Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques for Predicting Air Pollution

The modern and motorized way of life has cultured air pollution.  Air pollution has become the biggest rival of robust living. This situation is becoming more lethal in developing countries and so in Pakistan.  Hence, this inquiry was carried out to propose an architecture design that could make real-time prediction of air pollution with another purpose of scanning the frequently adopted algorithm in past investigations. In addition, it was also intended to narrate the toxic effects of air pollution on human health. So, this research was carried out on a large dataset of Seoul as an adequate dataset of Pakistan was not attainable. The dataset consisted of three years (2017-2019) including 647,512 instances and 11 attributes. The four distinctive algorithms termed Random Forest, Linear Regression, Decision Tree and XGBoosting were employed. It was inferred that XGB is more promising and feasible in predicting concentration level of NO2, O3, SO2, PM10, PM2.5 and CO with the lowest RMSE and MAE values of 0.0111, 0.0262, 0.0168, 49.64, 41.68 and 0.1856 and 0.0067, 0.0096, 0.0017, 12.28, 7.63 and 0.0982 respectively. Furthermore, it was found out as well that the Random Forest was preferred mostly in the previous studies related to air pollution prophecy while many probes supported that air pollution is very detrimental to human health especially long-lasting exposure causes lung cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases

Personal Identification Using Ear Recognition

 Biometric authentication for personal identification is very popular now a days. Human ear recognition system is a new technology in this field. The change of appearance with the expression was a major problem in face biometrics but in case of ear biometrics the shape and appearance is fixed. That is why it is advantageous to use it for personal identification. In this paper, we have proposed a new approach for an automated system for human ear identification. Our proposed method consists of three stages. In the first stage, preprocessing of ear image is done for its contrast enhancement and size normalization. In the second stage, features are extracted through Haar wavelets followed by ear identification using fast normalized cross correlation in the third stage. The proposed method is applied on USTB ear image database and IIT Delhi. Experimental results show that our proposed system achieves an average accuracy of 97.2% and 95.2% on these databases respectively

Lung Nodule Detection in CT Images using Neuro Fuzzy Classifier

Automated lung cancer detection using computer aided diagnosis (CAD) is an important area in clinical applications. As the manual nodule detection is very time consuming and costly so computerized systems can be helpful for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a computerized system for lung nodule detection in CT scan images. The automated system consists of two stages i.e. lung segmentation and enhancement, feature extraction and classification. The segmentation process will result in separating lung tissue from rest of the image, and only the lung tissues under examination are considered as candidate regions for detecting malignant nodules in lung portion. A feature vector for possible abnormal regions is calculated and regions are classified using neuro fuzzy classifier. It is a fully automatic system that does not require any manual intervention and experimental results show the validity of our system

Analysis of Financial Sector Reforms and Impacts: Reflections from Pakistan

The purpose of this paper is to examine all efforts made by the Government of Pakistan in order to uplift the efficiency of financial sector through financial restructuring institutions such as banks, as well as to recognize the impact of these reforms on various financial indicators. Results of this study suggested that financial sector performance was very much better after the completion of first generation reforms but many new reforms are still required for macroeconomic stability and economic growth of Pakistan. This was the first attempt made by researcher in which detailed discussion was provided about financial sector reforms and it will help out the policy makers while developing policies for future and it will enhance the knowledge of economists and all other beneficiaries as well. Moreover, discussion for further reforms and gap for future studies was also provided

Blood Vessel Enhancement and Segmentation for Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease caused by the increase of insulin in blood and it is one of the main cuases of blindness in idusterlized countries. It is a progressive disease and needs an early detection and treatment. Vascular pattern of human retina helps the ophthalmologists in automated screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. In this article, we present a method for vascular pattern ehnacement and segmentation. We present an automated system which uses wavelets to enhance the vascular pattern and then it applies a piecewise threshold probing and adaptive thresholding for vessel localization and segmentation respectively. The method is evaluated and tested using publicly available retinal databases and we further compare our method with already proposed techniques.

Automated grading of chest x-ray images for viral pneumonia with convolutional neural networks ensemble and region of interest localization

Following its initial identification on December 31, 2019, COVID-19 quickly spread around the world as a pandemic claiming more than six million lives. An early diagnosis with appropriate intervention can help prevent deaths and serious illness as the distinguishing symptoms that set COVID-19 apart from pneumonia and influenza frequently don't show up until after the patient has already suffered significant damage. A chest X-ray (CXR), one of many imaging modalities that are useful for detection and one of the most used, offers a non-invasive method of detection. The CXR image analysis can also reveal additional disorders, such as pneumonia, which show up as anomalies in the lungs. Thus these CXRs can be used for automated grading aiding the doctors in making a better diagnosis. In order to classify a CXR image into the Negative for Pneumonia, Typical, Indeterminate, and Atypical, we used the publicly available CXR image competition dataset SIIM-FISABIO-RSNA COVID-19 from Kaggle. The suggested architecture employed an ensemble of EfficientNetv2-L for classification, which was trained via transfer learning from the initialised weights of ImageNet21K on various subsets of data (Code for the proposed methodology is available at: https://github.com/asadkhan1221/siim-covid19.git). To identify and localise opacities, an ensemble of YOLO was combined using Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF). Significant generalisability gains were made possible by the suggested technique's addition of classification auxiliary heads to the CNN backbone. The suggested method improved further by utilising test time augmentation for both classifiers and localizers. The results for Mean Average Precision score show that the proposed deep learning model achieves 0.617 and 0.609 on public and private sets respectively and these are comparable to other techniques for the Kaggle dataset

Retinal Image Preprocessing: Background and Noise Segmentation

Medical imaging is very popular research area these days and includes computer aided diagnosis of different diseases by taking digital images as input. Digital retinal images are used for the screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease. An automated system for the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy should highlight all signs of disease present in the image and in order to improve the accuracy of the system, the retinal image quality must be improved. In this article, we present a method to improve the quality of input retinal image and we consider this method as a preprocessing step in automated diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. The preprocessing consists of background estimation and noise removal from retinal image by applying coarse and fine segmentation. We perform extensive results to check the validity of proposed preprocessing technique using standard fundus image database

Mass transfer efficiency of a tall and low plate free area liquid pulsed sieve-plate extraction column

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge Chakwal group of industries for funding the project. Ms. Madiha, Ms. Zona, Mr. Sohaib, Mr. Abdullah, Mr. Mudassar, and Mr. Salahuddin also deserve our acknowledgements for their assistance in different ways.Peer reviewedPublisher PD