FUSC: Fetal Ultrasound Semantic Clustering of Second Trimester Scans Using Deep Self-supervised Learning

Ultrasound is the primary imaging modality in clinical practice during pregnancy. More than 140M fetuses are born yearly, resulting in numerous scans. The availability of a large volume of fetal ultrasound scans presents the opportunity to train robust machine learning models. However, the abundance of scans also has its challenges, as manual labeling of each image is needed for supervised methods. Labeling is typically labor-intensive and requires expertise to annotate the images accurately. This study presents an unsupervised approach for automatically clustering ultrasound images into a large range of fetal views, reducing or eliminating the need for manual labeling. Our Fetal Ultrasound Semantic Clustering (FUSC) method is developed using a large dataset of 88,063 images and further evaluated on an additional unseen dataset of 8,187 images achieving over 92% clustering purity. The result of our investigation hold the potential to significantly impact the field of fetal ultrasound imaging and pave the way for more advanced automated labeling solutions. Finally, we make the code and the experimental setup publicly available to help advance the field

Modeling of a Super-Spreading Event of the Mers-Corona Virus during the Hajj Season using Simulation of the Existing Data

The Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) has exhibited super-spreading events in recent years. In this work, we investigate the effects a possible super-spreading event in one of the largest annual mass gatherings: the Hajj season in the Kingdome Saudi Arabia (KSA). Since the KSA has the most significant confirmed number of MERS-CoV, we assume that super-spreaders are only from the local population. By the use of an extended SIR model, we considered two subpopulations: local and non-local pilgrims, were calculated the basic reproduction number and final size of the epidemic. Simulation of the existing data gives find the estimation of the basic reproduction number is less than one, although the final size of the epidemic shows proportionality to the super-spreading effect