Covid-19 is a highly contagious virus which almost freezes the world along with its economy. Its ability of human-to-human and surface-to-human transmission turns the world into catastrophic phase. In this study, our aim is to predict the future conditions of novel Coronavirus to recede its impact. We have proposed deep learning based comparative analysis of Covid-19 cases in India and USA. The datasets of confirmed and death cases of Covid-19 are taken into consideration. The recurrent neural network (RNN) based variants of long short term memory (LSTM) such as Stacked LSTM, Bi-directional LSTM and Convolutional LSTM are used to design the proposed methodology and forecast the Covid-19 cases for one month ahead. Convolution LSTM outperformed the other two models and predicts the Covid-19 cases with high accuracy and very less error for all four datasets of both countries. Upward/downward trend of forecasted Covid-19 cases are also visualized graphically, which would be helpful for researchers and policy makers to mitigate the mortality and morbidity rate by streaming the Covid-19 into right direction.

Time Series Forecasting of Covid-19 using Deep Learning Models: India-USA Comparative Case Study

Recent years have witnessed widespread adoption of machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL) techniques due to their superior performance for a variety of healthcare applications ranging from the prediction of cardiac arrest from one-dimensional heart signals to computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) using multi-dimensional medical images. Notwithstanding the impressive performance of ML/DL, there are still lingering doubts regarding the robustness of ML/DL in healthcare settings (which is traditionally considered quite challenging due to the myriad security and privacy issues involved), especially in light of recent results that have shown that ML/DL are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we present an overview of various application areas in healthcare that leverage such techniques from security and privacy point of view and present associated challenges. In addition, we present potential methods to ensure secure and privacy-preserving ML for healthcare applications. Finally, we provide insight into the current research challenges and promising directions for future research.

Secure and Robust Machine Learning for Healthcare: A Survey

With the increasing demands on quality healthcare and the raising cost of care, pervasive healthcare is considered as a technological solutions to address the global health issues. In particular, the recent advances in Internet of Things have led to the development of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Although such low cost and pervasive sensing devices could potentially transform the current reactive care to preventative care, the security and privacy issues of such sensing system are often overlooked. As the medical devices capture and process very sensitive personal health data, the devices and their associated communications have to be very secured to protect the user’s privacy. However, the miniaturized IoMT devices have very limited computation power and fairly limited security schemes can be implemented in such devices. In addition, with the widespread use of IoMT devices, managing and ensuring the security of IoMT systems are very challenging and which are the major issues hindering the adoption of IoMT for clinical applications. In this paper, the security and privacy challenges, requirements, threats, and future research directions in the domain of IoMT are reviewed providing a general overview of the state-of-the-art approaches.

/pdf/security-and-privacy-for-the-internet-of-medical-things-5alvpotxfu.pdf

Security and Privacy for the Internet of Medical Things Enabled Healthcare Systems: A Survey

This generation faces existential threats because of the global assault of the novel Corona virus 2019 (i.e., COVID-19). With more than thirteen million infected and nearly 600000 fatalities in 188 countries/regions, COVID-19 is the worst calamity since the World War II. These misfortunes are traced to various reasons, including late detection of latent or asymptomatic carriers, migration, and inadequate isolation of infected people. This makes detection, containment, and mitigation global priorities to contain exposure via quarantine, lockdowns, work/stay at home, and social distancing that are focused on “flattening the curve”. While medical and healthcare givers are at the frontline in the battle against COVID-19, it is a crusade for all of humanity. Meanwhile, machine and deep learning models have been revolutionary across numerous domains and applications whose potency have been exploited to birth numerous state-of-the-art technologies utilised in disease detection, diagnoses, and treatment. Despite these potentials, machine and, particularly, deep learning models are data sensitive, because their effectiveness depends on availability and reliability of data. The unavailability of such data hinders efforts of engineers and computer scientists to fully contribute to the ongoing assault against COVID-19. Faced with a calamity on one side and absence of reliable data on the other, this study presents two data-augmentation models to enhance learnability of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM)-based deep learning models (DADLMs) and, by doing so, boost the accuracy of COVID-19 detection. Experimental results reveal improvement in terms of accuracy of detection, logarithmic loss, and testing time relative to DLMs devoid of such data augmentation. Furthermore, average increases of 4% to 11% in COVID-19 detection accuracy are reported in favour of the proposed data-augmented deep learning models relative to the machine learning techniques. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is effective in performing a rapid and consistent Corona virus diagnosis that is primarily aimed at assisting clinicians in making accurate identification of the virus.

Deploying Machine and Deep Learning Models for Efficient Data-Augmented Detection of COVID-19 Infections

Recent advancements in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) have ushered in the wide adoption of IoT devices in our daily health management. For IoHT data to be acceptable by stakeholders, applications that incorporate the IoHT must have a provision for data provenance, in addition to the accuracy, security, integrity, and quality of data. To protect the privacy and security of IoHT data, federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) have been proposed, where private IoHT data can be trained at the owner’s premises. Recent advancements in hardware GPUs even allow the FL process within smartphone or edge devices having the IoHT attached to their edge nodes. Although some of the privacy concerns of IoHT data are addressed by FL, fully decentralized FL is still a challenge due to the lack of training capability at all federated nodes, the scarcity of high-quality training datasets, the provenance of training data, and the authentication required for each FL node. In this paper, we present a lightweight hybrid FL framework in which blockchain smart contracts manage the edge training plan, trust management, and authentication of participating federated nodes, the distribution of global or locally trained models, the reputation of edge nodes and their uploaded datasets or models. The framework also supports the full encryption of a dataset, the model training, and the inferencing process. Each federated edge node performs additive encryption, while the blockchain uses multiplicative encryption to aggregate the updated model parameters. To support the full privacy and anonymization of the IoHT data, the framework supports lightweight DP. This framework was tested with several deep learning applications designed for clinical trials with COVID-19 patients. We present here the detailed design, implementation, and test results, which demonstrate strong potential for wider adoption of IoHT-based health management in a secure way.

/pdf/secure-and-provenance-enhanced-internet-of-health-things-1ifg1196hg.pdf

Secure and Provenance Enhanced Internet of Health Things Framework: A Blockchain Managed Federated Learning Approach

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have been widely used in medical applications, yet the use of EEG signals as user identification systems for healthcare and Internet of Things (IoT) systems has only gained interests in the last few years. The advantages of EEG-based user identification systems lie in its dynamic property and uniqueness among different individuals. However, it is for this reason that manually designed features are not always adapted to the needs. Therefore, a novel approach based on 1D Convolutional Long Short-term Memory Neural Network (1D-Convolutional LSTM) for EEG-based user identification system is proposed in this paper. The performance of the proposed approach was validated with a public database consists of EEG data of 109 subjects. The experimental results showed that the proposed network has a very high averaged accuracy of 99.58%, when using only 16 channels of EEG signals, which outperforms the state-of-the-art EEG-based user identification methods. The combined use of CNNs and LSTMs in the proposed 1D-Convolutional LSTM can greatly improve the accuracy of user identification systems by utilizing the spatiotemporal features of the EEG signals with LSTM, and lowering cost of the systems by reducing the number of EEG electrodes used in the systems.

https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/75200/2/eeg-based-authentication.pdf

EEG-based user identification system using 1D-convolutional long short-term memory neural networks

An objective dietary assessment system can help users to understand their dietary behavior and enable targeted interventions to address underlying health problems. To accurately quantify dietary intake, measurement of the portion size or food volume is required. For volume estimation, previous research studies mostly focused on using model-based or stereo-based approaches which rely on manual intervention or require users to capture multiple frames from different viewing angles which can be tedious. In this paper, a view synthesis approach based on deep learning is proposed to reconstruct 3D point clouds of food items and estimate the volume from a single depth image. A distinct neural network is designed to use a depth image from one viewing angle to predict another depth image captured from the corresponding opposite viewing angle. The whole 3D point cloud map is then reconstructed by fusing the initial data points with the synthesized points of the object items through the proposed point cloud completion and Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithms. Furthermore, a database with depth images of food object items captured from different viewing angles is constructed with image rendering and used to validate the proposed neural network. The methodology is then evaluated by comparing the volume estimated by the synthesized 3D point cloud with the ground truth volume of the object items.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/12/2005/pdf

Food Volume Estimation Based on Deep Learning View Synthesis from a Single Depth Map

A daily dietary assessment method named 24-hour dietary recall has commonly been used in nutritional epidemiology studies to capture detailed information of the food eaten by the participants to help understand their dietary behaviour. However, in this self-reporting technique, the food types and the portion size reported highly depends on users’ subjective judgement which may lead to a biased and inaccurate dietary analysis result. As a result, a variety of visual-based dietary assessment approaches have been proposed recently. While these methods show promises in tackling issues in nutritional epidemiology studies, several challenges and forthcoming opportunities, as detailed in this study, still exist. This study provides an overview of computing algorithms, mathematical models and methodologies used in the field of image-based dietary assessment. It also provides a comprehensive comparison of the state of the art approaches in food recognition and volume/weight estimation in terms of their processing speed, model accuracy, efficiency and constraints. It will be followed by a discussion on deep learning method and its efficacy in dietary assessment. After a comprehensive exploration, we found that integrated dietary assessment systems combining with different approaches could be the potential solution to tackling the challenges in accurate dietary intake assessment.

/pdf/image-based-food-classification-and-volume-estimation-for-3441qm3779.pdf

Image-Based Food Classification and Volume Estimation for Dietary Assessment: A Review

Dietary assessment is an important tool for nutritional epidemiology studies. To assess the dietary intake, the common approach is to carry out 24-h dietary recall (24HR), a structured interview conducted by experienced dietitians. Due to the unconscious biases in such self-reporting methods, many research works have proposed the use of vision-based approaches to provide accurate and objective assessments. In this article, a novel vision-based method based on real-time three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction and deep learning view synthesis is proposed to enable accurate portion size estimation of food items consumed. A point completion neural network is developed to complete partial point cloud of food items based on a single depth image or video captured from any convenient viewing position. Once 3-D models of food items are reconstructed, the food volume can be estimated through meshing. Compared to previous methods, our method has addressed several major challenges in vision-based dietary assessment, such as view occlusion and scale ambiguity, and it outperforms previous approaches in accurate portion size estimation.

Frank P.-W. Lo

Papers

Security and Privacy for the Internet of Medical Things Enabled Healthcare Systems: A Survey

EEG-based user identification system using 1D-convolutional long short-term memory neural networks

Food Volume Estimation Based on Deep Learning View Synthesis from a Single Depth Map

Image-Based Food Classification and Volume Estimation for Dietary Assessment: A Review

Point2Volume: A Vision-Based Dietary Assessment Approach Using View Synthesis