Retraction Note: Evolving deep convolutional neutral network by hybrid sine–cosine and extreme learning machine for real-time COVID19 diagnosis from X-ray images (Soft Computing, (2023), 27, 6, (3307-3326), 10.1007/s00500-021-05839-6)

The Editor-in-Chief and the publisher have retracted this article. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation's findings the Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article. Author Mohammad Khishe disagrees with the retraction. The other authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Levels and Trends of Maternal Mortality and Morbidity by Cause in North Africa and Middle East, 1990 to 2019: An Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background: Since 1990, the maternal mortality significantly decreased at global scale as well as the North Africa and Middle East. However, estimates for mortality and morbidity by cause and age at national scale in this region are not available. Method(s): This study is part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors study (GBD) 2019. Here we report maternal mortality and morbidity by age and cause across 21 countries in the region from 1990 to 2019. Result(s): Between 1990 and 2019, maternal mortality ratio (MMR) dropped from 148.8 (129.6-171.2) to 94.3 (73.4-121.1) per 100 000 live births in North Africa and Middle East. In 1990, MMR ranged from 6.0 (5.3-6.8) in Kuwait to 502.9 (375.2-655.3) per 100 000 live births in Afghanistan. Respective figures for 2019 were 5.1 (4.0-6.4) in Kuwait to 269.9 (195.8-368.6) in Afghanistan. Percentages of deaths under 25 years was 26.0% in 1990 and 23.8% in 2019. Maternal hemorrhage, indirect maternal deaths, and other maternal disorders rank 1st to 3rd in the entire region. Ultimately, there was an evident decrease in MMR along with increase in socio-demographic index from 1990 to 2019 in all countries in the region and an evident convergence across nations. Conclusion(s): MMR has significantly declined in the region since 1990 and only five countries (Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Morocco, and Algeria) out of 21 nations didn't achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of 70 deaths per 100 000 live births in 2019. Despite the convergence in trends, there are still disparities across countries.Copyright © 2022 Academy of Medical Sciences of I.R. Iran. All rights reserved.

Comparative Analysis of Swarm Algorithms to Classification of covid19 on X-Rays

The use of Chest radiograph (CXR) images in the examination and monitoring of different lung disorders like infiltration, tuberculosis, pneumonia, atelectasis, and hernia has long been known. The detection of COVID-19 can also be done with CXR images. COVID-19, a virus that results in an infection of the upper respiratory tract and lungs, was initially detected in late 2019 in China's Wuhan province and is considered to majorly damage the airway and, thus, the lungs of people afflicted. From that time, the virus has quickly spread over the world, with the number of mortalities and cases increasing daily. The COVID-19 effects on lung tissue can be monitored via CXR. As a result, This paper provides a comparison regarding k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support-vector machine (SVM), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGboost) classification techniques depending on Harris Hawks optimization algorithm (HHO), Salp swarm optimization algorithm (SSA), Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and Gray wolf optimizer (GWO) utilized in this domain and utilized for feature selection in the presented work. The dataset used in this analysis consists of 9000 2D X-ray images in Poster anterior chest view, which has been categorized by using valid tests into two categories: 5500 images of Normal lungs and 4044 images of COVID-19 patients. All of the image sizes were set to 200 × 200 pixels. this analysis used several quantitative evaluation metrics like precision, recall, and F1-score. © 2022 IEEE.

Perspectives on the Impact of E-Learning Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Pandemic—The Case of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly affected global patterns, and the period of the declared virus pandemic has had a negative influence on all aspects of life. This research focuses on categorizing and empirically investigating the role of digital platforms in learning and business processes during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent the use of electronic learning (EL) has been boosted by COVID-19's spread, and EL's effectiveness on the sustainable development of electronic commerce due to the demand for a variety of electronic devices. For this purpose, the information has been collected through an online questionnaire applied to 430 participants from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). The results indicate that participant usage and skills with electronic devices and online software programs are increasing, as the ratio indicated a level of 68% for both genders. Thus, the significance of EL concerning electronic commercial enterprises has been openly acknowledged and influenced by numerous factors. In addition, several suggestions and steps to be undertaken by the government are highlighted. Finally, this research mentions the current limitations of EL and suggests future works to build sustainable online experiences. © 2023 by the authors.

An Efficient Hybrid Classification Approach for COVID-19 Based on Harris Hawks Optimization and Salp Swarm Optimization

Feature selection can be defined as one of the pre-processing steps that decrease the dimensionality of a dataset by identifying the most significant attributes while also boosting the accuracy of classification. For solving feature selection problems, this study presents a hybrid binary version of the Harris Hawks Optimization algorithm (HHO) and Salp Swarm Optimization (SSA) (HHOSSA) for Covid-19 classification. The proposed (HHOSSA) presents a strategy for improving the basic HHO’s performance using the Salp algorithm’s power to select the best fitness values. The HHOSSA was tested against two well-known optimization algorithms, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and the Grey wolf optimizer (GWO), utilizing a total of 800 chest X-ray images. A total of four performance metrics (Accuracy, Recall, Precision, F1) were employed in the studies using three classifiers (Support vector machines (SVMs), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)). The proposed algorithm (HHOSSA) achieved 96% accuracy with the SVM classifier, and 98% accuracy with two classifiers, XGboost and KNN © 2022, International journal of online and biomedical engineering.All Rights Reserved.

A proposed hybrid algorithm for detecting COVID-19 patients

COVID-19, one of the most dangerous pandemics, is currently affecting humanity. COVID-19 is spreading rapidly due to its high reliability transmissibility. Patients who test positive more often have mild to severe symptoms such as a cough, fever, raw throat, and muscle aches. Diseased people experience severe symptoms in more severe cases. such as shortness of breath, which can lead to respiratory failure and death. Machine learning techniques for detection and classification are commonly used in current medical diagnoses. However, for treatment using neural networks based on improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), known as PSONN, the accuracy and performance of current models must be improved. This hybridization implements Particle Swarm Optimization and a neural network to improve results while slowing convergence and improving efficiency. The purpose of this study is to contribute to resolving this issue by presenting the implementation and assessment of Machine Learning models. Using Neural Networks and Particle Swarm Optimization to help in the detection of COVID-19 in its early stages. To begin, we preprocessed data from a Brazilian dataset consisted primarily of early-stage symptoms. Following that, we implemented Neural Network and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms. We used precision, accuracy score, recall, and F-Measure tests to evaluate the Neural Network with Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms. Based on the comparison, this paper grouped the top seven ML models such as Neural Networks, Logistic Regression, Nave Bayes Classifier, Multilayer Perceptron, Support Vector Machine, BF Tree, Bayesian Networks algorithms and measured feature importance, and other, to justify the differences between classification models. Particle Swarm Optimization with Neura Network is being deployed to improve the efficiency of the detection method by more accurately predicting COVID-19 detection. Preprocessed datasets with important features are then fed into the testing and training phases as inputs. Particle Swarm Optimization was used for the training phase of a neural net to identify the best weights and biases. On training data, the highest rate of accuracy gained is 0.98.738 and on testing data, it is 98.689.

Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Machine Learning Method for COVID-19 Cases Prediction

A novel type of coronavirus, now known under the acronym COVID-19, was initially discovered in the city of Wuhan, China. Since then, it has spread across the globe and now it is affecting over 210 countries worldwide. The number of confirmed cases is rapidly increasing and has recently reached over 14 million on July 18, 2020, with over 600,000 confirmed deaths. In the research presented within this paper, a new forecasting model to predict the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 disease is proposed. The model proposed in this paper is a hybrid between machine learning adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and enhanced genetic algorithm metaheuristics. The enhanced genetic algorithm is applied to determine the parameters of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and to enhance the overall quality and performances of the prediction model. Proposed hybrid method was tested by using realistic official dataset on the COVID-19 outbreak in the state of China. In this paper, proposed approach was compared against multiple existing state-of-the-art techniques that were tested in the same environment, on the same datasets. Based on the simulation results and conducted comparative analysis, it is observed that the proposed hybrid approach has outperformed other sophisticated approaches and that it can be used as a tool for other time-series prediction. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.