The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for governments and healthcare systems worldwide, highlighting the critical importance of understanding the factors that contribute to virus transmission. This study aimed to identify the most influential age groups in COVID-19 infection rates at the US county level using the Modified Morris Method and deep learning for time series. Our approach involved training the state-of-the-art time-series model Temporal Fusion Transformer on different age groups as a static feature and the population vaccination status as the dynamic feature. We analyzed the impact of those age groups on COVID-19 infection rates by perturbing individual input features and ranked them based on their Morris sensitivity scores, which quantify their contribution to COVID-19 transmission rates. The findings are verified using ground truth data from the CDC and US Census, which provide the true infection rates for each age group. The results suggest that young adults were the most influential age group in COVID-19 transmission at the county level between March 1, 2020, and November 27, 2021. Using these results can inform public health policies and interventions, such as targeted vaccination strategies, to better control the spread of the virus. Our approach demonstrates the utility of feature sensitivity analysis in identifying critical factors contributing to COVID-19 transmission and can be applied in other public health domains.
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have major impact to health and medical infrastructure, economy, and agriculture. Prominent computational and mathematical models have been unreliable due to the complexity of the spread of infections. Moreover, lack of data collection and reporting makes modelling attempts difficult and unreliable. Hence, we need to re-look at the situation with reliable data sources and innovative forecasting models. Deep learning models such as recurrent neural networks are well suited for modelling spatiotemporal sequences. In this paper, we apply recurrent neural network…
Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research（流行病学、疾病控制与研究所）
Effective and reliable screening of patients via Computer-Aided Diagnosis can play a crucial part in the battle against COVID-19. Most of the existing works focus on developing sophisticated methods yielding high detection performance, yet not addressing the issue of predictive uncertainty. In this work, we introduce uncertainty estimation to detect confusing cases for expert referral to address the unreliability of state-of-the-art (SOTA) DNNs on COVID-19 detection. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address this issue on the COVID-19 detection problem. In this work, we investi…
The SEIR model is a widely used epidemiological model used to predict the rise in infections. This model has been widely used in different countries to predict the number of Covid-19 cases. But the original SEIR model does not take into account the effect of factors such as lockdowns, vaccines, and re-infections. In India the first wave of Covid started in March 2020 and the second wave in April 2021. In this paper, we modify the SEIR model equations to model the effect of lockdowns and other influencers, and fit the model on data of the daily Covid-19 infections in India using lmfit, a python…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges in modeling its complex epidemic transmissions, infection and contagion, which are very different from known epidemics. The challenges in quantifying COVID-19 complexities include effectively modeling its process and data uncertainties. The uncertainties are embedded in implicit and high-proportional undocumented infections, asymptomatic contagion, social reinforcement of infections, and various quality issues in the reported data. These uncertainties become even more apparent in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the rele…
We present a robust data-driven machine learning analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic from its early infection dynamics, specifically infection counts over time. The goal is to extract actionable public health insights. These insights include the infectious force, the rate of a mild infection becoming serious, estimates for asymtomatic infections and predictions of new infections over time. We focus on USA data starting from the first confirmed infection on January 20 2020. Our methods reveal significant asymptomatic (hidden) infection, a lag of about 10 days, and we quantitatively confirm that t…
United Arab Emirates University（阿联酋大学）；Independent Data Scientist and Engineer（独立数据科学家和工程师）
COVID-19 has infected more than 68 million people worldwide since it was first detected about a year ago. Machine learning time series models have been implemented to forecast COVID-19 infections. In this paper, we develop time series models for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using the public COVID-19 dataset from Johns Hopkins. The dataset set includes the one-year cumulative COVID-19 cases between 22/01/2020 to 22/01/2021. We developed different models for the countries under study based on the spatial distribution of the infection data. Our experimental results show that the d…
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；Keio University School of Medicine（庆应义塾大学医学部）；Juntendo University（顺天堂大学）
This paper proposes an automated segmentation method of infection and normal regions in the lung from CT volumes of COVID-19 patients. From December 2019, novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreads over the world and giving significant impacts to our economic activities and daily lives. To diagnose the large number of infected patients, diagnosis assistance by computers is needed. Chest CT is effective for diagnosis of viral pneumonia including COVID-19. A quantitative analysis method of condition of the lung from CT volumes by computers is required for diagnosis assistance of COVID-19.…
Automated infection measurement and COVID-19 diagnosis based on Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is important for faster examination. We propose a novel approach, called DRR4Covid, to learn automated COVID-19 diagnosis and infection segmentation on CXRs from digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs). DRR4Covid comprises of an infection-aware DRR generator, a classification and/or segmentation network, and a domain adaptation module. The infection-aware DRR generator is able to produce DRRs with adjustable strength of radiological signs of COVID-19 infection, and generate pixel-level infection annota…
We present CRISP (COVID-19 Risk Score Prediction), a probabilistic graphical model for COVID-19 infection spread through a population based on the SEIR model where we assume access to (1) mutual contacts between pairs of individuals across time across various channels (e.g., Bluetooth contact traces), as well as (2) test outcomes at given times for infection, exposure and immunity tests. Our micro-level model keeps track of the infection state for each individual at every point in time, ranging from susceptible, exposed, infectious to recovered. We develop both a Monte Carlo EM as well as a me…
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, a significant amount of effort had been put into developing techniques that predict the number of infections under various assumptions about the public policy and non-pharmaceutical interventions. While both the available data and the sophistication of the AI models and available computing power exceed what was available in previous years, the overall success of prediction approaches was very limited. In this paper, we start from prediction algorithms proposed for XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge and consider several directions that might allow their improve…
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a real-time robot-based auxiliary system for risk evaluation of COVID-19 infection. It combines real-time speech recognition, temperature measurement, keyword detection, cough detection and other functions in order to convert live audio into actionable structured data to achieve the COVID-19 infection risk assessment function. In order to better evaluate the COVID-19 infection, we propose an end-to-end method for cough detection and classification for our proposed system. It is based on real conversation data from human-robot, which processes speech signals to detect …
University of Engineering and Applied Science (UEAS)（工程与应用科学大学）
COVID-19 is a new pathogen that first appeared in the human population at the end of 2019, and it can lead to novel variants of pneumonia after infection. COVID-19 is a rapidly spreading infectious disease that infects humans faster. Therefore, efficient diagnostic systems may accurately identify infected patients and thus help control their spread. In this regard, a new two-stage analysis framework is developed to analyze minute irregularities of COVID-19 infection. A novel detection Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), STM-BRNet, is developed that incorporates the Split-Transform-Merge (STM) …
The worldwide spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a threatening risk for global public health. It is of great importance to rapidly and accurately screen patients with COVID-19 from community acquired pneumonia (CAP). In this study, a total of 1658 patients with COVID-19 and 1027 patients of CAP underwent thin-section CT. All images were preprocessed to obtain the segmentations of both infections and lung fields, which were used to extract location-specific features. An infection Size Aware Random Forest method (iSARF) was proposed, in which subjects were automated categorized …
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；Keio University School of Medicine（庆应义塾大学医学部）；Juntendo University（顺天堂大学）
This paper proposes a segmentation method of infection regions in the lung from CT volumes of COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 spread worldwide, causing many infected patients and deaths. CT image-based diagnosis of COVID-19 can provide quick and accurate diagnosis results. An automated segmentation method of infection regions in the lung provides a quantitative criterion for diagnosis. Previous methods employ whole 2D image or 3D volume-based processes. Infection regions have a considerable variation in their sizes. Such processes easily miss small infection regions. Patch-based process is effecti…
A molecular and cellular understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 variably infects and causes severe COVID-19 remains a bottleneck in developing interventions to end the pandemic. We sought to use deep learning to study the biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity by identifying transcriptomic patterns and cell types associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity. To do this, we developed a new approach to generating self-supervised edge features. We propose a model that builds on Graph Attention Networks (GAT), creates edge features using self-supervised learning, and ingests …
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread globally in early 2020, causing the world to face an existential health crisis. Automated detection of lung infections from computed tomography (CT) images offers a great potential to augment the traditional healthcare strategy for tackling COVID-19. However, segmenting infected regions from CT slices faces several challenges, including high variation in infection characteristics, and low intensity contrast between infections and normal tissues. Further, collecting a large amount of data is impractical within a short time period, inhibiting the traini…
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Medical University of Graz（格拉茨医科大学）；Imperial College（帝国理工学院）
More than two years after its outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to plague medical systems around the world, putting a strain on scarce resources, and claiming human lives. From the very beginning, various AI-based COVID-19 detection and monitoring tools have been pursued in an attempt to stem the tide of infections through timely diagnosis. In particular, computer audition has been suggested as a non-invasive, cost-efficient, and eco-friendly alternative for detecting COVID-19 infections through vocal sounds. However, like all AI methods, also computer audition is heavily dependent on …
The spread of COVID-19 during the initial phase of the first half of 2020 was curtailed to a larger or lesser extent through measures of social distancing imposed by most countries. In this work, we link directly, through machine learning techniques, infection data at a country level to a single number that signifies social distancing effectiveness. We assume that the standard SIR model gives a reasonable description of the dynamics of spreading, and thus the social distancing aspect can be modeled through time-dependent infection rates that are imposed externally. We use an exponential ansatz…
COVID-19 Infection Map Generation and Detection from Chest X-Ray Images
Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Reem Medical Center（里姆医疗中心）；Hamad Medical Corporation Hospital（哈马德医疗公司医院）；Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar（威尔康奈尔医学院卡塔尔分校）
Interpretable machine learning plays a key role in healthcare because it is challenging in understanding feature importance in deep learning model predictions. We propose a novel framework that uses deep learning to study feature sensitivity for model predictions. This work combines sensitivity analysis with heterogeneous time-series deep learning model prediction, which corresponds to the interpretations of spatio-temporal features. We forecast county-level COVID-19 infection using the Temporal Fusion Transformer. We then use the sensitivity analysis extending Morris Method to see how sensiti…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly around the world and caused significant impact on the public health and economy. However, there is still lack of studies on effectively quantifying the lung infection caused by COVID-19. As a basic but challenging task of the diagnostic framework, segmentation plays a crucial role in accurate quantification of COVID-19 infection measured by computed tomography (CT) images. To this end, we proposed a novel deep learning algorithm for automated segmentation of multiple COVID-19 infection regions. Specifically, we use the Ag…
National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院国家心肺研究所）；Royal Brompton Hospital（皇家布朗普顿医院）；Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital（深圳市第二人民医院）；TECNALIA（泰克纳利亚研究中心）；University of the Basque Country（巴斯克大学）
The upheaval brought by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to bring fresh challenges over the past two years. During this COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a need for rapid identification of infected patients and specific delineation of infection areas in computed tomography (CT) images. Although deep supervised learning methods have been established quickly, the scarcity of both image-level and pixel-level labels as well as the lack of explainable transparency still hinder the applicability of AI. Can we identify infected patients and delineate the infections with extreme mini…
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；University of Dhaka（达卡大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Since the breakout of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the computer-aided diagnosis has become a necessity to prevent the spread of the virus. Detecting COVID-19 at an early stage is essential to reduce the mortality risk of the patients. In this study, a cascaded system is proposed to segment the lung, detect, localize, and quantify COVID-19 infections from computed tomography (CT) images Furthermore, the system classifies the severity of COVID-19 as mild, moderate, severe, or critical based on the percentage of infected lungs. An extensive set of experiments were performed using state-of-the-…
Center of Innovation and Development in Artif. Intell. (CIADA)（人工智能创新与发展中心（CIADA））；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·库拉大学）；University of Jeddah（吉达大学）
The rapid growth of social media content during the current pandemic provides useful tools for disseminating information which has also become a root for misinformation. Therefore, there is an urgent need for fact-checking and effective techniques for detecting misinformation in social media. In this work, we study the misinformation in the Arabic content of Twitter. We construct a large Arabic dataset related to COVID-19 misinformation and gold-annotate the tweets into two categories: misinformation or not. Then, we apply eight different traditional and deep machine learning models, with diff…
Hospital of Wuhan Red Cross Society（武汉红十字会医院）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford（牛津大学生物医学工程研究所）；Aladdin Healthcare Technologies Ltd（阿拉丁医疗科技有限公司）；Hangzhou Ocean's Smart Boya Co., Ltd（杭州奥盛博雅智能科技有限公司）；Mind Rank Ltd（Mind Rank有限公司）；IIAT；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital（深圳市第二人民医院）；Hunan Cancer Hospital（湖南省肿瘤医院）；NHLI, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院国家心肺研究所）；Royal Brompton Hospital（皇家布朗普顿医院）
An outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (i.e., COVID-19) has been recorded in Wuhan, China since late December 2019, which subsequently became pandemic around the world. Although COVID-19 is an acutely treated disease, it can also be fatal with a risk of fatality of 4.03% in China and the highest of 13.04% in Algeria and 12.67% Italy (as of 8th April 2020). The onset of serious illness may result in death as a consequence of substantial alveolar damage and progressive respiratory failure. Although laboratory testing, e.g., using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), is t…
Radiological image is currently adopted as the visual evidence for COVID-19 diagnosis in clinical. Using deep models to realize automated infection measurement and COVID-19 diagnosis is important for faster examination based on radiological imaging. Unfortunately, collecting large training data systematically in the early stage is difficult. To address this problem, we explore the feasibility of learning deep models for COVID-19 diagnosis from a single radiological image by resorting to synthesizing diverse radiological images. Specifically, we propose a novel conditional generative model, cal…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；China Electronics Cloud Brain (Tianjin) Technology CO., LTD（中电云脑（天津）科技有限公司）；Jiangsu University of Technology（江苏理工学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, the Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School（南京大学医学院附属鼓楼医院）；Lenovo Ltd.（联想集团）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Purpose: Accurate segmentation of lung and infection in COVID-19 CT scans plays an important role in the quantitative management of patients. Most of the existing studies are based on large and private annotated datasets that are impractical to obtain from a single institution, especially when radiologists are busy fighting the coronavirus disease. Furthermore, it is hard to compare current COVID-19 CT segmentation methods as they are developed on different datasets, trained in different settings, and evaluated with different metrics. Methods: To promote the development of data-efficient deep …
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affects billions of lives around the world and has a significant impact on public healthcare. Due to rising skepticism towards the sensitivity of RT-PCR as screening method, medical imaging like computed tomography offers great potential as alternative. For this reason, automated image segmentation is highly desired as clinical decision support for quantitative assessment and disease monitoring. However, publicly available COVID-19 imaging data is limited which leads to overfitting of traditional approaches. To address this problem, we propose an innovat…
Beijing Jingzhen Medical Technology Ltd.（北京精诊医疗科技有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
A novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was detected and has spread rapidly across various countries around the world since the end of the year 2019, Computed Tomography (CT) images have been used as a crucial alternative to the time-consuming RT-PCR test. However, pure manual segmentation of CT images faces a serious challenge with the increase of suspected cases, resulting in urgent requirements for accurate and automatic segmentation of COVID-19 infections. Unfortunately, since the imaging characteristics of the COVID-19 infection are diverse and similar to the backgrounds, existing med…
Université de Haute-Alsace（上阿尔萨斯大学）；Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；University of Lille（里尔大学）；YNCREA-ISEN Lille（里尔YNCREA-ISEN工程学院）；University of the Basque Country（巴斯克大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（伊克尔巴斯克巴斯克科学基金会）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；CHU Lille（里尔大学医院）
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with first symptoms similar to the flu. COVID-19 appeared first in China and very quickly spreads to the rest of the world, causing then the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic. In many cases, this disease causes pneumonia. Since pulmonary infections can be observed through radiography images, this paper investigates deep learning methods for automatically analyzing query chest X-ray images with the hope to bring precision tools to health professionals towards screening the COVID-19 and diagnosing confirmed patients. In this context, traini…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Quick and accurate diagnosis is of paramount importance to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 infection, particularly for severe cases. Enormous effort has been put towards developing deep learning methods to classify and detect COVID-19 infections from chest radiography images. However, recently some questions have been raised surrounding the clinical viability and effectiveness of such methods. In this work, we investigate the impact of multi-task learning (classification and segmentation) on the ability of CNNs to differentiate between various appearances of COVID-19 infections in the lung. W…
National Institute of Technology Durgapur（杜尔加布尔国立技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
COVID-19 pandemic is severely impacting the lives of billions across the globe. Even after taking massive protective measures like nation-wide lockdowns, discontinuation of international flight services, rigorous testing etc., the infection spreading is still growing steadily, causing thousands of deaths and serious socio-economic crisis. Thus, the identification of the major factors of this infection spreading dynamics is becoming crucial to minimize impact and lifetime of COVID-19 and any future pandemic. In this work, a probabilistic cellular automata based method has been employed to model…
