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Public Health Public Health

COVID-19 severity detection using machine learning techniques from CT-images.

In Evolutionary intelligence

COVID-19 has spread worldwide and the World Health Organization was forced to list it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The disease has severely impacted most of the people because it affects the lung and causes severe breathing problems and lung infections. Differentiating other lung ailments from COVID-19 infection and determining the severity is a challenging process. Doctors can give vital life-saving services and support patients' lives only if the severity of their condition is determined. This work proposed a two-step approach for detecting the COVID-19 infection from the lung CT images and determining the severity of the patient's illness. To extract the features, pre-trained models are used, and by analyzing them, integrated the features from AlexNet, DenseNet-201, and ResNet-50. The COVID-19 detection is carried out by using an Artificial Neural Network(ANN) model. After the COVID-19 infection has been identified, severity detection is performed. For that, image features are combined with the clinical data and is classified as High, Moderate, Low with the help of Cubic Support Vector Machine(SVM). By considering three severity levels, patients with high risk can be given more attention. The method was tested on a publicly available dataset and obtained an accuracy of 92.0%, sensitivity of 96.0%, and an F1-Score of 91.44% for COVID-19 detection and got overall accuracy of 90.0% for COVID-19 severity detection for three classes.

Aswathy A L, Anand Hareendran S, Chandra S S Vinod

2022-Jun-24

AlexNet, Computed tomography, DenseNet-201, Neural network, ResNet-50, Transfer learning

General General

Novel extreme regression-voting classifier to predict death risk in vaccinated people using VAERS data.

In PloS one ; h5-index 176.0

COVID-19 vaccination raised serious concerns among the public and people are mind stuck by various rumors regarding the resulting illness, adverse reactions, and death. Such rumors are dangerous to the campaign against the COVID-19 and should be dealt with accordingly and timely. One prospective solution is to use machine learning-based models to predict the death risk for vaccinated people and clarify people's perceptions regarding death risk. This study focuses on the prediction of the death risks associated with vaccinated people followed by a second dose for two reasons; first to build consensus among people to get the vaccines; second, to reduce the fear regarding vaccines. Given that, this study utilizes the COVID-19 VAERS dataset that records adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination as 'recovered', 'not recovered', and 'survived'. To obtain better prediction results, a novel voting classifier extreme regression-voting classifier (ER-VC) is introduced. ER-VC ensembles extra tree classifier and logistic regression using soft voting criterion. To avoid model overfitting and get better results, two data balancing techniques synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) and adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN) have been applied. Moreover, three feature extraction techniques term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), bag of words (BoW), and global vectors (GloVe) have been used for comparison. Both machine learning and deep learning models are deployed for experiments. Results obtained from extensive experiments reveal that the proposed model in combination with TF-TDF has shown robust results with a 0.85 accuracy when trained on the SMOTE-balanced dataset. In line with this, validation of the proposed voting classifier on binary classification shows state-of-the-art results with a 0.98 accuracy. Results show that machine learning models can predict the death risk with high accuracy and can assist the authors in taking timely measures.

Saad Eysha, Sadiq Saima, Jamil Ramish, Rustam Furqan, Mehmood Arif, Choi Gyu Sang, Ashraf Imran

2022

Public Health Public Health

Emission Sector Impacts on Air Quality and Public Health in China From 2010 to 2020.

In GeoHealth

Anthropogenic emissions and ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations have declined in recent years across China. However, PM2.5 exposure remains high, ozone (O3) exposure is increasing, and the public health impacts are substantial. We used emulators to explore how emission changes (averaged per sector over all species) have contributed to changes in air quality and public health in China over 2010-2020. We show that PM2.5 exposure peaked in 2012 at 52.8 μg m-3, with contributions of 31% from industry and 22% from residential emissions. In 2020, PM2.5 exposure declined by 36% to 33.5 μg m-3, where the contributions from industry and residential sources reduced to 15% and 17%, respectively. The PM2.5 disease burden decreased by only 9% over 2012 where the contributions from industry and residential sources reduced to 15% and 17%, respectively 2020, partly due to an aging population with greater susceptibility to air pollution. Most of the reduction in PM2.5 exposure and associated public health benefits occurred due to reductions in industrial (58%) and residential (29%) emissions. Reducing national PM2.5 exposure below the World Health Organization Interim Target 2 (25 μg m-3) would require a further 80% reduction in residential and industrial emissions, highlighting the challenges that remain to improve air quality in China.

Conibear Luke, Reddington Carly L, Silver Ben J, Chen Ying, Arnold Stephen R, Spracklen Dominick V

2022-Jun

China, air quality, emissions, emulators, health impact assessment, machine learning

Pathology Pathology

A Self Supervised StyleGAN for Image Annotation and Classification with Extremely Limited Labels.

In IEEE transactions on medical imaging ; h5-index 74.0

The recent success of learning-based algorithms can be greatly attributed to the immense amount of annotated data used for training. Yet, many datasets lack annotations due to the high costs associated with labeling, resulting in degraded performances of deep learning methods. Self-supervised learning is frequently adopted to mitigate the reliance on massive labeled datasets since it exploits unlabeled data to learn relevant feature representations. In this work, we propose SS-StyleGAN, a self-supervised approach for image annotation and classification suitable for extremely small annotated datasets. This novel framework adds self-supervision to the StyleGAN architecture by integrating an encoder that learns the embedding to the StyleGAN latent space, which is well-known for its disentangled properties. The learned latent space enables the smart selection of representatives from the data to be labeled for improved classification performance. We show that the proposed method attains strong classification results using small labeled datasets of sizes 50 and even 10. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach for the tasks of COVID-19 and liver tumor pathology identification.

Hochberg Dana Cohen, Greenspan Hayit, Giryes Raja

2022-Jun-29

General General

Sensitivity of Air Pollution Exposure and Disease Burden to Emission Changes in China Using Machine Learning Emulation.

In GeoHealth

Machine learning models can emulate chemical transport models, reducing computational costs and enabling more experimentation. We developed emulators to predict annual-mean fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3) concentrations and their associated chronic health impacts from changes in five major emission sectors (residential, industrial, land transport, agriculture, and power generation) in China. The emulators predicted 99.9% of the variance in PM2.5 and O3 concentrations. We used these emulators to estimate how emission reductions can attain air quality targets. In 2015, we estimate that PM2.5 exposure was 47.4 μg m-3 and O3 exposure was 43.8 ppb, associated with 2,189,700 (95% uncertainty interval, 95UI: 1,948,000-2,427,300) premature deaths per year, primarily from PM2.5 exposure (98%). PM2.5 exposure and the associated disease burden were most sensitive to industry and residential emissions. We explore the sensitivity of exposure and health to different combinations of emission reductions. The National Air Quality Target (35 μg m-3) for PM2.5 concentrations can be attained nationally with emission reductions of 72% in industrial, 57% in residential, 36% in land transport, 35% in agricultural, and 33% in power generation emissions. We show that complete removal of emissions from these five sectors does not enable the attainment of the WHO Annual Guideline (5 μg m-3) due to remaining air pollution from other sources. Our work provides the first assessment of how air pollution exposure and disease burden in China varies as emissions change across these five sectors and highlights the value of emulators in air quality research.

Conibear Luke, Reddington Carly L, Silver Ben J, Chen Ying, Knote Christoph, Arnold Stephen R, Spracklen Dominick V

2022-Jun

China, air quality, emulator, health impact assessment, machine learning, particulate matter

General General

Source code Optimized Parallel Inception: A fast COVID-19 screening software.

In Software impacts

COVID-19 and swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) are both pandemics that sparked significant concern worldwide. These two viruses have the same symptoms and occur at a collision timeline. Optimized Parallel Inception (OPI) presents a new strategy to screen the COVID-19 from H1N1 with use of only symptoms. In this paper the process of preprocessing, screening, and specifying feature importance by OPI and particle swarm optimization is presented. Experimental results indicate 98.88 accuracy for screening COVID-19, H1N1, and Neither COVID-19 Nor H1N1.

Tavakolian Alireza, Hajati Farshid, Rezaee Alireza, Fasakhodi Amirhossein Oliaei, Uddin Shahadat

2022-Jun-22

COVID-19, Coronavirus, Deep learning, H1N1 virus, Outbreak, Screening