Using a Deep Learning Model to Explore the Impact of Clinical Data on COVID-19 Diagnosis Using Chest X-ray.

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is disrupting the entire world; its rapid global spread threatens to affect millions of people. Accurate and timely diagnosis of COVID-19 is essential to control the spread and alleviate risk. Due to the promising results achieved by integrating machine learning (ML), particularly deep learning (DL), in automating the multiple disease diagnosis process. In the current study, a model based on deep learning was proposed for the automated diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images (CXR) and clinical data of the patient. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of integrating clinical patient data with the CXR for automated COVID-19 diagnosis. The proposed model used data collected from King Fahad University Hospital, Dammam, KSA, which consists of 270 patient records. The experiments were carried out first with clinical data, second with the CXR, and finally with clinical data and CXR. The fusion technique was used to combine the clinical features and features extracted from images. The study found that integrating clinical data with the CXR improves diagnostic accuracy. Using the clinical data and the CXR, the model achieved an accuracy of 0.970, a recall of 0.986, a precision of 0.978, and an F-score of 0.982. Further validation was performed by comparing the performance of the proposed system with the diagnosis of an expert. Additionally, the results have shown that the proposed system can be used as a tool that can help the doctors in COVID-19 diagnosis.

Sentiment Analysis of Arabic Tweets Regarding Distance Learning in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the normal life of people worldwide. One of the most noticeable impacts is the enforcement of social distancing to reduce the spread of the virus. The Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia implemented social distancing measures by enforcing distance learning at all educational stages. This measure brought about new experiences and challenges to students, parents, and teachers. This research measures the acceptance rate of this way of learning by analysing people's tweets regarding distance learning in Saudi Arabia. All the tweets analysed were written in Arabic and collected within the boundary of Saudi Arabia. They date back to the day that the distance learning announcement was made. The tweets were pre-processed, and labelled positive, or negative. Machine learning classifiers with different features and extraction techniques were then built to analyse the sentiment. The accuracy results for the different models were then compared. The best accuracy achieved (0.899) resulted from the Logistic regression classifier with unigram and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency as a feature extraction approach. This model was then applied on a new unlabelled dataset and classified to different educational stages; results demonstrated generally positive opinions regarding distance learning for general education stages (kindergarten, intermediate, and high schools), and negative opinions for the university stage. Further analysis was applied to identify the main topics related to the positive and negative sentiment. This result can be used by the Ministry of Education to further improve the distance learning educational system.

An Assessment of Lexical, Network, and Content-Based Features for Detecting Malicious URLs Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models.

The World Wide Web services are essential in our daily lives and are available to communities through Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Attackers utilize such means of communication and create malicious URLs to conduct fraudulent activities and deceive others by creating deceptive and misleading websites and domains. Such threats open the doors for many critical attacks such as spams, spyware, phishing, and malware. Therefore, detecting malicious URL is crucially important to prevent the occurrence of many cybercriminal activities. In this study, we examined a set of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to detect malicious websites using a dataset comprising 66,506 records of URLs. We engineered three different types of features including lexical-based, network-based and content-based features. To extract the most discriminative features in the dataset, we applied several features selection algorithms, namely, correlation analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and chi-square. Finally, we conducted a comparative performance evaluation for several ML and DL models considering set of criteria commonly used to evaluate such models. Results depicted that Naïve Bayes (NB) was the best model for detecting malicious URLs using the applied data with an accuracy of 96%. This research has made contribution to the field by conducting significant features engineering and analysis to identify the best features for malicious URLs predictions, compare different models and achieve a high accuracy using a large new URL dataset.

Computational Intelligence-Based Model for Mortality Rate Prediction in COVID-19 Patients.

The COVID-19 outbreak is currently one of the biggest challenges facing countries around the world. Millions of people have lost their lives due to COVID-19. Therefore, the accurate early detection and identification of severe COVID-19 cases can reduce the mortality rate and the likelihood of further complications. Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models have been shown to be effective in the detection and diagnosis of several diseases, including COVID-19. This study used ML algorithms, such as Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and DL model (containing six layers with ReLU and output layer with sigmoid activation), to predict the mortality rate in COVID-19 cases. Models were trained using confirmed COVID-19 patients from 146 countries. Comparative analysis was performed among ML and DL models using a reduced feature set. The best results were achieved using the proposed DL model, with an accuracy of 0.97. Experimental results reveal the significance of the proposed model over the baseline study in the literature with the reduced feature set.