Selecting regions of interest (ROI) is a common step in medical image analysis across all imaging modalities. An ROI is a subset of an image appropriate for the intended analysis and identified manually by experts. In modern pathology, the analysis involves processing multidimensional and high resolution whole slide image (WSI) tiles automatically with an overwhelming quantity of structural and functional information. Despite recent improvements in computing capacity, analyzing such a plethora of data is challenging but vital to accurate analysis. Automatic ROI detection can significantly reduce the number of pixels to be processed, speed the analysis, improve accuracy and reduce dependency on pathologists. In this paper, we present an ROI detection method for WSI and demonstrated it for human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) grading for breast cancer patients. Existing HER2 grading relies on manual ROI selection, which is tedious, time-consuming and suffers from inter-observer and intra-observer variability. This study found that the HER2 grade changes with ROI selection. We proposed an ROI detection method using Vision Transformer and investigated the role of image magnification for ROI detection. This method yielded an accuracy of 99% using 20 × WSI and 97% using 10 × WSI for the ROI detection. In the demonstration, the proposed method increased the diagnostic agreement to 99.3% with the clinical scores and reduced the time to 15 seconds for automated HER2 grading.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States and is anticipated to cause another 52,580 deaths in 2023. The standard medical procedure for screening and treating colorectal disease is a colonoscopy. By effectively examining the colonoscopy to identify precancerous polyps early and remove them before they become cancerous, CRC mortality can be lowered significantly. Manual colonoscopy examination for precancerous polyps detection is time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error. Automatic segmentation and examination could be fast and practical; however, existing automated methods fail to attain adequate accuracy in polyps segmentation. Moreover, these methods do not assess the risk of detected polyps. In this paper, we proposed an autonomous CRC screening method to detect polyps and assess their potential threats. The proposed method utilized DoubleU-Net for polyps segmentation and Vision Transformer (ViT) for classifying them based on their risks. The proposed method has achieved a mean dice-coefficient of 0.834 and 0.956 in segmentation for the Endotech challenge and Kvasir-SEG dataset, accordingly, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art polyps segmentation. Then, this method classified the segmented polyps as hyper-plastic or adenomatous with 99% test accuracy.

Medicinal plants are essential to healthcare since ancient times and are integral to developing drugs and other medical treatments. More than 25% of medicines in developed countries are produced from medicinal plants, while in developing countries, approximately 80% of individuals receive primary healthcare from these plants. Traditionally, these plants are identified manually by experts, which is tedious, time-consuming, subjective and dependent on the availability of experts. Furthermore, a wrong detection can result in serious health issues or death. This signifies the need for a more reliable approach to identifying medicinal plants, which is accurate and practical. Several automated methods were proposed previously, utilizing deep learning and traditional machine learning (TML) techniques, but they require singular leaf images and failed to achieve sufficient accuracy when demonstrated in a different setting. Capturing singular leaf images for each plant is also time-consuming and laborious. This paper presents a robust, accurate and practical system to identify medicinal plants from smartphone-captured plant images in the site of plants. The proposed system utilized a cascaded architecture to extract features using a pre-trained ResNet50 model, which were optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to classify the plants using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The proposed ResNet50-PSO-SVM network classified seven medicinal plants with 99.60% accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-art (99%). The system was demonstrated for three different smartphones, classifying an image in 0.15 seconds with 97.79% accuracy on average. The system’s high accuracy, rapid identification time and robustness ensured its practical use.

Bangladesh is undertaking a major transformation towards digitalization in every sector, and healthcare is no exception. Digitalization of the health sector is expected to improve healthcare services while reducing human effort and ensuring the satisfaction of patients and health professionals. However, for practical and successful digitalization, it is necessary to understand the perceptions of health professionals. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in Bangladesh to investigate health professionals’ perceptions in relation to various socio–demographic variables such as age, gender, location, profession and institution. We also evaluated their competencies, as digital health-related competencies are required for digitalization. Additionally, we identified major digitalization challenges. Quantitative survey data were analyzed with Python Pandas, and qualitative data were classified using Valence-Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER). This study found significant relationships between age ${\chi }^2(12,N=701)=82.02,p<0.001$; location ${\chi }^2(4,N=701)=18.78,p<0.001$; and profession ${\chi }^2(16,N=701)=71.02,p<0.001$; with technical competency. These variables also have similar influences on psychological competency. According to VADER, 88.1% (583/701) of respondents have a positive outlook toward digitalization. The internal consistency of the survey was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha score (0.746). This study assisted in developing a better understanding of how professionals perceive digitalization, categorizes professionals based on competency, and prioritizes the major digitalization challenges.

Dengue endemicity has become regular in recent times across the world. The numbers of cases and deaths have been alarmingly increasing over the years. In addition to this, there are no direct medications or vaccines to treat this viral infection. Thus, monitoring and controlling the carriers of this virus which are the Aedes mosquitoes become specially demanding to combat the endemicity, as killing all the mosquitoes regardless of their species would destroy ecosystems. The current approach requires collecting a larva sample from the hatching sites and, then, an expert entomologist manually examining it using a microscope in the laboratory to identify the Aedes vector. This is time-consuming, labor-intensive, subjective, and impractical. Several automated Aedes larvae detection systems have been proposed previously, but failed to achieve sufficient accuracy and reliability. We propose an automated system utilizing ensemble learning, which detects Aedes larvae effectively from a low-magnification image with an accuracy of over 99%. The proposed system outperformed all the previous methods with respect to accuracy. The practical usability of the system is also demonstrated.