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Applying deep learning (DL) for annotating surgical instruments in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) represents a significant advancement in surgical technology. This systematic review examines 48 studies that and advanced DL methods and architectures. These sophisticated DL models have shown notable improvements in the precision and efficiency of detecting and segmenting surgical tools. The enhanced capabilities of these models support various clinical applications, including real-time intraoperative guidance, comprehensive postoperative evaluations, and objective assessments of surgical skills. By accurately identifying and segmenting surgical instruments in video data, DL models provide detailed feedback to surgeons, thereby improving surgical outcomes and reducing complication risks. Furthermore, the application of DL in surgical education is transformative. The review underscores the significant impact of DL on improving the accuracy of skill assessments and the overall quality of surgical training programs. However, implementing DL in surgical tool detection and segmentation faces challenges, such as the need for large, accurately annotated datasets to train these models effectively. The manual annotation process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, posing a significant bottleneck. Future research should focus on automating the detection and segmentation process and enhancing the robustness of DL models against environmental variations. Expanding the application of DL models across various surgical specialties will be essential to fully realize this technology's potential. Integrating DL with other emerging technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), also offers promising opportunities to further enhance the precision and efficacy of surgical procedures., Comment: 57 pages, 9 figures, Published in Artificial Intelligence Reviews journal

This paper focuses on detecting propagandistic spans and persuasion techniques in Arabic text from tweets and news paragraphs. Each entry in the dataset contains a text sample and corresponding labels that indicate the start and end positions of propaganda techniques within the text. Tokens falling within a labeled span were assigned "B" (Begin) or "I" (Inside), "O", corresponding to the specific propaganda technique. Using attention masks, we created uniform lengths for each span and assigned BIO tags to each token based on the provided labels. Then, we used AraBERT-base pre-trained model for Arabic text tokenization and embeddings with a token classification layer to identify propaganda techniques. Our training process involves a two-phase fine-tuning approach. First, we train only the classification layer for a few epochs, followed by full model fine-tuning, updating all parameters. This methodology allows the model to adapt to the specific characteristics of the propaganda detection task while leveraging the knowledge captured by the pre-trained AraBERT model. Our approach achieved an F1 score of 0.2774, securing the 3rd position in the leaderboard of Task 1.

Recent developments in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have spurred significant interest in their potential applications across various medical imaging domains. On the one hand, there is a temptation to use these generative models to synthesize realistic-looking medical image data, while on the other hand, the ability to identify synthetic image data in a pool of data is also significantly important. In this study, we explore the potential of the Gemini (\textit{gemini-1.0-pro-vision-latest}) and GPT-4V (gpt-4-vision-preview) models for medical image analysis using two modalities of medical image data. Utilizing synthetic and real imaging data, both Gemini AI and GPT-4V are first used to classify real versus synthetic images, followed by an interpretation and analysis of the input images. Experimental results demonstrate that both Gemini and GPT-4 could perform some interpretation of the input images. In this specific experiment, Gemini was able to perform slightly better than the GPT-4V on the classification task. In contrast, responses associated with GPT-4V were mostly generic in nature. Our early investigation presented in this work provides insights into the potential of MLLMs to assist with the classification and interpretation of retinal fundoscopy and lung X-ray images. We also identify key limitations associated with the early investigation study on MLLMs for specialized tasks in medical image analysis., Comment: Accepted in Fifth IEEE Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for HealthCare, IEEE 25th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science

$ $The synergy of language and vision models has given rise to Large Language and Vision Assistant models (LLVAs), designed to engage users in rich conversational experiences intertwined with image-based queries. These comprehensive multimodal models seamlessly integrate vision encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs), expanding their applications in general-purpose language and visual comprehension. The advent of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) heralds a new era in Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance, extending the horizons of AI utilization. This paper takes a unique perspective on LMMs, exploring their efficacy in performing image classification tasks using tailored prompts designed for specific datasets. We also investigate the LLVAs zero-shot learning capabilities. Our study includes a benchmarking analysis across four diverse datasets: MNIST, Cats Vs. Dogs, Hymnoptera (Ants Vs. Bees), and an unconventional dataset comprising Pox Vs. Non-Pox skin images. The results of our experiments demonstrate the model's remarkable performance, achieving classification accuracies of 85\%, 100\%, 77\%, and 79\% for the respective datasets without any fine-tuning. To bolster our analysis, we assess the model's performance post fine-tuning for specific tasks. In one instance, fine-tuning is conducted over a dataset comprising images of faces of children with and without autism. Prior to fine-tuning, the model demonstrated a test accuracy of 55\%, which significantly improved to 83\% post fine-tuning. These results, coupled with our prior findings, underscore the transformative potential of LLVAs and their versatile applications in real-world scenarios., Comment: 5 pages,6 figures, 4 tables, Accepted on The International Symposium on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2023)

This study evaluates ChatGPT's performance in annotating vaccine-related Arabic tweets by comparing its annotations with human annotations. A dataset of 2,100 tweets representing various factors contributing to vaccine hesitancy was examined. Two domain experts annotated the data, with a third resolving conflicts. ChatGPT was then employed to annotate the same dataset using specific prompts for each factor. The ChatGPT annotations were evaluated through zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning tests, with an average accuracy of 82.14%, 83.85%, and 85.57%, respectively. Precision averaged around 86%, minimizing false positives. The average recall and F1-score ranged from 0.74 to 0.80 and 0.65 to 0.93, respectively. AUC for zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning was 0.79, 0.80, and 0.83. In cases of ambiguity, both human annotators and ChatGPT faced challenges. These findings suggest that ChatGPT holds promise as a tool for annotating vaccine-related tweets., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, two tables, accepted on The International Symposium on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2023)

The advanced large language model (LLM) ChatGPT has shown its potential in different domains and remains unbeaten due to its characteristics compared to other LLMs. This study aims to evaluate the potential of using a fine-tuned ChatGPT model as a personal medical assistant in the Arabic language. To do so, this study uses publicly available online questions and answering datasets in Arabic language. There are almost 430K questions and answers for 20 disease-specific categories. GPT-3.5-turbo model was fine-tuned with a portion of this dataset. The performance of this fine-tuned model was evaluated through automated and human evaluation. The automated evaluations include perplexity, coherence, similarity, and token count. Native Arabic speakers with medical knowledge evaluated the generated text by calculating relevance, accuracy, precision, logic, and originality. The overall result shows that ChatGPT has a bright future in medical assistance., Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, two tables, Accepted on The International Symposium on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2023)

Vision transformer-based methods are advancing the field of medical artificial intelligence and cancer imaging, including lung cancer applications. Recently, many researchers have developed vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. This scoping review aims to identify the recent developments on vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer imaging applications. It provides key insights into how vision transformers complemented the performance of AI and deep learning methods for lung cancer. Furthermore, the review also identifies the datasets that contributed to advancing the field. Of the 314 retrieved studies, this review included 34 studies published from 2020 to 2022. The most commonly addressed task in these studies was the classification of lung cancer types, such as lung squamous cell carcinoma versus lung adenocarcinoma, and identifying benign versus malignant pulmonary nodules. Other applications included survival prediction of lung cancer patients and segmentation of lungs. The studies lacked clear strategies for clinical transformation. SWIN transformer was a popular choice of the researchers; however, many other architectures were also reported where vision transformer was combined with convolutional neural networks or UNet model. It can be concluded that vision transformer-based models are increasingly in popularity for developing AI methods for lung cancer applications. However, their computational complexity and clinical relevance are important factors to be considered for future research work. This review provides valuable insights for researchers in the field of AI and healthcare to advance the state-of-the-art in lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. We provide an interactive dashboard on lung-cancer.onrender.com/., Comment: submitted to BMC Medical Imaging journal

The rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) necessitates the development of predictive models for T2DM risk assessment. Artificial intelligence (AI) models are being extensively used for this purpose, but a comprehensive review of their advancements and challenges is lacking. This scoping review analyzes existing literature on AI-based models for T2DM risk prediction. Forty studies were included, mainly published in the past four years. Traditional machine learning models were more prevalent than deep learning models. Electronic health records were the most commonly used data source. Unimodal AI models relying on EHR data were prominent, while only a few utilized multimodal models. Both unimodal and multimodal models showed promising performance, with the latter outperforming the former. Internal validation was common, while external validation was limited. Interpretability methods were reported in half of the studies. Few studies reported novel biomarkers, and open-source code availability was limited. This review provides insights into the current state and limitations of AI-based T2DM risk prediction models and highlights challenges for their development and clinical implementation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models can help in diagnosing COVID-19 from lung CT scans and X-ray images; however, these models require large amounts of data for training and validation. Many researchers studied Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for producing synthetic lung CT scans and X-Ray images to improve the performance of AI-based models. It is not well explored how good GAN-based methods performed to generate reliable synthetic data. This work analyzes 43 published studies that reported GANs for synthetic data generation. Many of these studies suffered data bias, lack of reproducibility, and lack of feedback from the radiologists or other domain experts. A common issue in these studies is the unavailability of the source code, hindering reproducibility. The included studies reported rescaling of the input images to train the existing GANs architecture without providing clinical insights on how the rescaling was motivated. Finally, even though GAN-based methods have the potential for data augmentation and improving the training of AI-based models, these methods fall short in terms of their use in clinical practice. This paper highlights research hotspots in countering the data scarcity problem, identifies various issues as well as potentials, and provides recommendations to guide future research. These recommendations might be useful to improve acceptability for the GAN-based approaches for data augmentation as GANs for data augmentation are increasingly becoming popular in the AI and medical imaging research community., Comment: submitted to 2023 CVPR workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision

Generative models have been very successful over the years and have received significant attention for synthetic data generation. As deep learning models are getting more and more complex, they require large amounts of data to perform accurately. In medical image analysis, such generative models play a crucial role as the available data is limited due to challenges related to data privacy, lack of data diversity, or uneven data distributions. In this paper, we present a method to generate brain tumor MRI images using generative adversarial networks. We have utilized StyleGAN2 with ADA methodology to generate high-quality brain MRI with tumors while using a significantly smaller amount of training data when compared to the existing approaches. We use three pre-trained models for transfer learning. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can learn the distributions of brain tumors. Furthermore, the model can generate high-quality synthetic brain MRI with a tumor that can limit the small sample size issues. The approach can addresses the limited data availability by generating realistic-looking brain MRI with tumors. The code is available at: ~\url{https://github.com/rizwanqureshi123/Brain-Tumor-Synthetic-Data}., Comment: Accepted in AICS conference

Generative models are becoming popular for the synthesis of medical images. Recently, neural diffusion models have demonstrated the potential to generate photo-realistic images of objects. However, their potential to generate medical images is not explored yet. In this work, we explore the possibilities of synthesis of medical images using neural diffusion models. First, we use a pre-trained DALLE2 model to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images from an input text prompt. Second, we train a stable diffusion model with 3165 X-Ray images and generate synthetic images. We evaluate the synthetic image data through a qualitative analysis where two independent radiologists label randomly chosen samples from the generated data as real, fake, or unsure. Results demonstrate that images generated with the diffusion model can translate characteristics that are otherwise very specific to certain medical conditions in chest X-Ray or CT images. Careful tuning of the model can be very promising. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images using neural diffusion models. This work aims to introduce a new dimension in artificial intelligence for medical imaging. Given that this is a new topic, the paper will serve as an introduction and motivation for the research community to explore the potential of diffusion models for medical image synthesis. We have released the synthetic images on https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hazrat/awesomelungs., Comment: 8 pages. Submitted to AICS 2022 conference

Healthcare data are inherently multimodal, including electronic health records (EHR), medical images, and multi-omics data. Combining these multimodal data sources contributes to a better understanding of human health and provides optimal personalized healthcare. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly machine learning (ML), enable the fusion of these different data modalities to provide multimodal insights. To this end, in this scoping review, we focus on synthesizing and analyzing the literature that uses AI techniques to fuse multimodal medical data for different clinical applications. More specifically, we focus on studies that only fused EHR with medical imaging data to develop various AI methods for clinical applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of the various fusion strategies, the diseases and clinical outcomes for which multimodal fusion was used, the ML algorithms used to perform multimodal fusion for each clinical application, and the available multimodal medical datasets. We followed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We searched Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar to retrieve relevant studies. We extracted data from 34 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In our analysis, a typical workflow was observed: feeding raw data, fusing different data modalities by applying conventional machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms, and finally, evaluating the multimodal fusion through clinical outcome predictions. Specifically, early fusion was the most used technique in most applications for multimodal learning (22 out of 34 studies). We found that multimodality fusion models outperformed traditional single-modality models for the same task. Disease diagnosis and prediction were the most common clinical outcomes (reported in 20 and 10 studies, respectively) from a clinical outcome perspective., Comment: Accepted in Nature Scientific Reports. 20 pages

This review presents a comprehensive study on the role of GANs in addressing the challenges related to COVID-19 data scarcity and diagnosis. It is the first review that summarizes the different GANs methods and the lungs images datasets for COVID-19. It attempts to answer the questions related to applications of GANs, popular GAN architectures, frequently used image modalities, and the availability of source code. This review included 57 full-text studies that reported the use of GANs for different applications in COVID-19 lungs images data. Most of the studies (n=42) used GANs for data augmentation to enhance the performance of AI techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. Other popular applications of GANs were segmentation of lungs and super-resolution of the lungs images. The cycleGAN and the conditional GAN were the most commonly used architectures used in nine studies each. 29 studies used chest X-Ray images while 21 studies used CT images for the training of GANs. For majority of the studies (n=47), the experiments were done and results were reported using publicly available data. A secondary evaluation of the results by radiologists/clinicians was reported by only two studies. Conclusion: Studies have shown that GANs have great potential to address the data scarcity challenge for lungs images of COVID-19. Data synthesized with GANs have been helpful to improve the training of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models trained for the diagnosis of COVID-19. Besides, GANs have also contributed to enhancing the CNNs performance through the super-resolution of the images and segmentation. This review also identified key limitations of the potential transformation of GANs based methods in clinical applications.

Background: Vaccination programs are effective only when a significant percentage of people are vaccinated. However, vaccine acceptance varies among communities around the world. Social media usage is arguably one of the factors affecting public attitudes towards vaccines. Objective: This study aims to identify if the social media usages factors can be used to predict attitudes and behavior towards the COVID-19 vaccines among the people in the Arab world. Methods: An online survey was conducted in the Arab countries and 217 Arab people participated in this study. Logistic regression was applied to identify what demographics and social media usage factors predict public attitudes and behavior towards the COVID-19 vaccines. Results: Of the 217 participants, 56.22% of them were willing to accept the vaccine and 41.47% of them were hesitant. This study shows that none of the social media usages factors were significant enough to predict the actual vaccine acceptance behavior. Whereas the analysis showed few of the social media usage factors can predict public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines. For example, frequent social media users were 2.85 times more likely to agree that the risk of COVID-19 is being exaggerated (OR=2.85, 95% CI=0.86-9.45, p=0.046) than infrequent social media users. Whereas participants having more trust in vaccine information shared by their contacts are less likely to agree that decision-makers have verified that vaccines are safe (OR=0.528, 95% CI= 0.276-1.012, p=0.05). Conclusion: The use of social media and information shared on it may affect public attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines. Therefore, disseminating correct and validated information about COVID-19 and other vaccines on social media is important for increasing public trust and countering the impact of incorrect and misinformation.

Contact tracing apps are powerful software tools that can help control the spread of COVID-19. In this article, we evaluated 53 COVID-19 contact tracing apps found on the Google Play Store in terms of their usage, rating, access permission, and user privacy. For each app included in the study, we identified the country of origin, number of downloads, and access permissions to further understand the attributes and ratings of the apps. Our results show that contact tracing apps had low overall ratings and nearly 40% of the included apps were requesting dangerous access permission including access to storage, media files, and camera permissions. We also found that user adoption rates were inversely correlated to access permission requirements. To the best of our knowledge, our article summarizes the most extensive collection of contact tracing apps for COVID-19. We recommend that future contact tracing apps should be more transparent in permission requirements and should provide justification for permissions requested to preserve the app users privacy., Comment: Contact Tracing Apps for COVID-19

In this article we research about underwater acoustics transceivers. As Underwater acoustic transceivers consume more power than Radio frequency transceivers. The techniques which are being utilized in radio frequency cannot be implemented directly in underwater acoustic system it needs to be re investigated to design new methods. To achieve reliable acoustic data transmission new techniques should be achieved or the traditional Orthogonal frequency divisional multiplexing techniques should be revised. The power consumption also relies upon underwater acoustic signal propagation and transmission distances. Several underwater acoustic applications require long-term monitoring of the sea. For the battery powered modems, it becomes very serious problem. By designing an Energy efficient OFDM Communication system we can solve this problem. We study about peak to average power ratio in an Orthogonal frequency divisional multiplexing system by reducing the major draw-back of OFDM system. The PAPR reduction utilized in this paper is Partial Transmit Sequences for underwater acoustic OFDM communication system which has lesser complexity. The results have provided better performance in underwater acoustic OFDM communication system.

Background: Tools used to appraise the credibility of health information are time-consuming to apply and require context-specific expertise, limiting their use for quickly identifying and mitigating the spread of misinformation as it emerges. Our aim was to estimate the proportion of vaccination-related posts on Twitter are likely to be misinformation, and how unevenly exposure to misinformation was distributed among Twitter users. Methods: Sampling from 144,878 vaccination-related web pages shared on Twitter between January 2017 and March 2018, we used a seven-point checklist adapted from two validated tools to appraise the credibility of a small subset of 474. These were used to train several classifiers (random forest, support vector machines, and a recurrent neural network with transfer learning), using the text from a web page to predict whether the information satisfies each of the seven criteria. Results: Applying the best performing classifier to the 144,878 web pages, we found that 14.4% of relevant posts to text-based communications were linked to webpages of low credibility and made up 9.2% of all potential vaccination-related exposures. However, the 100 most popular links to misinformation were potentially seen by between 2 million and 80 million Twitter users, and for a substantial sub-population of Twitter users engaging with vaccination-related information, links to misinformation appear to dominate the vaccination-related information to which they were exposed. Conclusions: We proposed a new method for automatically appraising the credibility of webpages based on a combination of validated checklist tools. The results suggest that an automatic credibility appraisal tool can be used to find populations at higher risk of exposure to misinformation or applied proactively to add friction to the sharing of low credibility vaccination information., Comment: 8 Pages, 5 Figures

Background: Studies examining how sentiment on social media varies depending on timing and location appear to produce inconsistent results, making it hard to design systems that use sentiment to detect localized events for public health applications. Objective: The aim of this study was to measure how common timing and location confounders explain variation in sentiment on Twitter. Methods: Using a dataset of 16.54 million English-language tweets from 100 cities posted between July 13 and November 30, 2017, we estimated the positive and negative sentiment for each of the cities using a dictionary-based sentiment analysis and constructed models to explain the differences in sentiment using time of day, day of week, weather, city, and interaction type (conversations or broadcasting) as factors and found that all factors were independently associated with sentiment. Results: In the full multivariable model of positive (Pearson r in test data 0.236; 95\% CI 0.231-0.241) and negative (Pearson r in test data 0.306; 95\% CI 0.301-0.310) sentiment, the city and time of day explained more of the variance than weather and day of week. Models that account for these confounders produce a different distribution and ranking of important events compared with models that do not account for these confounders. Conclusions: In public health applications that aim to detect localized events by aggregating sentiment across populations of Twitter users, it is worthwhile accounting for baseline differences before looking for unexpected changes., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, published in JMIR (doi:10.2196/12881)