Neural Networks for the Detection of COVID-19 and Other Diseases: Prospects and Challenges.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) ability to learn, correct errors, and transform a large amount of raw data into beneficial medical decisions for treatment and care has increased in popularity for enhanced patient safety and quality of care. Therefore, this paper reviews the critical role of ANNs in providing valuable insights for patients' healthcare decisions and efficient disease diagnosis. We study different types of ANNs in the existing literature that advance ANNs' adaptation for complex applications. Specifically, we investigate ANNs' advances for predicting viral, cancer, skin, and COVID-19 diseases. Furthermore, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model called ConXNet, based on chest radiography images, to improve the detection accuracy of COVID-19 disease. ConXNet is trained and tested using a chest radiography image dataset obtained from Kaggle, achieving more than 97% accuracy and 98% precision, which is better than other existing state-of-the-art models, such as DeTraC, U-Net, COVID MTNet, and COVID-Net, having 93.1%, 94.10%, 84.76%, and 90% accuracy and 94%, 95%, 85%, and 92% precision, respectively. The results show that the ConXNet model performed significantly well for a relatively large dataset compared with the aforementioned models. Moreover, the ConXNet model reduces the time complexity by using dropout layers and batch normalization techniques. Finally, we highlight future research directions and challenges, such as the complexity of the algorithms, insufficient available data, privacy and security, and integration of biosensing with ANNs. These research directions require considerable attention for improving the scope of ANNs for medical diagnostic and treatment applications.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Based Non-LOS Human Activity Recognition for Next-Generation 6G-Enabled Healthcare System.

Human activity monitoring is a fascinating area of research to support autonomous living in the aged and disabled community. Cameras, sensors, wearables, and non-contact microwave sensing have all been suggested in the past as methods for identifying distinct human activities. Microwave sensing is an approach that has lately attracted much interest since it has the potential to address privacy problems caused by cameras and discomfort caused by wearables, especially in the healthcare domain. A fundamental drawback of the current microwave sensing methods such as radar is non-line-of-sight and multi-floor environments. They need precise and regulated conditions to detect activity with high precision. In this paper, we have utilised the publicly available online database based on the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) system developed at the Communications, Sensing and Imaging group at the University of Glasgow, UK (references 39 and 40). The IRS system works better in the multi-floor and non-line-of-sight environments. This work for the first time uses algorithms such as support vector machine Bagging and Decision Tree on the publicly available IRS data and achieves better accuracy when a subset of the available data is considered along specific human activities. Additionally, the work also considers the processing time taken by the classier in training stage when exposed to the IRS data which was not previously explored.

Heartbeat Classification and Arrhythmia Detection Using a Multi-Model Deep-Learning Technique.

Cardiac arrhythmias pose a significant danger to human life; therefore, it is of utmost importance to be able to efficiently diagnose these arrhythmias promptly. There exist many techniques for the detection of arrhythmias; however, the most widely adopted method is the use of an Electrocardiogram (ECG). The manual analysis of ECGs by medical experts is often inefficient. Therefore, the detection and recognition of ECG characteristics via machine-learning techniques have become prevalent. There are two major drawbacks of existing machine-learning approaches: (a) they require extensive training time; and (b) they require manual feature selection. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel deep-learning framework that integrates various networks by stacking similar layers in each network to produce a single robust model. The proposed framework has been tested on two publicly available datasets for the recognition of five micro-classes of arrhythmias. The overall classification sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and accuracy of the proposed approach are 98.37%, 99.59%, 98.41%, and 99.35%, respectively. The results are compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed approach outperformed the existing approaches in terms of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, accuracy and computational cost.

Multiple Participants' Discrete Activity Recognition in a Well-Controlled Environment Using Universal Software Radio Peripheral Wireless Sensing.

Wireless sensing is the utmost cutting-edge way of monitoring different health-related activities and, concurrently, preserving most of the privacy of individuals. To meet future needs, multi-subject activity monitoring is in demand, whether it is for smart care centres or homes. In this paper, a smart monitoring system for different human activities is proposed based on radio-frequency sensing integrated with ensemble machine learning models. The ensemble technique can recognise a wide range of activity based on alterations in the wireless signal's Channel State Information (CSI). The proposed system operates at 3.75 GHz, and up to four subjects participated in the experimental study in order to acquire data on sixteen distinct daily living activities: sitting, standing, and walking. The proposed methodology merges subject count and performed activities, resulting in occupancy count and activity performed being recognised at the same time. To capture alterations owing to concurrent multi-subject motions, the CSI amplitudes collected from 51 subcarriers of the wireless signals were processed and merged. To distinguish multi-subject activity, a machine learning model based on an ensemble learning technique was designed and trained using the acquired CSI data. For maximum activity classes, the proposed approach attained a high average accuracy of up to 98%. The presented system has the ability to fulfil prospective health activity monitoring demands and is a viable solution towards well-being tracking.

Novel Privacy Preserving Non-Invasive Sensing-Based Diagnoses of Pneumonia Disease Leveraging Deep Network Model.

This article presents non-invasive sensing-based diagnoses of pneumonia disease, exploiting a deep learning model to make the technique non-invasive coupled with security preservation. Sensing and securing healthcare and medical images such as X-rays that can be used to diagnose viral diseases such as pneumonia is a challenging task for researchers. In the past few years, patients' medical records have been shared using various wireless technologies. The wireless transmitted data are prone to attacks, resulting in the misuse of patients' medical records. Therefore, it is important to secure medical data, which are in the form of images. The proposed work is divided into two sections: in the first section, primary data in the form of images are encrypted using the proposed technique based on chaos and convolution neural network. Furthermore, multiple chaotic maps are incorporated to create a random number generator, and the generated random sequence is used for pixel permutation and substitution. In the second part of the proposed work, a new technique for pneumonia diagnosis using deep learning, in which X-ray images are used as a dataset, is proposed. Several physiological features such as cough, fever, chest pain, flu, low energy, sweating, shaking, chills, shortness of breath, fatigue, loss of appetite, and headache and statistical features such as entropy, correlation, contrast dissimilarity, etc., are extracted from the X-ray images for the pneumonia diagnosis. Moreover, machine learning algorithms such as support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, and naive Bayes are also implemented for the proposed model and compared with the proposed CNN-based model. Furthermore, to improve the CNN-based proposed model, transfer learning and fine tuning are also incorporated. It is found that CNN performs better than other machine learning algorithms as the accuracy of the proposed work when using naive Bayes and CNN is 89% and 97%, respectively, which is also greater than the average accuracy of the existing schemes, which is 90%. Further, K-fold analysis and voting techniques are also incorporated to improve the accuracy of the proposed model. Different metrics such as entropy, correlation, contrast, and energy are used to gauge the performance of the proposed encryption technology, while precision, recall, F1 score, and support are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed machine learning-based model for pneumonia diagnosis. The entropy and correlation of the proposed work are 7.999 and 0.0001, respectively, which reflects that the proposed encryption algorithm offers a higher security of the digital data. Moreover, a detailed comparison with the existing work is also made and reveals that both the proposed models work better than the existing work.

On the Use of Deep Learning for Imaging-Based COVID-19 Detection Using Chest X-rays.

The global COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2019 and created major disruptions around the world demonstrated the imperative need for quick, inexpensive, accessible and reliable diagnostic methods that would allow the detection of infected individuals with minimal resources. Radiography, and more specifically, chest radiography, is a relatively inexpensive medical imaging modality that can potentially offer a solution for the diagnosis of COVID-19 cases. In this work, we examined eleven deep convolutional neural network architectures for the task of classifying chest X-ray images as belonging to healthy individuals, individuals with COVID-19 or individuals with viral pneumonia. All the examined networks are established architectures that have been proven to be efficient in image classification tasks, and we evaluated three different adjustments to modify the architectures for the task at hand by expanding them with additional layers. The proposed approaches were evaluated for all the examined architectures on a dataset with real chest X-ray images, reaching the highest classification accuracy of 98.04% and the highest F1-score of 98.22% for the best-performing setting.

Contactless Small-Scale Movement Monitoring System Using Software Defined Radio for Early Diagnosis of COVID-19.

The exponential growth of the novel coronavirus disease (N-COVID-19) has affected millions of people already and it is obvious that this crisis is global. This situation has enforced scientific researchers to gather their efforts to contain the virus. In this pandemic situation, health monitoring and human movements are getting significant consideration in the field of healthcare and as a result, it has emerged as a key area of interest in recent times. This requires a contactless sensing platform for detection of COVID-19 symptoms along with containment of virus spread by limiting and monitoring human movements. In this paper, a platform is proposed for the detection of COVID-19 symptoms like irregular breathing and coughing in addition to monitoring human movements using Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology. This platform uses Channel Frequency Response (CFR) to record the minute changes in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers due to any human motion over the wireless channel. In this initial research, the capabilities of the platform are analyzed by detecting hand movement, coughing, and breathing. This platform faithfully captures normal, slow, and fast breathing at a rate of 20, 10, and 28 breaths per minute respectively using different methods such as zero-cross detection, peak detection, and Fourier transformation. The results show that all three methods successfully record breathing rate. The proposed platform is portable, flexible, and has multifunctional capabilities. This platform can be exploited for other human body movements and health abnormalities by further classification using artificial intelligence.

Triaxial Accelerometer-Based Falls and Activities of Daily Life Detection Using Machine Learning.

The detection of activities of daily living (ADL) and the detection of falls is of utmost importance for addressing the issue of serious injuries and death as a consequence of elderly people falling. Wearable sensors can provide a viable solution for monitoring people in danger of falls with minimal external involvement from health or care home workers. In this work, we recorded accelerometer data from 35 healthy individuals performing various ADLs, as well as falls. Spatial and frequency domain features were extracted and used for the training of machine learning models with the aim of distinguishing between fall and no fall events, as well as between falls and other ADLs. Supervised classification experiments demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach, achieving an F1-score of 98.41% for distinguishing between fall and no fall events, and an F1-score of 88.11% for distinguishing between various ADLs, including falls. Furthermore, the created dataset, named "ShimFall&ADL" will be publicly released to facilitate further research on the field.