Analyzing the Implications of COVID-19 Pandemic through an Intelligent-Computing Technique

The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 virus or COVID-19) disease was declared pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. COVID-19 has already affected more than 211 nations. In such a bleak scenario, it becomes imperative to analyze and identify those regions in Saudi Arabia that are at high risk. A preemptive study done in the context of predicting the possible COVID-19 hotspots would facilitate in the implementation of prompt and targeted countermeasures against SARS-CoV-2, thus saving many lives. Working towards this intent, the present study adopts a decision making based methodology of simulation named Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multi criteria decision making approach, for assessing the risk of COVID-19 in different regions of Saudi Arabia. AHP gives the ability to measure the risks numerically. Moreover, numerical assessments are always effective and easy to understand. Hence, this research endeavour employs Fuzzy based computational method of decision making for its empirical analysis. Findings in the proposed paper suggest that Riyadh and Makkah are the most susceptible regions, implying that if sustained and focused preventive measures are not introduced at the right juncture, the two cities could be the worst afflicted with the infection. The results obtained through Fuzzy based computational method of decision making are highly corroborative and would be very useful for categorizing and assessing the current COVID-19 situation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. More specifically, identifying the cities that are likely to be COVID-19 hotspots would help the country’s health and medical fraternity to reinforce intensive containment strategies to counter the ills of the pandemic in such regions.     

新冠肺炎疫情趋势预测模型

2019年新型冠状病毒肺炎(corona virus disease 2019,COVID-19)的爆发对人们的健康和生活造成了极大的危害和影响.预测疫情的发展趋势可帮助人们提前制定应对措施.SEIR模型是经典的传染病模型之一,由于该模型中病毒传染率为常数,难以对新冠肺炎传播情况进行准确建模并完成疫情趋势预测.针对此问...     

新冠肺炎传播动力学建模及预测

为了深入研究新冠肺炎传播趋势和传播风险,根据新冠肺炎的传播特点,考虑政府管控和个人防护等措施,在经典传染病SIR模型的基础上,引入低风险群体,提出一种新冠肺炎传播动力学模型SLIR,并对模型的平衡点、稳定性和分岔等复杂动力学行为进行分析,揭示新冠肺炎传播机理.为了提高该模型的疫情预测精度,以美国新冠肺炎的真实数据为基础,使用最小二乘法对模型参数进行分段估计.最后利用该模型对美国新冠肺炎进行预测和分析,仿真结果表明,相比于传统SIR模型,该模型能较好地对美国疫情发展趋势做出预测,官方公布的实际数据也可进一步验证模型的有效性. SLIR模型可以有效仿真新冠肺炎传播,并为政府选择合适的防控措施提供技术支撑.     

Detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images: Boosting the performance with convolutional neural network and transfer learning

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic that has caused thousands of casualties and impacts all over the world. Most countries are facing a shortage of COVID-19 test kits in hospitals due to the daily increase in the number of cases. Early detection of COVID-19 can protect people from severe infection. Unfortunately, COVID-19 can be misdiagnosed as pneumonia or other illness and can lead to patient death. Therefore, in order to avoid the spread of COVID-19 among the population, it is necessary to implement an automated early diagnostic system as a rapid alternative diagnostic system. Several researchers have done very well in detecting COVID-19; however, most of them have lower accuracy and overfitting issues that make early screening of COVID-19 difficult. Transfer learning is the most successful technique to solve this problem with higher accuracy. In this paper, we studied the feasibility of applying transfer learning and added our own classifier to automatically classify COVID-19 because transfer learning is very suitable for medical imaging due to the limited availability of data. In this work, we proposed a CNN model based on deep transfer learning technique using six different pre-trained architectures, including VGG16, DenseNet201, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, Xception, and EfficientNetB0. A total of 3886 chest X-rays (1200 cases of COVID-19, 1341 healthy and 1345 cases of viral pneumonia) were used to study the effectiveness of the proposed CNN model. A comparative analysis of the proposed CNN models using three classes of chest X-ray datasets was carried out in order to find the most suitable model. Experimental results show that the proposed CNN model based on VGG16 was able to accurately diagnose COVID-19 patients with 97.84% accuracy, 97.90% precision, 97.89% sensitivity, and 97.89% of F1-score. Evaluation of the test data shows that the proposed model produces the highest accuracy among CNNs and seems to be the most suitable choice for COVID-19 classification. We believe that in this pandemic situation, this model will support healthcare professionals in improving patient screening.     

浅谈流行病动力学模型

流行病动力学研究可为新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情的控制决策提供科学依据,本文简介了经典SIR模型及基本再生数。     

Optimal design of lock-down and reopening policies for early-stage epidemics through SIR-D models

The diffusion of COVID-19 represents a real threat for the health and economic system of a country. Therefore the governments have to adopt fast containment measures in order to stop its spread and to prevent the related devastating consequences. In this paper, a technique is proposed to optimally design the lock-down and reopening policies so as to minimize an aggregate cost function accounting for the number of individuals that decease due to the spread of COVID-19. A constraint on the maximal number of concomitant infected patients is also taken into account in order to prevent the collapse of the health system. The optimal procedure is built on the basis of a simple SIR model that describes the outbreak of a generic disease, without attempting to accurately reproduce all the COVID-19 epidemic features. This modeling choice is motivated by the fact that the containing measurements are actuated during the very first period of the outbreak, when the characteristics of the new emergent disease are not known but timely containment actions are required. In fact, as a consequence of dealing with poor preliminary data, the simplest modeling choice is able to reduce unidentifiability problems. Further, the relative simplicity of this model allows to compute explicitly its solutions and to derive closed-form expressions for the maximum number of infected and for the steady-state value of deceased individuals. These expressions can be then used to design static optimization problems so to determine the (open-loop) optimal lock-down and reopening policies for early-stage epidemics accounting for both the health and economic costs.     

Prediction Model for Coronavirus Pandemic Using Deep Learning

The recent global outbreak of COVID-19 damaged the world health systems, human health, economy, and daily life badly. None of the countries was ready to face this emerging health challenge. Health professionals were not able to predict its rise and next move, as well as the future curve and impact on lives in case of a similar pandemic situation happened. This created huge chaos globally, for longer and the world is still struggling to come up with any suitable solution. Here the better use of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and deep learning, may aid healthcare practitioners in making reliable COVID-19 diagnoses. The proposed research would provide a prediction model that would use Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning to improve the diagnostic process by reducing unreliable diagnostic interpretation of chest CT scans and allowing clinicians to accurately discriminate between patients who are sick with COVID-19 or pneumonia, and also empowering health professionals to distinguish chest CT scans of healthy people. The efforts done by the Saudi government for the management and control of COVID-19 are remarkable, however; there is a need to improve the diagnostics process for better perception. We used a data set from Saudi regions to build a prediction model that can help distinguish between COVID-19 cases and regular cases from CT scans. The proposed methodology was compared to current models and found to be more accurate (93 percent) than the existing methods.     

基于SEIR-ARIMA混合模型的新冠肺炎预测

新型冠状病毒肺炎简称新冠肺炎,是一种由新型冠状病毒引起的急性感染性肺炎,具有传染性强、人群普遍易感的特点。因此,对新冠肺炎感染人数的预测,不仅仅有利于国家面对疫情做出科学决策,而且有利于及时整合防疫资源。本文提出一种基于传统的传染病动力模型SEIR和差分整合移动平均自回归模型ARIMA构建的SEIR-ARIMA混合模型,对不同时间段、不同地点的新冠肺炎疫情做出预测和分析。从实验结果上看,基于SEIR-ARIMA混合模型的预测,比常见的用于新冠肺炎预测的逻辑回归Logistic、长短期记忆人工神经网络LSTM、SEIR模型、ARIMA模型有较好的预测效果。为了真实地反映出实验效果的提高是否源于SEIR与ARIMA模型结合的优势,本文还实现SEIR-Logistic混合模型和SEIR-LSTM混合模型,并与SEIR-ARIMA对比分析得出,SEIR-ARIMA预测都取得更好的预测效果。因此,基于SEIR-ARIMA混合模型对新冠肺炎的发展趋势的分析相对可靠,有利于国家面对疫情的科学决策,对我国未来预防其他类型的传染病具有很好的应用价值。     

Smart COVID-3D-SCNN: A Novel Method to Classify X-ray Images of COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has spread worldwide, and millions of people are being infected. Image or detection classification is one of the first application areas of deep learning, which has a significant contribution to medical image analysis. In classification detection, one or more images (detection) are usually used as input, and diagnostic variables (such as whether there is a disease) are used as output. The novel coronavirus has spread across the world, infecting millions of people. Early-stage detection of critical cases of COVID-19 is essential. X-ray scans are used in clinical studies to diagnose COVID-19 and Pneumonia early. For extracting the discriminative features through these modalities, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used. A siamese convolutional neural network model (COVID-3D-SCNN) is proposed in this study for the automated detection of COVID-19 by utilizing X-ray scans. To extract the useful features, we used three consecutive models working in parallel in the proposed approach. We acquired 575 COVID-19, 1200 non-COVID, and 1400 pneumonia images, which are publicly available. In our framework, augmentation is used to enlarge the dataset. The findings suggest that the proposed method outperforms the results of comparative studies in terms of accuracy 96.70%, specificity 95.55%, and sensitivity 96.62% over (COVID-19 vs. non-COVID19 vs. Pneumonia).     

Learning Patterns from COVID-19 Instances

Coronavirus disease, which resulted from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has spread worldwide since early 2020 and has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Coronavirus disease is also termed COVID-19. It affects the human respiratory system and thus can be traced and tracked from the Chest X-Ray images. Therefore, Chest X-Ray alone may play a vital role in identifying COVID-19 cases. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning (ML) approach that utilizes the X-Ray images to classify the healthy and affected patients based on the patterns found in these images. The article also explores traditional, and Deep Learning (DL) approaches for COVID-19 patterns from Chest X-Ray images to predict, analyze, and further understand this virus. The experimental evaluation of the proposed approach achieves 97.5% detection performance using the DL model for COVID-19 versus normal cases. In contrast, for COVID-19 versus Pneumonia Virus scenario, we achieve 94.5% accurate detections. Our extensive evaluation in the experimental section guides and helps in the selection of an appropriate model for similar tasks. Thus, the approach can be used for medical usages and is particularly pertinent in detecting COVID-19 positive patients using X-Ray images alone.     

Automatic detection of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) using X-ray images and deep convolutional neural networks

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), with a starting point in China, has spread rapidly among people living in other countries and is approaching approximately 101,917,147 cases worldwide according to the statistics of World Health Organization. There are a limited number of COVID-19 test kits available in hospitals due to the increasing cases daily. Therefore, it is necessary to implement an automatic detection system as a quick alternative diagnosis option to prevent COVID-19 spreading among people. In this study, five pre-trained convolutional neural network-based models (ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet152, InceptionV3 and Inception-ResNetV2) have been proposed for the detection of coronavirus pneumonia-infected patient using chest X-ray radiographs. We have implemented three different binary classifications with four classes (COVID-19, normal (healthy), viral pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia) by using five-fold cross-validation. Considering the performance results obtained, it has been seen that the pre-trained ResNet50 model provides the highest classification performance (96.1% accuracy for Dataset-1, 99.5% accuracy for Dataset-2 and 99.7% accuracy for Dataset-3) among other four used models.

     

Corona-Nidaan: lightweight deep convolutional neural network for chest X-Ray based COVID-19 infection detection

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is today’s major public health crisis, we have faced since the Second World War. The pandemic is spreading around the globe like a wave, and according to the World Health Organization’s recent report, the number of confirmed cases and deaths are rising rapidly. COVID-19 pandemic has created severe social, economic, and political crises, which in turn will leave long-lasting scars. One of the countermeasures against controlling coronavirus outbreak is specific, accurate, reliable, and rapid detection technique to identify infected patients. The availability and affordability of RT-PCR kits remains a major bottleneck in many countries, while handling COVID-19 outbreak effectively. Recent findings indicate that chest radiography anomalies can characterize patients with COVID-19 infection. In this study, Corona-Nidaan, a lightweight deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), is proposed to detect COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Normal cases from chest X-ray image analysis; without any human intervention. We introduce a simple minority class oversampling method for dealing with imbalanced dataset problem. The impact of transfer learning with pre-trained CNNs on chest X-ray based COVID-19 infection detection is also investigated. Experimental analysis shows that Corona-Nidaan model outperforms prior works and other pre-trained CNN based models. The model achieved 95% accuracy for three-class classification with 94% precision and recall for COVID-19 cases. While studying the performance of various pre-trained models, it is also found that VGG19 outperforms other pre-trained CNN models by achieving 93% accuracy with 87% recall and 93% precision for COVID-19 infection detection. The model is evaluated by screening the COVID-19 infected Indian Patient chest X-ray dataset with good accuracy.

     

From the hospital scale to nationwide: observability and identification of models for the COVID-19 epidemic waves

Two mathematical models of the COVID-19 dynamics are considered as the health system in some country consists in a network of regional hospital centers. The first macroscopic model for the virus dynamics at the level of the general population of the country is derived from a standard SIR model. The second local model refers to a single node of the health system network, i.e. it models the flows of patients with a smaller granularity at the level of a regional hospital care center for COVID-19 infected patients. Daily (low cost) data are easily collected at this level, and are worked out for a fast evaluation of the local health status thanks to control systems methods.Precisely, the identifiability of the parameters of the hospital model is proven and thanks to the availability of clinical data, essential characteristics of the local health status are identified. Those parameters are meaningful not only to alert on some increase of the infection, but also to assess the efficiency of the therapy and health policy.     

Forecasting COVID-19 cases based on a parameter-varying stochastic SIR model

We address the prediction of the number of new cases and deaths for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) over a future horizon from historical data (forecasting). We use a model-based approach based on a stochastic Susceptible–Infections–Removed (SIR) model with time-varying parameters, which captures the evolution of the disease dynamics in response to changes in social behavior, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and testing rates. We show that, in the presence of asymptomatic cases, such model includes internal parameters and states that cannot be uniquely identified solely on the basis of measurements of new cases and deaths, but this does not preclude the construction of reliable forecasts for future values of these measurements. Such forecasts and associated confidence intervals can be computed using an iterative algorithm based on nonlinear optimization solvers, without the need for Monte Carlo sampling. Our results have been validated on an extensive COVID-19 dataset covering the period from March through December 2020 on 144 regions around the globe.     

An Optimized CNN Model Architecture for Detecting Coronavirus (COVID-19) with X-Ray Images

This paper demonstrates empirical research on using convolutional neural networks (CNN) of deep learning techniques to classify X-rays of COVID-19 patients versus normal patients by feature extraction. Feature extraction is one of the most significant phases for classifying medical X-rays radiography that requires inclusive domain knowledge. In this study, CNN architectures such as VGG-16, VGG-19, RestNet50, RestNet18 are compared, and an optimized model for feature extraction in X-ray images from various domains involving several classes is proposed. An X-ray radiography classifier with TensorFlow GPU is created executing CNN architectures and our proposed optimized model for classifying COVID-19 (Negative or Positive). Then, 2,134 X-rays of normal patients and COVID-19 patients generated by an existing open-source online dataset were labeled to train the optimized models. Among those, the optimized model architecture classifier technique achieves higher accuracy (0.97) than four other models, specifically VGG-16, VGG-19, RestNet18, and RestNet50 (0.96, 0.72, 0.91, and 0.93, respectively). Therefore, this study will enable radiologists to more efficiently and effectively classify a patient’s coronavirus disease.     

Location-proximity-based clustering method for peer-to-peer multimedia streaming services with multiple sources

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Social distancing to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) made a huge increase in the global OTT market, and OTT service providers get...     

Covid-19 Detection Using Deep Correlation-Grey Wolf Optimizer

The immediate and quick spread of the coronavirus has become a life-threatening disease around the globe. The widespread illness has dramatically changed almost all sectors, moving from offline to online, resulting in a new normal lifestyle for people. The impact of coronavirus is tremendous in the healthcare sector, which has experienced a decline in the first quarter of 2020. This pandemic has created an urge to use computer-aided diagnosis techniques for classifying the Covid-19 dataset to reduce the burden of clinical results. The current situation motivated me to choose correlation-based development called correlation-based grey wolf optimizer to perform accurate classification. A proposed multistage model helps to identify Covid from Computed Tomography (CT) scan image. The first process uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) for extracting the feature from the CT scans. The Pearson coefficient filter method is applied to remove redundant and irrelevant features. Finally, the Grey wolf optimizer is used to choose optimal features. Experimental analysis proves that this determines the optimal characteristics to detect the deadly disease. The proposed model’s accuracy is 14% higher than the krill herd and bacterial foraging optimization for severe accurate respiratory syndrome image (SARS-CoV-2 CT) dataset. The COVID CT image dataset is 22% higher than the existing krill herd and bacterial foraging optimization techniques. The proposed techniques help to increase the classification accuracy of the algorithm in most cases, which marks the stability of the stated result. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed classification technique to predict COVID-19 with maximum accuracy of 98% outperforms other competitive approaches.     

COVID-19肺部CT图像多尺度编解码分割

目的 新型冠状病毒肺炎(corona virus disease 2019, COVID-19)患者肺部计算机断层扫描(computed tomography, CT)图像具有明显的病变特征,快速而准确地从患者肺部CT图像中分割出病灶部位,对COVID-19患者快速诊断和监护具有重要意义。COVID-19肺炎病灶区域复杂多变,现有方法分割精度不高,且对假阴性的关注不够,导致分割结果往往具有较高的特异度,但灵敏度却很低。方法 本文提出了一个基于深度学习的多尺度编解码网络(MED-Net(multiscale encode decode network)),该网络采用资源利用率高、计算速度快的HarDNet68(harmonic densely connected network)作为主干,它主要由5个harmonic dense block(HDB)组成,首先通过5个空洞空间卷积池化金字塔(atrous spatial pyramid pooling, ASPP)对HarDNet68的第1个卷积层和第1、3、4、5个HDB提取多尺度特征。接着在并行解码器(paralleled parti...     

COVID TCL: A Joint Metric Loss Function for Diagnosing COVID-19 Patient in the Early and Incubation Period

Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) can quickly diagnose COVID-19 patients by analyzing computed tomography (CT) images of the lung, thereby effectively preventing the spread of COVID-19. However, the existing CNN-based COVID-19 diagnosis models do consider the problem that the lung images of COVID-19 patients in the early stage and incubation period are extremely similar to those of the non-COVID-19 population. Which reduces the model’s classification sensitivity, resulting in a higher probability of the model misdiagnosing COVID-19 patients as non-COVID-19 people. To solve the problem, this paper first attempts to apply triplet loss and center loss to the field of COVID-19 image classification, combining softmax loss to design a jointly supervised metric loss function COVID Triplet-Center Loss (COVID-TCL). Triplet loss can increase inter-class discreteness, and center loss can improve intra-class compactness. Therefore, COVID-TCL can help the CNN-based model to extract more discriminative features and strengthen the diagnostic capacity of COVID-19 patients in the early stage and incubation period. Meanwhile, we use the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) as a classifier to design a COVID-19 images classification model of CNN-XGBoost architecture, to further improve the CNN-based model’s classification effect and operation efficiency. The experiment shows that the classification accuracy of the model proposed in this paper is 97.41%, and the sensitivity is 97.61%, which is higher than the other 7 reference models. The COVID-TCL can effectively improve the classification sensitivity of the CNN-based model, the CNN-XGBoost architecture can further improve the CNN-based model’s classification effect.