Electroencephalogram-Based Subject Matching Learning (ESML): A Deep Learning Framework on Electroencephalogram-Based Biometrics and Task Identification.

An EEG signal (Electroencephalogram) is a bioelectric phenomenon reflecting human brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework ESML (EEG-based Subject Matching Learning) using raw EEG signals to learn latent representations for EEG-based user identification and tack classification. ESML consists of two parts: one is the ESML1 model via an LSTM-based method for EEG-user linking, and one is the ESML2 model via a CNN-based method for EEG-task linking. The new model ESML is simple, but effective and efficient. It does not require any restrictions for EEG data collection on motions and thinking for users, and it does not need any EEG preprocessing operations, such as EEG denoising and feature extraction. The experiments were conducted on three public datasets and the results show that ESML performs the best and achieves significant performance improvement when compared to baseline methods (i.e., SVM, LDA, NN, DTS, Bayesian, AdaBoost and MLP). The ESML1 model provided the best precision at 96% with 109 users and the ESML2 model achieved 99% precision at 3-Class task classification. These experimental results provide direct evidence that EEG signals can be used for user identification and task classification.

Multi-Head Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become an indispensable component of modern global technological development, as they play a massive role in the accurate statistical estimation of vehicles or individuals commuting to a particular transportation facility at a given time. This provides the perfect backdrop for designing and engineering an adequate infrastructural capacity for transportation analyses. However, traffic prediction remains a daunting task due to the non-Euclidean and complex distribution of road networks and the topological constraints of urbanized road networks. To solve this challenge, this paper presents a traffic forecasting model which combines a graph convolutional network, a gated recurrent unit, and a multi-head attention mechanism to simultaneously capture and incorporate the spatio-temporal dependence and dynamic variation in the topological sequence of traffic data effectively. By achieving 91.8% accuracy on the Los Angeles highway traffic (Los-loop) test data for 15-min traffic prediction and an R2 score of 85% on the Shenzhen City (SZ-taxi) test dataset for 15- and 30-min predictions, the proposed model demonstrated that it can learn the global spatial variation and the dynamic temporal sequence of traffic data over time. This has resulted in state-of-the-art traffic forecasting for the SZ-taxi and Los-loop datasets.

A hybrid explainable ensemble transformer encoder for pneumonia identification from chest X-ray images.

INTRODUCTION: Pneumonia is a microorganism infection that causes chronic inflammation of the human lung cells. Chest X-ray imaging is the most well-known screening approach used for detecting pneumonia in the early stages. While chest-Xray images are mostly blurry with low illumination, a strong feature extraction approach is required for promising identification performance. OBJECTIVES: A new hybrid explainable deep learning framework is proposed for accurate pneumonia disease identification using chest X-ray images. METHODS: The proposed hybrid workflow is developed by fusing the capabilities of both ensemble convolutional networks and the Transformer Encoder mechanism. The ensemble learning backbone is used to extract strong features from the raw input X-ray images in two different scenarios: ensemble A (i.e., DenseNet201, VGG16, and GoogleNet) and ensemble B (i.e., DenseNet201, InceptionResNetV2, and Xception). Whereas, the Transformer Encoder is built based on the self-attention mechanism with multilayer perceptron (MLP) for accurate disease identification. The visual explainable saliency maps are derived to emphasize the crucial predicted regions on the input X-ray images. The end-to-end training process of the proposed deep learning models over all scenarios is performed for binary and multi-class classification scenarios. RESULTS: The proposed hybrid deep learning model recorded 99.21% classification performance in terms of overall accuracy and F1-score for the binary classification task, while it achieved 98.19% accuracy and 97.29% F1-score for multi-classification task. For the ensemble binary identification scenario, ensemble A recorded 97.22% accuracy and 97.14% F1-score, while ensemble B achieved 96.44% for both accuracy and F1-score. For the ensemble multiclass identification scenario, ensemble A recorded 97.2% accuracy and 95.8% F1-score, while ensemble B recorded 96.4% accuracy and 94.9% F1-score. CONCLUSION: The proposed hybrid deep learning framework could provide promising and encouraging explainable identification performance comparing with the individual, ensemble models, or even the latest AI models in the literature. The code is available here: https://github.com/chiagoziemchima/Pneumonia_Identificaton.

Automated Lung-Related Pneumonia and COVID-19 Detection Based on Novel Feature Extraction Framework and Vision Transformer Approaches Using Chest X-ray Images.

According to research, classifiers and detectors are less accurate when images are blurry, have low contrast, or have other flaws which raise questions about the machine learning model's ability to recognize items effectively. The chest X-ray image has proven to be the preferred image modality for medical imaging as it contains more information about a patient. Its interpretation is quite difficult, nevertheless. The goal of this research is to construct a reliable deep-learning model capable of producing high classification accuracy on chest x-ray images for lung diseases. To enable a thorough study of the chest X-ray image, the suggested framework first derived richer features using an ensemble technique, then a global second-order pooling is applied to further derive higher global features of the images. Furthermore, the images are then separated into patches and position embedding before analyzing the patches individually via a vision transformer approach. The proposed model yielded 96.01% sensitivity, 96.20% precision, and 98.00% accuracy for the COVID-19 Radiography Dataset while achieving 97.84% accuracy, 96.76% sensitivity and 96.80% precision, for the Covid-ChestX-ray-15k dataset. The experimental findings reveal that the presented models outperform traditional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art approaches provided in the literature.

Dual_Pachi: Attention-based dual path framework with intermediate second order-pooling for Covid-19 detection from chest X-ray images.

Numerous machine learning and image processing algorithms, most recently deep learning, allow the recognition and classification of COVID-19 disease in medical images. However, feature extraction, or the semantic gap between low-level visual information collected by imaging modalities and high-level semantics, is the fundamental shortcoming of these techniques. On the other hand, several techniques focused on the first-order feature extraction of the chest X-Ray thus making the employed models less accurate and robust. This study presents Dual_Pachi: Attention Based Dual Path Framework with Intermediate Second Order-Pooling for more accurate and robust Chest X-ray feature extraction for Covid-19 detection. Dual_Pachi consists of 4 main building Blocks; Block one converts the received chest X-Ray image to CIE LAB coordinates (L & AB channels which are separated at the first three layers of a modified Inception V3 Architecture.). Block two further exploit the global features extracted from block one via a global second-order pooling while block three focuses on the low-level visual information and the high-level semantics of Chest X-ray image features using a multi-head self-attention and an MLP Layer without sacrificing performance. Finally, the fourth block is the classification block where classification is done using fully connected layers and SoftMax activation. Dual_Pachi is designed and trained in an end-to-end manner. According to the results, Dual_Pachi outperforms traditional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art approaches described in the literature with an accuracy of 0.96656 (Data_A) and 0.97867 (Data_B) for the Dual_Pachi approach and an accuracy of 0.95987 (Data_A) and 0.968 (Data_B) for the Dual_Pachi without attention block model. A Grad-CAM-based visualization is also built to highlight where the applied attention mechanism is concentrated.

MallesNet: A multi-object assistance based network for brachial plexus segmentation in ultrasound images.

Ultrasound-guided injection is widely used to help anesthesiologists perform anesthesia in peripheral nerve blockade (PNB). However, it is a daunting task to accurately identify nerve structure in ultrasound images even for the experienced anesthesiologists. In this paper, a Multi-object assistance based Brachial Plexus Segmentation Network, named MallesNet, is proposed to improve the nerve segmentation performance in ultrasound image with the assistance of simultaneously segmenting its surrounding anatomical structures (e.g., muscle, vein, and artery). The MallesNet is designed by following the framework of Mask R-CNN to implement the multi object identification and segmentation. Moreover, a spatial local contrast feature (SLCF) extraction module is proposed to compute contrast features at different scales to effectively obtain useful features for small objects. And the self-attention gate (SAG) is also utilized to capture the spatial relationships in different channels and further re-weight the channels in feature maps by following the design of non-local operation and channel attention. Furthermore, the upsampling mechanism in original Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is improved by adopting the transpose convolution and skip concatenation to fine-tune the feature maps. The Ultrasound Brachial Plexus Dataset (UBPD) is also proposed to support the research on brachial plexus segmentation, which consists of 1055 ultrasound images with four objects (i.e., nerve, artery, vein and muscle) and their corresponding label masks. Extensive experimental results using UBPD dataset demonstrate that MallesNet can achieve a better segmentation performance on nerves structure and also on surrounding structures in comparison to other competing approaches.

Multi-Classification of Breast Cancer Lesions in Histopathological Images Using DEEP_Pachi: Multiple Self-Attention Head.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND: Despite fast developments in the medical field, histological diagnosis is still regarded as the benchmark in cancer diagnosis. However, the input image feature extraction that is used to determine the severity of cancer at various magnifications is harrowing since manual procedures are biased, time consuming, labor intensive, and error-prone. Current state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for breast histopathology image classification take features from entire images (generic features). Thus, they are likely to overlook the essential image features for the unnecessary features, resulting in an incorrect diagnosis of breast histopathology imaging and leading to mortality. METHODS: This discrepancy prompted us to develop DEEP_Pachi for classifying breast histopathology images at various magnifications. The suggested DEEP_Pachi collects global and regional features that are essential for effective breast histopathology image classification. The proposed model backbone is an ensemble of DenseNet201 and VGG16 architecture. The ensemble model extracts global features (generic image information), whereas DEEP_Pachi extracts spatial information (regions of interest). Statistically, the evaluation of the proposed model was performed on publicly available dataset: BreakHis and ICIAR 2018 Challenge datasets. RESULTS: A detailed evaluation of the proposed model's accuracy, sensitivity, precision, specificity, and f1-score metrics revealed the usefulness of the backbone model and the DEEP_Pachi model for image classifying. The suggested technique outperformed state-of-the-art classifiers, achieving an accuracy of 1.0 for the benign class and 0.99 for the malignant class in all magnifications of BreakHis datasets and an accuracy of 1.0 on the ICIAR 2018 Challenge dataset. CONCLUSIONS: The acquired findings were significantly resilient and proved helpful for the suggested system to assist experts at big medical institutions, resulting in early breast cancer diagnosis and a reduction in the death rate.

LCSB-inception: Reliable and effective light-chroma separated branches for Covid-19 detection from chest X-ray images.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimate of more than five million infections and 355,000 deaths have been recorded worldwide since the emergence of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Various researchers have developed interesting and effective deep learning frameworks to tackle this disease. However, poor feature extraction from the Chest X-ray images and the high computational cost of the available models impose difficulties to an accurate and fast Covid-19 detection framework. Thus, the major purpose of this study is to offer an accurate and efficient approach for extracting COVID-19 features from chest X-rays that is also less computationally expensive than earlier research. To achieve the specified goal, we explored the Inception V3 deep artificial neural network. This study proposed LCSB-Inception; a two-path (L and AB channel) Inception V3 network along the first three convolutional layers. The RGB input image is first transformed to CIE LAB coordinates (L channel which is aimed at learning the textural and edge features of the Chest X-Ray and AB channel which is aimed at learning the color variations of the Chest X-ray images). The L achromatic channel and the AB channels filters are set to 50%L-50%AB. This method saves between one-third and one-half of the parameters in the divided branches. We further introduced a global second-order pooling at the last two convolutional blocks for more robust image feature extraction against the conventional max-pooling. The detection accuracy of the LCSB-Inception is further improved by employing the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) image enhancement technique on the input image before feeding them to the network. The proposed LCSB-Inception network is experimented on using two loss functions (Categorically smooth loss and categorically Cross-entropy) and two learning rates whereas Accuracy, Precision, Sensitivity, Specificity F1-Score, and AUC Score were used for evaluation via the chestX-ray-15k (Data_1) and COVID-19 Radiography dataset (Data_2). The proposed models produced an acceptable outcome with an accuracy of 0.97867 (Data_1) and 0.98199 (Data_2) according to the experimental findings. In terms of COVID-19 identification, the suggested models outperform conventional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art techniques presented in the literature based on the results.

MVFusFra: A Multi-View Dynamic Fusion Framework for Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation.

Medical practitioners generally rely on multimodal brain images, for example based on the information from the axial, coronal, and sagittal views, to inform brain tumor diagnosis. Hence, to further utilize the 3D information embedded in such datasets, this paper proposes a multi-view dynamic fusion framework (hereafter, referred to as MVFusFra) to improve the performance of brain tumor segmentation. The proposed framework consists of three key building blocks. First, a multi-view deep neural network architecture, which represents multi learning networks for segmenting the brain tumor from different views and each deep neural network corresponds to multi-modal brain images from one single view. Second, the dynamic decision fusion method, which is mainly used to fuse segmentation results from multi-views into an integrated method. Then, two different fusion methods (i.e., voting and weighted averaging) are used to evaluate the fusing process. Third, the multi-view fusion loss (comprising segmentation loss, transition loss, and decision loss) is proposed to facilitate the training process of multi-view learning networks, so as to ensure consistency in appearance and space, for both fusing segmentation results and the training of the learning network. We evaluate the performance of MVFusFra on the BRATS 2015 and BRATS 2018 datasets. Findings from the evaluations suggest that fusion results from multi-views achieve better performance than segmentation results from the single view, and also implying effectiveness of the proposed multi-view fusion loss. A comparative summary also shows that MVFusFra achieves better segmentation performance, in terms of efficiency, in comparison to other competing approaches.

An Efficient Ciphertext-Policy Weighted Attribute-Based Encryption for the Internet of Health Things.

The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is a medical concept that describes uniquely identifiable devices connected to the Internet that can communicate with each other. As one of the most important components of smart health monitoring and improvement systems, the IoHT presents numerous challenges, among which cybersecurity is a priority. As a well-received security solution to achieve fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy weighted attribute-based encryption (CP-WABE) has the potential to ensure data security in the IoHT. However, many issues remain, such as inflexibility, poor computational capability, and insufficient storage efficiency in attributes comparison. To address these issues, we propose a novel access policy expression method using 0-1 coding technology. Based on this method, a flexible and efficient CP-WABE is constructed for the IoHT. Our scheme supports not only weighted attributes but also any form of comparison of weighted attributes. Furthermore, we use offline/online encryption and outsourced decryption technology to ensure that the scheme can run on an inefficient IoT terminal. Both theoretical and experimental analyses show that our scheme is more efficient and feasible than other schemes. Moreover, security analysis indicates that our scheme achieves security against a chosen-plaintext attack.

DeepKeyGen: A Deep Learning-Based Stream Cipher Generator for Medical Image Encryption and Decryption.

The need for medical image encryption is increasingly pronounced, for example, to safeguard the privacy of the patients' medical imaging data. In this article, a novel deep learning-based key generation network (DeepKeyGen) is proposed as a stream cipher generator to generate the private key, which can then be used for encrypting and decrypting of medical images. In DeepKeyGen, the generative adversarial network (GAN) is adopted as the learning network to generate the private key. Furthermore, the transformation domain (that represents the "style" of the private key to be generated) is designed to guide the learning network to realize the private key generation process. The goal of DeepKeyGen is to learn the mapping relationship of how to transfer the initial image to the private key. We evaluate DeepKeyGen using three data sets, namely, the Montgomery County chest X-ray data set, the Ultrasonic Brachial Plexus data set, and the BraTS18 data set. The evaluation findings and security analysis show that the proposed key generation network can achieve a high-level security in generating the private key.

Insuring against the perils in distributed learning: privacy-preserving empirical risk minimization.

Multiple organizations would benefit from collaborative learning models trained over aggregated datasets from various human activity recognition applications without privacy leakages. Two of the prevailing privacy-preserving protocols, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy, however, are still confronted with serious privacy leakages: lack of provision for privacy guarantee about individual data and insufficient protection against inference attacks on the resultant models. To mitigate the aforementioned shortfalls, we propose privacy-preserving architecture to explore the potential of secure multi-party computation and differential privacy. We utilize the inherent prospects of output perturbation and gradient perturbation in our differential privacy method, and progress with an innovation for both techniques in the distributed learning domain. Data owners collaboratively aggregate the locally trained models inside a secure multi-party computation domain in the output perturbation algorithm, and later inject appreciable statistical noise before exposing the classifier. We inject noise during every iterative update to collaboratively train a global model in our gradient perturbation algorithm. The utility guarantee of our gradient perturbation method is determined by an expected curvature relative to the minimum curvature. With the application of expected curvature, we theoretically justify the advantage of gradient perturbation in our proposed algorithm, therefore closing existing gap between practice and theory. Validation of our algorithm on real-world human recognition activity datasets establishes that our protocol incurs minimal computational overhead, provides substantial utility gains for typical security and privacy guarantees.

Guaranteed distributed machine learning: Privacy-preserving empirical risk minimization.

Distributed learning over data from sensor-based networks has been adopted to collaboratively train models on these sensitive data without privacy leakages. We present a distributed learning framework that involves the integration of secure multi-party computation and differential privacy. In our differential privacy method, we explore the potential of output perturbation and gradient perturbation and also progress with the cutting-edge methods of both techniques in the distributed learning domain. In our proposed multi-scheme output perturbation algorithm (MS-OP), data owners combine their local classifiers within a secure multi-party computation and later inject an appreciable amount of statistical noise into the model before they are revealed. In our Adaptive Iterative gradient perturbation (MS-GP) method, data providers collaboratively train a global model. During each iteration, the data owners aggregate their locally trained models within the secure multi-party domain. Since the conversion of differentially private algorithms are often naive, we improve on the method by a meticulous calibration of the privacy budget for each iteration. As the parameters of the model approach the optimal values, gradients are decreased and therefore require accurate measurement. We, therefore, add a fundamental line-search capability to enable our MS-GP algorithm to decide exactly when a more accurate measurement of the gradient is indispensable. Validation of our models on three (3) real-world datasets shows that our algorithm possesses a sustainable competitive advantage over the existing cutting-edge privacy-preserving requirements in the distributed setting.

Secure and dynamic access control for the Internet of Things (IoT) based traffic system.

Today, the trend of the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing through the use of smart devices, vehicular networks, and household devices with internet-based networks. Specifically, the IoT smart devices and gadgets used in government and military are crucial to operational success. Communication and data sharing between these devices have increased in several ways. Similarly, the threats of information breaches between communication channels have also surged significantly, making data security a challenging task. In this context, access control is an approach that can secure data by restricting unauthorized users. Various access control models exist that can effectively implement access control yet, and there is no single state-of-the-art model that can provide dynamicity, security, ease of administration, and rapid execution all at once. In combating this loophole, we propose a novel secure and dynamic access control (SDAC) model for the IoT networks (smart traffic control and roadside parking management). Our proposed model allows IoT devices to communicate and share information through a secure means by using wired and wireless networks (Cellular Networks or Wi-Fi). The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model are demonstrated using mathematical models and discussed with many example implementations.

Attention Autoencoder for Generative Latent Representational Learning in Anomaly Detection.

Today, accurate and automated abnormality diagnosis and identification have become of paramount importance as they are involved in many critical and life-saving scenarios. To accomplish such frontiers, we propose three artificial intelligence models through the application of deep learning algorithms to analyze and detect anomalies in human heartbeat signals. The three proposed models include an attention autoencoder that maps input data to a lower-dimensional latent representation with maximum feature retention, and a reconstruction decoder with minimum remodeling loss. The autoencoder has an embedded attention module at the bottleneck to learn the salient activations of the encoded distribution. Additionally, a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network is designed to learn the Gaussian distribution of the generative reconstruction and time-series sequential data analysis. The three proposed models displayed outstanding ability to detect anomalies on the evaluated five thousand electrocardiogram (ECG5000) signals with 99% accuracy and 99.3% precision score in detecting healthy heartbeats from patients with severe congestive heart failure.

Brain MR Image Classification for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis Based on Multifeature Fusion.

We propose a novel classification framework to precisely identify individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from normal controls (NC). The proposed method combines three different features from structural MR images: gray-matter volume, gray-level cooccurrence matrix, and Gabor feature. These features can obtain both the 2D and 3D information of brains, and the experimental results show that a better performance can be achieved through the multifeature fusion. We also analyze the multifeatures combination correlation technologies and improve the SVM-RFE algorithm through the covariance method. The results of comparison experiments on public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Besides, it also indicates that multifeatures combination is better than the single-feature method. The proposed features selection algorithm could effectively extract the optimal features subset in order to improve the classification performance.

Accelerating pairwise statistical significance estimation for local alignment by harvesting GPU's power.

BACKGROUND: Pairwise statistical significance has been recognized to be able to accurately identify related sequences, which is a very important cornerstone procedure in numerous bioinformatics applications. However, it is both computationally and data intensive, which poses a big challenge in terms of performance and scalability. RESULTS: We present a GPU implementation to accelerate pairwise statistical significance estimation of local sequence alignment using standard substitution matrices. By carefully studying the algorithm's data access characteristics, we developed a tile-based scheme that can produce a contiguous data access in the GPU global memory and sustain a large number of threads to achieve a high GPU occupancy. We further extend the parallelization technique to estimate pairwise statistical significance using position-specific substitution matrices, which has earlier demonstrated significantly better sequence comparison accuracy than using standard substitution matrices. The implementation is also extended to take advantage of dual-GPUs. We observe end-to-end speedups of nearly 250 (370) × using single-GPU Tesla C2050 GPU (dual-Tesla C2050) over the CPU implementation using Intel Corei7 CPU 920 processor. CONCLUSIONS: Harvesting the high performance of modern GPUs is a promising approach to accelerate pairwise statistical significance estimation for local sequence alignment.