DLTN-LOSP: A Novel Deep-Linear-Transition-Network-Based Resource Allocation Model with the Logic Overhead Security Protocol for Cloud Systems.

Cloud organizations now face a challenge in managing the enormous volume of data and various resources in the cloud due to the rapid growth of the virtualized environment with many service users, ranging from small business owners to large corporations. The performance of cloud computing may suffer from ineffective resource management. As a result, resources must be distributed fairly among various stakeholders without sacrificing the organization's profitability or the satisfaction of its customers. A customer's request cannot be put on hold indefinitely just because the necessary resources are not available on the board. Therefore, a novel cloud resource allocation model incorporating security management is developed in this paper. Here, the Deep Linear Transition Network (DLTN) mechanism is developed for effectively allocating resources to cloud systems. Then, an Adaptive Mongoose Optimization Algorithm (AMOA) is deployed to compute the beamforming solution for reward prediction, which supports the process of resource allocation. Moreover, the Logic Overhead Security Protocol (LOSP) is implemented to ensure secured resource management in the cloud system, where Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic is used to predict the agreement logic. During the results analysis, the performance of the proposed DLTN-LOSP model is validated and compared using different metrics such as makespan, processing time, and utilization rate. For system validation and testing, 100 to 500 resources are used in this study, and the results achieved a make-up of 2.3% and a utilization rate of 13 percent. Moreover, the obtained results confirm the superiority of the proposed framework, with better performance outcomes.

Development and Validation of a Cyber-Physical System Leveraging EFDPN for Enhanced WSN-IoT Network Security.

In the current digital era, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are evolving, transforming human experiences by creating an interconnected environment. However, ensuring the security of WSN-IoT networks remains a significant hurdle, as existing security models are plagued with issues like prolonged training durations and complex classification processes. In this study, a robust cyber-physical system based on the Emphatic Farmland Fertility Integrated Deep Perceptron Network (EFDPN) is proposed to enhance the security of WSN-IoT. This initiative introduces the Farmland Fertility Feature Selection (F3S) technique to alleviate the computational complexity of identifying and classifying attacks. Additionally, this research leverages the Deep Perceptron Network (DPN) classification algorithm for accurate intrusion classification, achieving impressive performance metrics. In the classification phase, the Tunicate Swarm Optimization (TSO) model is employed to improve the sigmoid transformation function, thereby enhancing prediction accuracy. This study demonstrates the development of an EFDPN-based system designed to safeguard WSN-IoT networks. It showcases how the DPN classification technique, in conjunction with the TSO model, significantly improves classification performance. In this research, we employed well-known cyber-attack datasets to validate its effectiveness, revealing its superiority over traditional intrusion detection methods, particularly in achieving higher F1-score values. The incorporation of the F3S algorithm plays a pivotal role in this framework by eliminating irrelevant features, leading to enhanced prediction accuracy for the classifier, marking a substantial stride in fortifying WSN-IoT network security. This research presents a promising approach to enhancing the security and resilience of interconnected cyber-physical systems in the evolving landscape of WSN-IoT networks.

A Novel PPG-Based Biometric Authentication System Using a Hybrid CVT-ConvMixer Architecture with Dense and Self-Attention Layers.

Biometric authentication is a widely used method for verifying individuals' identities using photoplethysmography (PPG) cardiac signals. The PPG signal is a non-invasive optical technique that measures the heart rate, which can vary from person to person. However, these signals can also be changed due to factors like stress, physical activity, illness, or medication. Ensuring the system can accurately identify and authenticate the user despite these variations is a significant challenge. To address these issues, the PPG signals were preprocessed and transformed into a 2-D image that visually represents the time-varying frequency content of multiple PPG signals from the same human using the scalogram technique. Afterward, the features fusion approach is developed by combining features from the hybrid convolution vision transformer (CVT) and convolutional mixer (ConvMixer), known as the CVT-ConvMixer classifier, and employing attention mechanisms for the classification of human identity. This hybrid model has the potential to provide more accurate and reliable authentication results in real-world scenarios. The sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), F1-score, and area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) metrics are utilized to assess the model's performance in accurately distinguishing genuine individuals. The results of extensive experiments on the three PPG datasets were calculated, and the proposed method achieved ACCs of 95%, SEs of 97%, SPs of 95%, and an AUC of 0.96, which indicate the effectiveness of the CVT-ConvMixer system. These results suggest that the proposed method performs well in accurately classifying or identifying patterns within the PPG signals to perform continuous human authentication.

A Residual-Dense-Based Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Recognition of Cardiac Health Based on ECG Signals.

Cardiovascular disorders are often diagnosed using an electrocardiogram (ECG). It is a painless method that mimics the cyclical contraction and relaxation of the heart's muscles. By monitoring the heart's electrical activity, an ECG can be used to identify irregular heartbeats, heart attacks, cardiac illnesses, or enlarged hearts. Numerous studies and analyses of ECG signals to identify cardiac problems have been conducted during the past few years. Although ECG heartbeat classification methods have been presented in the literature, especially for unbalanced datasets, they have not proven to be successful in recognizing some heartbeat categories with high performance. This study uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to combine the benefits of dense and residual blocks. The objective is to leverage the benefits of residual and dense connections to enhance information flow, gradient propagation, and feature reuse, ultimately improving the model's performance. This proposed model consists of a series of residual-dense blocks interleaved with optional pooling layers for downsampling. A linear support vector machine (LSVM) classified heartbeats into five classes. This makes it easier to learn and represent features from ECG signals. We first denoised the gathered ECG data to correct issues such as baseline drift, power line interference, and motion noise. The impacts of the class imbalance are then offset by resampling techniques that denoise ECG signals. An RD-CNN algorithm is then used to categorize the ECG data for the various cardiac illnesses using the retrieved characteristics. On two benchmarked datasets, we conducted extensive simulations and assessed several performance measures. On average, we have achieved an accuracy of 98.5%, a sensitivity of 97.6%, a specificity of 96.8%, and an area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of 0.99. The effectiveness of our suggested method for detecting heart disease from ECG data was compared with several recently presented algorithms. The results demonstrate that our method is lightweight and practical, qualifying it for continuous monitoring applications in clinical settings for automated ECG interpretation to support cardiologists.

ROAST-IoT: A Novel Range-Optimized Attention Convolutional Scattered Technique for Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly benefited several businesses, but because of the volume and complexity of IoT systems, there are also new security issues. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) guarantee both the security posture and defense against intrusions of IoT devices. IoT systems have recently utilized machine learning (ML) techniques widely for IDSs. The primary deficiencies in existing IoT security frameworks are their inadequate intrusion detection capabilities, significant latency, and prolonged processing time, leading to undesirable delays. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel range-optimized attention convolutional scattered technique (ROAST-IoT) to protect IoT networks from modern threats and intrusions. This system uses the scattered range feature selection (SRFS) model to choose the most crucial and trustworthy properties from the supplied intrusion data. After that, the attention-based convolutional feed-forward network (ACFN) technique is used to recognize the intrusion class. In addition, the loss function is estimated using the modified dingo optimization (MDO) algorithm to ensure the maximum accuracy of classifier. To evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed ROAST-IoT system, we have utilized popular intrusion datasets such as ToN-IoT, IoT-23, UNSW-NB 15, and Edge-IIoT. The analysis of the results shows that the proposed ROAST technique did better than all existing cutting-edge intrusion detection systems, with an accuracy of 99.15% on the IoT-23 dataset, 99.78% on the ToN-IoT dataset, 99.88% on the UNSW-NB 15 dataset, and 99.45% on the Edge-IIoT dataset. On average, the ROAST-IoT system achieved a high AUC-ROC of 0.998, demonstrating its capacity to distinguish between legitimate data and attack traffic. These results indicate that the ROAST-IoT algorithm effectively and reliably detects intrusion attacks mechanism against cyberattacks on IoT systems.

EfficientRMT-Net-An Efficient ResNet-50 and Vision Transformers Approach for Classifying Potato Plant Leaf Diseases.

The primary objective of this study is to develop an advanced, automated system for the early detection and classification of leaf diseases in potato plants, which are among the most cultivated vegetable crops worldwide. These diseases, notably early and late blight caused by Alternaria solani and Phytophthora infestans, significantly impact the quantity and quality of global potato production. We hypothesize that the integration of Vision Transformer (ViT) and ResNet-50 architectures in a new model, named EfficientRMT-Net, can effectively and accurately identify various potato leaf diseases. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional methods, which are often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to inaccuracies due to the unpredictability of disease presentation. EfficientRMT-Net leverages the CNN model for distinct feature extraction and employs depth-wise convolution (DWC) to reduce computational demands. A stage block structure is also incorporated to improve scalability and sensitive area detection, enhancing transferability across different datasets. The classification tasks are performed using a global average pooling layer and a fully connected layer. The model was trained, validated, and tested on custom datasets specifically curated for potato leaf disease detection. EfficientRMT-Net's performance was compared with other deep learning and transfer learning techniques to establish its efficacy. Preliminary results show that EfficientRMT-Net achieves an accuracy of 97.65% on a general image dataset and 99.12% on a specialized Potato leaf image dataset, outperforming existing methods. The model demonstrates a high level of proficiency in correctly classifying and identifying potato leaf diseases, even in cases of distorted samples. The EfficientRMT-Net model provides an efficient and accurate solution for classifying potato plant leaf diseases, potentially enabling farmers to enhance crop yield while optimizing resource utilization. This study confirms our hypothesis, showcasing the effectiveness of combining ViT and ResNet-50 architectures in addressing complex agricultural challenges.

An Automatic Detection and Classification System of Five Stages for Hypertensive Retinopathy Using Semantic and Instance Segmentation in DenseNet Architecture.

The stage and duration of hypertension are connected to the occurrence of Hypertensive Retinopathy (HR) of eye disease. Currently, a few computerized systems have been developed to recognize HR by using only two stages. It is difficult to define specialized features to recognize five grades of HR. In addition, deep features have been used in the past, but the classification accuracy is not up-to-the-mark. In this research, a new hypertensive retinopathy (HYPER-RETINO) framework is developed to grade the HR based on five grades. The HYPER-RETINO system is implemented based on pre-trained HR-related lesions. To develop this HYPER-RETINO system, several steps are implemented such as a preprocessing, the detection of HR-related lesions by semantic and instance-based segmentation and a DenseNet architecture to classify the stages of HR. Overall, the HYPER-RETINO system determined the local regions within input retinal fundus images to recognize five grades of HR. On average, a 10-fold cross-validation test obtained sensitivity (SE) of 90.5%, specificity (SP) of 91.5%, accuracy (ACC) of 92.6%, precision (PR) of 91.7%, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 61%, F1-score of 92% and area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.915 on 1400 HR images. Thus, the applicability of the HYPER-RETINO method to reliably diagnose stages of HR is verified by experimental findings.

Exploring a pathway to carbon neutrality via reinforcing environmental performance through green process innovation, environmental orientation and green competitive advantage.

In the light of The Paris Agreement (COP 21), global leaders reached a consensus to curtail the increase in global temperature up to 2.0 °C ideally 1.5 °C pre-industrial level. Likewise, it has become a pathway to accomplish long-term goals of achieving carbon neutrality. In this regard, this paper aims to explore the role of green process innovation and environmental orientation toward environmental performance for achieving the long-term goal of carbon neutrality. In addition, this paper also discovers a mediating role of green competitive advantage in said context. Using data from a survey among managers of equipment manufacturing sector, the study employed structural equation modeling technique and found that green process innovation, environmental orientation and green competitive advantage significantly influence environmental performance. Subsequently, mediation analysis indicated that green competitive advantage partially mediates the relation from green process innovation and environmental orientation to environmental performance. In light of the carbon neutrality targets, the study highlight that improving environmental performance through green process innovation and environmental orientation can be a way-forward for manufacturing sector to play its role to achieve carbon neutrality. The study concludes with theoretical and practical implications.

Driver Fatigue Detection Systems Using Multi-Sensors, Smartphone, and Cloud-Based Computing Platforms: A Comparative Analysis.

Internet of things (IoT) cloud-based applications deliver advanced solutions for smart cities to decrease traffic accidents caused by driver fatigue while driving on the road. Environmental conditions or driver behavior can ultimately lead to serious roadside accidents. In recent years, the authors have developed many low-cost, computerized, driver fatigue detection systems (DFDs) to help drivers, by using multi-sensors, and mobile and cloud-based computing architecture. To promote safe driving, these are the most current emerging platforms that were introduced in the past. In this paper, we reviewed state-of-the-art approaches for predicting unsafe driving styles using three common IoT-based architectures. The novelty of this article is to show major differences among multi-sensors, smartphone-based, and cloud-based architectures in multimodal feature processing. We discussed all of the problems that machine learning techniques faced in recent years, particularly the deep learning (DL) model, to predict driver hypovigilance, especially in terms of these three IoT-based architectures. Moreover, we performed state-of-the-art comparisons by using driving simulators to incorporate multimodal features of the driver. We also mention online data sources in this article to test and train network architecture in the field of DFDs on public available multimodal datasets. These comparisons assist other authors to continue future research in this domain. To evaluate the performance, we mention the major problems in these three architectures to help researchers use the best IoT-based architecture for detecting DFDs in a real-time environment. Moreover, the important factors of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and 5th generation (5G) networks are analyzed in the context of deep learning architecture to improve the response time of DFD systems. Lastly, it is concluded that there is a research gap when it comes to implementing the DFD systems on MEC and 5G technologies by using multimodal features and DL architecture.

The nexus of carbon emissions, financial development, renewable energy consumption, and technological innovation: What should be the priorities in light of COP 21 Agreements?

This study analyses the dynamics of carbon emissions for N-11 countries from 1990 to 2017. We introduce some innovative factors such as financial development, human capital, renewable energy consumption, and gross domestic product as determinants of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The empirical estimations are based on Pesaran (2007) unit root test, common correlated effect mean group, and augmented mean group. The findings reveal a positive relationship between carbon emissions and financial development as well as a gross domestic product. In contrast, technological innovation and renewable energy consumption are adversely related to carbon emissions. These findings have important implications, and we recommend the promotion of technological innovation and the use of renewable energy consumption. This will help in achieving the goals set by COP21.

Charge transport mechanisms of PbSnSe2 and observation of transition from direct to Fowler-Nordheim tunneling.

In this study, we report the observation of various conduction mechanisms in mechanically exfoliated PbSnSe2 based on temperature-dependent current and voltage characteristics. A transition from direct tunneling to Fowler-Nordheim tunneling in PbSnSe2 was observed at 2.63 V. At lower temperatures, the 3D Mott variable range hopping model fits the data, yielding a density of states of ∼8.80 × 1020 eV-1 cm-3 at 2 V. The values of Whop and Rhop were 64 meV and 22.7 nm, respectively, at 250 K. The Poole-Frenkel conduction was observed in the Au/PbSnSe2/Au device and the dielectric constant of PbSnSe2 was calculated to be 1.4. At intermediate voltages, a space charge limited current with an exponential distribution of traps was observed and a trap density of ∼9.53 × 1013 cm-3 and a trap characteristic temperature of 430 K were calculated for the Au/PbSnSe2/Au device.

Unified approach for lesion border detection based on mixture modeling and local entropy thresholding.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Computer-aided design (CAD) methods are highly valuable for the analysis of skin lesions using digital dermoscopy due to low rate of diagnostic accuracy of expert dermatologist. In computerized diagnostic methods, automatic border detection is the first and crucial step. METHOD: In this study, a novel unified approach is proposed for automatic border detection (ABD). A preprocessing step is performed by normalized smoothing filter (NSF) to reduce background noise. Mixture models technique is then utilized to initially segment the lesion area roughly. Afterward, local entropy thresholding is performed to extract the lesion candidate pixels and the lesion border is smoothed using morphological reconstruction. RESULTS: The overall ABD system is tested on a set of 100 dermoscopy images with ground truth. A comparative study was conducted with the other three state-of-the-art methods using statistical metrics. This ABD technique has the minimal average error probability rate of 5%, true detection of 92.10% and false positive rate of 6.41%. CONCLUSION: Results demonstrate that the proposed method segments the lesion area accurately. Sample dataset and execute software are available online and can be downloaded from: http://cs.ntu.edu.pk/research.

A perceptually oriented method for contrast enhancement and segmentation of dermoscopy images.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Dermoscopy images often suffer from low contrast caused by different light conditions, which reduces the accuracy of lesion border detection. Accordingly for lesion recognition, automatic melanoma border detection (MBD) is an initial as well as crucial task. METHOD: In this article, a novel perceptually oriented approach for MBD is presented by combing region and edge-based segmentation techniques. The MBD system for color contrast and segmentation improvement consists of four main steps: first, the RGB dermoscopy image is transformed to CIE L*a*b* color space, lesion contrast is then enhanced by adjusting and mapping the intensity values of the lesion pixels in the specified range using the three channels of CIE L*a*b*, a hill-climbing algorithm is used later to detect region-of-interest (ROI) map in a perceptually oriented color space using color channels (L*,a*,b*) and finally, an adaptive thresholding is applied to determine the optimal lesion border. Manually drawn borders obtained from an experienced dermatologist are utilized as a ground truth for performance evaluation. RESULTS: The proposed MBD method is tested on a total of 100 dermoscopy images. A comparative study with three state-of-the-art color and texture-based segmentation techniques (JSeg, dermatologists-like tumor area extraction: DTEA and region-based active contours: RAC), is also conducted to show the effectiveness of our MBD method using measures of true positive rate (TPR), false positive rate (FPR), and error probability (EP). Among different algorithms, our MBD algorithm achieved TPR of 94.25%, FPR of 3.56%, and EP of 4%. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed MBD approach is highly accurate to detect the lesion border area. The MBD software and sample of dermoscopy images can be downloaded at http://cs.ntu.edu.pk/research.php.

Melanoma recognition framework based on expert definition of ABCD for dermoscopic images.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Melanoma Recognition based on clinical ABCD rule is widely used for clinical diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions in dermoscopy images. However, the current computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems for classification between malignant and nevus lesions using the ABCD criteria are imperfect due to use of ineffective computerized techniques. METHODS: In this study, a novel melanoma recognition system (MRS) is presented by focusing more on extracting features from the lesions using ABCD criteria. The complete MRS system consists of the following six major steps: transformation to the CIEL*a*b* color space, preprocessing to enhance the tumor region, black-frame and hair artifacts removal, tumor-area segmentation, quantification of feature using ABCD criteria and normalization, and finally feature selection and classification. RESULTS: The MRS system for melanoma-nevus lesions is tested on a total of 120 dermoscopic images. To test the performance of the MRS diagnostic classifier, the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) is utilized. The proposed classifier achieved a sensitivity of 88.2%, specificity of 91.3%, and AUC of 0.880. CONCLUSIONS: The experimental results show that the proposed MRS system can accurately distinguish between malignant and benign lesions. The MRS technique is fully automatic and can easily integrate to an existing CAD system. To increase the classification accuracy of MRS, the CASH pattern recognition technique, visual inspection of dermatologist, contextual information from the patients, and the histopathological tests can be included to investigate the impact with this system.

A feature-preserving hair removal algorithm for dermoscopy images.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Accurate segmentation and repair of hair-occluded information from dermoscopy images are challenging tasks for computer-aided detection (CAD) of melanoma. Currently, many hair-restoration algorithms have been developed, but most of these fail to identify hairs accurately and their removal technique is slow and disturbs the lesion's pattern. METHODS: In this article, a novel hair-restoration algorithm is presented, which has a capability to preserve the skin lesion features such as color and texture and able to segment both dark and light hairs. Our algorithm is based on three major steps: the rough hairs are segmented using a matched filtering with first derivative of gaussian (MF-FDOG) with thresholding that generate strong responses for both dark and light hairs, refinement of hairs by morphological edge-based techniques, which are repaired through a fast marching inpainting method. Diagnostic accuracy (DA) and texture-quality measure (TQM) metrics are utilized based on dermatologist-drawn manual hair masks that were used as a ground truth to evaluate the performance of the system. RESULTS: The hair-restoration algorithm is tested on 100 dermoscopy images. The comparisons have been done among (i) linear interpolation, inpainting by (ii) non-linear partial differential equation (PDE), and (iii) exemplar-based repairing techniques. Among different hair detection and removal techniques, our proposed algorithm obtained the highest value of DA: 93.3% and TQM: 90%. CONCLUSION: The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is highly accurate, robust and able to restore hair pixels without damaging the lesion texture. This method is fully automatic and can be easily integrated into a CAD system.

Optimized Xception Learning Model and XgBoost Classifier for Detection of Multiclass Chest Disease from X-ray Images.

Computed tomography (CT) scans, or radiographic images, were used to aid in the early diagnosis of patients and detect normal and abnormal lung function in the human chest. However, the diagnosis of lungs infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was made more accurately from CT scan data than from a swab test. This study uses human chest radiography pictures to identify and categorize normal lungs, lung opacities, COVID-19-infected lungs, and viral pneumonia (often called pneumonia). In the past, several CAD systems using image processing, ML/DL, and other forms of machine learning have been developed. However, those CAD systems did not provide a general solution, required huge hyper-parameters, and were computationally inefficient to process huge datasets. Moreover, the DL models required high computational complexity, which requires a huge memory cost, and the complexity of the experimental materials' backgrounds, which makes it difficult to train an efficient model. To address these issues, we developed the Inception module, which was improved to recognize and detect four classes of Chest X-ray in this research by substituting the original convolutions with an architecture based on modified-Xception (m-Xception). In addition, the model incorporates depth-separable convolution layers within the convolution layer, interlinked by linear residuals. The model's training utilized a two-stage transfer learning process to produce an effective model. Finally, we used the XgBoost classifier to recognize multiple classes of chest X-rays. To evaluate the m-Xception model, the 1095 dataset was converted using a data augmentation technique into 48,000 X-ray images, including 12,000 normal, 12,000 pneumonia, 12,000 COVID-19 images, and 12,000 lung opacity images. To balance these classes, we used a data augmentation technique. Using public datasets with three distinct train-test divisions (80-20%, 70-30%, and 60-40%) to evaluate our work, we attained an average of 96.5% accuracy, 96% F1 score, 96% recall, and 96% precision. A comparative analysis demonstrates that the m-Xception method outperforms comparable existing methods. The results of the experiments indicate that the proposed approach is intended to assist radiologists in better diagnosing different lung diseases.

CAD-ALZ: A Blockwise Fine-Tuning Strategy on Convolutional Model and Random Forest Classifier for Recognition of Multistage Alzheimer's Disease.

Mental deterioration or Alzheimer's (ALZ) disease is progressive and causes both physical and mental dependency. There is a need for a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that can help doctors make an immediate decision. (1) Background: Currently, CAD systems are developed based on hand-crafted features, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) techniques. Those CAD systems frequently require domain-expert knowledge and massive datasets to extract deep features or model training, which causes problems with class imbalance and overfitting. Additionally, there are still manual approaches used by radiologists due to the lack of dataset availability and to train the model with cost-effective computation. Existing works rely on performance improvement by neglecting the problems of the limited dataset, high computational complexity, and unavailability of lightweight and efficient feature descriptors. (2) Methods: To address these issues, a new approach, CAD-ALZ, is developed by extracting deep features through a ConvMixer layer with a blockwise fine-tuning strategy on a very small original dataset. At first, we apply the data augmentation method to images to increase the size of datasets. In this study, a blockwise fine-tuning strategy is employed on the ConvMixer model to detect robust features. Afterwards, a random forest (RF) is used to classify ALZ disease stages. (3) Results: The proposed CAD-ALZ model obtained significant results by using six evaluation metrics such as the F1-score, Kappa, accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity. The CAD-ALZ model performed with a sensitivity of 99.69% and an F1-score of 99.61%. (4) Conclusions: The suggested CAD-ALZ approach is a potential technique for clinical use and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The CAD-ALZ model code is freely available on GitHub for the scientific community.

Assist-Dermo: A Lightweight Separable Vision Transformer Model for Multiclass Skin Lesion Classification.

A dermatologist-like automatic classification system is developed in this paper to recognize nine different classes of pigmented skin lesions (PSLs), using a separable vision transformer (SVT) technique to assist clinical experts in early skin cancer detection. In the past, researchers have developed a few systems to recognize nine classes of PSLs. However, they often require enormous computations to achieve high performance, which is burdensome to deploy on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, a new approach to designing SVT architecture is developed based on SqueezeNet and depthwise separable CNN models. The primary goal is to find a deep learning architecture with few parameters that has comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures. This paper modifies the SqueezeNet design for improved runtime performance by utilizing depthwise separable convolutions rather than simple conventional units. To develop this Assist-Dermo system, a data augmentation technique is applied to control the PSL imbalance problem. Next, a pre-processing step is integrated to select the most dominant region and then enhance the lesion patterns in a perceptual-oriented color space. Afterwards, the Assist-Dermo system is designed to improve efficacy and performance with several layers and multiple filter sizes but fewer filters and parameters. For the training and evaluation of Assist-Dermo models, a set of PSL images is collected from different online data sources such as Ph2, ISBI-2017, HAM10000, and ISIC to recognize nine classes of PSLs. On the chosen dataset, it achieves an accuracy (ACC) of 95.6%, a sensitivity (SE) of 96.7%, a specificity (SP) of 95%, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.95. The experimental results show that the suggested Assist-Dermo technique outperformed SOTA algorithms when recognizing nine classes of PSLs. The Assist-Dermo system performed better than other competitive systems and can support dermatologists in the diagnosis of a wide variety of PSLs through dermoscopy. The Assist-Dermo model code is freely available on GitHub for the scientific community.

Dermo-Seg: ResNet-UNet Architecture and Hybrid Loss Function for Detection of Differential Patterns to Diagnose Pigmented Skin Lesions.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been extensively applied to skin lesions segmentation due to their information discrimination capabilities. However, CNNs' struggle to capture the connection between long-range contexts when extracting deep semantic features from lesion images, resulting in a semantic gap that causes segmentation distortion in skin lesions. Therefore, detecting the presence of differential structures such as pigment networks, globules, streaks, negative networks, and milia-like cysts becomes difficult. To resolve these issues, we have proposed an approach based on semantic-based segmentation (Dermo-Seg) to detect differential structures of lesions using a UNet model with a transfer-learning-based ResNet-50 architecture and a hybrid loss function. The Dermo-Seg model uses ResNet-50 backbone architecture as an encoder in the UNet model. We have applied a combination of focal Tversky loss and IOU loss functions to handle the dataset's highly imbalanced class ratio. The obtained results prove that the intended model performs well compared to the existing models. The dataset was acquired from various sources, such as ISIC18, ISBI17, and HAM10000, to evaluate the Dermo-Seg model. We have dealt with the data imbalance present within each class at the pixel level using our hybrid loss function. The proposed model achieves a mean IOU score of 0.53 for streaks, 0.67 for pigment networks, 0.66 for globules, 0.58 for negative networks, and 0.53 for milia-like-cysts. Overall, the Dermo-Seg model is efficient in detecting different skin lesion structures and achieved 96.4% on the IOU index. Our Dermo-Seg system improves the IOU index compared to the most recent network.

Computer-Aided Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images Using Hybrid-Features and Random Forest Classifier.

In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to using radiology imaging to automatically find COVID-19. (1) Background: There are now a number of computer-aided diagnostic schemes that help radiologists and doctors perform diagnostic COVID-19 tests quickly, accurately, and consistently. (2) Methods: Using chest X-ray images, this study proposed a cutting-edge scheme for the automatic recognition of COVID-19 and pneumonia. First, a pre-processing method based on a Gaussian filter and logarithmic operator is applied to input chest X-ray (CXR) images to improve the poor-quality images by enhancing the contrast, reducing the noise, and smoothing the image. Second, robust features are extracted from each enhanced chest X-ray image using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) transformer and an optimal collection of grey-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) that contain features such as contrast, correlation, entropy, and energy. Finally, based on extracted features from input images, a random forest machine learning classifier is used to classify images into three classes, such as COVID-19, pneumonia, or normal. The predicted output from the model is combined with Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) visualisation for diagnosis. (3) Results: Our work is evaluated using public datasets with three different train-test splits (70-30%, 80-20%, and 90-10%) and achieved an average accuracy, F1 score, recall, and precision of 97%, 96%, 96%, and 96%, respectively. A comparative study shows that our proposed method outperforms existing and similar work. The proposed approach can be utilised to screen COVID-19-infected patients effectively. (4) Conclusions: A comparative study with the existing methods is also performed. For performance evaluation, metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and F1-measure are calculated. The performance of the proposed method is better than that of the existing methodologies, and it can thus be used for the effective diagnosis of the disease.