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Background: COVID-19 pandemic has indeed plunged the global community especially African countries into an alarming difficult situation culminating into a great deal amounts of catastrophes such as economic recession, political instability and loss of jobs. The pandemic spreads exponentially and causes loss of lives. Following the outbreak of the omicron new variant of concern, forecasting and identification of the COVID-19 infection cases is very vital for government at various levels. Hence, having knowledge of the spread at a particular point in time, swift actions can be taken by government at various levels with a view to accordingly formulate new policies and modalities towards minimizing the trajectory of the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic to both public health and economic sectors., Methods: Here, a potent combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) learning algorithm along with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) learning algorithm has been proposed in this work in order to produce a hybrid of a deep learning algorithm Convolutional Neural Network - Long Short Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) for forecasting COVID-19 infection cases particularly in Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana. Forecasting models for COVID-19 infection cases in Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana, were developed for 10 days using deep learning-based approaches namely CNN, LSTM and CNN-LSTM deep learning algorithm respectively., Results: The models were evaluated on the basis of four standard performance evaluation metrics which include accuracy, MSE, MAE and RMSE respectively. However, the CNN-LSTM deep learning-based forecasting model achieved the best accuracy of 98.30%, 97.60%, and 97.74% for Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana respectively; and in the same manner, achieved lesser MSE, MAE and RMSE values compared to models developed with CNN and LSTM respectively., Conclusions: Taken together, the CNN-LSTM deep learning-based forecasting model for COVID-19 infection cases in Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana dramatically surpasses the two other DL based forecasting models (CNN and LSTM) for COVID-19 infection cases in Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana in terms of not only the best accuracy of with 98.30%, 97.60%, and 97.74% but also in terms of lesser MSE, MAE and RMSE., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine (IUPESM) 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) 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.)

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the commonest type of heart disease and over 80% of the deaths resulted from the diseases occurred in developing countries including Nigeria, with majority being in those victims are below 70 years of age. Though, CAD is not a well known disease in Nigeria but however in year 2014, 2.82% of the total of deaths occurred in the country were due to the disease. In this study, a machine leaning predictive models for CAD has been developed with diagnostic CAD dataset obtained in the two General Hospitals in Kano State-Nigeria. The dataset applied on machine learning algorithms which include support vector machine, K nearest neighbor, random tree, Naïve Bayes, gradient boosting and logistic regression algorithms to build the predictive models and the models were evaluated based accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and receiver operating curve (ROC) performance evaluation techniques. In terms of accuracy random forest-based machine learning model emerged to be the best model with 92.04%, for specificity Naive Bayes based machine learning model emerged to be the best model with 92.40%, while for sensitivity support vector machine based machine learning model emerged to be the best model with 87.34% and for ROC, random forest-based machine learning model emerged to be the best model with 92.20%. The decision tree generated with random forest machine learning algorithm which happened to be best model in terms accuracy and ROC can be converted into production rules and be used develop expert system for diagnosis of CAD patients in Nigeria., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2021.)

Expert system is an artificial intelligence based system that imitates the decision making ability of human and it is used as the diagnostic tool for many diseases including diabetes mellitus, COVID-19, cancers, coronary artery disease (CAD), among other diseases. Even though CAD is globally one of the deadliest diseases and it is not well known in Nigeria, it causes many deaths as such in 2014, 53,836 or 2.82% of total deaths in Nigeria resulted from the CAD. In this study, fuzzy based expert system for diagnosis of CAD is developed in order to provide the complementary diagnostic tools for diagnosis of CAD's patients in Nigeria. The improved C4.5 data mining algorithm is used to transfer the knowledge of human expert to the knowledge base on the expert system instead of using conventional techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, etc. Taken together, the performance evaluation system was carried out, and the system has an overall accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 94.55%, 95.35% and 95.00% respectively; which show that, the system is reliable and capable of diagnosing both negative and positive cases of CAD patients efficiently., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (© IUPESM and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021.)

COVID-19 or 2019-nCoV is no longer pandemic but rather endemic, with more than 651,247 people around world having lost their lives after contracting the disease. Currently, there is no specific treatment or cure for COVID-19, and thus living with the disease and its symptoms is inevitable. This reality has placed a massive burden on limited healthcare systems worldwide especially in the developing nations. Although neither an effective, clinically proven antiviral agents' strategy nor an approved vaccine exist to eradicate the COVID-19 pandemic, there are alternatives that may reduce the huge burden on not only limited healthcare systems but also the economic sector; the most promising include harnessing non-clinical techniques such as machine learning, data mining, deep learning and other artificial intelligence. These alternatives would facilitate diagnosis and prognosis for 2019-nCoV pandemic patients. Supervised machine learning models for COVID-19 infection were developed in this work with learning algorithms which include logistic regression, decision tree, support vector machine, naive Bayes, and artificial neutral network using epidemiology labeled dataset for positive and negative COVID-19 cases of Mexico. The correlation coefficient analysis between various dependent and independent features was carried out to determine a strength relationship between each dependent feature and independent feature of the dataset prior to developing the models. The 80% of the training dataset were used for training the models while the remaining 20% were used for testing the models. The result of the performance evaluation of the models showed that decision tree model has the highest accuracy of 94.99% while the Support Vector Machine Model has the highest sensitivity of 93.34% and Naïve Bayes Model has the highest specificity of 94.30%., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAuthors have declared that no conflict of interest exists., (© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.)

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19 or 2019-nCoV) pandemic has neither clinically proven vaccine nor drugs; however, its patients are recovering with the aid of antibiotic medications, anti-viral drugs, and chloroquine as well as vitamin C supplementation. It is now evident that the world needs a speedy and quicker solution to contain and tackle the further spread of COVID-19 across the world with the aid of non-clinical approaches such as data mining approaches, augmented intelligence and other artificial intelligence techniques so as to mitigate the huge burden on the healthcare system while providing the best possible means for patients' diagnosis and prognosis of the 2019-nCoV pandemic effectively. In this study, data mining models were developed for the prediction of COVID-19 infected patients' recovery using epidemiological dataset of COVID-19 patients of South Korea. The decision tree, support vector machine, naive Bayes, logistic regression, random forest, and K-nearest neighbor algorithms were applied directly on the dataset using python programming language to develop the models. The model predicted a minimum and maximum number of days for COVID-19 patients to recover from the virus, the age group of patients who are of high risk not to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, those who are likely to recover and those who might be likely to recover quickly from COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the present study have shown that the model developed with decision tree data mining algorithm is more efficient to predict the possibility of recovery of the infected patients from COVID-19 pandemic with the overall accuracy of 99.85% which stands to be the best model developed among the models developed with other algorithms including support vector machine, naive Bayes, logistic regression, random forest, and K-nearest neighbor., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAuthors have declared that no conflict of interest exists., (© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.)

Wearable technology plays a significant role in our daily life as well as in the healthcare industry. The recent coronavirus pandemic has taken the world's healthcare systems by surprise. Although trials of possible vaccines are underway, it would take a long time before the vaccines are permitted for public use. Most of the government efforts are currently geared towards preventing the spread of the coronavirus and predicting probable hot zones. The essential and healthcare workers are the most vulnerable towards coronavirus infections due to their required proximity to potential coronavirus patients. Wearable technology can potentially assist in these regards by providing real-time remote monitoring, symptoms prediction, contact tracing, etc. The goal of this paper is to discuss the different existing wearable monitoring devices (respiration rate, heart rate, temperature, and oxygen saturation) and respiratory support systems (ventilators, CPAP devices, and oxygen therapy) which are frequently used to assist the coronavirus affected people. The devices are described based on the services they provide, their working procedures as well as comparative analysis of their merits and demerits with cost. A comparative discussion with probable future trends is also drawn to select the best technology for COVID-19 infected patients. It is envisaged that wearable technology is only capable of providing initial treatment that can reduce the spread of this pandemic., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestOn behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest., (© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.)

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, especially in developed nations. In recent years, it has become rampant in the developing nations such as Nigeria, posing more threats to individuals in the latter than those in the former. More than 415 million people were reported to suffer from DM worldwide as of 2015, with type 2 of the disease accounting for approximately 90% of the cases. The number of people with DM is expected to rise to 592 million by the year 2035. Therefore, DM is one of the growing public health concerns in Nigeria. In this study, the diagnostic dataset of DM type 2 was collected from the Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital, Kano, and used to develop predictive supervised machine learning models based on logistic regression, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, random forest, naive Bayes and gradient booting algorithms. The random forest predictive learning-based model appeared to be one of the best developed models with 88.76% in terms of accuracy; however, in terms of receiver operating characteristic curve, random forest and gradient booting predictive learning-based models were found to be the best predictive learning models with 86.28% predictive ability, respectively., Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors have declared that no conflict of interest exists., (© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.)