COVID-19 infection analysis framework using novel boosted CNNs and radiological images.

COVID-19, a novel pathogen that emerged in late 2019, has the potential to cause pneumonia with unique variants upon infection. Hence, the development of efficient diagnostic systems is crucial in accurately identifying infected patients and effectively mitigating the spread of the disease. However, the system poses several challenges because of the limited availability of labeled data, distortion, and complexity in image representation, as well as variations in contrast and texture. Therefore, a novel two-phase analysis framework has been developed to scrutinize the subtle irregularities associated with COVID-19 contamination. A new Convolutional Neural Network-based STM-BRNet is developed, which integrates the Split-Transform-Merge (STM) block and Feature map enrichment (FME) techniques in the first phase. The STM block captures boundary and regional-specific features essential for detecting COVID-19 infectious CT slices. Additionally, by incorporating the FME and Transfer Learning (TL) concept into the STM blocks, multiple enhanced channels are generated to effectively capture minute variations in illumination and texture specific to COVID-19-infected images. Additionally, residual multipath learning is used to improve the learning capacity of STM-BRNet and progressively increase the feature representation by boosting at a high level through TL. In the second phase of the analysis, the COVID-19 CT scans are processed using the newly developed SA-CB-BRSeg segmentation CNN to accurately delineate infection in the images. The SA-CB-BRSeg method utilizes a unique approach that combines smooth and heterogeneous processes in both the encoder and decoder. These operations are structured to effectively capture COVID-19 patterns, including region-homogenous, texture variation, and border. By incorporating these techniques, the SA-CB-BRSeg method demonstrates its ability to accurately analyze and segment COVID-19 related data. Furthermore, the SA-CB-BRSeg model incorporates the novel concept of CB in the decoder, where additional channels are combined using TL to enhance the learning of low contrast regions. The developed STM-BRNet and SA-CB-BRSeg models achieve impressive results, with an accuracy of 98.01%, recall of 98.12%, F-score of 98.11%, Dice Similarity of 96.396%, and IOU of 98.85%. The proposed framework will alleviate the workload and enhance the radiologist's decision-making capacity in identifying the infected region of COVID-19 and evaluating the severity stages of the disease.

A novel data balancing approach and a deep fractal network with light gradient boosting approach for theft detection in smart grids.

Electricity theft is the largest type of non-technical losses faced by power utilities around the globe. It not only raises revenue losses to the utilities but also leads to lethal fires and electric shocks at distribution side. In the past, field operation groups were sent by the utilities to conduct inspections of suspicions electric equipments stated by the public. Advanced metering infrastructure based recent development in the smart grids makes it easy to detect electricity thefts. However, the conventional supervised learning techniques have low theft detection performance mainly due to imbalance datasets available for training. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a novel theft detection model with twofold contribution. A unique hybrid sampling technique named as hybrid oversampling and undersampling using both classes (HOUBC) is proposed to balance the dataset. HOUBC first performs undersampling and then oversampling using both the majority (normal) and minority (theft) classes. A new deep learning method, fractal network is applied with light gradient boosting method to extract and learn important characteristics from electricity consumption profiles for identifying electricity thieves. The proposed model relies on smart meter's data for theft detection and hence, a rapid and widespread adaption of this model is feasible, which shows its main advantage. The performance of the model is evaluated with real-world smart meter's data, i.e., state grid corporation of China. Comprehensive simulation results describe the effectiveness of the proposed model against conventional schemes in terms of electricity theft detection.

Transforming Healthcare Analytics with FHIR: A Framework for Standardizing and Analyzing Clinical Data.

In this study, we discussed our contribution to building a data analytic framework that supports clinical statistics and analysis by leveraging a scalable standards-based data model named Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR). We developed an intelligent algorithm that is used to facilitate the clinical data analytics process on FHIR-based data. We designed several workflows for patient clinical data used in two hospital information systems, namely patient registration and laboratory information systems. These workflows exploit various FHIR Application programming interface (APIs) to facilitate patient-centered and cohort-based interactive analyses. We developed an FHIR database implementation that utilizes FHIR APIs and a range of operations to facilitate descriptive data analytics (DDA) and patient cohort selection. A prototype user interface for DDA was developed with support for visualizing healthcare data analysis results in various forms. Healthcare professionals and researchers would use the developed framework to perform analytics on clinical data used in healthcare settings. Our experimental results demonstrate the proposed framework's ability to generate various analytics from clinical data represented in the FHIR resources.

A Framework for Automatic Clustering of EHR Messages Using a Spatial Clustering Approach.

Although Health Level Seven (HL 7) message standards (v2, v3, Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)) have been commonly adopted, there are still issues associated with them, especially the semantic interoperability issues and lack of support for smart devices (e.g., smartphones, fitness trackers, and smartwatches), etc. In addition, healthcare organizations in many countries are still using proprietary electronic health record (EHR) message formats, making it challenging to convert to other data formats-particularly the latest HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data standard. The FHIR is based on modern web technologies such as HTTP, XML, and JSON and would be capable of overcoming the shortcomings of the previous standards and supporting modern smart devices. Therefore, the FHIR standard could help the healthcare industry to avail the latest technologies benefits and improve data interoperability. The data representation and mapping from the legacy data standards (i.e., HL7 v2 and EHR) to the FHIR is necessary for the healthcare sector. However, direct data mapping or conversion from the traditional data standards to the FHIR data standard is challenging because of the nature and formats of the data. Therefore, in this article, we propose a framework that aims to convert proprietary EHR messages into the HL7 v2 format and apply an unsupervised clustering approach using the DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise) algorithm to automatically group a variety of these HL7 v2 messages regardless of their semantic origins. The proposed framework's implementation lays the groundwork to provide a generic mapping model with multi-point and multi-format data conversion input into the FHIR. Our experimental results show the proposed framework's ability to automatically cluster various HL7 v2 message formats and provide analytic insight behind them.