Summary Background Since December, 2019, Wuhan, China, has experienced an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of patients with COVID-19 have been reported but risk factors for mortality and a detailed clinical course of illness, including viral shedding, have not been well described. Methods In this retrospective, multicentre cohort study, we included all adult inpatients (≥18 years old) with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from Jinyintan Hospital and Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital (Wuhan, China) who had been discharged or had died by Jan 31, 2020. Demographic, clinical, treatment, and laboratory data, including serial samples for viral RNA detection, were extracted from electronic medical records and compared between survivors and non-survivors. We used univariable and multivariable logistic regression methods to explore the risk factors associated with in-hospital death. Findings 191 patients (135 from Jinyintan Hospital and 56 from Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital) were included in this study, of whom 137 were discharged and 54 died in hospital. 91 (48%) patients had a comorbidity, with hypertension being the most common (58 [30%] patients), followed by diabetes (36 [19%] patients) and coronary heart disease (15 [8%] patients). Multivariable regression showed increasing odds of in-hospital death associated with older age (odds ratio 1·10, 95% CI 1·03–1·17, per year increase; p=0·0043), higher Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score (5·65, 2·61–12·23; p Interpretation The potential risk factors of older age, high SOFA score, and d-dimer greater than 1 μg/mL could help clinicians to identify patients with poor prognosis at an early stage. Prolonged viral shedding provides the rationale for a strategy of isolation of infected patients and optimal antiviral interventions in the future. Funding Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences; National Science Grant for Distinguished Young Scholars; National Key Research and Development Program of China; The Beijing Science and Technology Project; and Major Projects of National Science and Technology on New Drug Creation and Development.

Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: a retrospective cohort study

Plants are a major source of food for the world population. Plant diseases contribute to production loss, which can be tackled with continuous monitoring. Manual plant disease monitoring is both laborious and error-prone. Early detection of plant diseases using computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) can help to reduce the adverse effects of diseases and also overcome the shortcomings of continuous human monitoring. In this work, we propose the use of a deep learning architecture based on a recent convolutional neural network called EfficientNet on 18,161 plain and segmented tomato leaf images to classify tomato diseases. The performance of two segmentation models i.e., U-net and Modified U-net, for the segmentation of leaves is reported. The comparative performance of the models for binary classification (healthy and unhealthy leaves), six-class classification (healthy and various groups of diseased leaves), and ten-class classification (healthy and various types of unhealthy leaves) are also reported. The modified U-net segmentation model showed accuracy, IoU, and Dice score of 98.66%, 98.5%, and 98.73%, respectively, for the segmentation of leaf images. EfficientNet-B7 showed superior performance for the binary classification and six-class classification using segmented images with an accuracy of 99.95% and 99.12%, respectively. Finally, EfficientNet-B4 achieved an accuracy of 99.89% for ten-class classification using segmented images. It can be concluded that all the architectures performed better in classifying the diseases when trained with deeper networks on segmented images. The performance of each of the experimental studies reported in this work outperforms the existing literature.

Automatic and Reliable Leaf Disease Detection Using Deep Learning Techniques

COVID-19 is the disease evoked by a new breed of coronavirus called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Recently, COVID-19 has become a pandemic by infecting more than 152 million people in over 216 countries and territories. The exponential increase in the number of infections has rendered traditional diagnosis techniques inefficient. Therefore, many researchers have developed several intelligent techniques, such as deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), which can assist the healthcare sector in providing quick and precise COVID-19 diagnosis. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the most recent DL and ML techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. The studies are published from December 2019 until April 2021. In general, this paper includes more than 200 studies that have been carefully selected from several publishers, such as IEEE, Springer and Elsevier. We classify the research tracks into two categories: DL and ML and present COVID-19 public datasets established and extracted from different countries. The measures used to evaluate diagnosis methods are comparatively analysed and proper discussion is provided. In conclusion, for COVID-19 diagnosing and outbreak prediction, SVM is the most widely used machine learning mechanism, and CNN is the most widely used deep learning mechanism. Accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are the most widely used measurements in previous studies. Finally, this review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of machine learning for COVID-19 and inspire their works for future development. This review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of ML and DL for COVID-19 and inspire their works for future development.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/exsy.12759

Review on COVID-19 diagnosis models based on machine learning and deep learning approaches.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory disease that has been classified as a pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO). The sudden spike in the number of infections and high mortality rates have put immense pressure on the public medical systems. Hence, it’s crucial to identify the key factors of mortality that yield high accuracy and consistency to optimize patient treatment strategy. This study uses machine learning methods to identify a powerful combination of five features that help predict mortality with 96% accuracy: neutrophils, lymphocytes, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and age. Various machine learning algorithms have been compared to achieve a consistent high accuracy across the days that span the disease. Robust testing with three cases confirm the strong predictive performance of the proposed model. The model predicts with an accuracy of 90% as early as 16 days before the outcome. This study would help accelerate the decision making process in healthcare systems for focused medical treatments early and accurately.

https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.19.20177477v1.full.pdf

Machine Learning Based Clinical Decision Support System for Early COVID-19 Mortality Prediction

Evolutionary warning system for COVID-19 severity: Colony predation algorithm enhanced extreme learning machine.

COVID-19 pandemic has created an extreme pressure on the global healthcare services. Fast, reliable and early clinical assessment of the severity of the disease can help in allocating and prioritizing resources to reduce mortality. In order to study the important blood biomarkers for predicting disease mortality, a retrospective study was conducted on 375 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to Tongji Hospital (China) from January 10 to February 18, 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics, and patient outcomes were investigated using machine learning tools to identify key biomarkers to predict the mortality of individual patient. A nomogram was developed for predicting the mortality risk among COVID-19 patients. Lactate dehydrogenase, neutrophils (%), lymphocyte (%), high sensitive C-reactive protein, and age - acquired at hospital admission were identified as key predictors of death by multi-tree XGBoost model. The area under curve (AUC) of the nomogram for the derivation and validation cohort were 0.961 and 0.991, respectively. An integrated score (LNLCA) was calculated with the corresponding death probability. COVID-19 patients were divided into three subgroups: low-, moderate- and high-risk groups using LNLCA cut-off values of 10.4 and 12.65 with the death probability less than 5%, 5% to 50%, and above 50%, respectively. The prognostic model, nomogram and LNLCA score can help in early detection of high mortality risk of COVID-19 patients, which will help doctors to improve the management of patient stratification.

An early warning tool for predicting mortality risk of COVID-19 patients using machine learning

COVID-19 pandemic has created an extreme pressure on the global healthcare services. Fast, reliable, and early clinical assessment of the severity of the disease can help in allocating and prioritizing resources to reduce mortality. In order to study the important blood biomarkers for predicting disease mortality, a retrospective study was conducted on a dataset made public by Yan et al. in [1] of 375 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to Tongji Hospital (China) from January 10 to February 18, 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics and patient outcomes were investigated using machine learning tools to identify key biomarkers to predict the mortality of individual patient. A nomogram was developed for predicting the mortality risk among COVID-19 patients. Lactate dehydrogenase, neutrophils (%), lymphocyte (%), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, and age (LNLCA)-acquired at hospital admission-were identified as key predictors of death by multi-tree XGBoost model. The area under curve (AUC) of the nomogram for the derivation and validation cohort were 0.961 and 0.991, respectively. An integrated score (LNLCA) was calculated with the corresponding death probability. COVID-19 patients were divided into three subgroups: low-, moderate-, and high-risk groups using LNLCA cutoff values of 10.4 and 12.65 with the death probability less than 5%, 5-50%, and above 50%, respectively. The prognostic model, nomogram, and LNLCA score can help in early detection of high mortality risk of COVID-19 patients, which will help doctors to improve the management of patient stratification.

/pdf/an-early-warning-tool-for-predicting-mortality-risk-of-covid-5diaklvrml.pdf

An Early Warning Tool for Predicting Mortality Risk of COVID-19 Patients Using Machine Learning.

Due to the variability of writing styles and to other problems related to the nature of Arabic scripts, the recognition of Arabic handwriting is still awaiting accurate results. Segmentation of Arabic handwritten words into graphemes poses a major challenge in Arabic handwriting recognition and is highly error prone. In this paper, we adopt the holistic approach which handles the whole word image without any segmentation step. A set of different statistical features were investigated in this paper, namely, the Invariant Moments (IV), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and the Gabor features. The classifier used is the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm which is an improvement of the Support Vector Machines (SVM). The dataset used is AHDB which consists of 3045 images containing the most commonly used Arabic words written by one hundred different writers. The application of the features used with the SMO algorithm resulted in 91.5928 % correct classification.

Arabic handwriting recognition using sequential minimal optimization

Arabic cheque processing is one of the important applications of handwriting recognition. The recognition of Arabic Cheque bank is still awaiting lots of work in its constituent stages, which include pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. Several feature extraction methods used to recognize handwritten digits and words. The stroke direction is one important feature of Arabic handwriting which Gabor filter proved its ability to detect this local structural feature. On the other hand, investigating different classifiers can improve the recognition accuracy. In this paper, Gabor features are investigated with ELM and SMO classifiers. Two Arabic Cheque datasets, AHDB and CENPARMI, are used for evaluation. The results from Gabor features with SMO classifier outperform previous studies.

Arabic Bank Cheque Words Recognition Using Gabor Features

The aim of anomaly detection is to find patterns or data points that are not confirming the expected behavior inside the dataset Techniques from a variety of disciplines like machine learning, statistics, information theory and data mining are used to solve this problem The form of input data from stock market is a non-linear complex time series Hence, the statistical methods in this case will be ineffective Using the behavior of similar time series for detecting anomalies in Qatar stock exchange and American stock market index (Standard & Poor (S&P)) is the main goal of this paper Supervised learning techniques were used extensively in detecting stock market manipulation The problem of supervised learning techniques is that they require substantial effort in labeling the data Having dynamic nature of anomalous behavior causes another problem In this research, we investigate the use of unsupervised learning for detecting stock market manipulation and we introduce a new preprocessing step for improving the recall of the anomaly detection system without hurting the precision The Contextual Anomaly Detector (CAD) that is based on unsupervised technique is used to find anomalies by looking at time series that have similar behaviors The use of our new preprocessing steps with CAD improved the recall significantly compared to other studies

Hanadi Hassen

Papers

An early warning tool for predicting mortality risk of COVID-19 patients using machine learning

An Early Warning Tool for Predicting Mortality Risk of COVID-19 Patients Using Machine Learning.

Arabic handwriting recognition using sequential minimal optimization

Arabic Bank Cheque Words Recognition Using Gabor Features

Unsupervised Technique for Anomaly Detection in Qatar Stock Market