Research on COVID-19

The gold standard for confirming COVID-19 infection is through Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) assay. The lack of sufficient RT-PCR testing capacity, false negative results of RT-PCR, time to get back the results and other logistical constraints enabled the epidemic to continue to spread albeit interventions like regional or complete country lockdowns. Therefore, chest radiographs such as CT and X-ray can be used to supplement PCR in combating the virus from spreading. In this work, we focus on proposing a deep learning tool that can be used by radiologists or healthcare professionals to diagnose COVID-19 cases in a quick and accurate manner. However, the lack of a publicly available dataset of X-ray and CT images makes the design of such AI tools a challenging task. To this end, this study aims to build a comprehensive dataset of X-rays and CT scan images from multiple sources as well as provides a simple but an effective COVID-19 detection technique using deep learning and transfer learning algorithms. In this vein, a simple convolution neural network (CNN) and modified pre-trained AlexNet model are applied on the prepared X-rays and CT scan images. The result of the experiments shows that the utilized models can provide accuracy up to 98% via pre-trained network and 94.1% accuracy by using the modified CNN. 

In this work, a bi-modular hybrid model is proposed to detect COVID-19 from the chest CT images. In the first module, we have used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to extract features from the chest CT images. In the second module, we have used a bi-stage feature selection (FS) approach to find out the most relevant features for the prediction of COVID and non-COVID cases from the chest CT images. At the first stage of FS, we have applied a guided FS methodology by employing two filter methods: Mutual Information (MI) and Relief-F, for the initial screening of the features obtained from the CNN model. In the second stage, Dragonfly algorithm (DA) has been used for the further selection of most relevant features. The final feature set has been used for the classification of the COVID-19 and non-COVID chest CT images using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed model has been tested on two open-access datasets: SARS-CoV-2 CT images and COVID-CT datasets and the model shows substantial prediction rates of 98.39% and 90.0% on the said datasets respectively. The proposed model has been compared with a few past works for the prediction of COVID-19 cases. The supporting codes are uploaded in the Github link: https://github.com/Soumyajit-Saha/A-Bi-Stage-Feature-Selection-on-Covid-19-Dataset 

This article proposes two optimization algorithms for feature selection and classification of COVID-19. The proposed framework has three cascaded phases. Firstly, the features are extracted from the CT scans using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named AlexNet. Secondly, a proposed features selection algorithm, Guided Whale Optimization Algorithm (Guided WOA) based on Stochastic Fractal Search (SFS), is then applied followed by balancing the selected features. Finally, a proposed voting classifier, Guided WOA based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), aggregates different classifiers’ predictions to choose the most voted class. This increases the chance that individual classifiers, e.g. Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks (NN), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Decision Trees (DT), to show significant discrepancies. Two datasets are used to test the proposed model: CT images containing clinical findings of positive COVID-19 and CT images negative COVID-19. The proposed feature selection algorithm (SFS-Guided WOA) is compared with other optimization algorithms widely used in recent literature to validate its efficiency. The proposed voting classifier (PSO-Guided-WOA) achieved AUC (area under the curve) of 0.995 that is superior to other voting classifiers in terms of performance metrics. Wilcoxon rank-sum, ANOVA, and T-test statistical tests are applied to statistically assess the quality of the proposed algorithms as well.

This paper aims to classify COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia patients from chest X-ray images. As such, an Optimized Convolutional Neural network (OptCoNet) is proposed in this work for the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19. The proposed OptCoNet architecture is composed of optimized feature extraction and classification components. The Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm is used to optimize the hyperparameters for training the CNN layers. The proposed model is tested and compared with different classification strategies utilizing an openly accessible dataset of COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia images. The presented optimized CNN model provides accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1 score values of 97.78%, 97.75%, 96.25%, 92.88%, and 95.25%, respectively, which are better than those of state-of-the-art models. This proposed CNN model can help in the automatic screening of COVID-19 patients and decrease the burden on medicinal services frameworks.

The rapid expansion of information science has caused the issue of “the curse of dimensionality”, which will negatively affect the performance of the machine learning model. Feature selection is typically considered as a pre-processing mechanism to find an optimal subset of features from a given set of all features in the data mining process. In this project, a novel Hyper Learning Binary Dragonfly Algorithm (HLBDA) is proposed as a wrapper-based method to find an optimal subset of features for a given classification problem. The DA is one of my widely-used optimization algorithms. The proposed method is applied to a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of HLBDA in increasing prediction accuracy and reducing the number of selected features.

During a crisis such as COVID-19, the demand for information drastically increases. The term infodemic has been even used by WHO, which indicates the fact that the risks of fake news are as high as the health risks of COVID-19. In this project, we are harnessing the power of AI in detecting fake news. To cope with these challenges,  we are designing AI frameworks and tools that can be used at three different stage: pre-moderation, post-moderation, and reactive-moderation.

• As a pre-moderator, AI can be trained with a large-scale dataset of news to classify news as fake or true. As discussed above, this classification is done after training is done. If AI detect news that cannot be classified, it can flag it for human moderation. 

• As a post-moderator, AI can be used to synthesizes data for the training dataset to increase the accuracy of AI pre-moderator. It can also be used to process and analyze flagged content by users after publication too. 

• As a reactive moderator, AI can assist the stage of moderation at requires human intervention. In other words, AI can facilitate and speed up the process of human content moderation. For instance, key frames in a video news can be highlighted to be moderated by a human rather than watching the entire news. 

The apparatus for RT-PCR based COVID-19 detection is scarce and the testing process takes 6-9 hours. The test is also not satisfactorily sensitive (71% sensitive only). Hence, Computer-Aided Detection techniques based on deep learning methods can be used in such a scenario using other modalities like chest CT-scan images for more accurate and sensitive screening. In this paper, we propose a method that uses a Sugeno fuzzy integral ensemble of four pre-trained deep learning models, namely, VGG-11, GoogLeNet, SqueezeNet v1.1 and Wide ResNet-50-2, for classification of chest CT-scan images into COVID and Non-COVID categories. The proposed framework has been tested on a publicly available dataset for evaluation and it achieves 98.93% accuracy and 98.93% sensitivity on the same. The model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the same dataset and proves to be a reliable COVID-19 detector. The relevant source codes for the proposed approach can be found at: https://github.com/Rohit-Kundu/Fuzzy-Integral-Covid-Detection. 

The aim of this research is to classify the different cough sound of COVID-19 artefacts in signal of altered real-life environments. More details will be shared upon the acceptance of this paper. 

In this work, a classifier ensemble technique is proposed, utilizing Choquet fuzzy integral, wherein convolutional neural network (CNN) based models are used as base classifiers. It classifies chest X-ray images from patients with common Pneumonia, confirmed COVID-19, and healthy lungs. Since there are few samples of COVID-19 cases for training on a standard CNN model from scratch, we use the transfer learning scheme to train the base classifiers, which are InceptionV3, DenseNet121, and VGG19. We utilize the pre-trained CNN models to extract features and classify the chest X-ray images using two dense layers and one softmax layer. After that, we combine the prediction scores of the data from individual models using Choquet fuzzy integral to get the final predicted labels, which is more accurate than the prediction by the individual models. To determine the fuzzy-membership values of each classifier for the application of Choquet fuzzy integral, we use the validation accuracy of each classifier. The proposed method is evaluated on chest X-ray images in publicly available repositories (IEEE and Kaggle datasets). It provides 99.00%, 99.00%, 99.00%, and 99.02% average recall, precision, F-score, and accuracy, respectively. We have also evaluated the performance of the proposed model on an inter-dataset experimental setup, where chest X-ray images from another dataset (CMSC-678-ML-Project GitHub dataset) are fed to our trained model and we have achieved 99.05% test accuracy on this dataset. The results are better than commonly used classifier ensemble methods as well as many state-of-the-art methods