CGO-ensemble: Chaos game optimization algorithm-based fusion of deep neural networks for accurate Mpox detection.

The rising global incidence of human Mpox cases necessitates prompt and accurate identification for effective disease control. Previous studies have predominantly delved into traditional ensemble methods for detection, we introduce a novel approach by leveraging a metaheuristic-based ensemble framework. In this research, we present an innovative CGO-Ensemble framework designed to elevate the accuracy of detecting Mpox infection in patients. Initially, we employ five transfer learning base models that integrate feature integration layers and residual blocks. These components play a crucial role in capturing significant features from the skin images, thereby enhancing the models' efficacy. In the next step, we employ a weighted averaging scheme to consolidate predictions generated by distinct models. To achieve the optimal allocation of weights for each base model in the ensemble process, we leverage the Chaos Game Optimization (CGO) algorithm. This strategic weight assignment enhances classification outcomes considerably, surpassing the performance of randomly assigned weights. Implementing this approach yields notably enhanced prediction accuracy compared to using individual models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through comprehensive experiments conducted on two widely recognized benchmark datasets: the Mpox Skin Lesion Dataset (MSLD) and the Mpox Skin Image Dataset (MSID). To gain insights into the decision-making process of the base models, we have performed Gradient Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) analysis. The experimental results showcase the outstanding performance of the CGO-ensemble, achieving an impressive accuracy of 100% on MSLD and 94.16% on MSID. Our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art optimization algorithms, traditional ensemble methods, and existing techniques in the context of Mpox detection on these datasets. These findings underscore the effectiveness and superiority of the CGO-Ensemble in accurately identifying Mpox cases, highlighting its potential in disease detection and classification.

Metaheuristics optimization-based ensemble of deep neural networks for Mpox disease detection.

The rising number of cases of human Mpox has emerged as a major global concern due to the daily increase of cases in several countries. The disease presents various skin symptoms in infected individuals, making it crucial to promptly identify and isolate them to prevent widespread community transmission. Rapid determination and isolation of infected individuals are therefore essential to curb the spread of the disease. Most research in the detection of Mpox disease has utilized convolutional neural network (CNN) models and ensemble methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, none have utilized a meta-heuristic-based ensemble approach. To address this gap, we propose a novel metaheuristics optimization-based weighted average ensemble model (MO-WAE) for detecting Mpox disease. We first train three transfer learning (TL)-based CNNs (DenseNet201, MobileNet, and DenseNet169) by adding additional layers to improve their classification strength. Next, we use a weighted average ensemble technique to fuse the predictions from each individual model, and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is utilized to assign optimized weights to each model during the ensembling process. By using this approach, we obtain more accurate predictions than individual models. To gain a better understanding of the regions indicating the onset of Mpox, we performed a Gradient Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) analysis to explain our model's predictions. Our proposed MO-WAE ensemble model was evaluated on a publicly available Mpox dataset and achieved an impressive accuracy of 97.78%. This outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the same dataset, thereby providing further evidence of the efficacy of our proposed model.

StoneNet: An Efficient Lightweight Model Based on Depthwise Separable Convolutions for Kidney Stone Detection from CT Images.

Kidney stone disease is one of the most common and serious health problems in much of the world, leading to many hospitalizations with severe pain. Detecting small stones is difficult and time-consuming, so an early diagnosis of kidney disease is needed to prevent the loss of kidney failure. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) found to be very successful in the diagnosis of various diseases in the biomedical field. However, existing models using deep networks have several problems, such as high computational cost, long training time, and huge parameters. Providing a low-cost solution for diagnosing kidney stones in a medical decision support system is of paramount importance. Therefore, in this study, we propose "StoneNet", a lightweight and high-performance model for the detection of kidney stones based on MobileNet using depthwise separable convolution. The proposed model includes a combination of global average pooling (GAP), batch normalization, dropout layer, and dense layers. Our study shows that using GAP instead of flattening layers greatly improves the robustness of the model by significantly reducing the parameters. The developed model is benchmarked against four pre-trained models as well as the state-of-the-art heavy model. The results show that the proposed model can achieve the highest accuracy of 97.98%, and only requires training and testing time of 996.88 s and 14.62 s. Several parameters, such as different batch sizes and optimizers, were considered to validate the proposed model. The proposed model is computationally faster and provides optimal performance than other considered models. Experiments on a large kidney dataset of 1799 CT images show that StoneNet has superior performance in terms of higher accuracy and lower complexity. The proposed model can assist the radiologist in faster diagnosis of kidney stones and has great potential for deployment in real-time applications.

BMRI-NET: A Deep Stacked Ensemble Model for Multi-class Brain Tumor Classification from MRI Images.

Brain tumors are one of the most dangerous health problems for adults and children in many countries. Any failure in the diagnosis of brain tumors may lead to shortening of human life. Accurate and timely diagnosis of brain tumors provides appropriate treatment to increase the patient's chances of survival. Due to the different characteristics of tumors, one of the challenging problems is the classification of three types of brain tumors. With the advent of deep learning (DL) models, three classes of brain tumor classification have been addressed. However, the accuracy of these methods requires significant improvements in brain image classification. The main goal of this article is to design a new method for classifying the three types of brain tumors with extremely high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel deep stacked ensemble model called "BMRI-NET" that can detect brain tumors from MR images with high accuracy and recall. The stacked ensemble proposed in this article adapts three pre-trained models, namely DenseNe201, ResNet152V2, and InceptionResNetV2, to improve the generalization capability. We combine decisions from the three models using the stacking technique to obtain final results that are much more accurate than individual models for detecting brain tumors. The efficacy of the proposed model is evaluated on the Figshare brain MRI dataset of three types of brain tumors consisting of 3064 images. The experimental results clearly highlight the robustness of the proposed BMRI-NET model by achieving an overall classification of 98.69% and an average recall, F1-score and MCC of 98.33%, 98.40, and 97.95%, respectively. The results indicate that the proposed BMRI-NET model is superior to existing methods and can assist healthcare professionals in the diagnosis of brain tumors.

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.

Deep Residual Network for Diagnosis of Retinal Diseases Using Optical Coherence Tomography Images.

Diabetic retinopathy occurs due to damage to the blood vessels in the retina, and it is a major health problem in recent years that progresses slowly without recognizable symptoms. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a popular and widely used noninvasive imaging modality for the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. Accurate and early diagnosis of this disease using OCT images is crucial for the prevention of blindness. In recent years, several deep learning methods have been very successful in automating the process of detecting retinal diseases from OCT images. However, most methods face reliability and interpretability issues. In this study, we propose a deep residual network for the classification of four classes of retinal diseases, namely diabetic macular edema (DME), choroidal neovascularization (CNV), DRUSEN and NORMAL in OCT images. The proposed model is based on the popular architecture called ResNet50, which eliminates the vanishing gradient problem and is pre-trained on large dataset such as ImageNet and trained end-to-end on the publicly available OCT image dataset. We removed the fully connected layer of ResNet50 and placed our new fully connected block on top to improve the classification accuracy and avoid overfitting in the proposed model. The proposed model was trained and evaluated using different performance metrics, including receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve on a dataset of 84,452 OCT images with expert disease grading as DRUSEN, CNV, DME and NORMAL. The proposed model provides an improved overall classification accuracy of 99.48% with only 5 misclassifications out of 968 test samples and outperforms existing methods on the same dataset. The results show that the proposed model is well suited for the diagnosis of retinal diseases in ophthalmology clinics.

A deep learning-based framework for detecting COVID-19 patients using chest X-rays.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused outbreaks of new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) around the world. Rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 coronavirus is an important step in limiting the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. To solve this problem, radiography techniques (such as chest X-rays and computed tomography (CT)) can play an important role in the early prediction of COVID-19 patients, which will help to treat patients in a timely manner. We aimed to quickly develop a highly efficient lightweight CNN architecture for detecting COVID-19-infected patients. The purpose of this paper is to propose a robust deep learning-based system for reliably detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. First, we evaluate the performance of various pre-trained deep learning models (InceptionV3, Xception, MobileNetV2, NasNet and DenseNet201) recently proposed for medical image classification. Second, a lightweight shallow convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for classifying X-ray images of a patient with a low false-negative rate. The data set used in this work contains 2,541 chest X-rays from two different public databases, which have confirmed COVID-19 positive and healthy cases. The performance of the proposed model is compared with the performance of pre-trained deep learning models. The results show that the proposed shallow CNN provides a maximum accuracy of 99.68% and more importantly sensitivity, specificity and AUC of 99.66%, 99.70% and 99.98%. The proposed model has fewer parameters and low complexity compared to other deep learning models. The experimental results of our proposed method show that it is superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods. We believe that this model can help healthcare professionals to treat COVID-19 patients through improved and faster patient screening.