Introduction: The breakdown of a deadly infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (named SARS n-CoV2) back in December 2019 has shown no respite to slow or stop in general. This contagious disease has spread across different lengths and breadths of the globe, taking a death toll to nearly 700 k by the start of August 2020. The number is well expected to rise even more significantly. In the absence of a thoroughly tested and approved vaccine, the onus primarily lies on obliging to standard operating procedures and timely detection and isolation of the infected persons. The detection of SARS n-CoV2 has been one of the core concerns during the fight against this pandemic. To keep up with the scale of the outbreak, testing needs to be scaled at par with it. With the conventional PCR testing, most of the countries have struggled to minimize the gap between the scale of outbreak and scale of testing. Method: One way of expediting the scale of testing is to shift to a rigorous computational model driven by deep neural networks, as proposed here in this paper. The proposed model is a non-contact process of determining whether a subject is infected or not and is achieved by using chest radiographs; one of the most widely used imaging technique for clinical diagnosis due to fast imaging and low cost. The dataset used in this work contains 1428 chest radiographs with confirmed COVID-19 positive, common bacterial pneumonia, and healthy cases (no infection). We explored the pre-trained VGG-16 model for classification tasks in this. Transfer learning with fine-tuning was used in this study to train the network on relatively small chest radiographs effectively. Results: Initial experiments showed that the model achieved promising results and can be significantly used to expedite COVID-19 detection. The experimentation showed an accuracy of 96% and 92.5% in two and three output class cases, respectively. Conclusion:We believe that this study could be used as an initial screening, which can help healthcare professionals to treat the COVID patients by timely detecting better and screening the presence of disease. Implication for practice: Its simplicity drives the proposed deep neural network model, the capability to work on small image dataset, the non-contact method with acceptable accuracy is a potential alternative for rapid COVID-19 testing that can be adapted by the medical fraternity considering the criticality of the time along with the magnitudes of the outbreak.

Purpose Novel coronavirus is fast spreading pathogen worldwide and is threatening billions of lives. SARS n-CoV2 is known to affect the lungs of the COVID-19 positive patients. Chest x-rays are the most widely used imaging technique for clinical diagnosis due to fast imaging time and low cost. The purpose of this study is to use deep learning technique for automatic detection of COVID-19 using chest x-rays. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a data set containing confirmed COVID-19 positive, common bacterial pneumonia and healthy cases (no infection). A collection of 1,428 x-ray images is used in this study. The authors used a pre-trained VGG-16 model for the classification task. Transfer learning with fine-tuning was used in this study to effectively train the network on a relatively small chest x-ray data set. Initial experiments show that the model achieves promising results and can be greatly used to expedite COVID-19 detection. Findings The authors achieved an accuracy of 96% and 92.5% in two and three output class cases, respectively. Based on these findings, the medical community can access using x-ray images as possible diagnostic tool for faster COVID-19 detection to complement the already testing and diagnosis methods. Originality/value The proposed method can be used as initial screening which can help health-care professionals to better treat the COVID patients by timely detecting and screening the presence of disease.

PurposeThe intelligence in the Internet of Things (IoT) can be embedded by analyzing the huge volumes of data generated by it in an ultralow latency environment. The computational latency incurred by the cloud-only solution can be significantly brought down by the fog computing layer, which offers a computing infrastructure to minimize the latency in service delivery and execution. For this purpose, a task scheduling policy based on reinforcement learning (RL) is developed that can achieve the optimal resource utilization as well as minimum time to execute tasks and significantly reduce the communication costs during distributed execution.Design/methodology/approachTo realize this, the authors proposed a two-level neural network (NN)-based task scheduling system, where the first-level NN (feed-forward neural network/convolutional neural network [FFNN/CNN]) determines whether the data stream could be analyzed (executed) in the resource-constrained environment (edge/fog) or be directly forwarded to the cloud. The second-level NN ( RL module) schedules all the tasks sent by level 1 NN to fog layer, among the available fog devices. This real-time task assignment policy is used to minimize the total computational latency (makespan) as well as communication costs.FindingsExperimental results indicated that the RL technique works better than the computationally infeasible greedy approach for task scheduling and the combination of RL and task clustering algorithm reduces the communication costs significantly.Originality/valueThe proposed algorithm fundamentally solves the problem of task scheduling in real-time fog-based IoT with best resource utilization, minimum makespan and minimum communication cost between the tasks.

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