Explainable AI in Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles in Unstructured Traffic Environments on Indian Roads Using the Inception U-Net Model with Grad-CAM Visualization.

The intelligent transportation system, especially autonomous vehicles, has seen a lot of interest among researchers owing to the tremendous work in modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, especially deep neural learning. As a result of increased road accidents over the last few decades, significant industries are moving to design and develop autonomous vehicles. Understanding the surrounding environment is essential for understanding the behavior of nearby vehicles to enable the safe navigation of autonomous vehicles in crowded traffic environments. Several datasets are available for autonomous vehicles focusing only on structured driving environments. To develop an intelligent vehicle that drives in real-world traffic environments, which are unstructured by nature, there should be an availability of a dataset for an autonomous vehicle that focuses on unstructured traffic environments. Indian Driving Lite dataset (IDD-Lite), focused on an unstructured driving environment, was released as an online competition in NCPPRIPG 2019. This study proposed an explainable inception-based U-Net model with Grad-CAM visualization for semantic segmentation that combines an inception-based module as an encoder for automatic extraction of features and passes to a decoder for the reconstruction of the segmentation feature map. The black-box nature of deep neural networks failed to build trust within consumers. Grad-CAM is used to interpret the deep-learning-based inception U-Net model to increase consumer trust. The proposed inception U-net with Grad-CAM model achieves 0.622 intersection over union (IoU) on the Indian Driving Dataset (IDD-Lite), outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep neural-network-based segmentation models.

ECG Data Analysis with Denoising Approach and Customized CNNs.

In the last decade, the proactive diagnosis of diseases with artificial intelligence and its aligned technologies has been an exciting and fruitful area. One of the areas in medical care where constant monitoring is required is cardiovascular diseases. Arrhythmia, one of the cardiovascular diseases, is generally diagnosed by doctors using Electrocardiography (ECG), which records the heart's rhythm and electrical activity. The use of neural networks has been extensively adopted to identify abnormalities in the last few years. It is found that the probability of detecting arrhythmia increases if the denoised signal is used rather than the raw input signal. This paper compares six filters implemented on ECG signals to improve classification accuracy. Custom convolutional neural networks (CCNNs) are designed to filter ECG data. Extensive experiments are drawn by considering the six ECG filters and the proposed custom CCNN models. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed models outperform the competitive models in various performance metrics.

Kids' Emotion Recognition Using Various Deep-Learning Models with Explainable AI.

Human ideas and sentiments are mirrored in facial expressions. They give the spectator a plethora of social cues, such as the viewer's focus of attention, intention, motivation, and mood, which can help develop better interactive solutions in online platforms. This could be helpful for children while teaching them, which could help in cultivating a better interactive connect between teachers and students, since there is an increasing trend toward the online education platform due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To solve this, the authors proposed kids' emotion recognition based on visual cues in this research with a justified reasoning model of explainable AI. The authors used two datasets to work on this problem; the first is the LIRIS Children Spontaneous Facial Expression Video Database, and the second is an author-created novel dataset of emotions displayed by children aged 7 to 10. The authors identified that the LIRIS dataset has achieved only 75% accuracy, and no study has worked further on this dataset in which the authors have achieved the highest accuracy of 89.31% and, in the authors' dataset, an accuracy of 90.98%. The authors also realized that the face construction of children and adults is different, and the way children show emotions is very different and does not always follow the same way of facial expression for a specific emotion as compared with adults. Hence, the authors used 3D 468 landmark points and created two separate versions of the dataset from the original selected datasets, which are LIRIS-Mesh and Authors-Mesh. In total, all four types of datasets were used, namely LIRIS, the authors' dataset, LIRIS-Mesh, and Authors-Mesh, and a comparative analysis was performed by using seven different CNN models. The authors not only compared all dataset types used on different CNN models but also explained for every type of CNN used on every specific dataset type how test images are perceived by the deep-learning models by using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), which helps in localizing features contributing to particular emotions. The authors used three methods of XAI, namely Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and SoftGrad, which help users further establish the appropriate reason for emotion detection by knowing the contribution of its features in it.

Detection of Iris Presentation Attacks Using Feature Fusion of Thepade's Sorted Block Truncation Coding with Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix Features.

Iris biometric detection provides contactless authentication, preventing the spread of COVID-19-like contagious diseases. However, these systems are prone to spoofing attacks attempted with the help of contact lenses, replayed video, and print attacks, making them vulnerable and unsafe. This paper proposes the iris liveness detection (ILD) method to mitigate spoofing attacks, taking global-level features of Thepade's sorted block truncation coding (TSBTC) and local-level features of the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of the iris image. Thepade's SBTC extracts global color texture content as features, and GLCM extracts local fine-texture details. The fusion of global and local content presentation may help distinguish between live and non-live iris samples. The fusion of Thepade's SBTC with GLCM features is considered in experimental validations of the proposed method. The features are used to train nine assorted machine learning classifiers, including naïve Bayes (NB), decision tree (J48), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and ensembles (SVM + RF + NB, SVM + RF + RT, RF + SVM + MLP, J48 + RF + MLP) for ILD. Accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure are used to evaluate the performance of the projected ILD variants. The experimentation was carried out on four standard benchmark datasets, and our proposed model showed improved results with the feature fusion approach. The proposed fusion approach gave 99.68% accuracy using the RF + J48 + MLP ensemble of classifiers, immediately followed by the RF algorithm, which gave 95.57%. The better capability of iris liveness detection will improve human-computer interaction and security in the cyber-physical space by improving person validation.

Multimodal dataset using OCTA and fundus images for the study of diabetic retinopathy.

This article presents a Multimodal database consisting of 222 images of 76 people wherein 111 are OCTA images and 111 are color fundus images taken at the Natasha Eye Care and Research Institute of Pune Maharashtra, India. Nonmydriatic fundus images were acquired using a confocal SLO widefield fundus imaging Eidon machine. Nonmydriatic OCTA images were acquired using the Optovue Avanti Edition machine Initially, the clinical approach described in this article was used to obtain the retinal images. Following that, the dataset was categorized by two experienced eye specialists. To identify instances of Non-Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (NPDR) with their various stages, medical professionals and scholars can use this data. Research scholars and ophthalmologists can utilize the data created to develop the initial stages of automated identification techniques for diabetic retinopathy (DR).

Can Machine Learning Correctly Predict Outcomes of Flexible Ureteroscopy with Laser Lithotripsy for Kidney Stone Disease? Results from a Large Endourology University Centre.

Background and objective: The integration of machine learning (ML) in health care has garnered significant attention because of its unprecedented opportunities to enhance patient care and outcomes. In this study, we trained ML algorithms for automated prediction of outcomes of ureteroscopic laser lithotripsy (URSL) on the basis of preoperative characteristics. Methods: Data were retrieved for patients treated with ureteroscopy for urolithiasis by a single experienced surgeon over a 7-yr period. Sixteen ML classification algorithms were trained to investigate correlation between preoperative characteristics and postoperative outcomes. The outcomes assessed were primary stone-free status (SFS, defined as the presence of only stone fragments <2 mm on endoscopic visualisation and at 3-mo imaging) and postoperative complications. An ensemble model was constructed from the best-performing algorithms for prediction of complications and for prediction of SFS. Simultaneous prediction of postoperative characteristics was then investigated using a multitask neural network, and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) was used to demonstrate the predictive power of the best models. Key findings and limitations: An ensemble ML model achieved accuracy of 93% and precision of 87% for prediction of SFS. Complications were mainly associated with a preoperative positive urine culture (1.44). Logistic regression revealed that SFS was impacted by the total stone burden (0.34), the presence of a preoperative stent (0.106), a positive preoperative urine culture (0.14), and stone location (0.09). Explainable AI results emphasised the key features and their contributions to the output. Conclusions and clinical implications: Technological advances are helping urologists to overcome the classic limits of ureteroscopy, namely stone size and the risk of complications. ML represents an excellent aid for correct prediction of outcomes after training on pre-existing data sets. Our ML model achieved accuracy of >90% for prediction of SFS and complications, and represents a basis for the development of an accessible predictive model for endourologists and patients in the URSL setting. Patient summary: We tested the ability of artificial intelligence to predict treatment outcomes for patients with kidney stones. We trained 16 different machine learning tools with data before surgery, such as patient age and the stone characteristics. Our final model was >90% accurate in predicting stone-free status after surgery and the occurrence of complications.

Enhanced lung image segmentation using deep learning.

With the advances in technology, assistive medical systems are emerging with rapid growth and helping healthcare professionals. The proactive diagnosis of diseases with artificial intelligence (AI) and its aligned technologies has been an exciting research area in the last decade. Doctors usually detect tuberculosis (TB) by checking the lungs' X-rays. Classification using deep learning algorithms is successfully able to achieve accuracy almost similar to a doctor in detecting TB. It is found that the probability of detecting TB increases if classification algorithms are implemented on segmented lungs instead of the whole X-ray. The paper's novelty lies in detailed analysis and discussion of U-Net + + results and implementation of U-Net + + in lung segmentation using X-ray. A thorough comparison of U-Net + + with three other benchmark segmentation architectures and segmentation in diagnosing TB or other pulmonary lung diseases is also made in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, no prior research tried to implement U-Net + + for lung segmentation. Most of the papers did not even use segmentation before classification, which causes data leakage. Very few used segmentations before classification, but they only used U-Net, which U-Net + + can easily replace because accuracy and mean_iou of U-Net + + are greater than U-Net accuracy and mean_iou , discussed in results, which can minimize data leakage. The authors achieved more than 98% lung segmentation accuracy and mean_iou 0.95 using U-Net + + , and the efficacy of such comparative analysis is validated.

Review on Epileptic Seizure Prediction: Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approaches.

Epileptic seizures occur due to brain abnormalities that can indirectly affect patient's health. It occurs abruptly without any symptoms and thus increases the mortality rate of humans. Almost 1% of world's population suffers from epileptic seizures. Prediction of seizures before the beginning of onset is beneficial for preventing seizures by medication. Nowadays, modern computational tools, machine learning, and deep learning methods have been used to predict seizures using EEG. However, EEG signals may get corrupted with background noise, and artifacts such as eye blinks and physical movements of muscles may lead to "pops" in the signal, resulting in electrical interference, which is cumbersome to detect through visual inspection for longer duration recordings. These limitations in automatic detection of interictal spikes and epileptic seizures are preferred, which is an essential tool for examining and scrutinizing the EEG recording more precisely. These restrictions bring our attention to present a review of automated schemes that will help neurologists categorize epileptic and nonepileptic signals. While preparing this review paper, it is observed that feature selection and classification are the main challenges in epilepsy prediction algorithms. This paper presents various techniques depending on various features and classifiers over the last few years. The methods presented will give a detailed understanding and ideas about seizure prediction and future research directions.

Improved Otsu and Kapur approach for white blood cells segmentation based on LebTLBO optimization for the detection of Leukemia.

The diagnosis of leukemia involves the detection of the abnormal characteristics of blood cells by a trained pathologist. Currently, this is done manually by observing the morphological characteristics of white blood cells in the microscopic images. Though there are some equipment- based and chemical-based tests available, the use and adaptation of the automated computer vision-based system is still an issue. There are certain software frameworks available in the literature; however, they are still not being adopted commercially. So there is a need for an automated and software- based framework for the detection of leukemia. In software-based detection, segmentation is the first critical stage that outputs the region of interest for further accurate diagnosis. Therefore, this paper explores an efficient and hybrid segmentation that proposes a more efficient and effective system for leukemia diagnosis. A very popular publicly available database, the acute lymphoblastic leukemia image database (ALL-IDB), is used in this research. First, the images are pre-processed and segmentation is done using Multilevel thresholding with Otsu and Kapur methods. To further optimize the segmentation performance, the Learning enthusiasm-based teaching-learning-based optimization (LebTLBO) algorithm is employed. Different metrics are used for measuring the system performance. A comparative analysis of the proposed methodology is done with existing benchmarks methods. The proposed approach has proven to be better than earlier techniques with measuring parameters of PSNR and Similarity index. The result shows a significant improvement in the performance measures with optimizing threshold algorithms and the LebTLBO technique.

A review of microscopic analysis of blood cells for disease detection with AI perspective.

BACKGROUND: Any contamination in the human body can prompt changes in blood cell morphology and various parameters of cells. The minuscule images of blood cells are examined for recognizing the contamination inside the body with an expectation of maladies and variations from the norm. Appropriate segmentation of these cells makes the detection of a disease progressively exact and vigorous. Microscopic blood cell analysis is a critical activity in the pathological analysis. It highlights the investigation of appropriate malady after exact location followed by an order of abnormalities, which assumes an essential job in the analysis of various disorders, treatment arranging, and assessment of results of treatment. METHODOLOGY: A survey of different areas where microscopic imaging of blood cells is used for disease detection is done in this paper. Research papers from this area are obtained from a popular search engine, Google Scholar. The articles are searched considering the basics of blood such as its composition followed by staining of blood, that is most important and mandatory before microscopic analysis. Different methods for classification, segmentation of blood cells are reviewed. Microscopic analysis using image processing, computer vision and machine learning are the main focus of the analysis and the review here. Methodologies employed by different researchers for blood cells analysis in terms of these mentioned algorithms is the key point of review considered in the study. RESULTS: Different methodologies used for microscopic analysis of blood cells are analyzed and are compared according to different performance measures. From the extensive review the conclusion is made. CONCLUSION: There are different machine learning and deep learning algorithms employed by researchers for segmentation of blood cell components and disease detection considering microscopic analysis. There is a scope of improvement in terms of different performance evaluation parameters. Different bio-inspired optimization algorithms can be used for improvement. Explainable AI can analyze the features of AI implemented system and will make the system more trusted and commercially suitable.

Explainable stock prices prediction from financial news articles using sentiment analysis.

The stock market is very complex and volatile. It is impacted by positive and negative sentiments which are based on media releases. The scope of the stock price analysis relies upon ability to recognise the stock movements. It is based on technical fundamentals and understanding the hidden trends which the market follows. Stock price prediction has consistently been an extremely dynamic field of exploration and research work. However, arriving at the ideal degree of precision is still an enticing challenge. In this paper, we are proposing a combined effort of using efficient machine learning techniques coupled with a deep learning technique-Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)-to use them to predict the stock prices with a high level of accuracy. Sentiments derived by users from news headlines have a tremendous effect on the buying and selling patterns of the traders as they easily get influenced by what they read. Hence, fusing one more dimension of sentiments along with technical analysis should improve the prediction accuracy. LSTM networks have proved to be a very useful tool to learn and predict temporal data having long term dependencies. In our work, the LSTM model uses historical stock data along with sentiments from news items to create a better predictive model.