Mortality Prediction of COVID-19 Patients Using Radiomic and Neural Network Features Extracted from a Wide Chest X-ray Sample Size: A Robust Approach for Different Medical Imbalanced Scenarios

Aim: The aim of this study was to develop robust prognostic models for mortality prediction of COVID-19 patients, applicable to different sets of real scenarios, using radiomic and neural network features extracted from chest X-rays (CXRs) with a certified and commercially available software. Methods: 1816 patients from 5 different hospitals in the Province of Reggio Emilia were included in the study. Overall, 201 radiomic features and 16 neural network features were extracted from each COVID-19 patient’s radiography. The initial dataset was balanced to train the classifiers with the same number of dead and survived patients, randomly selected. The pipeline had three main parts: balancing procedure; three-step feature selection; and mortality prediction with radiomic features through three machine learning (ML) classification models: AdaBoost (ADA), Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) and Random Forest (RF). Five evaluation metrics were computed on the test samples. The performance for death prediction was validated on both a balanced dataset (Case 1) and an imbalanced dataset (Case 2). Results: accuracy (ACC), area under the ROC-curve (AUC) and sensitivity (SENS) for the best classifier were, respectively, 0.72 ± 0.01, 0.82 ± 0.02 and 0.84 ± 0.04 for Case 1 and 0.70 ± 0.04, 0.79 ± 0.03 and 0.76 ± 0.06 for Case 2. These results show that the prediction of COVID-19 mortality is robust in a different set of scenarios. Conclusions: Our large and varied dataset made it possible to train ML algorithms to predict COVID-19 mortality using radiomic and neural network features of CXRs

IMPROVING STUDENTS PERFORMANCE PREDICTION USING MACHINE LEARNING AND SYNTHETIC MINORITY OVERSAMPLING TECHNIQUE

Classification under supervision is the most common job that performed by machine learning. However, most Educators were worried about the rising evidence of student academic failures in university education. So, this study presents a supervised classification strategy of machine learning algorithm using an actual dataset contains 44 students, fourteen attributes for three previous academic years. We have proposed features that show the relationship among three main subjects which are, calculus, mathematical analysis, and control system in the education course. The objective of this study is to identify the student’s failure in the control system subject and to enhance his performance by Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) algorithm. The dataset is unbalanced, which causes overfitting of the results. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique has applied to a dataset for obtaining balance dataset using Weka tool. Several standard metrics used to evaluate the classifier results. Therefore, the suitable results occurred after applying SMOTE with an accuracy of 76.9%

Improving sensitivity of machine learning methods for automated case identification from free-text electronic medical records

Background: Distinguishing cases from non-cases in free-text electronic medical records is an important initial step in observational epidemiological studies, but manual record validation is time-consuming and cumbersome. We compared different approaches to develop an automatic case identification system with high sensitivity to assist manual annotators. Methods. We used four different machine-learning algorithms to build case identification systems for two data sets, one comprising hepatobiliary disease patients, the other acute renal failure patients. To improve the sensitivity of the systems, we varied the imbalance ratio between positive cases and negative cases using under- and over-sampling techniques, and applied cost-sensitive learning with various misclassification costs. Results: For the hepatobiliary data set, we obtained a high sensitivity of 0.95 (on a par with manual annotators, as compared to 0.91 for a baseline classifier) with specificity 0.56. For the acute renal failure data set, sensitivity increased from 0.69 to 0.89, with specificity 0.59. Performance differences between the various machine-learning algorithms were not large. Classifiers performed best when trained on data sets with imbalance ratio below 10. Conclusions: We were able to achieve high sensitivity with moderate specificity for automatic case identification on two data sets of electronic medical records. Such a high-sensitive case identification system can be used as a pre-filter to significantly reduce the burden of manual record validation

A machine learning-based investigation of cloud service attacks

In this thesis, the security challenges of cloud computing are investigated in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, as security is one of the major concerns related to Cloud services. As IaaS consists of different security terms, the research has been further narrowed down to focus on Network Layer Security. Review of existing research revealed that several types of attacks and threats can affect cloud security. Therefore, there is a need for intrusion defence implementations to protect cloud services. Intrusion Detection (ID) is one of the most effective solutions for reacting to cloud network attacks. [Continues.

Text Mining to Support Knowledge Discovery from Electronic Health Records

The use of electronic health records (EHRs) has grown rapidly in the last decade. The EHRs are no longer being used only for storing information for clinical purposes but the secondary use of the data in the healthcare research has increased rapidly as well. The data in EHRs are recorded in a structured manner as much as possible, however, many EHRs often also contain large amount of unstructured free‐text. The structured and unstructured clinical data presents several challenges to the researchers since the data are not primarily collected for research purposes. The issues related to structured data can be missing data, noise, and inconsistency. The unstructured free-text is even more challenging to use since they often have no fixed format and may vary from clinician to clinician and from database to database. Text and data mining techniques are increasingly being used to effectively and efficiently process large EHRs for research purposes. Most of the me