Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease, which has already caused thousands of causalities and infected several millions of people worldwide. Any technological tool enabling rapid screening of the COVID-19 infection with high accuracy can be crucially helpful to the healthcare professionals. The main clinical tool currently in use for the diagnosis of COVID-19 is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is expensive, less-sensitive and requires specialized medical personnel. X-ray imaging is an easily accessible tool that can be an excellent alternative in the COVID-19 diagnosis. This research was taken to investigate the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. The aim of this paper is to propose a robust technique for automatic detection of COVID-19 pneumonia from digital chest X-ray images applying pre-trained deep-learning algorithms while maximizing the detection accuracy. A public database was created by the authors combining several public databases and also by collecting images from recently published articles. The database contains a mixture of 423 COVID-19, 1485 viral pneumonia, and 1579 normal chest X-ray images. Transfer learning technique was used with the help of image augmentation to train and validate several pretrained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The networks were trained to classify two different schemes: i) normal and COVID-19 pneumonia; ii) normal, viral and COVID-19 pneumonia with and without image augmentation. The classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both the schemes were 99.7%, 99.7%, 99.7% and 99.55% and 97.9%, 97.95%, 97.9%, and 98.8%, respectively. The high accuracy of this computer-aided diagnostic tool can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. This would be extremely useful in this pandemic where disease burden and need for preventive measures are at odds with available resources.
The paper proposes an artificial-intelligence-based solution to interface and deliver maximum power from a photovoltaic (PV) power generating system in standalone operation. The interface between the PV dc source and the load is accomplished by a quasi-Z-source inverter (qZSI). The maximum power delivery to the load is ensured by an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based on maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The proposed ANFIS-based MPPT offers an extremely fast dynamic response with high accuracy. The closed-loop control of the qZSI regulates the shoot through duty ratio and the modulation index to effectively control the injected power and maintain the stringent voltage, current, and frequency conditions. The proposed technique is tested for isolated load conditions. Simulation and experimental approaches are used to validate the proposed scheme.
Multilevel Inverters are a new family of converters for dc-ac conversion for the medium and high voltage and power applications. In this paper, two new topologies for the staircase output voltage generations have been proposed with lesser number of switch requirement. The first topology requires three dc voltage sources and ten switches to synthesize 15 levels across the load. The extension of the first topology has been proposed as the second topology which consist of four dc voltage sources and 12 switches to achieve 25 levels at the output. Both topologies, apart from having lesser switch count exhibit the merits in terms of reduced voltage stresses across the switches. In addition, a detailed comparative study of both topologies has been presented in the paper to demonstrate the features of the proposed topologies. Finally, several experimental results have been included in the paper to validate the performances of the proposed topologies with different loading condition and dynamic changes in load and modulation indexes.