Fast and accurate screening of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) suspected subjects plays a vital role in timely quarantine and medical care. Deep transfer learning-based screening models on chest X-ray (CXR) are effective for countering the COVID-19 outbreak. However, an efficient screening of COVID-19 is still a huge task due to the spatial complexity of CXRs. In this paper, a dense convolutional neural network (DCov-Net) based transfer learning model is proposed for the screening of COVID-19 suspected subjects using CXR images. A modified multi-crossover genetic algorithm (MMCGA) is then proposed to tune the hyper-parameters of DCov-Net. Majority of the existing COVID-19 diagnosis models are not interpretable as they do not provide any transparency to the users. Therefore, the concept of heat-maps is used to achieve explainability and interpretability. MMCGA based DCov-Net is implemented on a multiclass dataset that contains four different classes. Experimental results reveal that MMCGA based DCov-Net achieves better performance than the existing models. The proposed MMCGA based DCov-Net can be utilized for initial screening of COVID-19 suspected subjects with an accuracy of 99.34 ± 0.51 %.

The world is facing multiple healthcare challenges because of the emergence of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. The pandemic has exposed the limitations of handling public healthcare emergencies using existing digital healthcare technologies. Thus, the COVID-19 situation has forced research institutes and countries to rethink healthcare delivery solutions to ensure continuity of services while people stay at home and practice social distancing. Recently, several researchers have focused on disruptive technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), to improve the digital healthcare workflow during COVID-19. Blockchain could combat pandemics by enabling decentralized healthcare data sharing, protecting users’ privacy, providing data empowerment, and ensuring reliable data management during outbreak tracking. In addition, AI provides intelligent computer-aided solutions by analyzing a patient’s medical images and symptoms caused by coronavirus for efficient treatments, future outbreak prediction, and drug manufacturing. Integrating both blockchain and AI could transform the existing healthcare ecosystem by democratizing and optimizing clinical workflows. In this article, we begin with an overview of digital healthcare services and problems that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, we conceptually propose a decentralized, patient-centric healthcare framework based on blockchain and AI to mitigate COVID-19 challenges. Then, we explore the significant applications of integrated blockchain and AI technologies to augment existing public healthcare strategies for tackling COVID-19. Finally, we highlight the challenges and implications for future research within a patient-centric paradigm.

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In recent years, many researchers have focused on developing a feasible solution for storing and exchanging medical images in the field of health care. Current practices are deployed on cloud-based centralized data centers, which increase maintenance costs, require massive storage space, and raise privacy concerns about sharing information over a network. Therefore, it is important to design a framework to enable sharing and storing of big medical data efficiently within a trustless environment. In the present paper, we propose a novel proof-of-concept design for a distributed patient-centric image management (PCIM) system that is aimed to ensure safety and control of patient private data without using a centralized infrastructure. In this system, we employed an emerging Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). Then, we implemented an Ethereum smart contract called the patient-centric access control protocol to enable a distributed and trustworthy access control policy. IPFS provides the means for decentralized storage of medical images with global accessibility. We describe how the PCIM system architecture facilitates the distributed and secured patient-centric data access across multiple entities such as hospitals, patients, and image requestors. Finally, we deployed a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum testnet blockchain and evaluated the proposed framework within the Windows environment. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is efficient and feasible.

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