scholarly journals COVID-19 Screening Using a Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network with Generative Adversarial Network Data Augmentation

Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohd Asyraf Zulkifley ◽  
Siti Raihanah Abdani ◽  
Nuraisyah Hani Zulkifley

COVID-19 is a disease that can be spread easily with minimal physical contact. Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has endorsed the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction swab test as a diagnostic tool to confirm COVID-19 cases. This test requires at least a day for the results to come out depending on the available facilities. Many countries have adopted a targeted approach in screening potential patients due to the cost. However, there is a need for a fast and accurate screening test to complement this targeted approach, so that the potential virus carriers can be quarantined as early as possible. The X-ray is a good screening modality; it is quick at capturing, cheap, and widely available, even in third world countries. Therefore, a deep learning approach has been proposed to automate the screening process by introducing LightCovidNet, a lightweight deep learning model that is suitable for the mobile platform. It is important to have a lightweight model so that it can be used all over the world even on a standard mobile phone. The model has been trained with additional synthetic data that were generated from the conditional deep convolutional generative adversarial network. LightCovidNet consists of three components, which are entry, middle, and exit flows. The middle flow comprises five units of feed-forward convolutional neural networks that are built using separable convolution operators. The exit flow is designed to improve the multi-scale capability of the network through a simplified spatial pyramid pooling module. It is a symmetrical architecture with three parallel pooling branches that enable the network to learn multi-scale features, which is suitable for cases wherein the X-ray images were captured from all over the world independently. Besides, the usage of separable convolution has managed to reduce the memory usage without affecting the classification accuracy. The proposed method managed to get the best mean accuracy of 0.9697 with a low memory requirement of just 841,771 parameters. Moreover, the symmetrical spatial pyramid pooling module is the most crucial component; the absence of this module will reduce the screening accuracy to just 0.9237. Hence, the developed model is suitable to be implemented for mass COVID-19 screening.

Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1497
Author(s):  
Mohd Asyraf Zulkifley ◽  
Siti Raihanah Abdani ◽  
Nuraisyah Hani Zulkifley ◽  
Mohamad Ibrani Shahrimin

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of 2019, more than 170 million patients have been infected with the virus that has resulted in more than 3.8 million deaths all over the world. This disease is easily spreadable from one person to another even with minimal contact, even more for the latest mutations that are more deadly than its predecessor. Hence, COVID-19 needs to be diagnosed as early as possible to minimize the risk of spreading among the community. However, the laboratory results on the approved diagnosis method by the World Health Organization, the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test, takes around a day to be processed, where a longer period is observed in the developing countries. Therefore, a fast screening method that is based on existing facilities should be developed to complement this diagnosis test, so that a suspected patient can be isolated in a quarantine center. In line with this motivation, deep learning techniques were explored to provide an automated COVID-19 screening system based on X-ray imaging. This imaging modality is chosen because of its low-cost procedures that are widely available even in many small clinics. A new convolutional neural network (CNN) model is proposed instead of utilizing pre-trained networks of the existing models. The proposed network, Residual-Shuffle-Net, comprises four stacks of the residual-shuffle unit followed by a spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) unit. The architecture of the residual-shuffle unit follows an hourglass design with reduced convolution filter size in the middle layer, where a shuffle operation is performed right after the split branches have been concatenated back. Shuffle operation forces the network to learn multiple sets of features relationship across various channels instead of a set of global features. The SPP unit, which is placed at the end of the network, allows the model to learn multi-scale features that are crucial to distinguish between the COVID-19 and other types of pneumonia cases. The proposed network is benchmarked with 12 other state-of-the-art CNN models that have been designed and tuned specially for COVID-19 detection. The experimental results show that the Residual-Shuffle-Net produced the best performance in terms of accuracy and specificity metrics with 0.97390 and 0.98695, respectively. The model is also considered as a lightweight model with slightly more than 2 million parameters, which makes it suitable for mobile-based applications. For future work, an attention mechanism can be integrated to target certain regions of interest in the X-ray images that are deemed to be more informative for COVID-19 diagnosis.


AI ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 600-620
Author(s):  
Gabriele Accarino ◽  
Marco Chiarelli ◽  
Francesco Immorlano ◽  
Valeria Aloisi ◽  
Andrea Gatto ◽  
...  

One of the most important open challenges in climate science is downscaling. It is a procedure that allows making predictions at local scales, starting from climatic field information available at large scale. Recent advances in deep learning provide new insights and modeling solutions to tackle downscaling-related tasks by automatically learning the coarse-to-fine grained resolution mapping. In particular, deep learning models designed for super-resolution problems in computer vision can be exploited because of the similarity between images and climatic fields maps. For this reason, a new architecture tailored for statistical downscaling (SD), named MSG-GAN-SD, has been developed, allowing interpretability and good stability during training, due to multi-scale gradient information. The proposed architecture, based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), was applied to downscale ERA-Interim 2-m temperature fields, from 83.25 to 13.87 km resolution, covering the EURO-CORDEX domain within the 1979–2018 period. The training process involves seasonal and monthly dataset arrangements, in addition to different training strategies, leading to several models. Furthermore, a model selection framework is introduced in order to mathematically select the best models during the training. The selected models were then tested on the 2015–2018 period using several metrics to identify the best training strategy and dataset arrangement, which finally produced several evaluation maps. This work is the first attempt to use the MSG-GAN architecture for statistical downscaling. The achieved results demonstrate that the models trained on seasonal datasets performed better than those trained on monthly datasets. This study presents an accurate and cost-effective solution that is able to perform downscaling of 2 m temperature climatic maps.


Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 895
Author(s):  
Yash Karbhari ◽  
Arpan Basu ◽  
Zong-Woo Geem ◽  
Gi-Tae Han ◽  
Ram Sarkar

COVID-19 is a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The COVID-19 virus spreads when a person comes into contact with an affected individual. This is mainly through drops of saliva or nasal discharge. Most of the affected people have mild symptoms while some people develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which damages organs like the lungs and heart. Chest X-rays (CXRs) have been widely used to identify abnormalities that help in detecting the COVID-19 virus. They have also been used as an initial screening procedure for individuals highly suspected of being infected. However, the availability of radiographic CXRs is still scarce. This can limit the performance of deep learning (DL) based approaches for COVID-19 detection. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we developed an Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (ACGAN), to generate CXRs. Each generated X-ray belongs to one of the two classes COVID-19 positive or normal. To ensure the goodness of the synthetic images, we performed some experimentation on the obtained images using the latest Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect COVID-19 in the CXRs. We fine-tuned the models and achieved more than 98% accuracy. After that, we also performed feature selection using the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm, which reduces the number of features while retaining classification accuracy. We further release a GAN-generated dataset consisting of 500 COVID-19 radiographic images.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 249
Author(s):  
Xin Jin ◽  
Yuanwen Zou ◽  
Zhongbing Huang

The cell cycle is an important process in cellular life. In recent years, some image processing methods have been developed to determine the cell cycle stages of individual cells. However, in most of these methods, cells have to be segmented, and their features need to be extracted. During feature extraction, some important information may be lost, resulting in lower classification accuracy. Thus, we used a deep learning method to retain all cell features. In order to solve the problems surrounding insufficient numbers of original images and the imbalanced distribution of original images, we used the Wasserstein generative adversarial network-gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) for data augmentation. At the same time, a residual network (ResNet) was used for image classification. ResNet is one of the most used deep learning classification networks. The classification accuracy of cell cycle images was achieved more effectively with our method, reaching 83.88%. Compared with an accuracy of 79.40% in previous experiments, our accuracy increased by 4.48%. Another dataset was used to verify the effect of our model and, compared with the accuracy from previous results, our accuracy increased by 12.52%. The results showed that our new cell cycle image classification system based on WGAN-GP and ResNet is useful for the classification of imbalanced images. Moreover, our method could potentially solve the low classification accuracy in biomedical images caused by insufficient numbers of original images and the imbalanced distribution of original images.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Howard ◽  
◽  
Joe Tracey ◽  
Mike Shen ◽  
Shawn Zhang ◽  
...  

Borehole image logs are used to identify the presence and orientation of fractures, both natural and induced, found in reservoir intervals. The contrast in electrical or acoustic properties of the rock matrix and fluid-filled fractures is sufficiently large enough that sub-resolution features can be detected by these image logging tools. The resolution of these image logs is based on the design and operation of the tools, and generally is in the millimeter per pixel range. Hence the quantitative measurement of actual width remains problematic. An artificial intelligence (AI) -based workflow combines the statistical information obtained from a Machine-Learning (ML) segmentation process with a multiple-layer neural network that defines a Deep Learning process that enhances fractures in a borehole image. These new images allow for a more robust analysis of fracture widths, especially those that are sub-resolution. The images from a BHTV log were first segmented into rock and fluid-filled fractures using a ML-segmentation tool that applied multiple image processing filters that captured information to describe patterns in fracture-rock distribution based on nearest-neighbor behavior. The robust ML analysis was trained by users to identify these two components over a short interval in the well, and then the regression model-based coefficients applied to the remaining log. Based on the training, each pixel was assigned a probability value between 1.0 (being a fracture) and 0.0 (pure rock), with most of the pixels assigned one of these two values. Intermediate probabilities represented pixels on the edge of rock-fracture interface or the presence of one or more sub-resolution fractures within the rock. The probability matrix produced a map or image of the distribution of probabilities that determined whether a given pixel in the image was a fracture or partially filled with a fracture. The Deep Learning neural network was based on a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) approach where the probability map was first encoded and combined with a noise vector that acted as a seed for diverse feature generation. This combination was used to generate new images that represented the BHTV response. The second layer of the neural network, the adversarial or discriminator portion, determined whether the generated images were representative of the actual BHTV by comparing the generated images with actual images from the log and producing an output probability of whether it was real or fake. This probability was then used to train the generator and discriminator models that were then applied to the entire log. Several scenarios were run with different probability maps. The enhanced BHTV images brought out fractures observed in the core photos that were less obvious in the original BTHV log through enhanced continuity and improved resolution on fracture widths.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 3913 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingxuan Li ◽  
Ou Li ◽  
Guangyi Liu ◽  
Ce Zhang

With the recently explosive growth of deep learning, automatic modulation recognition has undergone rapid development. Most of the newly proposed methods are dependent on large numbers of labeled samples. We are committed to using fewer labeled samples to perform automatic modulation recognition in the cognitive radio domain. Here, a semi-supervised learning method based on adversarial training is proposed which is called signal classifier generative adversarial network. Most of the prior methods based on this technology involve computer vision applications. However, we improve the existing network structure of a generative adversarial network by adding the encoder network and a signal spatial transform module, allowing our framework to address radio signal processing tasks more efficiently. These two technical improvements effectively avoid nonconvergence and mode collapse problems caused by the complexity of the radio signals. The results of simulations show that compared with well-known deep learning methods, our method improves the classification accuracy on a synthetic radio frequency dataset by 0.1% to 12%. In addition, we verify the advantages of our method in a semi-supervised scenario and obtain a significant increase in accuracy compared with traditional semi-supervised learning methods.


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