Automatic detection of breast cancer in ultrasound images using Mayfly algorithm optimized handcrafted features.

BACKGROUND: The incidence rates of breast cancer in women community is progressively raising and the premature diagnosis is necessary to detect and cure the disease. OBJECTIVE: To develop a novel automated disuse detection framework to examine the Breast-Ultrasound-Images (BUI). METHODS: This scheme includes the following stages; (i) Image acquisition and resizing, (ii) Gaussian filter-based pre-processing, (iii) Handcrafted features extraction, (iv) Optimal feature selection with Mayfly Algorithm (MA), (v) Binary classification and validation. The dataset includes BUI extracted from 133 normal, 445 benign and 210 malignant cases. Each BUI is resized to 256×256×1 pixels and the resized BUIs are used to develop and test the new scheme. Handcrafted feature-based cancer detection is employed and the parameters, such as Entropies, Local-Binary-Pattern (LBP) and Hu moments are considered. To avoid the over-fitting problem, a feature reduction procedure is also implemented with MA and the reduced feature sub-set is used to train and validate the classifiers developed in this research. RESULTS: The experiments were performed to classify BUIs between (i) normal and benign, (ii) normal and malignant, and (iii) benign and malignant cases. The results show that classification accuracy of > 94%, precision of > 92%, sensitivity of > 92% and specificity of > 90% are achieved applying the developed new schemes or framework. CONCLUSION: In this work, a machine-learning scheme is employed to detect/classify the disease using BUI and achieves promising results. In future, we will test the feasibility of implementing deep-learning method to this framework to further improve detection accuracy.

EEG Channel Selection Using Multiobjective Cuckoo Search for Person Identification as Protection System in Healthcare Applications.

Recently, the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal presents an excellent potential for a new person identification technique. Several studies defined the EEG with unique features, universality, and natural robustness to be used as a new track to prevent spoofing attacks. The EEG signals are a visual recording of the brain's electrical activities, measured by placing electrodes (channels) in various scalp positions. However, traditional EEG-based systems lead to high complexity with many channels, and some channels have critical information for the identification system while others do not. Several studies have proposed a single objective to address the EEG channel for person identification. Unfortunately, these studies only focused on increasing the accuracy rate without balancing the accuracy and the total number of selected EEG channels. The novelty of this paper is to propose a multiobjective binary version of the cuckoo search algorithm (MOBCS-KNN) to find optimal EEG channel selections for person identification. The proposed method (MOBCS-KNN) used a weighted sum technique to implement a multiobjective approach. In addition, a KNN classifier for EEG-based biometric person identification is used. It is worth mentioning that this is the initial investigation of using a multiobjective technique with EEG channel selection problem. A standard EEG motor imagery dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the MOBCS-KNN. The experiments show that the MOBCS-KNN obtained accuracy of 93.86% using only 24 sensors with AR20 autoregressive coefficients. Another critical point is that the MOBCS-KNN finds channels not too close to each other to capture relevant information from all over the head. In conclusion, the MOBCS-KNN algorithm achieves the best results compared with metaheuristic algorithms. Finally, the recommended approach can draw future directions to be applied to different research areas.

Automated diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis using electromyograms and firefly algorithm based neural networks with fractional position update.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a disorder of the neuromuscular system that causes the impairment of nerve cells from brain to spinal cord and to the voluntary muscles in every part of the human physiological system, which totally leads to paralysis. The examination of ALS using Electromyograms (EMG) is a challenging task which requires experts to investigate and diagnose. Hence, the development of an efficient and automated procedure is significant for the analysis of ALS signals. In this work, eighty time-frequency features were extricated from EMG signals transformed into time-frequency images. Further, fifteen highly substantial features were chosen using the firefly algorithm with fractional position update. Further, fractional firefly neural network is introduced and developed to examine the EMG signals. The performance metrics of the fractional firefly based neural network diagnostic system were analyzed with different fractional orders (α) and hidden neurons. Results demonstrated that the proposed technique is highly efficient and yields good statistical significance. Further, the accuracy of the fractional firefly neural network classifier with α = 0.5 and 15 hidden neurons is higher (93.3%) when compared to the accuracy of the classifier with different α values and hidden neurons. The proposed fractional order-based feature selection algorithm and classifier model are highly suitable for development of systems for evaluation of ALS and normal EMG signals, since the proficient discrimination of normal and ALS EMG signals is essential for the identification of neuromuscular disorders.

An Optimized Method for Skin Cancer Diagnosis Using Modified Thermal Exchange Optimization Algorithm.

Skin cancer is the most common cancer of the body. It is estimated that more than one million people worldwide develop skin cancer each year. Early detection of this cancer has a high effect on the disease treatment. In this paper, a new optimal and automatic pipeline approach has been proposed for the diagnosis of this disease from dermoscopy images. The proposed method includes a noise reduction process before processing for eliminating the noises. Then, the Otsu method as one of the widely used thresholding method is used to characterize the region of interest. Afterward, 20 different features are extracted from the image. To reduce the method complexity, a new modified version of the Thermal Exchange Optimization Algorithm is performed to the features. This improves the method precision and consistency. To validate the proposed method's efficiency, it is implemented to the American Cancer Society database, its results are compared with some state-of-the-art methods, and the final results showed the superiority of the proposed method against the others.

Social Group Optimization-Assisted Kapur's Entropy and Morphological Segmentation for Automated Detection of COVID-19 Infection from Computed Tomography Images.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been declared a global pandemic. Due to its infection rate and severity, it has emerged as one of the major global threats of the current generation. To support the current combat against the disease, this research aims to propose a machine learning-based pipeline to detect COVID-19 infection using lung computed tomography scan images (CTI). This implemented pipeline consists of a number of sub-procedures ranging from segmenting the COVID-19 infection to classifying the segmented regions. The initial part of the pipeline implements the segmentation of the COVID-19-affected CTI using social group optimization-based Kapur's entropy thresholding, followed by k-means clustering and morphology-based segmentation. The next part of the pipeline implements feature extraction, selection, and fusion to classify the infection. Principle component analysis-based serial fusion technique is used in fusing the features and the fused feature vector is then employed to train, test, and validate four different classifiers namely Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function, and Decision Tree. Experimental results using benchmark datasets show a high accuracy (> 91%) for the morphology-based segmentation task; for the classification task, the KNN offers the highest accuracy among the compared classifiers (> 87%). However, this should be noted that this method still awaits clinical validation, and therefore should not be used to clinically diagnose ongoing COVID-19 infection.

Automated detection of schizophrenia using nonlinear signal processing methods.

Examination of the brain's condition with the Electroencephalogram (EEG) can be helpful to predict abnormality and cerebral activities. The purpose of this study was to develop an Automated Diagnostic Tool (ADT) to investigate and classify the EEG signal patterns into normal and schizophrenia classes. The ADT implements a sequence of events, such as EEG series splitting, non-linear features mining, t-test assisted feature selection, classification and validation. The proposed ADT is employed to evaluate a 19-channel EEG signal collected from normal and schizophrenia class volunteers. A dataset was created by splitting the raw 19-channel EEG into a sequence of 6250 sample points, which was helpful to produce 1142 features of normal and schizophrenia class patterns. Non-linear feature extraction was then implemented to mine 157 features from each EEG pattern, from which 14 of the principal features were identified based on significance. Finally, a signal classification practice with Decision-Tree (DT), Linear-Discriminant analysis (LD), k-Nearest-Neighbour (KNN), Probabilistic-Neural-Network (PNN), and Support-Vector-Machine (SVM) with various kernels was implemented. The experimental outcome showed that the SVM with Radial-Basis-Function (SVM-RBF) offered a superior average performance value of 92.91% on the considered EEG dataset, as compared to other classifiers implemented in this work.

Automated Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Brain MRI Images- A Study with Various Feature Extraction Techniques.

The aim of this work is to develop a Computer-Aided-Brain-Diagnosis (CABD) system that can determine if a brain scan shows signs of Alzheimer's disease. The method utilizes Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for classification with several feature extraction techniques. MRI is a non-invasive procedure, widely adopted in hospitals to examine cognitive abnormalities. Images are acquired using the T2 imaging sequence. The paradigm consists of a series of quantitative techniques: filtering, feature extraction, Student's t-test based feature selection, and k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) based classification. Additionally, a comparative analysis is done by implementing other feature extraction procedures that are described in the literature. Our findings suggest that the Shearlet Transform (ST) feature extraction technique offers improved results for Alzheimer's diagnosis as compared to alternative methods. The proposed CABD tool with the ST + KNN technique provided accuracy of 94.54%, precision of 88.33%, sensitivity of 96.30% and specificity of 93.64%. Furthermore, this tool also offered an accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity of 98.48%, 100%, 96.97% and 100%, respectively, with the benchmark MRI database.