Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are machine learning algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. Their popularity has increased in recent years due to their ability to learn and improve through experience, making them suitable for a wide range of applications. ANNs are often used as part of deep learning, which enables them to learn, transfer knowledge, make predictions, and take action. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of ANNs and explore potential directions for future research. To achieve this, the paper analyzes 10,661 articles and 35,973 keywords from various journals using a text-mining approach. The results of the analysis show that there is a high level of interest in topics related to machine learning, deep learning, and ANNs and that research in this field is increasingly focusing on areas such as optimization techniques, feature extraction and selection, and clustering. The study presented in this paper is motivated by the need for a framework to guide the continued study and development of ANNs. By providing insights into the current state of research on ANNs, this paper aims to promote a deeper understanding of ANNs and to facilitate the development of new techniques and applications for ANNs in the future.

Covid-19 is a disease that can lead to pneumonia, respiratory syndrome, septic shock, multiple organ failure, and death. This pandemic is viewed as a critical component of the fight against an enormous threat to the human population. Deep convolutional neural networks have recently proved their ability to perform well in classification and dimension reduction tasks. Selecting hyper-parameters is critical for these networks. This is because the search space expands exponentially in size as the number of layers increases. All existing approaches utilize a pre-trained or designed architecture as an input. None of them takes design and pruning into account throughout the process. In fact, there exists a convolutional topology for any architecture, and each block of a CNN corresponds to an optimization problem with a large search space. However, there are no guidelines for designing a specific architecture for a specific purpose; thus, such design is highly subjective and heavily reliant on data scientists’ knowledge and expertise. Motivated by this observation, we propose a topology optimization method for designing a convolutional neural network capable of classifying radiography images and detecting probable chest anomalies and infections, including COVID-19. Our method has been validated in a number of comparative studies against relevant state-of-the-art architectures.

American scientific publishing group