Malaria is a life-threatening disease that is spread by the Plasmodium parasites. It is detected by trained microscopists who analyze microscopic blood smear images. Modern deep learning techniques may be used to do this analysis automatically. The need for the trained personnel can be greatly reduced with the development of an automatic accurate and efficient model. In this article, we propose an entirely automated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based model for the diagnosis of malaria from the microscopic blood smear images. A variety of techniques including knowledge distillation, data augmentation, Autoencoder, feature extraction by a CNN model and classified by Support Vector Machine (SVM) or K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) are performed under three training procedures named general training, distillation training and autoencoder training to optimize and improve the model accuracy and inference performance. Our deep learning-based model can detect malarial parasites from microscopic images with an accuracy of 99.23% while requiring just over 4600 floating point operations. For practical validation of model efficiency, we have deployed the miniaturized model in different mobile phones and a server-backed web application. Data gathered from these environments show that the model can be used to perform inference under 1 s per sample in both offline (mobile only) and online (web application) mode, thus engendering confidence that such models may be deployed for efficient practical inferential systems.

BanglaLekha-Isolated, a Bangla handwritten isolated character dataset is presented in this article. This dataset contains 84 different characters comprising of 50 Bangla basic characters, 10 Bangla numerals and 24 selected compound characters. 2000 handwriting samples for each of the 84 characters were collected, digitized and pre-processed. After discarding mistakes and scribbles, 1,66,105 handwritten character images were included in the final dataset. The dataset also includes labels indicating the age and the gender of the subjects from whom the samples were collected. This dataset could be used not only for optical handwriting recognition research but also to explore the influence of gender and age on handwriting. The dataset is publicly available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/hf6sf8zrkc/2.

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an opinion mining study analyzing people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations and appraisals towards societal entities such as products, services, individuals, organizations, events, etc. Of late, most of the research works on SA in natural language processing (NLP) are focused on English language. However, it is noted that Bangla does not have a proper dataset that is both large and standard. As a result, recent research works with Bangla in SA have fallen short to produce results that can be both comparable to works done by others in other languages and reusable for further prospective research. In this work, a substantial textual dataset of both Bangla and Romanized Bangla texts have been provided which is first of this kind and post-processed, multiple validated, and ready for SAimplementation and experiments. Further, this dataset have been tested in Deep Recurrent model, specifically, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), using two types of loss functions - binary cross-entropy and categorical cross-entropy, and also some experimental pre-training were conducted by using data from one validation to pre-train the other and vice versa. Lastly, the results along with analysis are presented in this research.

Handwritten digit recognition is a typical image classification problem. Convolutional neural networks, also known as ConvNets, are powerful classification models for such tasks. As different languages have different styles and shapes of their numeral digits, accuracy rates of the models vary from each other and from language to language. However, unsupervised pre-training in such situation has shown improved accuracy for classification tasks, though no such work has been found for Bangla digit recognition. This paper presents the use of unsupervised pre-training using autoencoder with deep ConvNet in order to recognize handwritten Bangla digits, i.e., 0-9. The datasets that are used in this paper are CMATERDB 3.1.1 and a dataset published by the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). This paper studies four different combinations of these two datasets-two experiments are done against their own training and testing images, other two experiments are done cross validating the datasets. In one of these four experiments, the proposed approach achieves 99.50% accuracy, which is so far the best for recognizing handwritten Bangla digits. The ConvNet model is trained with 19,313 images of ISI handwritten character dataset and tested with images of CMATERDB dataset.

Background: Access to oral healthcare is not uniform globally, particularly in rural areas with limited resources, which limits the potential of automated diagnostics and advanced tele-dentistry applications. The use of digital caries detection and progression monitoring through photographic communication, is influenced by multiple variables that are difficult to standardize in such settings. The objective of this study was to develop a novel and cost-effective virtual computer vision AI system to predict dental cavitations from non-standardised photographs with reasonable clinical accuracy. Methods: A set of 1703 augmented images was obtained from 233 de-identified teeth specimens. Images were acquired using a consumer smartphone, without any standardised apparatus applied. The study utilised state-of-the-art ensemble modeling, test-time augmentation, and transfer learning processes. The “you only look once” algorithm (YOLO) derivatives, v5s, v5m, v5l, and v5x, were independently evaluated, and an ensemble of the best results was augmented, and transfer learned with ResNet50, ResNet101, VGG16, AlexNet, and DenseNet. The outcomes were evaluated using precision, recall, and mean average precision (mAP). Results: The YOLO model ensemble achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.732, an accuracy of 0.789, and a recall of 0.701. When transferred to VGG16, the final model demonstrated a diagnostic accuracy of 86.96%, precision of 0.89, and recall of 0.88. This surpassed all other base methods of object detection from free-hand non-standardised smartphone photographs. Conclusion: A virtual computer vision AI system, blending a model ensemble, test-time augmentation, and transferred deep learning processes, was developed to predict dental cavitations from non-standardised photographs with reasonable clinical accuracy. This model can improve access to oral healthcare in rural areas with limited resources, and has the potential to aid in automated diagnostics and advanced tele-dentistry applications.