Remote diagnostic and detection of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) system based on intelligent healthcare and internet of things.

In this paper, we will propose a novel system for remote detecting COVID-19 patients based on artificial intelligence technology and internet of things (IoT) in order to stop the virus spreading at an early stage. In this work, we will focus on connecting several sensors to work together as a system that can discover people infected with the Coronavirus remotely, this will reduce the spread of the disease. The proposed system consists of several devices called smart medical sensors such as: pulse, thermal monitoring, and blood sensors. The system is working sequentially starting by pulse sensor and end by blood sensor including an algorithm to manage the data given from sensors. The pulse sensor is devoted to acquire a high quality data using a smartphone equipped by a mobile dermatoscope with 20× magnification. The processing is used RGB color system to perform moving window to segment regions of interest (ROIs) as inputs of the heart rate estimation algorithm. The heart rate (HR) estimation is then given by computing the dominant frequency by identifying the most prominent peak of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) technique. The thermal monitoring is used for fever detection using a smart camera that can provide an optimum solution for fever detection. The infrared sensor can quickly measure surface temperature without making any contact with a person's skin. A blood sensor is used to measure percentages of white, red blood (WBCs, RBCs) volume and platelets non-invasively using the bioimpedance analysis and independent component analysis (ICA). The proposed sensor consists of two electrodes which can be used to send the current to the earlobe and measure the produced voltage. A mathematical model was modified to describe the impedance of earlobe in different frequencies (i.e., low, medium, and high). The COMSOL model is used to simulate blood electrical properties and frequencies to measure WBCs, RBCs and Platelets volume. These devices are collected to work automatically without user interaction for remote checking the coronavirus patients. The proposed system is experimented by six examples to prove its applicability and efficiency.

A watershed approach for improving medical image segmentation.

In this paper, a novel watershed approach based on seed region growing and image entropy is presented which could improve the medical image segmentation. The proposed algorithm enables the prior information of seed region growing and image entropy in its calculation. The algorithm starts by partitioning the image into several levels of intensity using watershed multi-degree immersion process. The levels of intensity are the input to a computationally efficient seed region segmentation process which produces the initial partitioning of the image regions. These regions are fed to entropy procedure to carry out a suitable merging which produces the final segmentation. The latter process uses a region-based similarity representation of the image regions to decide whether regions can be merged. The region is isolated from the level and the residual pixels are uploaded to the next level and so on, we recall this process as multi-level process and the watershed is called multi-level watershed. The proposed algorithm is applied to challenging applications: grey matter-white matter segmentation in magnetic resonance images (MRIs). The established methods and the proposed approach are experimented by these applications to a variety of simulating immersion, multi-degree, multi-level seed region growing and multi-level seed region growing with entropy. It is shown that the proposed method achieves more accurate results for medical image oversegmentation.