Developing countries have had numerous obstacles in diagnosing the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic since its emergence. One of the most important ways to control the spread of this disease begins with early detection, which allows that isolation and treatment could perhaps be started. According to recent results, chest X-ray scans provide important information about the onset of the infection, and this information may be evaluated so that diagnosis and treatment can begin sooner. This is where artificial intelligence collides with skilled clinicians’ diagnostic abilities. The suggested study’s goal is to make a contribution to battling the worldwide epidemic by using a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) model to construct an automated image analysis framework for recognizing COVID-19 afflicted chest X-ray data. To improve classification accuracy, fully connected layers of simple CNN were replaced by the efficient extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier, which is used to categorize extracted features by the convolutional layers. Additionally, a hybrid version of the arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA), which is also developed to facilitate proposed research, is used to tune XGBoost hyperparameters for COVID-19 chest X-ray images. Reported experimental data showed that this approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, including other cutting-edge metaheuristics algorithms, that were tested in the same framework. For validation purposes, a balanced X-ray images dataset with 12,000 observations, belonging to normal, COVID-19 and viral pneumonia classes, was used. The proposed method, where XGBoost was tuned by introduced hybrid AOA, showed superior performance, achieving a classification accuracy of approximately 99.39% and weighted average precision, recall and F1-score of 0.993889, 0.993887 and 0.993887, respectively.

Wearable sensors and advanced algorithms can provide significant decision support for clinical practice. Currently, the motor symptoms of patients with neurological disorders are often visually observed and evaluated, which may result in rough and subjective quantification. Using small inertial wearable sensors, fine repetitive and clinically important movements can be captured and objectively evaluated. In this paper, a new methodology is designed for objective evaluation and automatic scoring of bradykinesia in repetitive finger-tapping movements for patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease and atypical parkinsonism. The methodology comprises several simple and repeatable signal-processing techniques that are applied for the extraction of important movement features. The decision support system consists of simple rules designed to match universally defined criteria that are evaluated in clinical practice. The accuracy of the system is calculated based on the reference scores provided by two neurologists. The proposed expert system achieved an accuracy of 88.16% for files on which neurologists agreed with their scores. The introduced system is simple, repeatable, easy to implement, and can provide good assistance in clinical practice, providing a detailed analysis of finger-tapping performance and decision support for symptom evaluation.

Monitoring and classification of dairy cattle behaviours is essential for optimising milk yields. Early detection of illness, days before the critical conditions occur, together with automatic detection of the onset of oestrus cycles is crucial for obviating prolonged cattle treatments and improving the pregnancy rates. Accelerometer-based sensor systems are becoming increasingly popular, as they are automatically providing information about key cattle behaviours such as the level of restlessness and the time spent ruminating and eating, proxy measurements that indicate the onset of heat events and overall welfare, at an individual animal level. This paper reports on an approach to the development of algorithms that classify key cattle states based on a systematic dimensionality reduction process through two feature selection techniques. These are based on Mutual Information and Backward Feature Elimination and applied on knowledge-specific and generic time-series extracted from raw accelerometer data. The extracted features are then used to train classification models based on a Hidden Markov Model, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis. The proposed feature engineering methodology permits model deployment within the computing and memory restrictions imposed by operational settings. The models were based on measurement data from 18 steers, each animal equipped with an accelerometer-based neck-mounted collar and muzzle-mounted halter, the latter providing the truthing data. A total of 42 time-series features were initially extracted and the trade-off between model performance, computational complexity and memory footprint was explored. Results show that the classification model that best balances performance and computation complexity is based on Linear Discriminant Analysis using features selected through Backward Feature Elimination. The final model requires 1.83 ± 1.00 ms to perform feature extraction with 0.05 ± 0.01 ms for inference with an overall balanced accuracy of 0.83.

Water quality prediction is crucial for effective river stream management. Dissolved oxygen, conductivity and chemical oxygen demand are vital chemical parameters for water quality. Development of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods made them widely used in this domain. Sophisticated DL techniques, especially long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, are required for accurate, real-time multistep prediction. LSTM networks are effective in predicting water quality due to their ability to handle long-term dependencies in sequential data. We propose a novel hybrid approach for water quality parameters prediction combining DL with data smoothing method. The Sava river at the Jamena hydrological station serves as a case study. Our workflow uses LSTM networks alongside LOcally WEighted Scatterplot Smoothing (LOWESS) technique for data filtering. For comparison, Support Vector Regressor (SVR) is used as the baseline method. Performance is evaluated using Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Coefficient of Determination R2 metrics. Results demonstrate that LSTM outperforms the baseline method, with an R2 up to 0.9998 and RMSE of 0.0230 on the test set for dissolved oxygen. Over a 5-day prediction period, our approach achieves R2 of 0.9912 and RMSE of 0.1610 confirming it as a reliable method for water quality multistep parameters prediction.

Background: Portable energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (pEDXRF) spectrometry analysis was applied for the characterisation of archaeological ceramic findings from three Neolithic sites in Serbia. Two dimension reduction techniques, principal component analysis (PCA) and scattering matrices-based dimension reduction were used to examine the possible classification of those findings, and to extract the most discriminant features.Results: A decision-making procedure is proposed, whose goal is to classify unknown ceramic findings based on their elemental compositions derived by pEDXRF spectrometry. As a major part of decision-making procedure, the possibilities of two dimension reduction methods were tested. Scattering matrices-based dimension reduction was found to be the more efficient method for the purpose. Linear classifiers designed based on the desired output allowed for 7 of 8 unknown samples from the test set to be correctly classified.Conclusions: Based on the results, the conclusion is that despite the constraints typical of the applied analytical technique, the elemental composition can be considered as viable information in provenience studies. With a fully-developed procedure, ceramic artefacts can be classified based on their elemental composition and well-known provenance.

The paper presents an analysis of water-level control in a thermal power plant (TPP) steam separator. This control structure is vital for the entire plant’s stable, reliable, and efficient operation. This process belongs to processes with an integrator because it concerns a level-control issue, and the control variable is the feedwater flow. Said industrial processes are challenging to control and apply standard methods for tuning the PID controller, so a new procedure has been proposed. A procedure for tuning a PID controller for integrating processes is proposed based on the IFOPDT model, obtained from the wide step response of the process. Based on the process parameters estimated, the tuning of the controller is proposed. Results from the TPP TEKO-B2 (350 MW) are presented as an experimental verification. Compared with standard tuning methods, better results are achieved in the form of rise time and disturbance elimination rate. A significantly less risky and faster experiment for parameter estimation and controller tuning is also obtained. In addition, one adjustable parameter is provided to select the relation between performance and robustness. This method can be applied to various industrial processes with an integrator.