Evaluation of focus and deep learning methods for automated image grading and factors influencing image quality in adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy

Adaptive optics flood illumination ophthalmoscopy (AO-FIO) is an established imaging tool in the investigation of retinal diseases. However, the clinical interpretation of AO-FIO images can be challenging due to varied image quality. Therefore, image quality assessment is essential before interpretation. An image assessment tool will also assist further work on improving the image quality, either during acquisition or post processing. In this paper, we describe, validate and compare two automated image quality assessment methods; the energy of Laplacian focus operator (LAPE; not commonly used but easily implemented) and convolutional neural network (CNN; effective but more complex approach). We also evaluate the effects of subject age, axial length, refractive error, fixation stability, disease status and retinal location on AO-FIO image quality. Based on analysis of 10,250 images of 50 × 50 μm size, at 41 retinal locations, from 50 subjects we demonstrate that CNN slightly outperforms LAPE in image quality assessment. CNN achieves accuracy of 89%, whereas LAPE metric achieves 73% and 80% (for a linear regression and random forest multiclass classifier methods, respectively) compared to ground truth. Furthermore, the retinal location, age and disease are factors that can influence the likelihood of poor image quality.

Artificial Intelligence in Smart Farms: Plant Phenotyping for Species Recognition and Health Condition Identification Using Deep Learning

This paper analyses the contribution of residual network (ResNet) based convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture employed in two tasks related to plant phenotyping. Among the contemporary works for species recognition (SR) and infection detection of plants, the majority of them have performed experiments on balanced datasets and used accuracy as the evaluation parameter. However, this work used an imbalanced dataset having an unequal number of images, applied data augmentation to increase accuracy, organised data as multiple test cases and classes, and, most importantly, employed multiclass classifier evaluation parameters useful for asymmetric class distribution. Additionally, the work addresses typical issues faced such as selecting the size of the dataset, depth of classifiers, training time needed, and analysing the classifier’s performance if various test cases are deployed. In this work, ResNet 20 (V2) architecture has performed significantly well in the tasks of Species Recognition (SR) and Identification of Healthy and Infected Leaves (IHIL) with a Precision of 91.84% and 84.00%, Recall of 91.67% and 83.14% and F1 Score of 91.49% and 83.19%, respectively.

A vital sign-based prediction algorithm for differentiating COVID-19 versus seasonal influenza in hospitalized patients

Patients with influenza and SARS-CoV2/Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections have a different clinical course and outcomes. We developed and validated a supervised machine learning pipeline to distinguish the two viral infections using the available vital signs and demographic dataset from the first hospital/emergency room encounters of 3883 patients who had confirmed diagnoses of influenza A/B, COVID-19 or negative laboratory test results. The models were able to achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of at least 97% using our multiclass classifier. The predictive models were externally validated on 15,697 encounters in 3125 patients available on TrinetX database that contains patient-level data from different healthcare organizations. The influenza vs COVID-19-positive model had an AUC of 98.8%, and 92.8% on the internal and external test sets, respectively. Our study illustrates the potentials of machine-learning models for accurately distinguishing the two viral infections. The code is made available at https://github.com/ynaveena/COVID-19-vs-Influenza and may have utility as a frontline diagnostic tool to aid healthcare workers in triaging patients once the two viral infections start cocirculating in the communities.

Multiclass Classifier for Stock Price Prediction

The stock market has been a crucial factor of investments in the financial domain. Risk modeling and profit generation heavily rely on the sophisticated and intricate stock movement prediction task. Stock Price forecasting is complex that could have a significant influence on the financial market. The Machine Learning (ML) type of artificial intelligence (AI) provides a more accurate forecast for binary and multiclass classification. Different effective methods have been recommended to resolve the problem in the binary classification case but the multiclass classification case is a more delicate one. This paper discusses the application of multiclass classifier mappings such as One v/s All (OvA) and One v/s One (OvO) for stock movement prediction. The proposed approach comprises four main steps: data collection, assign a multi-label (up, down, or same), discover the best classifier methods, and comparison of classifiers on evaluation metrics of 10k cross-validation for stock price movement. In this study, a stock NASDAQ dataset for about ten years of ten companies from yahoo finance on daily basis is used. The resultant Stock Price prediction uncovers Neural Network classifier has good performance in some case whereas Multiclass (One V/s One) and (One V/s All) have overall better performance among all other classifiers as AdaBoost, Support Vector Machine, OneR, Bagging, Simple Logistic, Hoeffding trees, PART, Decision Tree and Random Forest. The Precision, Recall, F-Measure, and ROC area comparison results show that Multiclass (One V/s All) is better than Multiclass (One V/s one). The proposed method Multiclass classification (One v/s All) yields an accuracy of 97.63% for average prediction performance on all ten stock companies, also the highest accuracy achieved as 98.7% for QCOM. The individual stock-wise evaluation of the Multiclass (One V/s All) classifier is found to achieve the highest accuracy among all other classifiers which is outperforming all the recent proposals.

Automatic Genre Categorization of Emails into predefined categories using machine learning

In today’s dynamic world, there is a need for fast, efficient, and reliable means of communication. To meet these requirements email system was developed and it got popular with the invention of WWW. Now, the Email system has been used extensively for official, business, and personal communication. On average individual users receive 50-60 mails each day. It is becoming a burden to easily manage emails. So there is a need for effective and reliable means to organize the mails for easy and fast retrieval. An efficient approach is proposed in this paper to classify the mails based on the predefined genres. It has been observed in the proposed research that the classification of emails greatly improves efficiency and saves time and effort to manage them. The results obtained in this paper are very encouraging. Over 90 % of emails are categorized correctly. Email genres are predefined and corresponding keyword lists are generated. Frequency tf-idf of the keywords in the email decides the genre of mail. SVM is used as a multiclass classifier. In this paper need for negative training data has been removed as the proposed classifier works on the principle of one class against the rest.

A Vital Sign-based Prediction Algorithm for Differentiating COVID-19 Versus Seasonal Influenza in Hospitalized Patients

Patients with influenza and SARS-CoV2/Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections have different clinical course and outcomes. We developed and validated a supervised machine learning pipeline to distinguish the two viral infections using the available vital signs and demographic dataset from the first hospital/emergency room encounters of 3,883 patients who had confirmed diagnoses of influenza A/B, COVID-19 or negative laboratory test results. The models were able to achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of at least 97% using our multiclass classifier. The predictive models were externally validated on 15,697 encounters in 3,125 patients available on TrinetX database that contains patient-level data from different healthcare organizations. The influenza vs. COVID-19-positive model had an AUC of 98%, and 92% on the internal and external test sets, respectively. Our study illustrates the potentials of machine-learning models for accurately distinguishing the two viral infections. The code is made available at https://github.com/ynaveena/COVID-19-vs-Influenza and may be have utility as a frontline diagnostic tool to aid healthcare workers in triaging patients once the two viral infections start cocirculating in the communities.