Severity assessment of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) using chest computed tomography (CT) scan is crucial for the effective administration of the right therapeutic drugs and also for monitoring the progression of the disease. However, determining the severity of COVID-19 needs a highly expert radiologist by visual assessment, which is time-consuming, boring, and subjective. This article introduces an advanced machine learning tool to determine the severity of COVID-19 to mild, moderate, and severe from the lung CT images. We have used a set of quantitative first-and second-order statistical texture features from each image. The first-order texture features extracted from the image histogram are variance, skewness, and kurtosis. The second-order texture features extraction methods are gray-level co-occurrence matrix, graylevel run length matrix, and gray-level size zone matrix. Finally, using the extracted features, CT images of each person are classified using random forest (RF) as an ensemble method based on majority voting of the decision trees outputs to four classes. We have used a dataset of CT scans labeled as being normal (231), mild (563), moderate (120), and severe (42) determined by expert radiologists. The experimental results indicate the combination of all feature extraction methods, and RF achieves the highest result compared with the other strategies in detecting the four classes of severity of COVID-19 from CT images with an accuracy of 90.95%. This proposed system can work well and can be used as an assistant diagnostic tool for quantification of lung involvement of COVID-19 to monitor the progression of the disease.

Image fusion means to integrate information from one image to another image. Medical images according to the nature of the images are divided into structural (such as CT and MRI) and functional (such as SPECT, PET). This article fused MRI and PET images and the purpose is adding structural information from MRI to functional information of PET images. The images decomposed with Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and then two images were fused with applying fusion rules. The coefficients of the low frequency band are combined by a maximal energy rule and coefficients of the high frequency bands are combined by a maximal variance rule. Finally, visual and quantitative criteria were used to evaluate the fusion result. In visual evaluation the opinion of two radiologists was used and in quantitative evaluation the proposed fusion method was compared with six existing methods and used criteria were entropy, mutual information, discrepancy and overall performance.

Background: Arcus Senilis (AS) appears as a white, grey or blue ring or arc in front of the periphery of the iris, and is a symptom of abnormally high cholesterol in patients under 50 years old. Objective: This work proposes a deep learning approach to automatic recognition of AS in eye images. Material and Methods: In this analytical study, a dataset of 191 eye images (130 normal, 61 with AS) was employed where ¾ of the data were used for training the proposed model and ¼ of the data were used for test, using a 4-fold cross-validation. Due to the limited amount of training data, transfer learning was conducted with AlexNet as the pretrained network. Results: The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 100% in classifying the eye images into normal and AS categories. Conclusion: The excellent performance of the proposed model despite limited training set, demonstrate the efficacy of deep transfer learning in AS recognition in eye images. The proposed approach is preferred to previous methods for AS recognition, as it eliminates cumbersome segmentation and feature engineering processes.

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