The field of Medicine and Healthcare has attained revolutionary advancements in the last forty years. Within this period, the actual reasons behind numerous diseases were unveiled, novel diagnostic methods were designed, and new medicines were developed. Even after all these achievements, diseases like cancer continue to haunt us since we are still vulnerable to them. Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally; about one in every six people die suffering from it. Among many types of cancers, the lung and colon variants are the most common and deadliest ones. Together, they account for more than 25% of all cancer cases. However, identifying the disease at an early stage significantly improves the chances of survival. Cancer diagnosis can be automated by using the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which allows us to assess more cases in less time and cost. With the help of modern Deep Learning (DL) and Digital Image Processing (DIP) techniques, this paper inscribes a classification framework to differentiate among five types of lung and colon tissues (two benign and three malignant) by analyzing their histopathological images. The acquired results show that the proposed framework can identify cancer tissues with a maximum of 96.33% accuracy. Implementation of this model will help medical professionals to develop an automatic and reliable system capable of identifying various types of lung and colon cancers.
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) refers to the damages endured by the retina as an effect of diabetes. DR has become a severe health concern worldwide, as the number of diabetes patients is soaring uncountably. Periodic eye examination allows doctors to detect DR in patients at an early stage to initiate proper treatments. Advancements in artificial intelligence and camera technology have allowed us to automate the diagnosis of DR, which can benefit millions of patients indeed. This paper inscribes a novel method for DR diagnosis based on the gray-level intensity and texture features extracted from fundus images using a decision tree-based ensemble learning technique. This study primarily works with the Asia Pacific Tele-Ophthalmology Society 2019 Blindness Detection (APTOS 2019 BD) dataset. We undertook several steps to curate its contents to make them more suitable for machine learning applications. Our approach incorporates several image processing techniques, two feature extraction techniques, and one feature selection technique, which results in a classification accuracy of 94.20% (margin of error: ±0.32%) and an F-measure of 93.51% (margin of error: ±0.5%). Several other parameters regarding the proposed method’s performance have been presented to manifest its robustness and reliability. Details on each employed technique have been included to make the provided results reproducible. This method can be a valuable tool for mass retinal screening to detect DR, thus drastically reducing the rate of vision loss attributed to it.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) simply refers to the capacity of a machine to perceive human actions. HAR is a prominent application of advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques that utilize computer vision to understand the semantic meanings of heterogeneous human actions. This paper describes a supervised learning method that can distinguish human actions based on data collected from practical human movements. The primary challenge while working with HAR is to overcome the difficulties that come with the cyclostationary nature of the activity signals. This study proposes a HAR classification model based on a two-channel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that makes use of the frequency and power features of the collected human action signals. The model was tested on the UCI HAR dataset, which resulted in a 95.25% classification accuracy. This approach will help others to conduct further researches on the recognition of human activities based on their biomedical signals.
Robotics is one of the many tools that is making a substantial difference as the world is experiencing the fourth industrial revolution. To ease control over this engineering marvel substantially, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has paved its way in recent years quite remarkably. RL enables robots to become self-aware towards carrying out a specific task followed by user operations. For decades of rigorous endeavor, this research field has gone through numerous groundbreaking developments and it will be the same for the coming days. Therefore, this paper steps in to enlighten the scientific community with a systemic review of the published research papers within the past decade. The bibliographic data that is extracted from the papers are analyzed using an automated tool named Vosviewer with respect to some parameters. Substantial excerpts from the most influential papers are highlighted in this work. Furthermore, this paper points out the global research practice in this field. The paper also generates some intriguing questions and answers them in regards to the research topic. After reading this paper, future researchers will have a firm idea in the RL-based robotics and will be able to incorporate in their own research.
25 February 2021 in Journal of Healthcare Engineering
Pneumonia is a fatal disease responsible for almost one in five child deaths worldwide. Many developing countries have high mortality rates due to pneumonia because of the unavailability of proper and timely diagnostic measures. Using machine learning-based diagnosis methods can help to detect the disease early and in less time and cost. In this study, we proposed a novel method to determine the presence of pneumonia and identify its type (bacterial or viral) through analyzing chest radiographs. We performed a three-class classification based on features containing diverse information of the samples. After using an augmentation technique to balance the dataset’s sample sizes, we extracted the chest X-ray images’ statistical features, as well as global features by employing a deep learning architecture. We then combined both sets of features and performed the final classification using the RandomForest classifier. A feature selection method was also incorporated to identify the features with the highest relevance. We tested the proposed method on a widely used (but relabeled) chest radiograph dataset to evaluate its performance. The proposed model can classify the dataset’s samples with an 86.30% classification accuracy and 86.03% F-score, which assert the model’s efficacy and reliability. However, results show that the classifier struggles while distinguishing between viral and bacterial pneumonia samples. Implementing this method will provide a fast and automatic way to detect pneumonia in a patient and identify its type.