radiologists fast and accurately. These deep learning Coronavirus detection systems can also be useful in the regions where expert physicians and well-equipped clinics are not easily accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Use Machine Learning models to predict the mortality of COVID19 patients. • Analyse patient case studies which may help in better personalised treatment. • Apply Shapley Values to interpret the Machine Learning models predictions. • Perform what-if analysis to see how patient mortality outcomes change. In this paper we apply a series of Machine Learning models to a recently published unique dataset on the mortality of COVID19 patients. We use a dataset consisting of blood samples of 375 patients admitted to a hospital in the region of Wuhan, China. There are 201 patients who survived hospitalisation and 174 patients who died whilst in hospital. The focus of the paper is not only on seeing which Machine Learning model is able to obtain the absolute highest accuracy but more on the interpretation of what the Machine Learning models provides. We find that age , days in hospital , Lymphocyte and Neutrophils are important and robust predictors when predicting a patients mortality. Furthermore, the algorithms we use allows us to observe the marginal impact of each variable on a case-by-case patient level, which might help practicioneers to easily detect anomalous patterns. This paper analyses the global and local interpretation of the Machine Learning models on patients with COVID19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Extraction of image features for some classifiers. Selection of the five most successful classifiers for Phase-1 and Phase-2. Designing a system using majority voting and creating a theoretical framework. Designing the graphical user interface application. The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the world since December 2019, and nowadays, the number of infected is increasing rapidly. Chest X-ray images are clinical adjuncts that can be used in the diagnosis of COVID-19 disease. Because of the rapid spread of COVID-19 disease worldwide and the limited number of expert radiologists, the proposed method uses the automatic diagnosis method rather than a manual diagnosis method. In the paper, COVID-19 Positive/Negative (2275 Positive, 4626 Negative) and Normal/Pneumonia (2313 Normal, 2313 Pneumonia) are diagnosed using chest X-ray images. Herein, 80 % and 20 % of the images are used in the training and validation set, respectively. In the proposed method, six different classifiers are trained using chest X-ray images, and the five most successful classifiers are used in both phases. In Phase-1 and Phase-2, image features are extracted using the Bag of Features method for Cosine K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Linear Discriminant, Logistic Regression, Bagged Trees Ensemble, Medium Gaussian Support Vector Machine (SVM), excluding SqueezeNet Deep Learning (K = 2000 and K = 1500 for Phase-1 and Phase-2, respectively). In both phases, the five most successful classifiers are determined, and images classify with the help of the Majority Voting (Mathematical Evaluation) method. The application of the proposed method is designed for users to diagnose COVID-19 Positive, Normal, and Pneumonia. The results show that accuracy values obtained by Majority Voting (Mathematical Evaluation) method for Phase-1 and Phase-2 are equal to 99.86 % and 99.28 %, respectively. Thus, it indicates that the accuracy of the whole system is 99.63 %. When we analyze the classification performance metrics for Phase-1 and Phase-2, Specificity (%), Precision (%), Recall (%), F 1 Score (%), Area Under Curve (AUC), and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) are equal to 99.98–99.83–99.07–99.51–0.9974–0.9855 and 99.73–99.69–98.63–99.23–0.9928–0.9518, respectively. Moreover, if the classification performance metrics of the whole system are examined, it is seen that Specificity (%), Precision (%), Recall (%), F 1 Score (%), AUC, and MCC are 99.88, 99.78, 98.90, 99.40, 0.9956, and 0.9720 , respectively. When the studies in the literature are examined, the results show that the proposed model is better than its counterparts. Because the best performance metrics for the dataset used were obtained in this study. In addition, since the biphasic majority voting technique is used in the study, it is seen that the proposed model is more reliable. On the other hand, although there are tens of thousands of studies on this subject, the usability of these models is debatable since most of them do not have graphical user interface applications. Already, in artificial intelligence technologies, besides the performance of the developed models, their usability is also important. Because the developed models can generally be used by people who are less knowledgeable about artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An improved Crow Search Algorithm (VMCSA) is proposed. • Two effective position updating strategies are introduced into CSA. • The performance of VMCSA is verified by comparison with some excellent peers. • An effective image segmentation method based on VMCSA is proposed. • VMCSA is tested on standard benchmark and COVID-19 image segmentation problems. COVID-19 is pervasive and threatens the safety of people around the world. Therefore, now, a method is needed to diagnose COVID-19 accurately. The identification of COVID-19 by X-ray images is a common method. The target area is extracted from the X-ray images by image segmentation to improve classification efficiency and help doctors make a diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an improved crow search algorithm (CSA) based on variable neighborhood descent (VND) and information exchange mutation (IEM) strategies, called VMCSA. The original CSA quickly falls into the local optimum, and the possibility of finding the best solution is significantly reduced. Therefore, to help the algorithm avoid falling into local optimality and improve the global search capability of the algorithm, we introduce VND and IEM into CSA. Comparative experiments are conducted at CEC2014 and CEC'21 to demonstrate the better performance of the proposed algorithm in optimization. We also apply the proposed algorithm to multi-level thresholding image segmentation using Renyi's entropy as the objective function to find the optimal threshold, where we construct 2-D histograms with grayscale images and non-local mean images and maximize the Renyi's entropy on top of the 2-D histogram. The proposed segmentation method is evaluated on X-ray images of COVID-19 and compared with some algorithms. VMCSA has a significant advantage in segmentation results and obtains better robustness than other algorithms. The available extra info can be found at https://github.com/1234zsw/VMCSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To manage the propagation of infectious diseases, particularly fast-spreading pandemics, it is necessary to provide information about possible infected places and individuals, however, it needs diagnostic tests and is time-consuming and expensive. To smooth these issues, and motivated by the current Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in this paper, we propose a learning-based system and a hidden Markov model (i) to assess hazardous places of a contagious disease, and (ii) to predict the probability of individuals' infection. To this end, we track the trajectories of individuals in an environment. For evaluating the models and the approaches, we use the Covid-19 outbreak in an urban environment as a case study. Individuals in a closed population are explicitly represented by their movement trajectories over a period of time. The simulation results demonstrate that by adjusting the communicable disease parameters, the detector system and the predictor system are able to correctly assess the hazardous places and determine the infection possibility of individuals and cluster them accurately with high probability, i.e., on average more than 96%. In general, the proposed approaches to assessing hazardous places and predicting the infection possibility of individuals can be applied to contagious diseases by tailoring them to the influential features of the disease. • Utilizing the movement trajectories of individuals in a city to manage infection disease. • Proposing a learning-based system to assess hazardous places of a contagious disease. • Proposing a hidden Markov model to predict the probability of individuals infection. • Applying the Covid-19 outbreak in an urban environment as a case study. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An improved Crow Search Algorithm (VMCSA) is proposed. • Two effective position updating strategies are introduced into CSA. • The performance of VMCSA is verified by comparison with some excellent peers. • An effective image segmentation method based on VMCSA is proposed. • VMCSA is tested on standard benchmark and COVID-19 image segmentation problems. COVID-19 is pervasive and threatens the safety of people around the world. Therefore, now, a method is needed to diagnose COVID-19 accurately. The identification of COVID-19 by X-ray images is a common method. The target area is extracted from the X-ray images by image segmentation to improve classification efficiency and help doctors make a diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an improved crow search algorithm (CSA) based on variable neighborhood descent (VND) and information exchange mutation (IEM) strategies, called VMCSA. The original CSA quickly falls into the local optimum, and the possibility of finding the best solution is significantly reduced. Therefore, to help the algorithm avoid falling into local optimality and improve the global search capability of the algorithm, we introduce VND and IEM into CSA. Comparative experiments are conducted at CEC2014 and CEC'21 to demonstrate the better performance of the proposed algorithm in optimization. We also apply the proposed algorithm to multi-level thresholding image segmentation using Renyi's entropy as the objective function to find the optimal threshold, where we construct 2-D histograms with grayscale images and non-local mean images and maximize the Renyi's entropy on top of the 2-D histogram. The proposed segmentation method is evaluated on X-ray images of COVID-19 and compared with some algorithms. VMCSA has a significant advantage in segmentation results and obtains better robustness than other algorithms. The available extra info can be found at https://github.com/1234zsw/VMCSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To manage the propagation of infectious diseases, particularly fast-spreading pandemics, it is necessary to provide information about possible infected places and individuals, however, it needs diagnostic tests and is time-consuming and expensive. To smooth these issues, and motivated by the current Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in this paper, we propose a learning-based system and a hidden Markov model (i) to assess hazardous places of a contagious disease, and (ii) to predict the probability of individuals' infection. To this end, we track the trajectories of individuals in an environment. For evaluating the models and the approaches, we use the Covid-19 outbreak in an urban environment as a case study. Individuals in a closed population are explicitly represented by their movement trajectories over a period of time. The simulation results demonstrate that by adjusting the communicable disease parameters, the detector system and the predictor system are able to correctly assess the hazardous places and determine the infection possibility of individuals and cluster them accurately with high probability, i.e., on average more than 96%. In general, the proposed approaches to assessing hazardous places and predicting the infection possibility of individuals can be applied to contagious diseases by tailoring them to the influential features of the disease. • Utilizing the movement trajectories of individuals in a city to manage infection disease. • Proposing a learning-based system to assess hazardous places of a contagious disease. • Proposing a hidden Markov model to predict the probability of individuals infection. • Applying the Covid-19 outbreak in an urban environment as a case study. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Sparse deep convolutional model is employed for blood-based COVID-19 prediction. • Sparsity can discover the real/hidden dependency between the employed blood tests. • A new Minkowski-based equilibrium optimizer (MEO) is proposed for feature selection. • Pearson elimination assists the proposed MEO in a fused feature selection mechanism. • With a feature bool reduced to less than its half, the performance is outstanding. SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) is the virus that causes the pandemic that has severely impacted human society with a massive death toll worldwide. Hence, there is a persistent need for fast and reliable automatic tools to help health teams in making clinical decisions. Predictive models could potentially ease the strain on healthcare systems by early and reliable screening of COVID-19 patients which helps to combat the spread of the disease. Recent studies have reported some key advantages of employing routine blood tests for initial screening of COVID-19 patients. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel COVID-19 prediction model based on routine blood tests. In this model, we depend on exploiting the real dependency among the employed feature pool by a sparsification procedure. In this sparse domain, a hybrid feature selection mechanism is proposed. This mechanism fuses the selected features from two perspectives, the first is Pearson correlation and the second is a new Minkowski-based equilibrium optimizer (MEO). Then, the selected features are fed into a new 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1DCNN) for a final diagnosis decision. The proposed prediction model is tested with a new public dataset from San Raphael Hospital, Milan, Italy, i.e., OSR dataset which has two sub-datasets. According to the experimental results, the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques with an average testing accuracy of 98.5% while we employ only less than half the size of the feature pool, i.e., we need only less than half the given blood tests in the employed dataset to get a final diagnosis decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An innovative ensemble model is proposed for Covid-19 forecasting. • A new type of heuristic optimization algorithm (SCWOA) is introduced. • Four neural networks are selected to predict the Covid-19 outbreak. • The SCWOA is used to optimize the best matching weights of the ensemble model. During the global fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) epidemic, accurate outbreak trend forecasting has become vital for outbreak prevention and control. Effective COVID-19 outbreak trend prediction remains a complex and challenging issue owing to the significant fluctuations in the COVID-19 data series. Most previous studies have limitations only using individual forecasting methods for outbreak modeling, ignoring the combination of the advantages of different prediction methods, which may lead to insufficient results. Therefore, this paper develops a novel ensemble paradigm based on multiple neural networks and a novel heuristic optimization algorithm. First, a new hybrid sine cosine algorithm-whale optimization algorithm (SCWOA) is exercised on 15 benchmark tests. Second, four neural networks are used as predictors for the COVID-19 outbreak forecasting. Each predictor is given a weight, and the proposed SCWOA is used to optimize the best matching weights of the ensemble model. The daily COVID-19 series collected from three of the most-affected countries were taken as the test cases. The experimental results demonstrate that different neural network models have different performances in various complex epidemic prediction scenarios. The SCWOA-based ensemble model can outperform all comparable models with its high accuracy and robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet public social media and forums provide a convenient channel for people concerned about public health issues, such as COVID-19, to share and discuss information/misinformation with each other. In this paper, we propose a natural language processing (NLP) method based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) technique to perform sentiment classification and uncover various issues related to COVID-19 public opinions. Bi-LSTM is an improved version of conventional LSTMs for generating the output from both left and right contexts at each time step. We experimented with real datasets extracted from Twitter and Reddit social media platforms, and our experimental results showed improved metrics compared with the conventional LSTM model as well as recent studies available in the literature. The proposed model can be used by official institutions to mitigate the effects of negative messages and to understand peoples' concerns during the pandemic. Furthermore, our findings shed light on the importance of using NLP techniques to analyze public opinion and to combat the spreading of misinformation and to guide health decision-making. • Bi-LSTM sentiment detection model is developed to classify COVID-19 social comments. • Various scenarios to help counter negative COVID-19 comments and reduce their impact. • Comparative analysis of our approach with most popular models is presented. • Word embedding followed by Bi-LSTM provides better performance on Sentiment Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented predicament for global supply chains (SCs). Shipments of essential and life-saving products, ranging from pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and healthcare, to manufacturing, have been significantly impacted or delayed, making the global SCs vulnerable. A better understanding of the shipment risks can substantially reduce that nervousness. Thenceforth, this paper proposes a few Deep Learning (DL) approaches to mitigate shipment risks by predicting "if a shipment can be exported from one source to another", despite the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed DL methodologies have four main stages: data capturing, de-noising or pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. The feature extraction stage depends on two main variants of DL models. The first variant involves three recurrent neural networks (RNN) structures (i.e., long short-term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU)), and the second variant is the temporal convolutional network (TCN). In terms of the classification stage, six different classifiers are applied to test the entire methodology. These classifiers are SoftMax, random trees (RT), random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM). The performance of the proposed DL models is evaluated based on an online dataset (taken as a case study). The numerical results show that one of the proposed models (i.e., TCN) is about 100% accurate in predicting the risk of shipment to a particular destination under COVID-19 restrictions. Unarguably, the aftermath of this work will help the decision-makers to predict supply chain risks proactively to increase the resiliency of the SCs. • Proposes a wide range of DL approaches to predict supply chain risks. • Introducing a temporal convolutional network (TCN) by combining RNN and CNN models. • Identification of the most promising DL approach in terms of performance. • Performance demonstration of the selected classifiers on the advanced DL networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Dietary habits and geo-economic factors accurately explain COVID-19 mortality. • Unbalanced dietary patterns contribute to predicting larger COVID-19 mortality rate. • Fusion of relevant data factors improves the prediction of COVID-19 mortality. • Countries with similar dietary habits and COVID-19 mortality clustered together. Many factors significantly influence the outcomes of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. A significant focus needs to be put on dietary habits as environmental factors since it has been deemed that imbalanced diets contribute to chronic diseases. However, not enough effort has been made in order to assess these relations. So far, studies in the field have shown that comorbid conditions influence the severity of COVID-19 symptoms in infected patients. Furthermore, COVID-19 has exhibited seasonal patterns in its spread; therefore, considering weather-related factors in the analysis of the mortality rates might introduce a more relevant explanation of the disease's progression. In this work, we provide an explainable analysis of the global risk factors for COVID-19 mortality on a national scale, considering dietary habits fused with data on past comorbidity prevalence and environmental factors such as seasonally averaged temperature geolocation, economic and development indices, undernourished and obesity rates. The innovation in this paper lies in the explainability of the obtained results and is equally essential in the data fusion methods and the broad context considered in the analysis. Apart from a country's age and gender distribution, which has already been proven to influence COVID-19 mortality rates, our empirical analysis shows that countries with imbalanced dietary habits generally tend to have higher COVID-19 mortality predictions. Ultimately, we show that the fusion of the dietary data set with the geo-economic variables provides more accurate modeling of the country-wise COVID-19 mortality rates with respect to considering only dietary habits, proving the hypothesis that fusing factors from different contexts contribute to a better descriptive analysis of the COVID-19 mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a respiratory infection caused by a coronavirus that spreads from person to person. In the present situation, the COVID-19 pandemic is a swiftly rising phase. Now the time is the second wave ending phase of coronavirus and the third wave coming phase of coronavirus in India. The pandemic situation is moving forward all over India. Nowadays, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic structure is a very hazardous situation. The COVID-19 vaccine can suppress this situation and gain preventive measures against coronavirus. In producing the COVID-19 vaccine, the Indian medical board plays a significant role. The COVID-19 vaccines have exhibited 90%–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Against COVID-19, for emergency purposes, the Indian medical board has approved three vaccines: Covishield, Covaxin, and Sputnik V. Generally, the Indian people are embarrassed about the vaccination of COVID-19. All people are thinking about which vaccine is best for them. This labyrinth can be evaluated effectively using the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique. Therefore, we have proposed a novel MCDM technique for selecting COVID-19 vaccines. The main aim of this paper is to develop an MCDM technique based on a λ -weighted ranking interpreter ( R λ + , R λ − ). The first time, we have defined positive and negative λ -weighted rank interpreter for the ranking of single-valued bipolar neutrosophic (SVbN) number. Additionally, positive and negative λ -weighted values and positive and negative λ -weighted ambiguity of an SVbN-number are formulated here. Some important, valuable theorems and corollary of SVbN-number are formulated. To show the applicability of the proposed MCDM technique, we have considered a real decision-making problem where ratings of the alternatives are with SVbN-numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global pandemic Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that threatens life of all human beings, it is of vital importance to achieve early detection of COVID-19 among symptomatic patients. In this paper, a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) model Cov-Net is proposed for accurate recognition of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images via machine vision techniques, which mainly concentrates on powerful and robust feature learning ability. In particular, a modified residual network with asymmetric convolution and attention mechanism embedded is selected as the backbone of feature extractor, after which skip-connected dilated convolution with varying dilation rates is applied to achieve sufficient feature fusion among high-level semantic and low-level detailed information. Experimental results on two public COVID-19 radiography databases have demonstrated the practicality of proposed Cov-Net in accurate COVID-19 recognition with accuracy of 0.9966 and 0.9901, respectively. Furthermore, within same experimental conditions, proposed Cov-Net outperforms other six state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms, which validates the superiority and competitiveness of Cov-Net in building highly discriminative features from the perspective of methodology. Hence, it is deemed that proposed Cov-Net has a good generalization ability so that it can be applied to other CAD scenarios. Consequently, one can conclude that this work has both practical value in providing reliable reference to the radiologist and theoretical significance in developing methods to build robust features with strong presentation ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many types of research have been carried out with the aim of combating the COVID-19 pandemic since the first outbreak was detected in Wuhan, China. Anticipating the evolution of an outbreak helps to devise suitable economic, social and health care strategies to mitigate the effects of the virus. For this reason, predicting the SARS-CoV-2 transmission rate has become one of the most important and challenging problems of the past months. In this paper, we apply a two-stage mid and long-term forecasting framework to the epidemic situation in eight districts of Andalusia, Spain. First, an analytical procedure is performed iteratively to fit polynomial curves to the cumulative curve of contagions. Then, the extracted information is used for estimating the parameters and structure of an evolutionary artificial neural network with hybrid architectures (i.e., with different basis functions for the hidden nodes) while considering single and simultaneous time horizon estimations. The results obtained demonstrate that including polynomial information extracted during the training stage significantly improves the mid- and long-term estimations in seven of the eight considered districts. The increase in average accuracy (for the joint mid- and long-term horizon forecasts) is 37.61% and 35.53% when considering the single and simultaneous forecast approaches, respectively. • Estimated polynomial model coefficients serve as COVID19 contagion rate descriptors. • EANNs are used to build valid predictors for different pandemic stages. • Considering curve polynomial descriptors significantly improve the model performances. • Simultaneous Multi-Task EANN forecast perform better in Málaga with simpler models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 has affected the lives and livelihoods of a large part of the society. Hence, to confine the rapid spread of this virus, early detection of COVID-19 is extremely important. One of the most common ways of detecting COVID-19 is by using chest X-ray images. In the literature, it is found that most of the research activities applied convolutional neural network (CNN) models where the features generated by the last convolutional layer were directly passed to the classification models. In this paper, convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) layer is used in order to encode the spatial dependency among the feature maps obtained from the last convolutional layer of the CNN and to improve the image representational capability of the model. Additionally, the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) block, a spatial attention mechanism, is used to allocate weights to important local features. These two mechanisms are employed on three popular CNN models – VGG19, InceptionV3, and MobileNet to improve their classification strength. Finally, the Sugeno fuzzy integral based ensemble method is used on these classifiers' outputs to enhance the detection accuracy further. For experiments, three chest X-ray datasets, which are very prevalent for COVID-19 detection, are considered. For all the three datasets, it is found that the results obtained by the proposed method are comparable to state-of-the-art methods. The code, along with the pre-trained models, can be found at https://github.com/colabpro123/CovidConvLSTM. • Proposed a model to classify COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Normal chest X-ray images. • Generated feature maps using three pre-trained standard deep learning models. • Improved the spatial dependency among feature maps prior to use as features. • Used squeeze-and-excitation block as a spatial attention scheme. • Utilized the Sugeno fuzzy integral based classifier ensembling technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This research revised the studies on COVID-19 pandemic in supply chain disciplines. • The impact of COVID-19 on Supply Chain Barriers in Manufacturing Sectors. • Seven major barriers that direct impact industries have been classified. • The trapezoidal neutrosophic numbers are introduced to dispose uncertainties. • A case study is proposed to illustrate the rationality of the proposed approach. The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a shadow on the global economy. Since the beginning of 2020, the pandemic has contributed significantly to the global recession. In addition to the health damages of the pandemic, the economic impacts are also severe. The consequences of such effects have pushed global supply chains toward their breaking point. Industries have faced multiple obstacles, threatening the fragile flow of raw materials, spare parts, and consumer goods. Previous studies showed that supply chain barriers have multi-faceted impacts on industries and supply chains, which demand appropriate measures. In this regard, seven major barriers that directly impact industries have been identified to determine which industry is most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper utilized a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach under a neutrosophic environment using trapezoidal neutrosophic numbers to rank those barriers. The Analytical Network Process (ANP) quantifies the effects and considers the interrelationships between the determined barriers (criteria) involved in decision-making. Subsequently, the Measurement Alternatives and Ranking according to the COmpromise Solution (MARCOS) method was adopted to rank six industries according to the impact of those barriers. Results show that the lack of inventory is the largest barrier to influencing industries, followed by the lack of manpower. Sensitivity analysis is performed to detect the change in the rank of industries according to the change in the relative importance of the barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rapid technological advances that have been made over the years, more people are changing their way of living from traditional ways of doing business to those featuring greater use of electronic resources. This transition has attracted (and continues to attract) the attention of cybercriminals, referred to in this article as "attackers", who make use of the structure of the Internet to commit cybercrimes, such as phishing, in order to trick users into revealing sensitive data, including personal information, banking and credit card details, IDs, passwords, and more important information via replicas of legitimate websites of trusted organizations. In our digital society, the COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented situation. As a result, many individuals were left vulnerable to cyberattacks while attempting to gather credible information about this alarming situation. Unfortunately, by taking advantage of this situation, specific attacks associated with the pandemic dramatically increased. Regrettably, cyberattacks do not appear to be abating. For this reason, cyber-security corporations and researchers must constantly develop effective and innovative solutions to tackle this growing issue. Although several anti-phishing approaches are already in use, such as the use of blacklists, visuals, heuristics, and other protective solutions, they cannot efficiently prevent imminent phishing attacks. In this paper, we propose machine learning models that use a limited number of features to classify COVID-19-related domain names as either malicious or legitimate. Our primary results show that a small set of carefully extracted lexical features, from domain names, can allow models to yield high scores; additionally, the number of subdomain levels as a feature can have a large influence on the predictions. • A method to detect cyberattacks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. • An efficient feature set for the fast detection of COVID-19 malicious domain names. • Knowledge of the entire URL is not required to prevent an attack. • The number of subdomains as a feature can highly influence the chosen model. • Examining the effectiveness of both batch and online learning approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Time series Covid-19 prediction problem, a case study in Vietnam. • A dual attention mechanism with RNN-based auto-encoding for handling chaotic time series prediction task. • Extensive experiments with realistic Covid-19 data in Vietnam. • Datasets and implementation source code are available for future studies. For preventing the outbreaks of Covid-19 infection in different countries, many organizations and governments have extensively studied and applied different kinds of quarantine isolation policies, medical treatments as well as organized massive/fast vaccination strategy for over-18 citizens. There are several valuable lessons have been achieved in different countries this Covid-19 battle. These studies have presented the usefulness of prompt actions in testing, isolating confirmed infectious cases from community as well as social resource planning/optimization through data-driven anticipation. In recent times, many studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of short/long-term forecasting in number of new Covid-19 cases in forms of time-series data. These predictions have directly supported to effectively optimize the available healthcare resources as well as imposing suitable policies for slowing down the Covid-19 spreads, especially in high-populated cities/regions/nations. There are several progresses of deep neural architectures, such as recurrent neural network (RNN) have demonstrated significant improvements in analyzing and learning the time-series datasets for conducting better predictions. However, most of recent RNN-based techniques are considered as unable to handle chaotic/non-smooth sequential datasets. The consecutive disturbances and lagged observations from chaotic time-series dataset like as routine Covid-19 confirmed cases have led to the low performance in temporal feature learning process through recent RNN-based models. To meet this challenge, in this paper, we proposed a novel dual attention-based sequential auto-encoding architecture, called as: DAttAE. Our proposed model supports to effectively learn and predict the new Covid-19 cases in forms of chaotic and non-smooth time series dataset. Specifically, the integration between dual self-attention mechanism in a given Bi-LSTM based auto-encoder in our proposed model supports to directly focus the model on a specific time-range sequence in order to achieve better prediction. We evaluated the performance of our proposed DAttAE model by comparing with multiple traditional and state-of-the-art deep learning-based techniques for time-series prediction task upon different real-world datasets. Experimental outputs demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed attention-based deep neural approach in comparing with state-of-the-art RNN-based architectures for time series based Covid-19 outbreak prediction task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radiological methodologies, such as chest x-rays and CT, are widely employed to help diagnose and monitor COVID-19 disease. COVID-19 displays certain radiological patterns easily detectable by X-rays of the chest. Therefore, radiologists can investigate these patterns for detecting coronavirus disease. However, this task is time-consuming and needs lots of trial and error. One of the main solutions to resolve this issue is to apply intelligent techniques such as deep learning (DL) models to automatically analyze the chest X-rays. Nevertheless, fine-tuning of architecture and hyperparameters of DL models is a complex and time-consuming procedure. In this paper, we propose an effective method to detect COVID-19 disease by applying convolutional neural network (CNN) to the chest X-ray images. To improve the accuracy of the proposed method, the last Softmax CNN layer is replaced with a K -nearest neighbors (KNN) classifier which takes into account the agreement of the neighborhood labeling. Moreover, we develop a novel evolutionary algorithm by improving the basic version of competitive swarm optimizer. To this end, three powerful evolutionary operators: Cauchy Mutation (CM), Evolutionary Boundary Constraint Handling (EBCH), and tent chaotic map are incorporated into the search process of the proposed evolutionary algorithm to speed up its convergence and make an excellent balance between exploration and exploitation phases. Then, the proposed evolutionary algorithm is used to automatically achieve the optimal values of CNN's hyperparameters leading to a significant improvement in the classification accuracy of the proposed method. Comprehensive comparative results reveal that compared with current models in the literature, the proposed method performs significantly more efficient. • A novel deep neuroevolution algorithm for detecting COVID-19 from X-ray images. • Proposing a modified version of the Competitive Swarm Optimizer algorithm. • Tuning the hyperparameters and architecture of Convolutional Neural Networks. • Producing excellent results by proposed framework comparing to 23 benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification accuracy achieved by a machine learning technique depends on the feature set used in the learning process. However, it is often found that all the features extracted by some means for a particular task do not contribute to the classification process. Feature selection (FS) is an imperative and challenging pre-processing technique that helps to discard the unnecessary and irrelevant features while reducing the computational time and space requirement and increasing the classification accuracy. Generalized Normal Distribution Optimizer (GNDO), a recently proposed meta-heuristic algorithm, can be used to solve any optimization problem. In this paper, a hybrid version of GNDO with Simulated Annealing (SA) called Binary Simulated Normal Distribution Optimizer (BSNDO) is proposed which uses SA as a local search to achieve higher classification accuracy. The proposed method is evaluated on 18 well-known UCI datasets and compared with its predecessor as well as some popular FS methods. Moreover, this method is tested on high dimensional microarray datasets to prove its worth in real-life datasets. On top of that, it is also applied to a COVID-19 dataset for classification purposes. The obtained results prove the usefulness of BSNDO as a FS method. The source code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/ahmed-shameem/Feature_selection. • A hybrid version of GNDO with Simulated Annealing is proposed. • SA is used as local search to achieve higher classification accuracy. • The proposed method is evaluated on 18 well-known UCI datasets. • The proposed method is tested on high dimensional microarray datasets. • It is also applied on a COVID-19 dataset for the classification purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared on 11th March 2020 the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic. The traditional infectious disease surveillance had failed to alert public health authorities to intervene in time and mitigate and control the COVID-19 before it became a pandemic. Compared with traditional public health surveillance, harnessing the rich data from social media, including Twitter, has been considered a useful tool and can overcome the limitations of the traditional surveillance system. This paper proposes an intelligent COVID-19 early warning system using Twitter data with novel machine learning methods. We use the natural language processing (NLP) pre-training technique, i.e., fine-tuning BERT as a Twitter classification method. Moreover, we implement a COVID-19 forecasting model through a Twitter-based linear regression model to detect early signs of the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, we develop an expert system, an early warning web application based on the proposed methods. The experimental results suggest that it is feasible to use Twitter data to provide COVID-19 surveillance and prediction in the US to support health departments' decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Face detection is a challenge in today's scenario as the people are wearing a mask. • Activities detection is computationally costly for a real-time environment. • Proposed an extended Mask R-Convolutional Network for face & activities detection. • The algorithm results achieved a high level of accuracy in detection. Face recognition has become a significant challenge today since an increasing number of individuals wear masks to avoid infection with the novel coronavirus or Covid-19. Due to its rapid proliferation, it has garnered growing attention. The technique proposed in this chapter seeks to produce unconstrained generic actions in the video. Conventional anomaly detection is difficult because computationally expensive characteristics cannot be employed directly, owing to the necessity for real-time processing. Even before activities are completely seen, they must be located and classified. This paper proposes an expanded Mask R-CNN (Ex-Mask R-CNN) architecture that overcomes these issues. High accuracy is achieved by using robust convolutional neural network (CNN)-based features. The technique consists of two steps. First, a video surveillance algorithm is employed to determine whether or not a human is wearing a mask. Second, Multi-CNN forecasts the frame's suspicious conventional abnormality of people. Experiments on tough datasets indicate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art online traditional detection of anomaly systems while maintaining the real-time efficiency of existing classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Propose an innovative Bayesian model to control the risk of COVID-19 patients. • Propose two indicators to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the model. • Provide the tool for risk assessment in the field of epidemics. In the context of the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), this paper proposes an innovative and systematic decision support model based on Bayesian networks (BNs) to identify and control the risk of COVID-19 patients spreading the virus, which requires the following three steps. First, by consulting the related literature and combining this with expert knowledge, we identify and classify the characteristics (risk factors) of COVID-19 and obtain a conceptual framework for COVID-19 Risk Assessment Bayesian Networks (CRABNs). Second, data on COVID-19 patients with expert scoring results on patient risk levels were collected from hospitals in Hubei Province of China and are used as the training set, and the structure and parameters of the CRABNs model are obtained through machine learning. Finally, we propose two indicators, namely, Model Bias and Model Accuracy, and use the remaining data to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the CRABNs model to ensure that there are no significant differences between the predicted results of the model and the actual results provided by experts who have relevant experience in treating COVID-19. At the same time, we compared the CRABNs model with the support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and k-nearest neighbour (KNN) models through four indicators: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F-score. The results suggest the reliability of the model and show that it has promising application potential. The proposed model can be used globally by doctors in hospitals as a decision support tool to improve the accuracy of assessing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms in patients. Furthermore, with the further improvement of the model in the future, it can be used for risk assessments in the field of epidemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To combat the recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), academician and clinician are in search of new approaches to predict the COVID-19 outbreak dynamic trends that may slow down or stop the pandemic. Epidemiological models like Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) and its variants are helpful to understand the dynamics trend of pandemic that may be used in decision making to optimize possible controls from the infectious disease. But these epidemiological models based on mathematical assumptions may not predict the real pandemic situation. Recently the new machine learning approaches are being used to understand the dynamic trend of COVID-19 spread. In this paper, we designed the recurrent and convolutional neural network models: vanilla LSTM, stacked LSTM, ED_LSTM, BiLSTM, CNN, and hybrid CNN+LSTM model to capture the complex trend of COVID-19 outbreak and perform the forecasting of COVID-19 daily confirmed cases of 7, 14, 21 days for India and its four most affected states (Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu). The root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) evaluation metric are computed on the testing data to demonstrate the relative performance of these models. The results show that the stacked LSTM and hybrid CNN+LSTM models perform best relative to other models. • Various variants of LSTM and CNN deep learning architectures have been designed. • Predicted COVID-19 confirmed cases for India and its four most affected states. • RMSE and MAPE are computed to compare the performance of the designed models. • Experimental results show that predicted cases are very close to actual cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Emergency department patients are classified based on their health condition. • Four classes are considered: emergent, urgent, non-urgent, self-care. • The patient's queue is optimized using a mathematical model after classification. • A real-life case study is proposed. One of the principal problems in epidemic disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic is that the number of patients needing hospitals' emergency departments' services significantly grows. Since COVID-19 is an infectious disease, any aggregation has to be prevented accordingly. However, few aggregations cannot be prevented, including hospitals. To the best of our knowledge, COVID-19 is a life-threatening disease, especially for people in poor health conditions. Therefore, it sounds reasonable to optimize the health care queuing systems to minimize the infection rate by prioritizing patients based on their health condition so patients with a higher risk of infection will leave the queue sooner. In this paper, relying on data mining models and expert's opinions, we propose a method for patient classification and prioritizing. The optimal number of servers (treatment systems) will be determined by benefiting from a mixed-integer model and the grasshopper optimization algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. • Achieved an accuracy of 99.73% and a recall of 100%. • Enhance the quality of the CT scan images using CLAHE. • Build a novel CNN for extracting the most relevant features from the CT scan images. • Develop a soft voting ensemble learning model for improving the performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 20 CNNs were trained and evaluated for COVID-19 Classification from Chest-CT scans. • EfficientNetB5 attained highest accuracy(0.976), sensitivity(0.979), & F1 score (0.977). • Model generalizes to new datasets & predicts with ∼ 0.1 s/img on GPU & ∼0.5 s on CPU. • GradCAMs localized ground-glass opacities and consolidations. • Intermediate Activation Maps demonstrated the model's learning behavior. With coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases rising rapidly, deep learning has emerged as a promising diagnosis technique. However, identifying the most accurate models to characterize COVID-19 patients is challenging because comparing results obtained with different types of data and acquisition processes is non-trivial. In this paper we designed, evaluated, and compared the performance of 20 convolutional neutral networks in classifying patients as COVID-19 positive, healthy, or suffering from other pulmonary lung infections based on chest computed tomography (CT) scans, serving as the first to consider the EfficientNet family for COVID-19 diagnosis and employ intermediate activation maps for visualizing model performance. All models are trained and evaluated in Python using 4173 chest CT images from the dataset entitled "A COVID multiclass dataset of CT scans," with 2168, 758, and 1247 images of patients that are COVID-19 positive, healthy, or suffering from other pulmonary infections, respectively. EfficientNet-B5 was identified as the best model with an F1 score of 0.9769 ± 0.0046, accuracy of 0.9759 ± 0.0048, sensitivity of 0.9788 ± 0.0055, specificity of 0.9730 ± 0.0057, and precision of 0.9751 ± 0.0051. On an alternate 2-class dataset, EfficientNetB5 obtained an accuracy of 0.9845 ± 0.0109, F1 score of 0.9599 ± 0.0251, sensitivity of 0.9682 ± 0.0099, specificity of 0.9883 ± 0.0150, and precision of 0.9526 ± 0.0523. Intermediate activation maps and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mappings offered human-interpretable evidence of the model's perception of ground-class opacities and consolidations, hinting towards a promising use-case of artificial intelligence-assisted radiology tools. With a prediction speed of under 0.1 s on GPUs and 0.5 s on CPUs, our proposed model offers a rapid, scalable, and accurate diagnostic for COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public concern detection provides potential guidance to the authorities for crisis management before or during a pandemic outbreak. Detecting people's concerns and attention from online social media platforms has been widely acknowledged as an effective approach to relieve public panic and prevent a social crisis. However, detecting concerns in time from massive volumes of information in social media turns out to be a big challenge, especially when sufficient manually labelled data is in the absence during public health emergencies, e.g., COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model to identify people's concerns and the corresponding relations based on Graph Convolutional Networks and Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory integrated with Concern Graphs. Except for the sequential features from BERT embeddings, the regional features of tweets can be extracted by the Concern Graph module, which not only benefits the concern detection but also enables our model to be high noise-tolerant. Thus, our model can address the issue of insufficient manually labelled data. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed model by using both manually labelled tweets and automatically labelled tweets. The experimental results show that our model can outperform the state-of-the-art models on real-world datasets. • The inherent features captured by concern graph for improving the model performance. • A novel deep learning model for sequential and regional dependency feature learning. • A novel end-to-end model for concerns and relations extraction. • Generic and effective concerns extraction evaluated by using real-world data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• MSA outperforms more frequently than all other methods. • GMDH is the most stable in terms of outperforming random walk (75% of cases). • The results show better forecasting performance of longer period data. • The market has been less efficient during Covid-19. This paper investigates the forecasting performance for credit default swap (CDS) spreads by Support Vector Machines (SVM), Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Markov switching autoregression (MSA) for daily CDS spreads of the 513 leading US companies, in the period 2009–2020. The goal of this study is to test the forecasting performance of these methods before and during the Covid-19 pandemic and to check whether there are changes in the market efficiency. MSA outperforms all other methods most frequently. GMDH breaks the efficient market hypothesis more frequently (75%) than other methods. The change of the relative predictability during Covid-19 is small with some increase of the advantage of the investigated methods over a benchmark. We find that the market has been less efficient during Covid-19, however, there are no huge differences in prediction performances before and during the Covid-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]