A Novel Deep Learning-Based Black Fungus Disease Identification Using Modified Hybrid Learning Methodology.

Currently, countries across the world are suffering from a prominent viral infection called COVID-19. Most countries are still facing several issues due to this disease, which has resulted in several fatalities. The first COVID-19 wave caused devastation across the world owing to its virulence and led to a massive loss in human lives, impacting the country's economy drastically. A dangerous disease called mucormycosis was discovered worldwide during the second COVID-19 wave, in 2021, which lasted from April to July. The mucormycosis disease is commonly known as "black fungus," which belongs to the fungus family Mucorales. It is usually a rare disease, but the level of destruction caused by the disease is vast and unpredictable. This disease mainly targets people already suffering from other diseases and consuming heavy medication to counter the disease they are suffering from. This is because of the reduction in antibodies in the affected people. Therefore, the patient's body does not have the ability to act against fungus-oriented infections. This black fungus is more commonly identified in patients with coronavirus disease in certain country. The condition frequently manifests on skin, but it can also harm organs such as eyes and brain. This study intends to design a modified neural network logic for an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy with learning principles, called a hybrid learning-based neural network classifier (HLNNC). The proposed method is based on well-known techniques such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM). This article discusses a dataset containing several eye photographs of patients with and without black fungus infection. These images were collected from the real-time records of people afflicted with COVID followed by the black fungus. This proposed HLNNC scheme identifies the black fungus disease based on the following image processing procedures: image acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification; these procedures were performed considering the dataset training and testing principles with proper performance analysis. The results of the procedure are provided in a graphical format with the precise specification, and the efficacy of the proposed method is established.

FractalCovNet architecture for COVID-19 Chest X-ray image Classification and CT-scan image Segmentation.

Precise and fast diagnosis of COVID-19 cases play a vital role in early stage of medical treatment and prevention. Automatic detection of COVID-19 cases using the chest X-ray images and chest CT-scan images will be helpful to reduce the impact of this pandemic on the human society. We have developed a novel FractalCovNet architecture using Fractal blocks and U-Net for segmentation of chest CT-scan images to localize the lesion region. The same FractalCovNet architecture is also used for classification of chest X-ray images using transfer learning. We have compared the segmentation results using various model such as U-Net, DenseUNet, Segnet, ResnetUNet, and FCN. We have also compared the classification results with various models like ResNet5-, Xception, InceptionResNetV2, VGG-16 and DenseNet architectures. The proposed FractalCovNet model is able to predict the COVID-19 lesion with high F-measure and precision values compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. Thus the proposed model can accurately predict the COVID-19 cases and discover lesion regions in chest CT without the manual annotations of lesions for every suspected individual. An easily-trained and high-performance deep learning model provides a fast way to identify COVID-19 patients, which is beneficial to control the outbreak of SARS-II-COV.

Obstructive sleep apnea: clinical and diagnostic features.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is an increasingly common disorder. It is characterized by frequent episodes of airway obstruction associated with a reduced caliber of the upper airway and is vulnerable to further narrowing and collapse. Acute and repetitive effects of apnea and hypopnea include oxygen desaturation, reduction in intrathoracic pressure, excessive daytime sleepiness, impaired executive function and central nervous system arousals. The apnea-hypopnea index and respiratory distress index help quantify the severity of the condition. The condition is associated with several clinical symptoms of which daytime sleepiness is considered the cardinal symptom. Obesity is one of the major predisposing factors. Three types of apneas have been recognized -obstructive, central and mixed; OSA is the commonest. This review will cover aspects of their radiologic features, diagnosis and management.