Social group optimization–assisted Kapur's entropy and morphological segmentation for automated detection of COVID-19 infection from computed tomography images

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been declared a global pandemic. Due to its infection rate and severity, it has emerged as one of the major global threats of the current generation. To support the current combat against the disease, this research aims to propose a machine learning–based pipeline to detect COVID-19 infection using lung computed tomography scan images (CTI). This implemented pipeline consists of a number of sub-procedures ranging from segmenting the COVID-19 infection to classifying the segmented regions. The initial part of the pipeline implements the segmentation of the COVID-19–affected CTI using social group optimization–based Kapur's entropy thresholding, followed by k-means clustering and morphology-based segmentation. The next part of the pipeline implements feature extraction, selection, and fusion to classify the infection. Principle component analysis–based serial fusion technique is used in fusing the features and the fused feature vector is then employed to train, test, and validate four different classifiers namely Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function, and Decision Tree. Experimental results using benchmark datasets show a high accuracy (> 91%) for the morphology-based segmentation task; for the classification task, the KNN offers the highest accuracy among the compared classifiers (> 87%). However, this should be noted that this method still awaits clinical validation, and therefore should not be used to clinically diagnose ongoing COVID-19 infection

One-shot cluster-based approach for the detection of COVID–19 from chest X–ray images

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has infected over more than 28.3 million people around the globe and killed 913K people worldwide as of 11 September 2020. With this pandemic, to combat the spreading of COVID-19, effective testing methodologies and immediate medical treatments are much required. Chest X-rays are the widely available modalities for immediate diagnosis of COVID-19. Hence, automation of detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images using machine learning approaches is of greater demand. A model for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images is proposed in this paper. A novel concept of cluster-based one-shot learning is introduced in this work. The introduced concept has an advantage of learning from a few samples against learning from many samples in case of deep leaning architectures. The proposed model is a multi-class classification model as it classifies images of four classes, viz., pneumonia bacterial, pneumonia virus, normal, and COVID-19. The proposed model is based on ensemble of Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifiers at decision level. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been demonstrated through extensive experimentation on a publicly available dataset consisting of 306 images. The proposed cluster-based one-shot learning has been found to be more effective on GRNN and PNN ensembled model to distinguish COVID-19 images from that of the other three classes. It has also been experimentally observed that the model has a superior performance over contemporary deep learning architectures. The concept of one-shot cluster-based learning is being first of its kind in literature, expected to open up several new dimensions in the field of machine learning which require further researching for various applications

Application of deep learning in detecting neurological disorders from magnetic resonance images: a survey on the detection of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia

Neuroimaging, in particular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been playing an important role in understanding brain functionalities and its disorders during the last couple of decades. These cutting-edge MRI scans, supported by high-performance computational tools and novel ML techniques, have opened up possibilities to unprecedentedly identify neurological disorders. However, similarities in disease phenotypes make it very difficult to detect such disorders accurately from the acquired neuroimaging data. This article critically examines and compares performances of the existing deep learning (DL)-based methods to detect neurological disorders—focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—from MRI data acquired using different modalities including functional and structural MRI. The comparative performance analysis of various DL architectures across different disorders and imaging modalities suggests that the Convolutional Neural Network outperforms other methods in detecting neurological disorders. Towards the end, a number of current research challenges are indicated and some possible future research directions are provided

SANTIA: a Matlab-based open-source toolbox for artifact detection and removal from extracellular neuronal signals

Neuronal signals generally represent activation of the neuronal networks and give insights into brain functionalities. They are considered as fingerprints of actions and their processing across different structures of the brain. These recordings generate a large volume of data that are susceptible to noise and artifacts. Therefore, the review of these data to ensure high quality by automatically detecting and removing the artifacts is imperative. Toward this aim, this work proposes a custom-developed automatic artifact removal toolbox named, SANTIA (SigMate Advanced: a Novel Tool for Identification of Artifacts in Neuronal Signals). Developed in Matlab, SANTIA is an open-source toolbox that applies neural network-based machine learning techniques to label and train models to detect artifacts from the invasive neuronal signals known as local field potentials

Attention-based bi-directional long-short term memory network for earthquake prediction

An earthquake is a tremor felt on the surface of the earth created by the movement of the major pieces of its outer shell. Till now, many attempts have been made to forecast earthquakes, which saw some success, but these attempted models are specific to a region. In this paper, an earthquake occurrence and location prediction model is proposed. After reviewing the literature, long short-term memory (LSTM) is found to be a good option for building the model because of its memory-keeping ability. Using the Keras tuner, the best model was selected from candidate models, which are composed of combinations of various LSTM architectures and dense layers. This selected model used seismic indicators from the earthquake catalog of Bangladesh as features to predict earthquakes of the following month. and Attention mechanism was added to the LSTM architecture to improve the model’s earthquake occurrence prediction accuracy, which was 74.67%. Additionally, a regression model was built using LSTM and dense layers to predict the earthquake epicenter as a distance from a predefined location, which provided a root mean square error of 1.25

Study of the Influence of Oil Prices on Stock Markets’ Indices and Macroeconomic Factors in OPEC Countries and Top Economies and the Prediction of Future Oil Prices

Oil as one of the main fossil fuel energy sources, its price changes and fluctuation has the ability to influence the local economy or even the world economy. Especially for the oil-exporting countries, like OPEC countries, they have big influence on the oil prices. Whilst the proof of oil prices themselves have been examined, the influence of the oil prices on the relationship between different indices and between macroeconomic is not clear and the usage of Holt-Winter model on the oil price prediction has not been proofed. The aim of this thesis was to determine influence two oil prices (WTI and Brent crude oil prices) on the relationship between top economies in the world (Japan, the UK and the US). To achieve this the simple regression model, the VAR and the VECM model was including to examine the relationship of oil prices with indices and macroeconomic factors. The cointegration tests were used first to test whether they are stationary or non-stationary. Then, the VAR and the VECM model were employed to examine the short-run and long-run relationship between them. In addition, the Holt-Winter model was applied to test its predictability by estimate the oil prices. This thesis was the first to investigate the influence of oil prices on the relationship between different indices between OPEC countries and top economies’ stock indices. The key findings were that the oil prices changes’ conditions have influence on the relationship between different indices but limited. Secondly, by using the Holt-Winter model indicates that the oil market is inefficient where the prediction period had large difference between real period data. Thirdly, this thesis concluded that the oil prices and macroeconomic variables had causality relationship. These indicate that it is necessary to consider the influence of oil prices when analyse the world economy