Revisiting segmentation of lung tumors from CT images.

Lung cancer is a leading cause of death throughout the world. Because the prompt diagnosis of tumors allows oncologists to discern their nature, type, and mode of treatment, tumor detection and segmentation from CT scan images is a crucial field of study. This paper investigates lung tumor segmentation via a two-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) on the LOTUS dataset (31,247 training, and 4458 testing samples) and a Deeply Supervised MultiResUNet model. Coupling the DWT, which is used to achieve a more meticulous textural analysis while integrating information from neighboring CT slices, with the deep supervision of the model architecture results in an improved dice coefficient of 0.8472. A key characteristic of our approach is its avoidance of 3D kernels (despite being used for a 3D segmentation task), thereby making it quite lightweight.

An Agent-Based Modeling of COVID-19: Validation, Analysis, and Recommendations.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in an ongoing pandemic worldwide. Countries have adopted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to slow down the spread. This study proposes an agent-based model that simulates the spread of COVID-19 among the inhabitants of a city. The agent-based model can be accommodated for any location by integrating parameters specific to the city. The simulation gives the number of total COVID-19 cases. Considering each person as an agent susceptible to COVID-19, the model causes infected individuals to transmit the disease via various actions performed every hour. The model is validated by comparing the simulation to the real data of Ford County, KS, USA. Different interventions, including contact tracing, are applied on a scaled-down version of New York City, USA, and the parameters that lead to a controlled epidemic are determined. Our experiments suggest that contact tracing via smartphones with more than 60% of the population owning a smartphone combined with city-wide lockdown results in the effective reproduction number (R t ) to fall below 1 within 3 weeks of intervention. For 75% or more smartphone users, new infections are eliminated, and the spread is contained within 3 months of intervention. Contact tracing accompanied with early lockdown can suppress the epidemic growth of COVID-19 completely with sufficient smartphone owners. In places where it is difficult to ensure a high percentage of smartphone ownership, tracing only emergency service providers during a lockdown can go a long way to contain the spread. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s12559-020-09801-w).