Background: Accurate prediction of the disease severity of patients with COVID-19 would greatly improve care delivery and resource allocation and thereby reduce mortality risks, especially in less developed countries. Many patient-related factors, such as pre-existing comorbidities, affect disease severity and can be used to aid this prediction. Objective: Because rapid automated profiling of peripheral blood samples is widely available, we aimed to investigate how data from the peripheral blood of patients with COVID-19 can be used to predict clinical outcomes. Methods: We investigated clinical data sets of patients with COVID-19 with known outcomes by combining statistical comparison and correlation methods with machine learning algorithms; the latter included decision tree, random forest, variants of gradient boosting machine, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and deep learning methods. Results: Our work revealed that several clinical parameters that are measurable in blood samples are factors that can discriminate between healthy people and COVID-19–positive patients, and we showed the value of these parameters in predicting later severity of COVID-19 symptoms. We developed a number of analytical methods that showed accuracy and precision scores >90% for disease severity prediction. Conclusions: We developed methodologies to analyze routine patient clinical data that enable more accurate prediction of COVID-19 patient outcomes. With this approach, data from standard hospital laboratory analyses of patient blood could be used to identify patients with COVID-19 who are at high risk of mortality, thus enabling optimization of hospital facilities for COVID-19 treatment.

Providing appropriate care for people suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a significant global challenge. Many individuals who become infected may have pre-existing conditions that may interact with COVID-19 to increase symptom severity and mortality risk. COVID-19 patient comorbidities are likely to be informative regarding the individual risk of severe illness and mortality. Determining the degree to which comorbidities are associated with severe symptoms and mortality would thus greatly assist in COVID-19 care planning and provision. To assess this we performed a meta-analysis of published global literature, and machine learning predictive analysis using an aggregated COVID-19 global dataset. Our meta-analysis suggested that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cerebrovascular disease (CEVD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes, malignancy, and hypertension as most significantly associated with COVID-19 severity in the current published literature. Machine learning classification using novel aggregated cohort data similarly found COPD, CVD, CKD, type 2 diabetes, malignancy, and hypertension, as well as asthma, as the most significant features for classifying those deceased versus those who survived COVID-19. While age and gender were the most significant predictors of mortality, in terms of symptom–comorbidity combinations, it was observed that Pneumonia–Hypertension, Pneumonia–Diabetes, and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)–Hypertension showed the most significant associations with COVID-19 mortality. These results highlight the patient cohorts most likely to be at risk of COVID-19-related severe morbidity and mortality, which have implications for prioritization of hospital resources.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), commonly called depression, is a prevalent psychiatric condition diagnosed via questionnaire-based mental status assessments. However, this method often yields inconsistent and inaccurate results. Furthermore, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive diagnostic framework for MDD that assesses various brainwaves (alpha, theta, gamma, etc.) of EEG signals as potential biomarkers, aiming to identify the most effective one for achieving accurate and robust diagnostic outcomes. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach employing a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for MDD diagnosis utilising the brainwaves present in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Our proposed model, an extended 11-layer one-dimensional convolutional neural network (Ex-1DCNN), is designed to automatically learn from input EEG signals, foregoing the need for manual feature selection. By harnessing intrinsic brainwave patterns, our model demonstrates adaptability in classifying EEG signals into depressive and healthy categories. We have conducted an extensive analysis to identify optimal brainwave features and epoch duration for accurate MDD diagnosis. Leveraging EEG data from 34 MDD patients and 30 healthy subjects, we have identified that the Gamma brainwave at a 15-second epoch duration is the most effective configuration, achieving an accuracy of 99.60%, sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 99.21%, and an F1-score of 99.60%. This study highlights the potential of deep learning techniques in streamlining the diagnostic process for MDD and offering a reliable aid to clinicians in MDD diagnosis.

In digital image processing and steganography, images are often described using edges and local binary pattern (LBP) codes. By combining these two properties, a novel hybrid image steganography method of secret embedding is proposed in this paper. This method only employs edge pixels that influence how well the novel approach embeds data. To increase the quantity of computed edge pixels, several edge detectors are applied and hybridized using a logical OR operation. A morphological dilation procedure in the hybridized edge image is employed to this purpose. The least significant bits (LSB) and all LBP codes are calculated for edge pixels. Afterward, these LBP codes, LSBs, and secret bits using an exclusive-OR operation are merged. These resulting implanted bits are delivered to edge pixels’ LSBs. The experimental results show that the suggested approach outperforms current strategies in terms of measuring perceptual transparency, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSI). The embedding capacity per tempered pixel in the proposed approach is also substantial. Its embedding guidelines protect the privacy of implanted data. The entropy, correlation coefficient, cosine similarity, and pixel difference histogram data show that our proposed method is more resistant to various types of cyber-attacks.

E‐medicine is a process to provide health care services to people using the Internet or any networking technology. In this Letter, a new idea is proposed to model the physical structure of the e‐medicine system to better provide offline health care services. Smart cards are used to authenticate the user singly. A very unique technique is also suggested to verify the card owner's identity and to embed secret data to the card while providing patients' reports either at booths or at the e‐medicine server system. The simulation results of card authentication and embedding procedure justify the proposed implementation.