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The outbreaks of Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic have increased the pressure on healthcare and medical systems worldwide. The timely diagnosis of infected patients is a critical step to limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. The chest radiography imaging has shown to be an effective screening technique in diagnosing the COVID-19 epidemic. To reduce the pressure on radiologists and control of the epidemic, fast and accurate a hybrid deep learning framework for diagnosing COVID-19 virus in chest X-ray images is developed and termed as the COVID-CheXNet system. First, the contrast of the X-ray image was enhanced and the noise level was reduced using the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and Butterworth bandpass filter, respectively. This was followed by fusing the results obtained from two different pre-trained deep learning models based on the incorporation of a ResNet34 and high-resolution network model trained using a large-scale dataset. Herein, the parallel architecture was considered, which provides radiologists with a high degree of confidence to discriminate between the healthy and COVID-19 infected people. The proposed COVID-CheXNet system has managed to correctly and accurately diagnose the COVID-19 patients with a detection accuracy rate of 99.99%, sensitivity of 99.98%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, F1-score of 99.99%, MSE of 0.011%, and RMSE of 0.012% using the weighted sum rule at the score-level. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed COVID-CheXNet system are established along with the possibility of using it in real clinical centers for fast diagnosis and treatment supplement, with less than 2 s per image to get the prediction result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic outbreak has devastating effects on daily lives and healthcare systems worldwide. This newly recognized virus is highly transmissible, and no clinically approved vaccine or antiviral medicine is currently available. Early diagnosis of infected patients through effective screening is needed to control the rapid spread of this virus. Chest radiography imaging is an effective diagnosis tool for COVID-19 virus and follow-up. Here, a novel hybrid multimodal deep learning system for identifying COVID-19 virus in chest X-ray (CX-R) images is developed and termed as the COVID-DeepNet system to aid expert radiologists in rapid and accurate image interpretation. First, Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and Butter worth band pass ilter were applied to enhance the contrast and eliminate the noise in CX-R images, respectively. Results from two different deep learning approaches based on the incorporation of a deep belief network and a convolutional deep belief network trained from scratch using a large-scale dataset were then fused. Parallel architecture, which provides radiologists a high degree of confidence to distinguish healthy and COVID-19 infected people, was considered. The proposed COVID-DeepNet system can correctly and accurately diagnose patients with COVID-19 with a detection accuracy rate of 99.93%, sensitivity of 99.90%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, F1-score of 99.93%, MSE of 0.021%, and RMSE of 0.016%in a large-scale dataset. This system shows efficiency and accuracy and can be used in a real clinical center for the early diagnosis of COVID-19 virus and treatment follow-up with less than 3 s per image to make the final decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent face recognition systems are mainly dependent on feature representations obtained using either local handcrafted-descriptors, such as local binary patterns (LBP), or use a deep learning approach, such as deep belief network (DBN). However, the former usually suffers from the wide variations in face images, while the latter usually discards the local facial features, which are proven to be important for face recognition. In this paper, a novel framework based on merging the advantages of the local handcrafted feature descriptors with the DBN is proposed to address the face recognition problem in unconstrained conditions. Firstly, a novel multimodal local feature extraction approach based on merging the advantages of the Curvelet transform with Fractal dimension is proposed and termed the Curvelet-Fractal approach. The main motivation of this approach is that the Curvelet transform, a new anisotropic and multidirectional transform, can efficiently represent the main structure of the face (e.g., edges and curves), while the Fractal dimension is one of the most powerful texture descriptors for face images. Secondly, a novel framework is proposed, termed the multimodal deep face recognition (MDFR) framework, to add feature representations by training a DBN on top of the local feature representations instead of the pixel intensity representations. We demonstrate that representations acquired by the proposed MDFR framework are complementary to those acquired by the Curvelet-Fractal approach. Finally, the performance of the proposed approaches has been evaluated by conducting a number of extensive experiments on four large-scale face datasets: the SDUMLA-HMT, FERET, CAS-PEAL-R1, and LFW databases. The results obtained from the proposed approaches outperform other state-of-the-art of approaches (e.g., LBP, DBN, WPCA) by achieving new state-of-the-art results on all the employed datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]