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COVID-19 is one of the greatest challenges humanity has faced recently, forcing a change in the daily lives of billions of people worldwide. Therefore, many efforts have been made by researchers across the globe in the attempt of determining the models of COVID-19 spread. The objectives of this review are to analyze some of the open-access datasets mostly used in research in the field of COVID-19 regression modeling as well as present current literature based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for regression tasks, like disease spread. Moreover, we discuss the applicability of Machine Learning (ML) and Evolutionary Computing (EC) methods that have focused on regressing epidemiology curves of COVID-19, and provide an overview of the usefulness of existing models in specific areas. An electronic literature search of the various databases was conducted to develop a comprehensive review of the latest AI-based approaches for modeling the spread of COVID-19. Finally, a conclusion is drawn from the observation of reviewed papers that AI-based algorithms have a clear application in COVID-19 epidemiological spread modeling and may be a crucial tool in the combat against coming pandemics.

Estimation of the epidemiology curve for the COVID-19 pandemic can be a very computationally challenging task. Thus far, there have been some implementations of artificial intelligence (AI) methods applied to develop epidemiology curve for a specific country. However, most applied AI methods generated models that are almost impossible to translate into a mathematical equation. In this paper, the AI method called genetic programming (GP) algorithm is utilized to develop a symbolic expression (mathematical equation) which can be used for the estimation of the epidemiology curve for the entire U.S. with high accuracy. The GP algorithm is utilized on the publicly available dataset that contains the number of confirmed, deceased and recovered patients for each U.S. state to obtain the symbolic expression for the estimation of the number of the aforementioned patient groups. The dataset consists of the latitude and longitude of the central location for each state and the number of patients in each of the goal groups for each day in the period of 22nd January 2020-3rd December 2020. The obtained symbolic expressions for each state are summed up to obtain symbolic expressions for estimation of each of the patient groups (confirmed, deceased and recovered). These symbolic expressions are combined to obtain the symbolic expression for the estimation of the epidemiology curve for the entire U.S. The obtained symbolic expressions for the estimation of the number of confirmed, deceased and recovered patients for each state achieved R2 score in the ranges 0.9406-0.9992, 0.9404-0.9998 and 0.9797-0.99955, respectively. These equations are summed up to formulate symbolic expressions for the estimation of the number of confirmed, deceased and recovered patients for the entire U.S. with achieved R2 score of 0.9992, 0.9997 and 0.9996, respectively. Using these symbolic expressions, the equation for the estimation of the epidemiology curve for the entire U.S. is formulated which achieved R2 score of 0.9933. Investigation showed that GP algorithm can produce symbolic expressions for the estimation of the number of confirmed, recovered and deceased patients as well as the epidemiology curve not only for the states but for the entire U.S. with very high accuracy.

Simple Summary: An established dataset of histopathology images obtained by biopsy and reviewed by two pathologists is used to create a two-stage oral squamous cell carcinoma diagnostic AI-based system. In the first stage, automated multiclass grading of OSCC is performed to improve the objectivity and reproducibility of histopathological examination. Furthermore, in the second stage, semantic segmentation of OSCC on epithelial and stromal tissue is performed in order to assist the clinician in discovering new informative features. Proposed AI-system based on deep convolutional neural networks and preprocessing methods achieved satisfactory results in terms of multiclass grading and segmenting. This research is the first step in analysing the tumor microenvironment, i.e., tumor-stroma ratio and segmentation of the microenvironment cells. Oral squamous cell carcinoma is most frequent histological neoplasm of head and neck cancers, and although it is localized in a region that is accessible to see and can be detected very early, this usually does not occur. The standard procedure for the diagnosis of oral cancer is based on histopathological examination, however, the main problem in this kind of procedure is tumor heterogeneity where a subjective component of the examination could directly impact patient-specific treatment intervention. For this reason, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are widely used as computational aid in the diagnosis for classification and segmentation of tumors, in order to reduce inter- and intra-observer variability. In this research, a two-stage AI-based system for automatic multiclass grading (the first stage) and segmentation of the epithelial and stromal tissue (the second stage) from oral histopathological images is proposed in order to assist the clinician in oral squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis. The integration of Xception and SWT resulted in the highest classification value of 0.963 (σ = 0.042) AUCmacro and 0.966 (σ = 0.027) AUCmicro while using DeepLabv3+ along with Xception_65 as backbone and data preprocessing, semantic segmentation prediction resulted in 0.878 (σ = 0.027) mIOU and 0.955 (σ = 0.014) F1 score. Obtained results reveal that the proposed AI-based system has great potential in the diagnosis of OSCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]