Development of New and Improved Driver-sensitive Car-following Model

One of the important components of traffic simulation models is a car-following model that describes the driver behaviour in a car-following situation. The existing car-following models have some limitations that may adversely affect the performance of in-vehicle rear-end collision warning systems. This paper presents a car-following model that addresses some limitations of the existing models. The proposed model considers the variations in the drivers’ perception-reaction time and the effect of the front and back vehicles in the car-following situation. The proposed model explicitly considers the driver’s age and gender in car-following modeling. Actual vehicle tracking data obtained from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration were used to calibrate and validate the proposed model. The results of the proposed model in terms of replicating actual speed and spacing profiles of the following vehicle are promising

Smart Health Care System for Early Detection of COVID-19 Using X-ray Scans

The novel Coronavirus spread in the world in December 2019. Millions of people are infected due to this disease. Due to viral illness, daily life routines and the economy are affected in many countries. According to a clinical study, the disease directly attacks the lungs and disturbs the respiratory system. X-ray and CT scans are the main imaging techniques to discover that disease. However, X-ray scans cost is low as comparatively CT scans. In the limited resources, deep learning plays a key role in diagnosing the COVID-19 with the help of X-ray scans. This study proposed a new transfer learning approach based on the convolutional neural network (CNN). We used the four different classes during the experimental process: COVID-19, pneumonia, lung opacity, and viral pneumonia. We also compared our proposed model with other transfer learning-based techniques. Our proposed COVID-TL model attained the best results in terms of classification. The proposed model is a beneficial tool for radiologists to get the early diagnosis results and help the patients in their early stages

IMPACT OF INDUSTRY SPECIFIC VARIABLES ON THE DIVIDEND POLICY OF OIL AND GAS SECTOR IN PAKISTAN

Dividends act as a pathway to attract investments andpetroleum industry of Pakistan has remained an important element in economic progress. Therefore, this research investigates the impact of corporate tax, financial leverage and sales growth on dividend payout ratio of oil & gas sector companies in Pakistan. Secondary data of 10 companies for 12 years have been incorporated. Hypotheses have been tested using fixed effects regression technique which was confirmed through Hausman specification test. Empirical findings reveal that corporate tax and sales growth have insignificant positive impacts, whereas financial leverage has an insignificant negative impact on the dividend payout ratio. The study concludes that decisions about dividend payouts should be made by considering other variables

Health care intelligent system: A neural network based method for early diagnosis of Alzheimer\u27s disease using MRI images

Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that causes memory loss and is considered the most common type of dementia. In many countries, AD is commonly affecting senior citizens having an aged more than 65 years. Machine learning-based approaches have some limitations due to data pre-processing issues. We propose a health care intelligent system based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in this research work. It classifies normal control (NC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD. The proposed model is employed on white matter (WM), and grey matter (GM) tissues with more cognitive decline features. In the experimental process, we used 375 Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) subjects collected from Alzheimer\u27s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI), including 130 NC people, 120 MCI patients, and 125 AD patients. We extract three major regions during pre-processing, that is, WM, GM and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This study shows promising classification results for NC versus AD 97.94%, MCI versus AD 92.84%, and NC versus MCI 88.15% on GM images. Furthermore, our proposed model attained 95.97%, 90.82%, and 86.87% on the same three binary classes on WM tissue, respectively. When comparing existing studies in terms of accuracy and other evaluation parameters, we found that our proposed approach shows better results than those approaches based on the CNN method

Brain Image Fusion Approach based on Side Window Filtering

Brain medical image fusion plays an important role in framing a contemporary image to enhance the reciprocal and repetitive information for diagnosis purposes. A novel approach using kernel-based image filtering on brain images is presented. Firstly, the Bilateral filter is used to generate a high-frequency component of a source image. Secondly, an intensity component is estimated for the first image. Thirdly, side window filtering is employed on several filters, including the guided filter, gradient guided filter, and weighted guided filter. Thereby minimizing the difference between the intensity component of the first image and the low pass filter of the second image. Finally, the fusion result is evaluated based on three evaluation indexes, including standard deviation (STD), features mutual information (FMI), average gradient (AG). The fused image based on this algorithm contains more information, more details, and clearer edges for better diagnosis. Thus, our fused image-based method is good at finding the position and state of the target volume, which leads to keeping away from the healthy parts and ensuring patients’ soundness

Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, causing the most common dementia in the elderly peoples. The AD patients are rapidly increasing in each year and AD is sixth leading cause of death in USA. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the leading modality used for the diagnosis of AD. Deep learning based approaches have produced impressive results in this domain. The early diagnosis of AD depends on the efficient use of classification approach. To address this issue, this study proposes a system using two convolutional neural networks (CNN) based approaches for an early diagnosis of AD automatically. In the proposed system, we use segmented MRI scans. Input data samples of three classes include 110 normal control (NC), 110 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 105 AD subjects are used in this paper. The data is acquired from the ADNI database and gray matter (GM) images are obtained after the segmentation of MRI subjects which are used for the classification in the proposed models. The proposed approaches segregate among NC, MCI, and AD. While testing both methods applied on the segmented data samples, the highest performance results of the classification in terms of accuracy on NC vs. AD are 95.33% and 89.87%, respectively. The proposed methods distinguish between NC vs. MCI and MCI vs. AD patients with a classification accuracy of 90.74% and 86.69%. The experimental outcomes prove that both CNN-based frameworks produced state-of-the-art accurate results for testing

An Intelligent Information System and Application for the Diagnosis and Analysis of COVID-19

The novel coronavirus spread across the world at the start of 2020. Millions of people are infected due to the COVID-19. At the start, the availability of corona test kits is challenging. Researchers analyzed the current situation and produced the COVID-19 detection system on X-ray scans. Artificial intelligence (AI) based systems produce better results in terms of COVID detection. Due to the overfitting issue, many AI-based models cannot produce the best results, directly impacting model performance. In this study, we also introduced the CNN-based technique for classifying normal, pneumonia, and COVID-19. In the proposed model, we used batch normalization to regularize the mode land achieve promising results for the three binary classes. The proposed model produces 96.56% accuracy for the classification for COVID-19 vs. Normal. Finally, we compared our model with other deep learning-based approaches and discovered that our approach outperformed

Smart COVID-3D-SCNN: A novel method to classify x-ray images of COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has spread worldwide, and millions of people are being infected. Image or detection classification is one of the first application areas of deep learning, which has a significant contribution to medical image analysis. In classification detection, one or more images (detection) are usually used as input, and diagnostic variables (such as whether there is a disease) are used as output. The novel coronavirus has spread across the world, infecting millions of people. Early-stage detection of critical cases of COVID-19 is essential. X-ray scans are used in clinical studies to diagnose COVID-19 and Pneumonia early. For extracting the discriminative features through these modalities, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used. A siamese convolutional neural network model (COVID-3D-SCNN) is proposed in this study for the automated detection of COVID-19 by utilizing X-ray scans. To extract the useful features, we used three consecutive models working in parallel in the proposed approach. We acquired 575 COVID-19, 1200 non-COVID, and 1400 pneumonia images, which are publicly available. In our framework, augmentation is used to enlarge the dataset. The findings suggest that the proposed method outperforms the results of comparative studies in terms of accuracy 96.70%, specificity 95.55%, and sensitivity 96.62% over (COVID-19 vs. non-COVID19 vs. Pneumonia)