Glaucoma is a chronic ocular degenerative disease that can cause blindness if left untreated in its early stages. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (Deep CNNs) and its variants have provided superior performance in glaucoma classification, segmentation, and detection. In this paper, we propose a two-staged glaucoma classification scheme based on Deep CNN architectures. In stage one, four different ImageNet pre-trained Deep CNN architectures, i.e., AlexNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and NasNet-Large are used and it is observed that NasNet-Large architecture provides superior performance in terms of sensitivity (99.1%), specificity (99.4%), accuracy (99.3%), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (97.8%) metrics. A detailed performance comparison is also presented among these on public datasets, i.e., ACRIMA, ORIGA-Light, and RIM-ONE as well as locally available datasets, i.e., AFIO, and HMC. In the second stage, we propose an ensemble classifier with two novel ensembling techniques, i.e., accuracy based weighted voting, and accuracy/score based weighted averaging to further improve the glaucoma classification results. It is shown that ensemble with accuracy/score based scheme improves the accuracy (99.5%) for diverse databases. As an outcome of this study, it is presented that the NasNet-Large architecture is a feasible option in terms of its performance as a single classifier while ensemble classifier further improves the generalized performance for automatic glaucoma classification.

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common type of cancer and is also a leading cause of mortality among women across the world. Various types of screening tests are used for its diagnosis, but the most popular one is the Papanicolaou smear test, in which cell cytology is carried out. It is a reliable tool for early identification of cervical cancer, but there is always a chance of misdiagnosis because of possible errors in human observations. In this paper, an auto-assisted cervical cancer screening system is proposed that uses a convolutional neural network trained on Cervical Cells database. The training of the network is accomplished through transfer learning, whereby initializing weights are obtained from the training on ImageNet dataset. After fine-tuning the network on the Cervical Cells database, the feature vector is extracted from the last fully connected layer of convolutional neural network. For final classification/screening of the cell samples, three different classifiers are proposed including Softmax regression (SR), Support vector machine (SVM), and GentleBoost ensemble of decision trees (GEDT). The performance of the proposed screening system is evaluated for two different testing protocols, namely, 2-class problem and 7-class problem, on the Herlev database. Classification accuracies of SR, SVM, and GEDT for the 2-class problem are found to be 98.8%, 99.5%, and 99.6%, respectively, while for the 7-class problem, they are 97.21%, 98.12%, and 98.85%, respectively. These results show that the proposed system provides better performance than its previous counterparts under various testing conditions.

This paper presents an important issue related to COCOA production and provides a comprehensive description of the significance of CNN for pest detection in Ghana. It also discusses how modern technology is being used in COCOA farming. In my point of...