LDDNet: a deep learning framework for the diagnosis of infectious lung diseases.

This paper proposes a new deep learning (DL) framework for the analysis of lung diseases, including COVID-19 and pneumonia, from chest CT scans and X-ray (CXR) images. This framework is termed optimized DenseNet201 for lung diseases (LDDNet). The proposed LDDNet was developed using additional layers of 2D global average pooling, dense and dropout layers, and batch normalization to the base DenseNet201 model. There are 1024 Relu-activated dense layers and 256 dense layers using the sigmoid activation method. The hyper-parameters of the model, including the learning rate, batch size, epochs, and dropout rate, were tuned for the model. Next, three datasets of lung diseases were formed from separate open-access sources. One was a CT scan dataset containing 1043 images. Two X-ray datasets comprising images of COVID-19-affected lungs, pneumonia-affected lungs, and healthy lungs exist, with one being an imbalanced dataset with 5935 images and the other being a balanced dataset with 5002 images. The performance of each model was analyzed using the Adam, Nadam, and SGD optimizers. The best results have been obtained for both the CT scan and CXR datasets using the Nadam optimizer. For the CT scan images, LDDNet showed a COVID-19-positive classification accuracy of 99.36%, a 100% precision recall of 98%, and an F1 score of 99%. For the X-ray dataset of 5935 images, LDDNet provides a 99.55% accuracy, 73% recall, 100% precision, and 85% F1 score using the Nadam optimizer in detecting COVID-19-affected patients. For the balanced X-ray dataset, LDDNet provides a 97.07% classification accuracy. For a given set of parameters, the performance results of LDDNet are better than the existing algorithms of ResNet152V2 and XceptionNet

Mass screening vs lockdown vs combination of both to control COVID-19: a systematic review

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic. Non-pharmacological interventions, such as lockdown and mass testing, remain as the mainstay of control measures for the outbreak. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of mass testing, lockdown, or a combination of both to control COVID-19 pandemic. A systematic search on 11 major databases was conducted on June 8, 2020. This review is registered in Prospero (CRD42020190546). We included primary studies written in English which investigate mass screening, lockdown, or a combination of both to control and/or mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. There are four important outcomes as selected by WHO experts for their decision-making process: incident cases, onward transmission, mortality, and resource use. Among 623 studies, only 14 studies met our criteria. Four observational studies were rated as strong evidence and ten modelling studies were rated as moderate evidence. Based on one modelling study, mass testing reduced the total infected people compared to no mass testing. For lockdown, ten studies consistently showed that it successfully reduced the incidence, onward transmission, and mortality rate of COVID-19. A limited evidence showed that a combination of lockdown and mass screening resulted in a greater reduction of incidence and mortality rate compared to lockdown only. However, there is not enough evidence on the effectiveness of mass testing only

Study of Different Deep Learning Approach with Explainable AI for Screening Patients with COVID-19 Symptoms: Using CT Scan and Chest X-ray Image Dataset

The outbreak of COVID-19 disease caused more than 100,000 deaths so far in the USA alone. It is necessary to conduct an initial screening of patients with the symptoms of COVID-19 disease to control the spread of the disease. However, it is becoming laborious to conduct the tests with the available testing kits due to the growing number of patients. Some studies proposed CT scan or chest X-ray images as an alternative solution. Therefore, it is essential to use every available resource, instead of either a CT scan or chest X-ray to conduct a large number of tests simultaneously. As a result, this study aims to develop a deep learning-based model that can detect COVID-19 patients with better accuracy both on CT scan and chest X-ray image dataset. In this work, eight different deep learning approaches such as VGG16, InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, DenseNet201, VGG19, MobilenetV2, NasNetMobile, and ResNet15V2 have been tested on two dataset-one dataset includes 400 CT scan images, and another dataset includes 400 chest X-ray images studied. Besides, Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) is used to explain the model's interpretability. Using LIME, test results demonstrate that it is conceivable to interpret top features that should have worked to build a trust AI framework to distinguish between patients with COVID-19 symptoms with other patients.Comment: This is a work in progress, it should not be relied upon without context to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information without consulting multiple experts in the fiel

Interactive framework for Covid-19 detection and segmentation with feedback facility for dynamically improved accuracy and trust

Due to the severity and speed of spread of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, fast but accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 patients has become a crucial task. Achievements in this respect might enlighten future efforts for the containment of other possible pandemics. Researchers from various fields have been trying to provide novel ideas for models or systems to identify Covid-19 patients from different medical and non-medical data. AI-based researchers have also been trying to contribute to this area by mostly providing novel approaches of automated systems using convolutional neural network (CNN) and deep neural network (DNN) for Covid-19 detection and diagnosis. Due to the efficiency of deep learning (DL) and transfer learning (TL) models in classification and segmentation tasks, most of the recent AI-based researches proposed various DL and TL models for Covid-19 detection and infected region segmentation from chest medical images like X-rays or CT images. This paper describes a web-based application framework for Covid-19 lung infection detection and segmentation. The proposed framework is characterized by a feedback mechanism for self learning and tuning. It uses variations of three popular DL models, namely Mask R-CNN, UNet, and U-Net++. The models were trained, evaluated and tested using CT images of Covid patients which were collected from two different sources. The web application provide a simple user friendly interface to process the CT images from various resources using the chosen models, thresholds and other parameters to generate the decisions on detection and segmentation. The models achieve high performance scores for Dice similarity, Jaccard similarity, accuracy, loss, and precision values. The U-Net model outperformed the other models with more than 98% accuracy

Vascular Implications of COVID-19: Role of Radiological Imaging, Artificial Intelligence, and Tissue Characterization: A Special Report

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has caused a pandemic, infecting nearly 80 million people worldwide, with mortality exceeding six million. The average survival span is just 14 days from the time the symptoms become aggressive. The present study delineates the deep-driven vascular damage in the pulmonary, renal, coronary, and carotid vessels due to SARS-CoV-2. This special report addresses an important gap in the literature in understanding (i) the pathophysiology of vascular damage and the role of medical imaging in the visualization of the damage caused by SARS-CoV-2, and (ii) further understanding the severity of COVID-19 using artificial intelligence (AI)-based tissue characterization (TC). PRISMA was used to select 296 studies for AI-based TC. Radiological imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound were selected for imaging of the vasculature infected by COVID-19. Four kinds of hypotheses are presented for showing the vascular damage in radiological images due to COVID-19. Three kinds of AI models, namely, machine learning, deep learning, and transfer learning, are used for TC. Further, the study presents recommendations for improving AI-based architectures for vascular studies. We conclude that the process of vascular damage due to COVID-19 has similarities across vessel types, even though it results in multi-organ dysfunction. Although the mortality rate is ~2% of those infected, the long-term effect of COVID-19 needs monitoring to avoid deaths. AI seems to be penetrating the health care industry at warp speed, and we expect to see an emerging role in patient care, reduce the mortality and morbidity rate

Vascular Implications of COVID-19: Role of Radiological Imaging, Artificial Intelligence, and Tissue Characterization: A Special Report

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has caused a pandemic, infecting nearly 80 million people worldwide, with mortality exceeding six million. The average survival span is just 14 days from the time the symptoms become aggressive. The present study delineates the deep-driven vascular damage in the pulmonary, renal, coronary, and carotid vessels due to SARS-CoV-2. This special report addresses an important gap in the literature in understanding (i) the pathophysiology of vascular damage and the role of medical imaging in the visualization of the damage caused by SARS-CoV-2, and (ii) further understanding the severity of COVID-19 using artificial intelligence (AI)-based tissue characterization (TC). PRISMA was used to select 296 studies for AI-based TC. Radiological imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound were selected for imaging of the vasculature infected by COVID-19. Four kinds of hypotheses are presented for showing the vascular damage in radiological images due to COVID-19. Three kinds of AI models, namely, machine learning, deep learning, and transfer learning, are used for TC. Further, the study presents recommendations for improving AI-based architectures for vascular studies. We conclude that the process of vascular damage due to COVID-19 has similarities across vessel types, even though it results in multi-organ dysfunction. Although the mortality rate is ~2% of those infected, the long-term effect of COVID-19 needs monitoring to avoid deaths. AI seems to be penetrating the health care industry at warp speed, and we expect to see an emerging role in patient care, reduce the mortality and morbidity rate

Mathematical Modelling and Nonstandard Schemes for the Corona Virus Pandemic

The programs used in this Master thesis: https://git.uni-wuppertal.de/1449563/covid-19-modelling/-/tree/master/PROGRAM