Synergic Deep Learning for Smart Health Diagnosis of COVID-19 for Connected Living and Smart Cities

COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant loss of global deaths, economical status, and so on. To prevent and control COVID-19, a range of smart, complex, spatially heterogeneous, control solutions, and strategies have been conducted. Earlier classification of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is needed to cure and control the disease. It results in a requirement of secondary diagnosis models, since no precise automated toolkits exist. The latest finding attained using radiological imaging techniques highlighted that the images hold noticeable details regarding the COVID-19 virus. The application of recent artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) approaches integrated to radiological images finds useful to accurately detect the disease. This article introduces a new synergic deep learning (SDL)-based smart health diagnosis of COVID-19 using Chest X-Ray Images. The SDL makes use of dual deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and involves a mutual learning process from one another. Particularly, the representation of images learned by both DCNNs is provided as the input of a synergic network, which has a fully connected structure and predicts whether the pair of input images come under the identical class. Besides, the proposed SDL model involves a fuzzy bilateral filtering (FBF) model to pre-process the input image. The integration of FBL and SDL resulted in the effective classification of COVID-19. To investigate the classifier outcome of the SDL model, a detailed set of simulations takes place and ensures the effective performance of the FBF-SDL model over the compared methods.

Weakly Supervised Spatial Deep Learning for Earth Image Segmentation Based on Imperfect Polyline Labels

In recent years, deep learning has achieved tremendous success in image segmentation for computer vision applications. The performance of these models heavily relies on the availability of large-scale high-quality training labels (e.g., PASCAL VOC 2012). Unfortunately, such large-scale high-quality training data are often unavailable in many real-world spatial or spatiotemporal problems in earth science and remote sensing (e.g., mapping the nationwide river streams for water resource management). Although extensive efforts have been made to reduce the reliance on labeled data (e.g., semi-supervised or unsupervised learning, few-shot learning), the complex nature of geographic data such as spatial heterogeneity still requires sufficient training labels when transferring a pre-trained model from one region to another. On the other hand, it is often much easier to collect lower-quality training labels with imperfect alignment with earth imagery pixels (e.g., through interpreting coarse imagery by non-expert volunteers). However, directly training a deep neural network on imperfect labels with geometric annotation errors could significantly impact model performance. Existing research that overcomes imperfect training labels either focuses on errors in label class semantics or characterizes label location errors at the pixel level. These methods do not fully incorporate the geometric properties of label location errors in the vector representation. To fill the gap, this article proposes a weakly supervised learning framework to simultaneously update deep learning model parameters and infer hidden true vector label locations. Specifically, we model label location errors in the vector representation to partially reserve geometric properties (e.g., spatial contiguity within line segments). Evaluations on real-world datasets in the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) refinement application illustrate that the proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in classification accuracy.

A Multi-attention Collaborative Deep Learning Approach for Blood Pressure Prediction

We develop a deep learning model based on Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) to predict blood pressure based on a unique data set collected from physical examination centers capturing comprehensive multi-year physical examination and lab results. In the Multi-attention Collaborative Deep Learning model (MAC-LSTM) we developed for this type of data, we incorporate three types of attention to generate more explainable and accurate results. In addition, we leverage information from similar users to enhance the predictive power of the model due to the challenges with short examination history. Our model significantly reduces predictive errors compared to several state-of-the-art baseline models. Experimental results not only demonstrate our model’s superiority but also provide us with new insights about factors influencing blood pressure. Our data is collected in a natural setting instead of a setting designed specifically to study blood pressure, and the physical examination items used to predict blood pressure are common items included in regular physical examinations for all the users. Therefore, our blood pressure prediction results can be easily used in an alert system for patients and doctors to plan prevention or intervention. The same approach can be used to predict other health-related indexes such as BMI.