In the recent pandemic, accurate and rapid testing of patients remained a critical task in the diagnosis and control of COVID-19 disease spread in the healthcare industry. Because of the sudden increase in cases, most countries have faced scarcity and a low rate of testing. Chest X-rays have been shown in the literature to be a potential source of testing for COVID-19 patients, but manually checking X-ray reports is time-consuming and error-prone. Considering these limitations and the advancements in data science, we proposed a Vision Transformer-based deep learning pipeline for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray-based imaging. Due to the lack of large data sets, we collected data from three open-source data sets of chest X-ray images and aggregated them to form a 30 K image data set, which is the largest publicly available collection of chest X-ray images in this domain to our knowledge. Our proposed transformer model effectively differentiates COVID-19 from normal chest X-rays with an accuracy of 98% along with an AUC score of 99% in the binary classification task. It distinguishes COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia patient’s X-rays with an accuracy of 92% and AUC score of 98% in the Multi-class classification task. For evaluation on our data set, we fine-tuned some of the widely used models in literature, namely, EfficientNetB0, InceptionV3, Resnet50, MobileNetV3, Xception, and DenseNet-121, as baselines. Our proposed transformer model outperformed them in terms of all metrics. In addition, a Grad-CAM based visualization is created which makes our approach interpretable by radiologists and can be used to monitor the progression of the disease in the affected lungs, assisting healthcare.

In recent times,COVID-19, has a great impact on the healthcare sector and results in a wide range of respiratory illnesses. It is a type of Ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus, which affects humans as well as animals. Though several artificial intelligence-based COVID-19 diagnosis models have been presented in the literature, most of the works have not focused on the hyperparameter tuning process. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent COVID-19 diagnosis model using a barnacle mating optimization (BMO) algorithm with a cascaded recurrent neural network (CRNN) model, named BMO-CRNN. The proposed BMO-CRNN model aims to detect and classify the existence of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray images. Initially, image pre-processing is applied to enhance the quality of the image. Next, the CRNN model is applied as feature extraction and the hyperparameter tuning of CRNN takes place via the BMO algorithm to improve the classification performance. The BMO algorithm determines the optimal values of the CRNN hyperparameters namely learning rate, batch size, activation function, and epoch count. The application of CRNN and hyperparameter tuning using BMO algorithm shows the novelty of this work. A comprehensive simulation analysis is carried out to ensure the better performance of the BMO-CRNN model and the experimental outcome is investigated using several performance metrics. The simulation results portrayed that the BMO-CRNN model has showcased optimal performance with an average sensitivity of 97.01%, specificity of 98.15%, accuracy of 97.31%, and F-measure of 97.73% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Breast cancer has evolved as the most lethal illness impacting women all over the globe. Breast cancer may be detected early, which reduces mortality and increases the chances of a full recovery. Researchers all around the world are working on breast cancer screening tools based on medical imaging. Deep learning approaches have piqued the attention of many in the medical imaging field due to their rapid growth. In this research, mammography pictures were utilized to detect breast cancer. We have used four mammography imaging datasets with a similar number of 1145 normal, benign, and malignant pictures using various deep CNN (Inception V4, ResNet-164, VGG-11, and DenseNet121) models as base classifiers. The proposed technique employs an ensemble approach in which the Gompertz function is used to build fuzzy rankings of the base classification techniques, and the decision scores of the base models are adaptively combined to construct final predictions. The proposed fuzzy ensemble techniques outperform each individual transfer learning methodology as well as multiple advanced ensemble strategies (Weighted Average, Sugeno Integral) with reference to prediction and accuracy. The suggested Inception V4 ensemble model with fuzzy rank based Gompertz function has a 99.32% accuracy rate. We believe that the suggested approach will be of tremendous value to healthcare practitioners in identifying breast cancer patients early on, perhaps leading to an immediate diagnosis.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has influenced the everyday life of people around the globe. In general and during lockdown phases, people worldwide use social media network to state their viewpoints and general feelings concerning the pandemic that has hampered their daily lives. Twitter is one of the most commonly used social media platforms, and it showed a massive increase in tweets related to coronavirus, including positive, negative, and neutral tweets, in a minimal period. The researchers move toward the sentiment analysis and analyze the various emotions of the public toward COVID-19 due to the diverse nature of tweets. Meanwhile, people have expressed their feelings regarding the vaccinations' safety and effectiveness on social networking sites such as Twitter. As an advanced step, in this paper, our proposed approach analyzes COVID-19 by focusing on Twitter users who share their opinions on this social media networking site. The proposed approach analyzes collected tweets' sentiments for sentiment classification using various feature sets and classifiers. The early detection of COVID-19 sentiments from collected tweets allow for a better understanding and handling of the pandemic. Tweets are categorized into positive, negative, and neutral sentiment classes. We evaluate the performance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) classifiers using evaluation metrics (i.e., accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score). Experiments prove that the proposed approach provides better accuracy of 96.66, 95.22, 94.33, and 93.88% for COVISenti, COVIDSenti_A, COVIDSenti_B, and COVIDSenti_C, respectively, compared to all other methods used in this study as well as compared to the existing approaches and traditional ML and DL algorithms.

The entire world is suffering from the post-COVID-19 crisis, and governments are facing problems concerning the provision of satisfactory food and services to their citizens through food supply chain systems. During pandemics, it is difficult to handle the demands of consumers, to overcome food production problems due to lockdowns, work with minimum manpower, follow import and export trade policies, and avoid transportation disruptions. This study aims to analyze the behavior of food imports in Saudi Arabia and how this pandemic and its resulting precautionary measures have affected the food supply chain. We performed a statistical analysis and extracted descriptive measures prior to applying hybrid statistical hypothesis tests to study the behavior of the food chain. The paired samples t-test was used to study differences while the independent samples t-test was used to study differences in means at the level of each item and country, followed by the comparison of means test in order to determine the difference and whether it is increasing or decreasing. According to the results, Saudi Arabia experienced significant effects on the number of items shipped and the countries that supplied these items. The paired samples t-test showed a change in the behavior of importing activities by—47% for items and countries. The independent t-test revealed that 24 item groups and 86 countries reflected significant differences in the mean between the two periods. However, the impact on 41 other countries was almost negligible. In addition, the comparison of means test found that 68% of item groups were significantly reduced and 24% were increased, while only 4% of the items remained the same. From a country perspective, 65% of countries showed a noticeable decrease and 16% a significant increase, while 19% remained the same.