Histopathologic Oral Cancer Prediction Using Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Biopsy Empowered with Transfer Learning.

Oral cancer is a dangerous and extensive cancer with a high death ratio. Oral cancer is the most usual cancer in the world, with more than 300,335 deaths every year. The cancerous tumor appears in the neck, oral glands, face, and mouth. To overcome this dangerous cancer, there are many ways to detect like a biopsy, in which small chunks of tissues are taken from the mouth and tested under a secure and hygienic microscope. However, microscope results of tissues to detect oral cancer are not up to the mark, a microscope cannot easily identify the cancerous cells and normal cells. Detection of cancerous cells using microscopic biopsy images helps in allaying and predicting the issues and gives better results if biologically approaches apply accurately for the prediction of cancerous cells, but during the physical examinations microscopic biopsy images for cancer detection there are major chances for human error and mistake. So, with the development of technology deep learning algorithms plays a major role in medical image diagnosing. Deep learning algorithms are efficiently developed to predict breast cancer, oral cancer, lung cancer, or any other type of medical image. In this study, the proposed model of transfer learning model using AlexNet in the convolutional neural network to extract rank features from oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) biopsy images to train the model. Simulation results have shown that the proposed model achieved higher classification accuracy 97.66% and 90.06% of training and testing, respectively.

Comorbidities and Risk Factors for Severe Outcomes in COVID-19 Patients in Saudi Arabia: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

PURPOSE: The first novel coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) case in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was reported in Qatif in March 2020 with continual increase in infection and mortality rates since then. In this study, we aim to determine risk factors which effect severity and mortality rates in a cohort of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in KSA. METHOD: We reviewed medical records of hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 positive results via reverse-transcriptase-polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) tests at Prince Mohammed Bin Abdulaziz Hospital, Riyadh between May and August 2020. Data were obtained for patient's demography, body mass index (BMI), and comorbidities. Additional data on patients that required intensive care unit (ICU) admission and clinical outcomes were recorded and analyzed with Python Pandas. RESULTS: A total of 565 COVID-19 positive patients were inducted in the study out of which, 63 (11.1%) patients died while 101 (17.9%) patients required ICU admission. Disease incidences were significantly higher in males and non-Saudi nationals. Patients with cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal diseases displayed significantly higher association with ICU admissions (p<0.001) while mortality rates were significantly higher in COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and neurological diseases. Univariate cox proportional hazards regression model showed that COVID-19 positive patients requiring ICU admission [Hazard's ratio, HR=4.2 95% confidence interval, CI 2.5-7.2); p<0.001] with preexisting cardiovascular [HR=4.1 (CI 2.5-6.7); p<0.001] or respiratory [HR=4.0 (CI 2.0-8.1); p=0.010] diseases were at significantly higher risk for mortality among the positive patients. There were no significant differences in mortality rates or ICU admissions among males and females, and across different age groups, BMIs and nationalities. Hospitalized patients with cardiovascular comorbidity had the highest risk of death (HR=2.9, CI 1.7-5.0; p=0.020). CONCLUSION: Independent risk factors for critical outcomes among COVID-19 in KSA include cardiovascular, respiratory and renal comorbidities.

Digitalization of learning in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 outbreak: A survey.

Following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in China in late December 2019, more than 217 countries became almost immediately infected in the resulting pandemic. Consequently, many of them decided to close their educational institutions as a way of preventing the spread of this virus. For many of them, though, the closure made them unable to deliver learning materials to students owing to their inability to provide the right technology for the purpose. To assist with the digitalizing of learning during this time, this study reviews the most common technologies used in the delivery of learning materials, with the experience of most infected countries being considered. Major challenges in online learning are discussed in this study as well. Further, Saudi Arabia was considered as a case study for the effectiveness of distance learning during the 2020 spring semester, where 300 undergraduate students were surveyed on their opinions of distance learning. The responses to the survey indicated that distance learning was effective in providing the required knowledge to the students during the outbreak of COVID-19. The findings showed that although the lack of interaction and poor internet connections were factors affecting comfortable and successful learning of physics and mathematics, 63% of students were satisfied with learning management systems, 75% of students found it easy to understand course materials, and 67% of students found it easy to understand assignments and could deal with them comfortably. The study findings can encourage educational institutions to digitalize their learning materials in the future.

Reversible and Fragile Watermarking for Medical Images.

A novel reversible digital watermarking technique for medical images to achieve high level of secrecy, tamper detection, and blind recovery of the original image is proposed. The technique selects some of the pixels from the host image using chaotic key for embedding a chaotically generated watermark. The rest of the pixels are converted to residues by using the Residue Number System (RNS). The chaotically selected pixels are represented by the polynomial. A primitive polynomial of degree four is chosen that divides the message polynomial and consequently the remainder is obtained. The obtained remainder is XORed with the watermark and appended along with the message. The decoder receives the appended message and divides it by the same primitive polynomial and calculates the remainder. The authenticity of watermark is done based on the remainder that is valid, if it is zero and invalid otherwise. On the other hand, residue is divided with a primitive polynomial of degree 3 and the obtained remainder is appended with residue. The secrecy of proposed system is considerably high. It will be almost impossible for the intruder to find out which pixels are watermarked and which are just residue. Moreover, the proposed system also ensures high security due to four keys used in chaotic map. Effectiveness of the scheme is validated through MATLAB simulations and comparison with a similar technique.

Robust and Fragile Medical Image Watermarking: A Joint Venture of Coding and Chaos Theories.

A secure spatial domain, hybrid watermarking technique for obtaining watermark (authentication information) robustness and fragility of the host medical image (content integrity) using product codes, chaos theory, and residue number system (RNS) is proposed. The proposed scheme is highly fragile and unrecoverable in terms of the host image, but it is significantly robust and recoverable in terms of the watermark. Altering the medical image may result in misdiagnosis, hence the watermark that may contain patient information and organization logo must be protected against certain attacks. The host medical image is separated into two parts, namely, the region of interest (ROI) and region of noninterest (RONI) using a rectangular region. The RONI part is used to embed the watermark information. Moreover, two watermarks are used: one to achieve authenticity of image and the other to achieve the robustness against both incidental and malicious attacks. Effectiveness in terms of security, robustness, and fragility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by the simulations and comparison with the other state-of-the-art techniques.