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Around the world, lung disease is a prevalent cause of death and illness. In this article, we propose a lung disease detection system for the automated identification of critical lung diseases: 1. Tuberculosis 2. Regular Pneumonia 3. COVID Pneumonia and healthy individuals from chest X-ray (CXR) images. The proposed system incorporates a two-stage classification method using an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We evaluated the performance of the proposed system using various evaluation metrics with a test set containing 200 normal, 100 Tuberculosis, 200 Regular Pneumonia, and 100 COVID Pneumonia (a total of 600) CXR images. The proposed system achieves an average macro precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.99 and an accuracy of 0.99. The performance of the proposed system based on F1-Score (0.99) for three classes, namely Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, and COVID, is better than the following existing classification frameworks: ensemble of K-ResNets for the same three classes (F1-Score: 0.84), modified ResNet50 (F1-Score:0.89), KNN classifier with fractional multi-channel exponent moments (F1-Score: 0.89), VGG-16 (F1-Score: 0.89), and convolutional sparse support estimator network (F1-Score for COVID: 0.78). The proposed system can also determine the confidence associated with the challenging classification of Regular Vs. COVID Pneumonia. We also utilized visualization techniques like Grad-CAM and Saliency maps to analyze the features learned by the CNNs, to create transparency in the prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning architectures are the state-of-the-art in image-based pattern recognition applications. The receptive filter fields in convolutional layers are learned from training data patterns automatically during classifier learning. There are number of well-defined, well-studied and proven filters in the literature that can extract informative content from the input patterns. This paper focuses on utilizing scattering transform-based wavelet filters as the first-layer convolutional filters in CNN architecture. The scattering networks are generated by a series of scattering transform operations. The scattering coefficients generated in first few layers are effective in capturing the dominant energy contained in the input data patterns. The present work aims at replacing the first-layer convolutional feature maps in CNN architecture with scattering feature maps. This architecture is equivalent to utilizing scattering wavelet filters as the first-layer receptive fields in CNN architecture. The proposed hybrid CNN architecture experiments the Malayalam handwritten character recognition which is one of the challenging multi-class classification problems. The initial studies confirm that the proposed hybrid CNN architecture based on scattering feature maps could perform better than the equivalent self-learning architecture of CNN on handwritten character recognition problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pneumonia is an acute respiratory infection caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi and has become very common in children ranging from 1 to 5 years of age. Common symptoms of pneumonia include difficulty breathing due to inflamed or pus and fluid-filled alveoli. The United Nations Children's Fund reports nearly 800,000 deaths in children due to pneumonia. Delayed diagnosis and overpriced tests are the prime reason for the high mortality rate, especially in underdeveloped countries. A time and cost-efficient diagnosis tool: Chest X-rays, was thus accepted as the standard diagnostic test for pediatric pneumonia. However, the lower radiation levels for diagnosis in children make the task much more onerous and time-consuming. The mentioned challenges initiate the need for a computer-aided detection model that is instantaneous and accurate. Our work proposes a stacked ensemble learning of deep learning-based features for pediatric pneumonia classification. The extracted features from the global average pooling layer of the fine-tuned Xception model pretrained on ImageNet weights are sent to the Kernel Principal Component Analysis for dimensionality reduction. The dimensionally reduced features are further trained and validated on the stacking classifier. The stacking classifier consists of two stages; the first stage uses the Random-Forest classifier, K-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, XGB classifier, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Nu-SVC, and MLP classifier. The second stage operates on Logistic Regression using the first stage predictions for the final classification with Stratified K-fold cross-validation to prevent overfitting. The model was tested on the publicly available pediatric pneumonia dataset, achieving an accuracy of 98.3%, precision of 99.29%, recall of 98.36%, F1-score of 98.83%, and an AUC score of 98.24%. The performance shows its reliability for real-time deployment in assisting radiologists and physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NLP and Machine Translation tools are upcoming areas of study in the field of Computational Linguistics. The development of Language technology and its growth leads to the need for the detailed study of computational aspect of Language and especially for those who mastered the field of Technology. This paper tends to create a basic reference tools for those students and researchers who are interested in Computational Linguistics and also give some basic idea of every tool used to develop such software tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybercriminals use domain generation algorithms (DGAs) to prevent their servers from being potentially blacklisted or shut down. Existing reverse engineering techniques for DGA detection is labor intensive, extremely time-consuming, prone to human errors, and have significant limitations. Hence, an automated real-time technique with a high detection rate is warranted in such applications. In this article, we present a novel technique to detect randomly generated domain names and domain name system (DNS) homograph attacks without the need for any reverse engineering or using nonexistent domain (NXDomain) inspection using deep learning. We provide an extensive evaluation of our model over four large, real-world, publicly available datasets. We further investigate the robustness of our model against three different adversarial attacks: DeepDGA, CharBot, and MaskDGA. Our evaluation demonstrates that our method is effectively able to identify DNS homograph attacks and DGAs and also is resilient to common evading cyberattacks. Promising results show that our approach provides a more effective detection rate with an accuracy of 0.99. Additionally, the performance of our model is compared against the most popular deep learning architectures. Our findings highlight the essential need for more robust detection models to counter adversarial learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pediatric pneumonia has drawn immense awareness due to the high mortality rates over recent years. The acute respiratory infection caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi infects the lung region and hinders oxygen transport, making breathing difficult due to inflamed or pus and fluid-filled alveoli. Being non-invasive and painless, chest X-rays are the most common modality for pediatric pneumonia diagnosis. However, the low radiation levels for diagnosis in children make accurate detection challenging. This challenge initiates the need for an unerring computer-aided diagnosis model. Our work proposes Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization for image enhancement and a stacking classifier based on the fusion of deep learning-based features for pediatric pneumonia diagnosis. The extracted features from the global average pooling layers of the fine-tuned MobileNet, DenseNet121, DenseNet169, and DenseNet201 are concatenated for the final classification using a stacked ensemble classifier. The stacking classifier uses Support Vector Classifier, Nu-SVC, Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest Classifier, Gaussian Naïve Bayes, AdaBoost classifier, Bagging Classifier, and Extra-trees Classifier for the first stage, and Nu-SVC as the meta-classifier. The stacking classifier validated using Stratified K-Fold cross-validation achieves an accuracy of 98.62%, precision of 98.99%, recall of 99.53%, F1 score of 99.26%, and an AUC score of 93.17% on the publicly available pediatric pneumonia dataset. We expect this model to greatly help the real-time diagnosis of pediatric pneumonia., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest/competing interestsThe authors declare no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)

A novel approach of preprocessing EEG signals by generating spectrum image for effective Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based classification for Motor Imaginary (MI) recognition is proposed. The approach involves extracting the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) modes of EEG signals, from which the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of all the modes are arranged to form EEG spectrum images. The EEG spectrum images generated are provided as input image to CNN. The two generic CNN architectures for MI classification (EEGNet and DeepConvNet) and the architectures for pattern recognition (AlexNet and LeNet) are used in this study. Among the four architectures, EEGNet provides average accuracies of 91.37%, 94.41%, 85.67% and 90.21% for the four datasets used to validate the proposed approach. Consistently better results in comparison with results in recent literature demonstrate that the EEG spectrum image generation using VMD-STFT is a promising method for the time frequency analysis of EEG signals., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAll authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering 2021.)

Segmentation of fundamental heart sounds-S1 and S2 is important for automated monitoring of cardiac activity including diagnosis of the heart diseases. This pa-per proposes a novel hybrid method for S1 and S2 heart sound segmentation using group sparsity denoising and variation mode decomposition (VMD) technique. In the proposed method, the measured phonocardiogram (PCG) signals are denoised using group sparsity algorithm by exploiting the group sparse (GS) property of PCG signals. The denoised GS-PCG signals are then decomposed into subsequent modes with specific spectral characteristics using VMD algorithm. The appropriate mode for further processing is selected based on mode central frequencies and mode energy. It is then followed by the extraction of Hilbert envelope (HEnv) and a thresholding on the selected mode to segment S1 and S2 heart sounds. The performance advantage of the proposed method is verified using PCG signals from benchmark databases namely eGeneralMedical, Littmann, Washington, and Michigan. The proposed hybrid algorithm has achieved a sensitivity of 100%, positive predictivity of 98%, accuracy of 98% and detection error rate of 1.5%. The promising results obtained suggest that proposed approach can be considered for automated heart sound segmentation., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering 2019.)