Due to the successful application of machine learning techniques in several fields, automated diagnosis system in healthcare has been increasing at a high rate. The aim of the study is to propose an automated skin cancer diagnosis and triaging model and to explore the impact of integrating the clinical features in the diagnosis and enhance the outcomes achieved by the literature study. We used an ensemble‐learning framework, consisting of the EfficientNetB3 deep learning model for skin lesion analysis and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) for clinical data. The study used PAD‐UFES‐20 data set consisting of six unbalanced categories of skin cancer. To overcome the data imbalance, we used data augmentation. Experiments were conducted using skin lesion merely and the combination of skin lesion and clinical data. We found that integration of clinical data with skin lesions enhances automated diagnosis accuracy. Moreover, the proposed model outperformed the results achieved by the previous study for the PAD‐UFES‐20 data set with an accuracy of 0.78, precision of 0.89, recall of 0.86, and F1 of 0.88. In conclusion, the study provides an improved automated diagnosis system to aid the healthcare professional and patients for skin cancer diagnosis and remote triaging.
The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is disrupting the entire world; its rapid global spread threatens to affect millions of people. Accurate and timely diagnosis of COVID-19 is essential to control the spread and alleviate risk. Due to the promising results achieved by integrating machine learning (ML), particularly deep learning (DL), in automating the multiple disease diagnosis process. In the current study, a model based on deep learning was proposed for the automated diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images (CXR) and clinical data of the patient. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of integrating clinical patient data with the CXR for automated COVID-19 diagnosis. The proposed model used data collected from King Fahad University Hospital, Dammam, KSA, which consists of 270 patient records. The experiments were carried out first with clinical data, second with the CXR, and finally with clinical data and CXR. The fusion technique was used to combine the clinical features and features extracted from images. The study found that integrating clinical data with the CXR improves diagnostic accuracy. Using the clinical data and the CXR, the model achieved an accuracy of 0.970, a recall of 0.986, a precision of 0.978, and an F-score of 0.982. Further validation was performed by comparing the performance of the proposed system with the diagnosis of an expert. Additionally, the results have shown that the proposed system can be used as a tool that can help the doctors in COVID-19 diagnosis.
28 March 2022 in Journal of Biomimetics, Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering
Mental stress is a natural response to life activities. However, acute and prolonged stress may cause psychological and heart diseases. Heart rate variability (HRV) is considered an indicator of mental stress and physical fitness. The standard way of obtaining HRV is using electrocardiography (ECG) as the time interval between two consecutive R-peaks. ECG signal is collected by attaching electrodes on different locations of the body, which need a proper clinical setup and is costly as well; therefore, it is not feasible to monitor stress with ECG. Photoplethysmography (PPG) is considered an alternative for mental stress detection using pulse rate variability (PRV), the time interval between two successive peaks of PPG. This study aims to diagnose daily life stress using low-cost portable PPG devices instead of lab trials and expensive devices. Data is collected from 27 subjects both in rest and in stressed conditions in daily life routine. Thirty-six time domain, frequency domain, and non-linear features are extracted from PRV. Multiple machine learning classifiers are used to classify these features. Recursive feature elimination, student t-test and genetic algorithm are used to select these features. An accuracy of 72% is achieved using stratified leave out cross-validation using K-Nearest Neighbor, and it increased up to 81% using a genetic algorithm. Once the model is trained with the best features selected with the genetic algorithm, we used the trained weights for the real-time prediction of mental stress. The results show that using a low-cost device; stress can be diagnosed in real life. The proposed method enable the regular monitoring of stress in short time that help to control the occurrence of psychological and cardiovascular diseases.
The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease that primarily affects lungs. This virus has spread in almost every continent. Countries are racing to slow down the spread by testing and treating patients. To diagnose the infected people, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test is used. Because of colossal demand; PCR kits are under shortage, and to overcome this; radiographic techniques such as X-rays and CT-scan can be used for diagnostic purpose. In this paper, deep learning technology is used to diagnose COVID-19 in subjects through chest CT-scan. EfficientNet deep learning architecture is used for timely and accurate detection of coronavirus with an accuracy 0.897, F1 score 0.896, and AUC 0.895. Three different learning rate strategies are used, such as reducing the learning rate when model performance stops increasing (reduce on plateau), cyclic learning rate, and constant learning rate. Reduce on plateau strategy achieved F1-score of 0.9, cyclic learning rate and constant learning rate resulted in F1-score of 0.86 and 0.82, respectively. Implementation is available at github.com/talhaanwarch/Corona\_Virus/tree/master/CT\_scan
1 March 2023 in IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI)
Vehicle identification based on make and model is an integral part of an intelligent transport system that helps traffic monitoring and crime control. Much research has been performed in this regard, but most of them used manual feature extraction or ensemble convolution neural networks that result in increased execution time during inference. This paper compared three deep learning models and utilized different augmentation techniques to achieve state-of-the-art performance without ensembling or fusing the models. Experimentations are made without any augmentation, with standard augmentation, and by mixed sample data augmentation techniques. Gradient accumulation and stochastic weighted averaging with mixed precision are used to have a large batch size that helped to reduce training time. The dataset comprised 48 vehicles’ models running on the road of Pakistan. The highest accuracy and F1 score of 97% and 95% using the FMix augmentation technique with EfficientNetV2-S architecture gave the confidence that the proposed solution can be implemented in production.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus. Usually, COVID-19 is diagnosed by PCR test, which requires less human expertise, but this test's false-negative ratio is high. COVID can also be diagnosed from radiographs such as CT-scan and X-ray, but it requires expert radiologists. So there is a need for an automated way to interpret chest radiographs using artificial intelligence. Several labelled datasets and deep learning algorithms are available to diagnose corona patients using radiographs. These algorithms classify the images into predefined categories such as healthy or infected. But there is no way to know how much area of chest radiograph is infected by COVID. This paper proposed an ensemble network to predict COVID-19 percentage infection from a chest CT scan. The proposed ensemble network used squeeze and excitation bock to learn individual models' weights during the training process. On validation data and test data, the proposed approach obtained a mean absolute error of 4.469 and 3.64, respectively. Implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/talhaanwarch/Covid-Infection-Estimation