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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is widespread throughout the world and poses a serious threat to public health and safety. A COVID-19 infection can be recognized using computed tomography (CT) scans. To enhance the categorization, some image segmentation techniques are presented to extract regions of interest from COVID-19 CT images. Multi-level thresholding (MLT) is one of the simplest and most effective image segmentation approaches, especially for grayscale images like CT scan images. Traditional image segmentation methods use histogram approaches; however, these approaches encounter some limitations. Now, swarm intelligence inspired meta-heuristic algorithms have been applied to resolve MLT, deemed an NPhard optimization task. Despite the advantages of using meta-heuristics to solve global optimization tasks, each approach has its own drawbacks. However, the common flaw for most meta-heuristic algorithms is that they are unable to maintain the diversity of their population during the search, which means they might not always converge to the global optimum. This study proposes a cooperative swarm intelligence-based MLT image segmentation approach that hybridizes the advantages of parallel meta-heuristics and MLT for developing an efficient image segmentation method for COVID-19 CT images. An efficient cooperative model-based meta-heuristic called the CPGH is developed based on three practical algorithms: particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), and Harris hawks optimization (HHO). In the cooperative model, the applied algorithms are executed concurrently, and a number of potential solutions are moved across their populations through a procedure called migration after a set number of generations. The CPGH model can solve the image segmentation problem using MLT image segmentation. The proposed CPGH is evaluated using three objective functions, cross-entropy, Otsu's, and Tsallis, over the COVID-19 CT images selected from open-sourced datasets. Various evaluation metrics covering peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and universal quality image index (UQI) were employed to quantify the segmentation quality. The overall ranking results of the segmentation quality metrics indicate that the performance of the proposed CPGH is better than conventional PSO, GWO, and HHO algorithms and other state-of-the-art methods for MLT image segmentation. On the tested COVID-19 CT images, the CPGH offered an average PSNR of 24.8062, SSIM of 0.8818, and UQI of 0.9097 using 20 thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fruits of Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck var. Valencia contain hesperidin as a major flavanone glycoside. Hesperidin (H) was isolated from the peels of Valencia orange and formulated as hexosomal nanodispersions (F1) adopting the hot emulsification method. The antimycobacterial activity(anti-TB) was evaluated through a microplate Alamar blue (MABA) assay where F1 showed significant activity with MIC = 0.19 µM. To unravel the potential mechanism of the anti-TB, a molecular docking study of H using the Mycobacterial Dihydrofolate reductase (Mtb. DHFR) enzyme was performed. Hesperidin exhibited significant interactions with Mtb. DHFR active site. Sulforhodamine B assay was applied to evaluate cytotoxic activity against the lung cancer cell line (A-549). F1 showed a cytotoxic effect at IC50= 33 µM. It also has potent antiviral activity against Human Coronavirus 229E with IC50= 258.8 μM utilising crystal violet assay. Peels of Valencia orange could be a source of bioactive metabolites to control significant diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bladder cancer (BC) diagnosis presents a critical challenge in biomedical research, necessitating accurate tumor classification from diverse datasets for effective treatment planning. This paper introduces a novel wrapper feature selection (FS) method that leverages a hybrid optimization algorithm combining Orthogonal Learning (OL) with a rime optimization algorithm (RIME), termed mRIME. The mRIME algorithm is designed to avoid local optima, streamline the search process, and select the most relevant features without compromising classifier performance. It also introduces mRIME-SVM, a novel hybrid model integrating modified mRIME for FS with Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. The mRIME algorithm is employed as an FS method and is also utilized to fine-tune the hyperparameters of it the It SVM, enhancing the overall classification accuracy. Specifically, mRIME navigates complex search spaces to optimize FS without compromising classifier performance. Evaluated on eight diverse BC datasets, mRIME-SVM outperforms popular metaheuristic algorithms, ensuring precise and reliable diagnostic outcomes. Moreover, the proposed mRIME was employed for tackling global optimization problems. It has been thoroughly assessed using the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2022 (CEC'2022) test suite. Comparative analyzes with Gray wolf optimization (GWO), Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Harris hawks optimization (HHO), Golden Jackal Optimization (GJO), Hunger Game optimization algorithm (HGS), Sinh Cosh Optimizer (SCHO), and the original RIME highlight mRIME's competitiveness and efficacy across diverse optimization tasks. Leveraging mRIME's success, mRIME-SVM achieves high classification accuracy on nine BC datasets, surpassing existing models. Results underscore mRIME's competitiveness and applicability across diverse optimization tasks, extending its utility to enhance BC classification. This study contributes to advancing BC diagnostics with a robust computational framework, promising broader applications in bioinformatics and AI-driven medical research., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors have declared that there are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)