Search

Introduction: In humanity's ongoing fight against its common enemy of COVID-19, researchers have been relentless in finding efficient technologies to support mitigation, diagnosis, management, contact tracing, and ultimately vaccination., Objectives: Engineers and computer scientists have deployed the potent properties of deep learning models (DLMs) in COVID-19 detection and diagnosis. However, publicly available datasets are often adulterated during collation, transmission, or storage. Meanwhile, inadequate, and corrupted data are known to impact the learnability and efficiency of DLMs., Methods: This study focuses on enhancing previous efforts via two multimodal diagnostic systems to extract required features for COVID-19 detection using adulterated chest X-ray images. Our proposed DLM consists of a hierarchy of convolutional and pooling layers that are combined to support efficient COVID-19 detection using chest X-ray images. Additionally, a batch normalization layer is used to curtail overfitting that usually arises from the convolution and pooling (CP) layers., Results: In addition to matching the performance of standard techniques reported in the literature, our proposed diagnostic systems attain an average accuracy of 98% in the detection of normal, COVID-19, and viral pneumonia cases using corrupted and noisy images., Conclusions: Such robustness is crucial for real-world applications where data is usually unavailable, corrupted, or adulterated., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Authors.)

Traditional methods for behavior detection of distracted drivers are not capable of capturing driver behavior features related to complex temporal features. With the goal to improve transportation safety and to reduce fatal accidents on roads, this research article presents a Hybrid Scheme for the Detection of Distracted Driving called HSDDD. This scheme is based on a strategy of aggregating handcrafted and deep CNN features. HSDDD is based on three-tiered architecture. The three tiers are named as Coordination tier, Concatenation tier and Classification tier. We first obtain HOG features by using handcrafted algorithms, and then at the coordination tier, we leverage four deep CNN models including AlexNet, Inception V3, Resnet50 and VGG-16 for extracting DCNN features. DCNN extracted features are fused with HOG extracted features at the Concatenation tier. Then PCA is used as a feature selection technique. PCA takes both the extracted features and removes the redundant and irrelevant information, and it improves the classification performance. After feature fusion and feature selection, the two classifiers, KNN and SVM, at the Classification tier take the selected features and classify the ten classes of distracted driving behaviors. We evaluate our proposed scheme and observe its performance by using the accuracy metrics.

Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G are enabling intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). ITSs promise to improve road safety in smart cities. Therefore, ITSs are gaining earnest devotion in the industry as well as in academics. Due to the rapid increase in population, vehicle numbers are increasing, resulting in a large number of road accidents. The majority of the time, casualties are not appropriately discovered and reported to hospitals and relatives. This lack of rapid care and first aid might result in life loss in a matter of minutes. To address all of these challenges, an intelligent system is necessary. Although several information communication technologies (ICT)-based solutions for accident detection and rescue operations have been proposed, these solutions are not compatible with all vehicles and are also costly. Therefore, we proposed a reporting and accident detection system (RAD) for a smart city that is compatible with any vehicle and less expensive. Our strategy aims to improve the transportation system at a low cost. In this context, we developed an android application that collects data related to sound, gravitational force, pressure, speed, and location of the accident from the smartphone. The value of speed helps to improve the accident detection accuracy. The collected information is further processed for accident identification. Additionally, a navigation system is designed to inform the relatives, police station, and the nearest hospital. The hospital dispatches UAV (i.e., drone with first aid box) and ambulance to the accident spot. The actual dataset from the Road Safety Open Repository is used for results generation through simulation. The proposed scheme shows promising results in terms of accuracy and response time as compared to existing techniques.

In this paper, we will propose a novel system for remote detecting COVID-19 patients based on artificial intelligence technology and internet of things (IoT) in order to stop the virus spreading at an early stage. In this work, we will focus on connecting several sensors to work together as a system that can discover people infected with the Coronavirus remotely, this will reduce the spread of the disease. The proposed system consists of several devices called smart medical sensors such as: pulse, thermal monitoring, and blood sensors . The system is working sequentially starting by pulse sensor and end by blood sensor including an algorithm to manage the data given from sensors. The pulse sensor is devoted to acquire a high quality data using a smartphone equipped by a mobile dermatoscope with 20× magnification. The processing is used RGB color system to perform moving window to segment regions of interest (ROIs) as inputs of the heart rate estimation algorithm. The heart rate (HR) estimation is then given by computing the dominant frequency by identifying the most prominent peak of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) technique. The thermal monitoring is used for fever detection using a smart camera that can provide an optimum solution for fever detection. The infrared sensor can quickly measure surface temperature without making any contact with a person's skin. A blood sensor is used to measure percentages of white, red blood (WBCs, RBCs) volume and platelets non-invasively using the bioimpedance analysis and independent component analysis (ICA). The proposed sensor consists of two electrodes which can be used to send the current to the earlobe and measure the produced voltage. A mathematical model was modified to describe the impedance of earlobe in different frequencies (i.e., low, medium, and high). The COMSOL model is used to simulate blood electrical properties and frequencies to measure WBCs, RBCs and Platelets volume. These devices are collected to work automatically without user interaction for remote checking the coronavirus patients. The proposed system is experimented by six examples to prove its applicability and efficiency., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2021 The Author(s).)

Seizure is an abnormal electrical activity of the brain. Neurologists can diagnose the seizure using several methods such as neurological examination, blood tests, computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG). Medical data, such as the EEG signal, usually includes a number of features and attributes that do not contains important information. This paper proposes an automatic seizure classification system based on extracting the most significant EEG features for seizure diagnosis. The proposed algorithm consists of five steps. The first step is the channel selection to minimize dimensionality by selecting the most affected channels using the variance parameter. The second step is the feature extraction to extract the most relevant features, 11 features, from the selected channels. The third step is to average the 11 features extracted from each channel. Next, the fourth step is the classification of the average features using the classification step. Finally, cross-validation and testing the proposed algorithm by dividing the dataset into training and testing sets. This paper presents a comparative study of seven classifiers. These classifiers were tested using two different methods: random case testing and continuous case testing. In the random case process, the KNN classifier had greater precision, specificity, positive predictability than the other classifiers. Still, the ensemble classifier had a higher sensitivity and a lower miss-rate (2.3%) than the other classifiers. For the continuous case test method, the ensemble classifier had higher metric parameters than the other classifiers. In addition, the ensemble classifier was able to detect all seizure cases without any mistake.

Textile wastewater contains large quantities of azo dyes mixed with various contaminants especially heavy metal ions. The discharge of effluents containing methyl orange (MO) dye and Cu 2+ ions into water is harmful because they have severe toxic effects to humans and the aquatic ecosystem. The dried algal biomass was used as a sustainable, cost-effective and eco-friendly for the treatment of the textile wastewater. Box-Behnken design (BBD) was used to identify the most significant factors for achieving maximum biosorption of Cu 2+ and MO from aqueous solutions using marine alga Fucus vesiculosus biomass. The experimental results indicated that 3 g/L of F. vesiculosus biomass was capable of removing 92.76% of copper and 50.27% of MO simultaneously from aqueous solution using MO (60 mg/L), copper (200 mg/L) at pH 7 within 60 min with agitation at 200 rpm. The dry biomass was also investigated using SEM, EDS, and FTIR before and after MO and copper biosorption. FTIR, EDS and SEM analyses revealed obvious changes in the characteristics of the algal biomass as a result of the biosorption process. The dry biomass of F. vesiculosus can eliminate MO and copper ions from aquatic effluents in a feasible and efficient method.

Background: Breast cancer is considered as one of the most perilous sickness among females worldwide and the ratio of new cases is increasing yearly. Many researchers have proposed efficient algorithms to diagnose breast cancer at early stages, which have increased the efficiency and performance by utilizing the learned features of gold standard histopathological images., Objective: Most of these systems have either used traditional handcrafted or deep features, which had a lot of noise and redundancy, and ultimately decrease the performance of the system., Methods: A hybrid approach is proposed by fusing and optimizing the properties of handcrafted and deep features to classify the breast cancer images. HOG and LBP features are serially fused with pre-trained models VGG19 and InceptionV3. PCR and ICR are used to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed method., Results: The method concentrates on histopathological images to classify the breast cancer. The performance is compared with the state-of-the-art techniques, where an overall patient-level accuracy of 97.2% and image-level accuracy of 96.7% is recorded., Conclusion: The proposed hybrid method achieves the best performance as compared to previous methods and it can be used for the intelligent healthcare systems and early breast cancer detection., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)

The gait speed affects the gait patterns (biomechanical and spatiotemporal parameters) of distinct age populations. Classification of normal, slow and fast walking is fundamental for understanding the effects of gait speed on the gait patterns and for proper evaluation of alternations associated with it. In this study, we extracted multimodal features such as time domain and entropy-based complexity measures from stride interval signals of healthy subjects moving with normal, slow and fast speeds. The classification between different gait speeds was performed using machine learning classifiers such as classification and regression tree (CART), support vector machine linear (SVM-L), Naïve Bayes, neural network, and ensemble classifiers (random forest (RF), XG boost, averaged neural network (AVNET)). The performance was evaluated in term of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), p-value, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). To distinguish the slow and normal gait walking, the highest performance was yielded in terms of accuracy (100%), p-value (0.004), and AUC (1.00) using RF, XGB-L followed by XGB-Tree with accuracy (88%), p-value (0.04) and AUC (1.00). To classify the fast and normal walking, the highest performance was obtained with accuracy (88%), p-value (0.04) using XGB-L, XGB-Tree and AVNET. The highest AUC (0.94) was obtained using NB. To discriminate the fast and slow gait walking, the highest performance was obtained using SVM-R, NNET, RF, AVNET with accuracy (88%), p-value (0.04) and AUC (0.94) using RF and AUC (0.96) using XGB-L.

In this study, we ranked the Multimodal Features extracted from Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) and Normal Sinus Rhythm (NSR) subjects. We categorized the ranked features into 1 to 5 categories based on Empirical Receiver Operating Characteristics (EROC) values. Instead of using all multimodal features, we use high ranking features for detection of CHF and normal subjects. We employed powerful machine learning techniques such as Decision Tree (DT), Naïve Bayes (NB), SVM Gaussian, SVM RBF and SVM Polynomial. The performance was measured in terms of Sensitivity, Specificity, Positive Predictive Value (PPV), Negative Predictive Value (NPV), Accuracy, False Positive Rate (FPR), and area under the Receiver Operating characteristic Curve (AUC). The highest detection performance in terms of accuracy and AUC was obtained with all multimodal features using SVM Gaussian with Sensitivity (93.06%), Specificity (81.82%), Accuracy (88.79%) and AUC (0.95). Using the top five ranked features, the highest performance was obtained with SVM Gaussian yields accuracy (84.48%), AUC (0.86); top nine ranked features using Decision Tree and Naïve Bayes got accuracy (84.48%), AUC (0.88); last thirteen ranked features using SVM polynomial obtained accuracy (80.17%), AUC (0.84). The findings indicate that proposed approach with feature ranking can be very useful for automatic detection of congestive heart failure patients and can be very helpful for further decision making by the clinicians and physicians in order to decrease the mortality rate.

Cancer identification and classification from histopathological images of the breast depends greatly on experts, and computer-aided diagnosis can play an important role in disagreement of experts. This automatic process has increased the accuracy of the classification at a reduced cost. The advancement in Convolution Neural Network (CNN) structure has outperformed the traditional approaches in biomedical imaging applications. One of the limiting factors of CNN is it uses spatial image features only for classification. The spectral features from the transform domain have equivalent importance in the complex image classification algorithm. This paper proposes a new CNN structure to classify the histopathological cancer images based on integrating the spectral features obtained using a multi-resolution wavelet transform with the spatial features of CNN. In addition, batch normalization process is used after every layer in the convolution network to improve the poor convergence problem of CNN and the deep layers of CNN are trained with spectral-spatial features. The proposed structure is tested on malignant histology images of the breast for both binary and multi-class classification of tissue using the BreaKHis Dataset and the Breast Cancer Classification Challenge 2015 Datasest. Experimental results show that the combination of spectral-spatial features improves classification accuracy of the CNN network and requires less training parameters in comparison with the well known models (i.e., VGG16 and ALEXNET). The proposed structure achieves an average accuracy of 97.58% and 97.45% with 7.6 million training parameters on both datasets, respectively.

Several investigations have focused on studying the suppressing influence of Salvadora persica (miswak) on oral microbes; however, studies regarding its fungicidal activity versus human aspergillosis-related illness are still scarce. The current research was designed to evaluate the fungicidal action of S persica aquatic root extract in terms of radial growth rate and inhibition zone (IZO) versus 3 pathogenic Aspergillus species, namely, A nige r, A flavus , and A fumigatus in vitro. The results revealed that the plant extract (50 and 100 mg/mL) exhibited a prohibiting influence on the growth of the tested fungal species. The high concentration (100 mg/mL) of the plant extract was efficient in prohibiting the growing rate of the tested Aspergillus species after 6 days exposure period. Aspergillus niger and A flavus showed the largest inhibition ratios (60% and 54.4%, respectively) and IZO (33.00 ± 0.05 mm and 25.50 ± 0.18 mm, respectively) versus the control counterparts. Aspergillus fumigatus showed the minimum inhibition ratio (39%) and IZO (20.31 ± 0.05). The present data showed that the extract of S persica possesses potential fungicidal influence versus the tested pathogenic Aspergillus species and this may support the utilization of this extract as a promising antifungal agent versus aspergillosis., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2019.)

Background: Digital images are captured using sensors during the data acquisition phase, where they are often contaminated by noise (an undesired random signal). Such noise can also be produced during transmission or by poor-quality lossy image compression. Reducing the noise and enhancing the images are considered the central process to all other digital image processing tasks. The improvement in the performance of image denoising methods would contribute greatly on the results of other image processing techniques. Patch-based denoising methods recently have merged as the state-of-the-art denoising approaches for various additive noise levels. In this work, the use of the state-of-the-art patch-based denoising methods for additive noise reduction is investigated. Various types of image datasets are addressed to conduct this study., Methods: We first explain the type of noise in digital images and discuss various image denoising approaches, with a focus on patch-based denoising methods. Then, we experimentally evaluate both quantitatively and qualitatively the patch-based denoising methods. The patch-based image denoising methods are analyzed in terms of quality and computational time., Results: Despite the sophistication of patch-based image denoising approaches, most patch-based image denoising methods outperform the rest. Fast patch similarity measurements produce fast patch-based image denoising methods., Conclusion: Patch-based image denoising approaches can effectively reduce noise and enhance images. Patch-based image denoising approach is the state-of-the-art image denoising approach., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2017.)