Advanced disk herniation computer aided diagnosis system.

Over recent years, researchers and practitioners have encountered massive and continuous improvements in the computational resources available for their use. This allowed the use of resource-hungry Machine learning (ML) algorithms to become feasible and practical. Moreover, several advanced techniques are being used to boost the performance of such algorithms even further, which include various transfer learning techniques, data augmentation, and feature concatenation. Normally, the use of these advanced techniques highly depends on the size and nature of the dataset being used. In the case of fine-grained medical image sets, which have subcategories within the main categories in the image set, there is a need to find the combination of the techniques that work the best on these types of images. In this work, we utilize these advanced techniques to find the best combinations to build a state-of-the-art lumber disc herniation computer-aided diagnosis system. We have evaluated the system extensively and the results show that the diagnosis system achieves an accuracy of 98% when it is compared with human diagnosis.

E-learningDJUST: E-learning dataset from Jordan university of science and technology toward investigating the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education.

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered different behaviors in education, especially during the lockdown, to contain the virus outbreak in the world. As a result, educational institutions worldwide are currently using online learning platforms to maintain their education presence. This research paper introduces and examines a dataset, E-LearningDJUST, that represents a sample of the student's study progress during the pandemic at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST). The dataset depicts a sample of the university's students as it includes 9,246 students from 11 faculties taking four courses in spring 2020, summer 2020, and fall 2021 semesters. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first collected dataset that reflects the students' study progress within a Jordanian institute using e-learning system records. One of this work's key findings is observing a high correlation between e-learning events and the final grades out of 100. Thus, the E-LearningDJUST dataset has been experimented with two robust machine learning models (Random Forest and XGBoost) and one simple deep learning model (Feed Forward Neural Network) to predict students' performances. Using RMSE as the primary evaluation criteria, the RMSE values range between 7 and 17. Among the other main findings, the application of feature selection with the random forest leads to better prediction results for all courses as the RMSE difference ranges between (0-0.20). Finally, a comparison study examined students' grades before and after the Coronavirus pandemic to understand how it impacted their grades. A high success rate has been observed during the pandemic compared to what it was before, and this is expected because the exams were online. However, the proportion of students with high marks remained similar to that of pre-pandemic courses.

Chest X-ray pneumothorax segmentation using U-Net with EfficientNet and ResNet architectures.

Medical imaging refers to visualization techniques to provide valuable information about the internal structures of the human body for clinical applications, diagnosis, treatment, and scientific research. Segmentation is one of the primary methods for analyzing and processing medical images, which helps doctors diagnose accurately by providing detailed information on the body's required part. However, segmenting medical images faces several challenges, such as requiring trained medical experts and being time-consuming and error-prone. Thus, it appears necessary for an automatic medical image segmentation system. Deep learning algorithms have recently shown outstanding performance for segmentation tasks, especially semantic segmentation networks that provide pixel-level image understanding. By introducing the first fully convolutional network (FCN) for semantic image segmentation, several segmentation networks have been proposed on its basis. One of the state-of-the-art convolutional networks in the medical image field is U-Net. This paper presents a novel end-to-end semantic segmentation model, named Ens4B-UNet, for medical images that ensembles four U-Net architectures with pre-trained backbone networks. Ens4B-UNet utilizes U-Net's success with several significant improvements by adapting powerful and robust convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as backbones for U-Nets encoders and using the nearest-neighbor up-sampling in the decoders. Ens4B-UNet is designed based on the weighted average ensemble of four encoder-decoder segmentation models. The backbone networks of all ensembled models are pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset to exploit the benefit of transfer learning. For improving our models, we apply several techniques for training and predicting, including stochastic weight averaging (SWA), data augmentation, test-time augmentation (TTA), and different types of optimal thresholds. We evaluate and test our models on the 2019 Pneumothorax Challenge dataset, which contains 12,047 training images with 12,954 masks and 3,205 test images. Our proposed segmentation network achieves a 0.8608 mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) on the test set, which is among the top one-percent systems in the Kaggle competition.