Background: Plant diseases significantly affect the crop, so their identification is very important. Correct identification of these diseases is crucial for establishing a good disease control strategy to avoid time and financial losses. In general, machines can greatly reduce the possibility of human error. In particular, computer vision techniques developed through deep learning have paved a way to detect and diagnose these plant diseases on the leaf. Methods: In this work, the model AFD-Net was developed to detect and identify various leaf diseases in apple trees. The dataset is from Kaggle 2020 and 2021 and was financially supported by the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture. An AFD-Net was proposed for leaf disease classification in apple trees and the results of the efficiency of the model are compared with other state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. Results: The results of the experiments in the validation dataset show that the proposed AFD-Net model achieves the highest values of 98.7% accuracy for Plant Pathology 2020 and 92.6% for Plant Pathology 2021 compared to other deep learning models in the original and extended datasets. Discussion: The results also indicate the efficiency of the proposed model in identifying leaf diseases on apple trees for major and minor classes, i.e., for multiple classification.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have witnessed great advancement in the field of neural networks for processing graph datasets. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have outperformed current models/algorithms in accomplishing tasks such as semi-supervised node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. GCNs perform well even with a very small training dataset. The GCN framework has evolved to Graph Attention Model (GAT), GraphSAGE, and other hybrid frameworks. In this paper, we effectively usd the network centrality approach to select nodes from the training set (instead of a traditional random selection), which is fed into GCN (and GAT) to perform semi-supervised node classification tasks. This allows us to take advantage of the best positional nodes in the network. Based on empirical analysis, we choose the betweenness centrality measure for selecting the training nodes. We also mathematically justify why our proposed technique offers better training. This novel training technique is used to analyze the performance of GCN and GAT models on five benchmark networks—Cora, Citeseer, PubMed, Wiki-CS, and Amazon Computers. In GAT implementations, we obtain improved classification accuracy compared to the other state-of-the-art GCN-based methods. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, the results obtained for Citeseer, Wiki- CS, and Amazon Computer datasets are the best compared to all the existing node classification methods.

Pulmonary fibrosis is a severe chronic lung disease that causes irreversible scarring in the tissues of the lungs, which results in the loss of lung capacity. The Forced Vital Capacity (FVC) of the patient is an interesting measure to investigate this disease to have the prognosis of the disease. This paper proposes a deep learning-based FVC-Net architecture to predict the progression of the disease from the patients computed tomography (CT) scan and the patients metadata. The input to the model combines the image score generated based on the degree of honeycombing for a patient identified based on segmented lung images and the metadata. This input is then fed to a 3-layer net to obtain the final output. The performance of the proposed FVC-Net model is compared with various contemporary state-of-the-art deep learning-based models, which are available on a cohort from the pulmonary fibrosis progression dataset. The model showcased significant improvement in the performance over other models for modified Laplace Log-Likelihood (6.64). Finally, the paper concludes with some prospects to be explored in the proposed study.

VANET has been an area of great interest and exploration for researchers to solve several challenging issues regarding communication, topology, security etc. in the last few years. Currently, a lot of work has been done and is looked after to establi