The world is still trying to recover from the devastation caused by the wide spread of COVID-19, and now the monkeypox virus threatens becoming a worldwide pandemic. Although the monkeypox virus is not as lethal or infectious as COVID-19, numerous countries report new cases daily. Thus, it is not surprising that necessary precautions have not been taken, and it will not be surprising if another worldwide pandemic occurs. Machine learning has recently shown tremendous promise in image-based diagnosis, including cancer detection, tumor cell identification, and COVID-19 patient detection. Therefore, a similar application may be implemented to diagnose monkeypox as it invades the human skin. An image can be acquired and utilized to further diagnose the condition. In this paper, two algorithms are proposed for improving the classification accuracy of monkeypox images. The proposed algorithms are based on transfer learning for feature extraction and meta-heuristic optimization for feature selection and optimization of the parameters of a multi-layer neural network. The GoogleNet deep network is adopted for feature extraction, and the utilized meta-heuristic optimization algorithms are the Al-Biruni Earth radius algorithm, the sine cosine algorithm, and the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Based on these algorithms, a new binary hybrid algorithm is proposed for feature selection, along with a new hybrid algorithm for optimizing the parameters of the neural network. To evaluate the proposed algorithms, a publicly available dataset is employed. The assessment of the proposed optimization of feature selection for monkeypox classification was performed in terms of ten evaluation criteria. In addition, a set of statistical tests was conducted to measure the effectiveness, significance, and robustness of the proposed algorithms. The results achieved confirm the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed methods compared to other optimization methods. The average classification accuracy was 98.8%.

Recent technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are essential for supporting healthcare monitoring systems, particularly for monitoring Monkeypox confirmed cases. Infected and uninfected cases around the world have contributed to a growing dataset, which is publicly available and can be used by artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict the confirmed cases of Monkeypox at an early stage. Motivated by this, we propose in this paper a new approach for accurate prediction of the Monkeypox confirmed cases based on an optimized Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep network. To fine-tune the hyper-parameters of the LSTM-based deep network, we employed the Al-Biruni Earth Radius (BER) optimization algorithm; thus, the proposed approach is denoted by BER-LSTM. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach when assessed using various evaluation criteria, such as Mean Bias Error, which is recorded as (0.06) using BER-LSTM. To prove the superiority of the proposed approach, six different machine learning models are included in the conducted experiments. In addition, four different optimization algorithms are considered for comparison purposes. The results of this comparison confirmed the superiority of the proposed approach. On the other hand, several statistical tests are applied to analyze the stability and significance of the proposed approach. These tests include one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Wilcoxon, and regression tests. The results of these tests emphasize the robustness, significance, and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms present an effective method for solving several optimization problems from various types of applications and fields. Several metaheuristics and evolutionary optimization algorithms have been emerged recently in the literature and gained widespread attention, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO), genetic algorithm (GA), and gravitational search algorithm (GSA). According to the literature, no one metaheuristic optimization algorithm can handle all present optimization problems. Hence novel optimization methodologies are still needed. The Al-Biruni earth radius (BER) search optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm was motivated by the behavior of swarm members in achieving their global goals. The search space around local solutions to be explored is determined by Al-Biruni earth radius calculation method. A comparative analysis with existing state-of-the-art optimization algorithms corroborated the findings of BER's validation and testing against seven mathematical optimization problems. The results show that BER can both explore and avoid local optima. BER has also been tested on an engineering design optimization problem. The results reveal that, in terms of performance and capability, BER outperforms the performance of state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimization algorithms.

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