Refined Anam-Net:Lightweight Deep Learning Model for Improved Segmentation Performance of Optic Cup and Disc for Glaucoma Diagnosis

In this work,we aim to introduce some modifications to the Anam-Net deep neural network(DNN)model for segmenting optic cup(OC)and optic disc(OD)in retinal fundus images to estimate the cup-to-disc ratio(CDR).The CDR is a reliable measure for the early diagnosis of Glaucoma.In this study,we developed a lightweight DNN model for OC and OD segmentation in retinal fundus images.Our DNN model is based on modifications to Anam-Net,incorporating an anamorphic depth embedding block.To reduce computational complexity,we employ a fixed filter size for all convolution layers in the encoder and decoder stages as the network deepens.This modification significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters,making the model lightweight and suitable for resource-constrained applications.We evaluate the performance of the developed model using two publicly available retinal image databases,namely RIM-ONE and Drishti-GS.The results demonstrate promising OC segmentation performance across most standard evaluation metrics while achieving analogous results for OD segmentation.We used two retinal fundus image databases named RIM-ONE and Drishti-GS that contained 159 images and 101 retinal images,respectively.For OD segmentation using the RIM-ONE we obtain an f1-score(F1),Jaccard coefficient(JC),and overlapping error(OE)of 0.950,0.9219,and 0.0781,respectively.Similarly,for OC segmentation using the same databases,we achieve scores of 0.8481(F1),0.7428(JC),and 0.2572(OE).Based on these experimental results and the significantly lower number of trainable parameters,we conclude that the developed model is highly suitable for the early diagnosis of glaucoma by accurately estimating the CDR.

An Attention-Based Approach to Enhance the Detection and Classification of Android Malware

The dominance of Android in the global mobile market and the open development characteristics of this platform have resulted in a significant increase in malware.These malicious applications have become a serious concern to the security of Android systems.To address this problem,researchers have proposed several machine-learning models to detect and classify Android malware based on analyzing features extracted from Android samples.However,most existing studies have focused on the classification task and overlooked the feature selection process,which is crucial to reduce the training time and maintain or improve the classification results.The current paper proposes a new Android malware detection and classification approach that identifies the most important features to improve classification performance and reduce training time.The proposed approach consists of two main steps.First,a feature selection method based on the Attention mechanism is used to select the most important features.Then,an optimized Light Gradient Boosting Machine(LightGBM)classifier is applied to classify the Android samples and identify the malware.The feature selection method proposed in this paper is to integrate an Attention layer into a multilayer perceptron neural network.The role of the Attention layer is to compute the weighted values of each feature based on its importance for the classification process.Experimental evaluation of the approach has shown that combining the Attention-based technique with an optimized classification algorithm for Android malware detection has improved the accuracy from 98.64%to 98.71%while reducing the training time from 80 to 28 s.

Spatio-temporal Evolution Characteristics and Driving Forces of Winter Urban Heat Island:A Case Study of Rapid Urbanization Area of Fuzhou City,China

Under the influence of anthropogenic and climate change,the problems caused by urban heat island(UHI)has become increasingly prominent.In order to promote urban sustainable development and improve the quality of human settlements,it is significant for exploring the evolution characteristics of urban thermal environment and analyzing its driving forces.Taking the Landsat series images as the basic data sources,the winter land surface temperature(LST)of the rapid urbanization area of Fuzhou City in China was quantitatively retrieved from 2001 to 2021.Combing comprehensively the standard deviation ellipse model,profile analysis and GeoDetector model,the spatio-temporal evolution characteristics and influencing factors of the winter urban thermal environment were systematically analyzed.The results showed that the winter LST presented an increasing trend in the study area during 2001–2021,and the winter LST of the central urban regions was significantly higher than the suburbs.There was a strong UHI effect from 2001 to 2021with an expansion trend from the central urban regions to the suburbs and coastal areas in space scale.The LST of green lands and wetlands are significantly lower than croplands,artificial surface and unvegetated lands.Vegetation and water bodies had a significant mitigation effect on UHI,especially in the micro-scale.The winter UHI had been jointly driven by the underlying surface and socio-economic factors in a nonlinear or two-factor interactive enhancement mode,and socio-economic factors had played a leading role.This research could provide data support and decision-making references for rationally planning urban layout and promoting sustainable urban development.

Tracking direct and indirect impact on technology and policy of transformative research via ego citation network

Purpose:The disseminating of academic knowledge to nonacademic audiences partly relies on the transition of subsequent citing papers.This study aims to investigate direct and indirect impact on technology and policy originating from transformative research based on ego citation network.Design/methodology/approach:Key Nobel Prize-winning publications(NPs)in fields of gene engineering and astrophysics are regarded as a proxy for transformative research.In this contribution,we introduce a network-structural indicator of citing patents to measure technological impact of a target article and use policy citations as a preliminary tool for policy impact.Findings:The results show that the impact on technology and policy of NPs are higher than that of their subsequent citation generations in gene engineering but not in astrophysics.Research limitations:The selection of Nobel Prizes is not balanced and the database used in this study,Dimensions,suffers from incompleteness and inaccuracy of citation links.Practical implications:Our findings provide useful clues to better understand the characteristics of transformative research in technological and policy impact.Originality/value:This study proposes a new framework to explore the direct and indirect impact on technology and policy originating from transformative research.

Capillary Property of Entangled Porous Metallic Wire materials and Its Application in Fluid Buffers:Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Study

Strong impact does serious harm to the military industries so it is necessary to choose reasonable cushioning material and design effective buffers to prevent the impact of equipment.Based on the capillary property entangled porous metallic wire materials(EPMWM),this paper designed a composite buffer which uses EPMWM and viscous fluid as cushioning materials under the low-speed impact of the recoil force device of weapon equipment(such as artillery,mortar,etc.).Combined with the capillary model,porosity,hydraulic diameter,maximum pore diameter and pore distribution were used to characterize the pore structure characteristics of EPMWM.The calculation model of the damping force of the composite buffer was established.The low-speed impact test of the composite buffer was conducted.The parameters of the buffer under low-speed impact were identified according to the model,and the nonlinear model of damping force was obtained.The test results show that the composite buffer with EPMWM and viscous fluid can absorb the impact energy from the recoil movement effectively,and provide a new method for the buffer design of weapon equipment(such as artillery,mortar,etc.).

Towards Improving the Quality of Requirement and Testing Process in Agile Software Development:An Empirical Study

Software testing is a critical phase due to misconceptions about ambiguities in the requirements during specification,which affect the testing process.Therefore,it is difficult to identify all faults in software.As requirement changes continuously,it increases the irrelevancy and redundancy during testing.Due to these challenges;fault detection capability decreases and there arises a need to improve the testing process,which is based on changes in requirements specification.In this research,we have developed a model to resolve testing challenges through requirement prioritization and prediction in an agile-based environment.The research objective is to identify the most relevant and meaningful requirements through semantic analysis for correct change analysis.Then compute the similarity of requirements through case-based reasoning,which predicted the requirements for reuse and restricted to error-based requirements.Afterward,the apriori algorithm mapped out requirement frequency to select relevant test cases based on frequently reused or not reused test cases to increase the fault detection rate.Furthermore,the proposed model was evaluated by conducting experiments.The results showed that requirement redundancy and irrelevancy improved due to semantic analysis,which correctly predicted the requirements,increasing the fault detection rate and resulting in high user satisfaction.The predicted requirements are mapped into test cases,increasing the fault detection rate after changes to achieve higher user satisfaction.Therefore,the model improves the redundancy and irrelevancy of requirements by more than 90%compared to other clustering methods and the analytical hierarchical process,achieving an 80%fault detection rate at an earlier stage.Hence,it provides guidelines for practitioners and researchers in the modern era.In the future,we will provide the working prototype of this model for proof of concept.

Computational Approach for Automated Segmentation and Classification of Region of Interest in Lateral Breast Thermograms

Breast cancer is one of the major health issues with high mortality rates and a substantial impact on patients and healthcare systems worldwide.Various Computer-Aided Diagnosis(CAD)tools,based on breast thermograms,have been developed for early detection of this disease.However,accurately segmenting the Region of Interest(ROI)fromthermograms remains challenging.This paper presents an approach that leverages image acquisition protocol parameters to identify the lateral breast region and estimate its bottomboundary using a second-degree polynomial.The proposed method demonstrated high efficacy,achieving an impressive Jaccard coefficient of 86%and a Dice index of 92%when evaluated against manually created ground truths.Textural features were extracted from each view’s ROI,with significant features selected via Mutual Information for training Multi-Layer Perceptron(MLP)and K-Nearest Neighbors(KNN)classifiers.Our findings revealed that the MLP classifier outperformed the KNN,achieving an accuracy of 86%,a specificity of 100%,and an Area Under the Curve(AUC)of 0.85.The consistency of the method across both sides of the breast suggests its viability as an auto-segmentation tool.Furthermore,the classification results suggests that lateral views of breast thermograms harbor valuable features that can significantly aid in the early detection of breast cancer.

Nonlinear Registration of Brain Magnetic Resonance Images with Cross Constraints of Intensity and Structure

Many deep learning-based registration methods rely on a single-stream encoder-decoder network for computing deformation fields between 3D volumes.However,these methods often lack constraint information and overlook semantic consistency,limiting their performance.To address these issues,we present a novel approach for medical image registration called theDual-VoxelMorph,featuring a dual-channel cross-constraint network.This innovative network utilizes both intensity and segmentation images,which share identical semantic information and feature representations.Two encoder-decoder structures calculate deformation fields for intensity and segmentation images,as generated by the dual-channel cross-constraint network.This design facilitates bidirectional communication between grayscale and segmentation information,enabling the model to better learn the corresponding grayscale and segmentation details of the same anatomical structures.To ensure semantic and directional consistency,we introduce constraints and apply the cosine similarity function to enhance semantic consistency.Evaluation on four public datasets demonstrates superior performance compared to the baselinemethod,achieving Dice scores of 79.9%,64.5%,69.9%,and 63.5%for OASIS-1,OASIS-3,LPBA40,and ADNI,respectively.

Appropriate Combination of Crossover Operator and Mutation Operator in Genetic Algorithms for the Travelling Salesman Problem

Genetic algorithms(GAs)are very good metaheuristic algorithms that are suitable for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems.AsimpleGAbeginswith a set of solutions represented by a population of chromosomes and then uses the idea of survival of the fittest in the selection process to select some fitter chromosomes.It uses a crossover operator to create better offspring chromosomes and thus,converges the population.Also,it uses a mutation operator to explore the unexplored areas by the crossover operator,and thus,diversifies the GA search space.A combination of crossover and mutation operators makes the GA search strong enough to reach the optimal solution.However,appropriate selection and combination of crossover operator and mutation operator can lead to a very good GA for solving an optimization problem.In this present paper,we aim to study the benchmark traveling salesman problem(TSP).We developed several genetic algorithms using seven crossover operators and six mutation operators for the TSP and then compared them to some benchmark TSPLIB instances.The experimental studies show the effectiveness of the combination of a comprehensive sequential constructive crossover operator and insertion mutation operator for the problem.The GA using the comprehensive sequential constructive crossover with insertion mutation could find average solutions whose average percentage of excesses from the best-known solutions are between 0.22 and 14.94 for our experimented problem instances.

Predicting Age and Gender in Author Profiling: A Multi-Feature Exploration

Author Profiling (AP) is a subsection of digital forensics that focuses on the detection of the author’s personalinformation, such as age, gender, occupation, and education, based on various linguistic features, e.g., stylistic,semantic, and syntactic. The importance of AP lies in various fields, including forensics, security, medicine, andmarketing. In previous studies, many works have been done using different languages, e.g., English, Arabic, French,etc.However, the research on RomanUrdu is not up to the mark.Hence, this study focuses on detecting the author’sage and gender based on Roman Urdu text messages. The dataset used in this study is Fire’18-MaponSMS. Thisstudy proposed an ensemble model based on AdaBoostM1 and Random Forest (AMBRF) for AP using multiplelinguistic features that are stylistic, character-based, word-based, and sentence-based. The proposed model iscontrasted with several of the well-known models fromthe literature, including J48-Decision Tree (J48),Na飗e Bays(NB), K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Composite Hypercube on Random Projection (CHIRP), NB-Updatable,RF, and AdaboostM1. The overall outcome shows the better performance of the proposed AdaboostM1 withRandom Forest (ABMRF) with an accuracy of 54.2857% for age prediction and 71.1429% for gender predictioncalculated on stylistic features. Regarding word-based features, age and gender were considered in 50.5714% and60%, respectively. On the other hand, KNN and CHIRP show the weakest performance using all the linguisticfeatures for age and gender prediction.

Olive Leaf Disease Detection via Wavelet Transform and Feature Fusion of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Models

Olive trees are susceptible to a variety of diseases that can cause significant crop damage and economic losses.Early detection of these diseases is essential for effective management.We propose a novel transformed wavelet,feature-fused,pre-trained deep learning model for detecting olive leaf diseases.The proposed model combines wavelet transforms with pre-trained deep-learning models to extract discriminative features from olive leaf images.The model has four main phases:preprocessing using data augmentation,three-level wavelet transformation,learning using pre-trained deep learning models,and a fused deep learning model.In the preprocessing phase,the image dataset is augmented using techniques such as resizing,rescaling,flipping,rotation,zooming,and contrasting.In wavelet transformation,the augmented images are decomposed into three frequency levels.Three pre-trained deep learning models,EfficientNet-B7,DenseNet-201,and ResNet-152-V2,are used in the learning phase.The models were trained using the approximate images of the third-level sub-band of the wavelet transform.In the fused phase,the fused model consists of a merge layer,three dense layers,and two dropout layers.The proposed model was evaluated using a dataset of images of healthy and infected olive leaves.It achieved an accuracy of 99.72%in the diagnosis of olive leaf diseases,which exceeds the accuracy of other methods reported in the literature.This finding suggests that our proposed method is a promising tool for the early detection of olive leaf diseases.

Model Agnostic Meta-Learning(MAML)-Based Ensemble Model for Accurate Detection of Wheat Diseases Using Vision Transformer and Graph Neural Networks

Wheat is a critical crop,extensively consumed worldwide,and its production enhancement is essential to meet escalating demand.The presence of diseases like stem rust,leaf rust,yellow rust,and tan spot significantly diminishes wheat yield,making the early and precise identification of these diseases vital for effective disease management.With advancements in deep learning algorithms,researchers have proposed many methods for the automated detection of disease pathogens;however,accurately detectingmultiple disease pathogens simultaneously remains a challenge.This challenge arises due to the scarcity of RGB images for multiple diseases,class imbalance in existing public datasets,and the difficulty in extracting features that discriminate between multiple classes of disease pathogens.In this research,a novel method is proposed based on Transfer Generative Adversarial Networks for augmenting existing data,thereby overcoming the problems of class imbalance and data scarcity.This study proposes a customized architecture of Vision Transformers(ViT),where the feature vector is obtained by concatenating features extracted from the custom ViT and Graph Neural Networks.This paper also proposes a Model AgnosticMeta Learning(MAML)based ensemble classifier for accurate classification.The proposedmodel,validated on public datasets for wheat disease pathogen classification,achieved a test accuracy of 99.20%and an F1-score of 97.95%.Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods,this proposed model outperforms in terms of accuracy,F1-score,and the number of disease pathogens detection.In future,more diseases can be included for detection along with some other modalities like pests and weed.

A Hybrid and Lightweight Device-to-Server Authentication Technique for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things(IoT)is a smart networking infrastructure of physical devices,i.e.,things,that are embedded with sensors,actuators,software,and other technologies,to connect and share data with the respective server module.Although IoTs are cornerstones in different application domains,the device’s authenticity,i.e.,of server(s)and ordinary devices,is the most crucial issue and must be resolved on a priority basis.Therefore,various field-proven methodologies were presented to streamline the verification process of the communicating devices;however,location-aware authentication has not been reported as per our knowledge,which is a crucial metric,especially in scenarios where devices are mobile.This paper presents a lightweight and location-aware device-to-server authentication technique where the device’s membership with the nearest server is subjected to its location information along with other measures.Initially,Media Access Control(MAC)address and Advance Encryption Scheme(AES)along with a secret shared key,i.e.,λ_(i) of 128 bits,have been utilized by Trusted Authority(TA)to generate MaskIDs,which are used instead of the original ID,for every device,i.e.,server and member,and are shared in the offline phase.Secondly,TA shares a list of authentic devices,i.e.,server S_(j) and members C_(i),with every device in the IoT for the onward verification process,which is required to be executed before the initialization of the actual communication process.Additionally,every device should be located such that it lies within the coverage area of a server,and this location information is used in the authentication process.A thorough analytical analysis was carried out to check the susceptibility of the proposed and existing authentication approaches against well-known intruder attacks,i.e.,man-in-the-middle,masquerading,device,and server impersonations,etc.,especially in the IoT domain.Moreover,proposed authentication and existing state-of-the-art approaches have been simulated in the real environment of IoT to verify their performance,particularly in terms of various evaluation metrics,i.e.,processing,communication,and storage overheads.These results have verified the superiority of the proposed scheme against existing state-of-the-art approaches,preferably in terms of communication,storage,and processing costs.

AI-Driven Learning Management Systems:Modern Developments, Challenges and Future Trends during theAge of ChatGPT

COVID-19 pandemic restrictions limited all social activities to curtail the spread of the virus.The foremost and most prime sector among those affected were schools,colleges,and universities.The education system of entire nations had shifted to online education during this time.Many shortcomings of Learning Management Systems(LMSs)were detected to support education in an online mode that spawned the research in Artificial Intelligence(AI)based tools that are being developed by the research community to improve the effectiveness of LMSs.This paper presents a detailed survey of the different enhancements to LMSs,which are led by key advances in the area of AI to enhance the real-time and non-real-time user experience.The AI-based enhancements proposed to the LMSs start from the Application layer and Presentation layer in the form of flipped classroom models for the efficient learning environment and appropriately designed UI/UX for efficient utilization of LMS utilities and resources,including AI-based chatbots.Session layer enhancements are also required,such as AI-based online proctoring and user authentication using Biometrics.These extend to the Transport layer to support real-time and rate adaptive encrypted video transmission for user security/privacy and satisfactory working of AI-algorithms.It also needs the support of the Networking layer for IP-based geolocation features,the Virtual Private Network(VPN)feature,and the support of Software-Defined Networks(SDN)for optimum Quality of Service(QoS).Finally,in addition to these,non-real-time user experience is enhanced by other AI-based enhancements such as Plagiarism detection algorithms and Data Analytics.

Improving Prediction of Chronic Kidney Disease Using KNN Imputed SMOTE Features and TrioNet Model

Chronic kidney disease(CKD)is a major health concern today,requiring early and accurate diagnosis.Machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool for disease detection,and medical professionals are increasingly using ML classifier algorithms to identify CKD early.This study explores the application of advanced machine learning techniques on a CKD dataset obtained from the University of California,UC Irvine Machine Learning repository.The research introduces TrioNet,an ensemble model combining extreme gradient boosting,random forest,and extra tree classifier,which excels in providing highly accurate predictions for CKD.Furthermore,K nearest neighbor(KNN)imputer is utilized to deal withmissing values while synthetic minority oversampling(SMOTE)is used for class-imbalance problems.To ascertain the efficacy of the proposed model,a comprehensive comparative analysis is conducted with various machine learning models.The proposed TrioNet using KNN imputer and SMOTE outperformed other models with 98.97%accuracy for detectingCKD.This in-depth analysis demonstrates the model’s capabilities and underscores its potential as a valuable tool in the diagnosis of CKD.

An Implementation of Multiscale Line Detection and Mathematical Morphology for Efficient and Precise Blood Vessel Segmentation in Fundus Images

Diagnosing various diseases such as glaucoma,age-related macular degeneration,cardiovascular conditions,and diabetic retinopathy involves segmenting retinal blood vessels.The task is particularly challenging when dealing with color fundus images due to issues like non-uniformillumination,low contrast,and variations in vessel appearance,especially in the presence of different pathologies.Furthermore,the speed of the retinal vessel segmentation system is of utmost importance.With the surge of now available big data,the speed of the algorithm becomes increasingly important,carrying almost equivalent weightage to the accuracy of the algorithm.To address these challenges,we present a novel approach for retinal vessel segmentation,leveraging efficient and robust techniques based on multiscale line detection and mathematical morphology.Our algorithm’s performance is evaluated on two publicly available datasets,namely the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction dataset(DRIVE)and the Structure Analysis of Retina(STARE)dataset.The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method,withmean accuracy values of 0.9467 forDRIVE and 0.9535 for STARE datasets,aswell as sensitivity values of 0.6952 forDRIVE and 0.6809 for STARE datasets.Notably,our algorithmexhibits competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods.Importantly,it operates at an average speed of 3.73 s per image for DRIVE and 3.75 s for STARE datasets.It is worth noting that these results were achieved using Matlab scripts containing multiple loops.This suggests that the processing time can be further reduced by replacing loops with vectorization.Thus the proposed algorithm can be deployed in real time applications.In summary,our proposed system strikes a fine balance between swift computation and accuracy that is on par with the best available methods in the field.

Security Monitoring and Management for the Network Services in the Orchestration of SDN-NFV Environment Using Machine Learning Techniques

Software Defined Network(SDN)and Network Function Virtualization(NFV)technology promote several benefits to network operators,including reduced maintenance costs,increased network operational performance,simplified network lifecycle,and policies management.Network vulnerabilities try to modify services provided by Network Function Virtualization MANagement and Orchestration(NFV MANO),and malicious attacks in different scenarios disrupt the NFV Orchestrator(NFVO)and Virtualized Infrastructure Manager(VIM)lifecycle management related to network services or individual Virtualized Network Function(VNF).This paper proposes an anomaly detection mechanism that monitors threats in NFV MANO and manages promptly and adaptively to implement and handle security functions in order to enhance the quality of experience for end users.An anomaly detector investigates these identified risks and provides secure network services.It enables virtual network security functions and identifies anomalies in Kubernetes(a cloud-based platform).For training and testing purpose of the proposed approach,an intrusion-containing dataset is used that hold multiple malicious activities like a Smurf,Neptune,Teardrop,Pod,Land,IPsweep,etc.,categorized as Probing(Prob),Denial of Service(DoS),User to Root(U2R),and Remote to User(R2L)attacks.An anomaly detector is anticipated with the capabilities of a Machine Learning(ML)technique,making use of supervised learning techniques like Logistic Regression(LR),Support Vector Machine(SVM),Random Forest(RF),Naïve Bayes(NB),and Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost).The proposed framework has been evaluated by deploying the identified ML algorithm on a Jupyter notebook in Kubeflow to simulate Kubernetes for validation purposes.RF classifier has shown better outcomes(99.90%accuracy)than other classifiers in detecting anomalies/intrusions in the containerized environment.

Adaptation of Federated Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Efficient and Secure E-Healthcare Systems

Explainable Artificial Intelligence(XAI)has an advanced feature to enhance the decision-making feature and improve the rule-based technique by using more advanced Machine Learning(ML)and Deep Learning(DL)based algorithms.In this paper,we chose e-healthcare systems for efficient decision-making and data classification,especially in data security,data handling,diagnostics,laboratories,and decision-making.Federated Machine Learning(FML)is a new and advanced technology that helps to maintain privacy for Personal Health Records(PHR)and handle a large amount of medical data effectively.In this context,XAI,along with FML,increases efficiency and improves the security of e-healthcare systems.The experiments show efficient system performance by implementing a federated averaging algorithm on an open-source Federated Learning(FL)platform.The experimental evaluation demonstrates the accuracy rate by taking epochs size 5,batch size 16,and the number of clients 5,which shows a higher accuracy rate(19,104).We conclude the paper by discussing the existing gaps and future work in an e-healthcare system.

Privacy-Preserving Information Fusion Technique for Device to Server-Enabled Communication in the Internet of Things:A Hybrid Approach

Due to the overwhelming characteristics of the Internet of Things(IoT)and its adoption in approximately every aspect of our lives,the concept of individual devices’privacy has gained prominent attention from both customers,i.e.,people,and industries as wearable devices collect sensitive information about patients(both admitted and outdoor)in smart healthcare infrastructures.In addition to privacy,outliers or noise are among the crucial issues,which are directly correlated with IoT infrastructures,as most member devices are resource-limited and could generate or transmit false data that is required to be refined before processing,i.e.,transmitting.Therefore,the development of privacy-preserving information fusion techniques is highly encouraged,especially those designed for smart IoT-enabled domains.In this paper,we are going to present an effective hybrid approach that can refine raw data values captured by the respectivemember device before transmission while preserving its privacy through the utilization of the differential privacy technique in IoT infrastructures.Sliding window,i.e.,δi based dynamic programming methodology,is implemented at the device level to ensure precise and accurate detection of outliers or noisy data,and refine it prior to activation of the respective transmission activity.Additionally,an appropriate privacy budget has been selected,which is enough to ensure the privacy of every individualmodule,i.e.,a wearable device such as a smartwatch attached to the patient’s body.In contrast,the end module,i.e.,the server in this case,can extract important information with approximately the maximum level of accuracy.Moreover,refined data has been processed by adding an appropriate nose through the Laplace mechanism to make it useless or meaningless for the adversary modules in the IoT.The proposed hybrid approach is trusted from both the device’s privacy and the integrity of the transmitted information perspectives.Simulation and analytical results have proved that the proposed privacy-preserving information fusion technique for wearable devices is an ideal solution for resource-constrained infrastructures such as IoT and the Internet ofMedical Things,where both device privacy and information integrity are important.Finally,the proposed hybrid approach is proven against well-known intruder attacks,especially those related to the privacy of the respective device in IoT infrastructures.

Robust Machine Learning Technique to Classify COVID-19 Using Fusion of Texture and Vesselness of X-Ray Images

Manual investigation of chest radiography(CXR)images by physicians is crucial for effective decision-making in COVID-19 diagnosis.However,the high demand during the pandemic necessitates auxiliary help through image analysis and machine learning techniques.This study presents a multi-threshold-based segmentation technique to probe high pixel intensity regions in CXR images of various pathologies,including normal cases.Texture information is extracted using gray co-occurrence matrix(GLCM)-based features,while vessel-like features are obtained using Frangi,Sato,and Meijering filters.Machine learning models employing Decision Tree(DT)and RandomForest(RF)approaches are designed to categorize CXR images into common lung infections,lung opacity(LO),COVID-19,and viral pneumonia(VP).The results demonstrate that the fusion of texture and vesselbased features provides an effective ML model for aiding diagnosis.The ML model validation using performance measures,including an accuracy of approximately 91.8%with an RF-based classifier,supports the usefulness of the feature set and classifier model in categorizing the four different pathologies.Furthermore,the study investigates the importance of the devised features in identifying the underlying pathology and incorporates histogrambased analysis.This analysis reveals varying natural pixel distributions in CXR images belonging to the normal,COVID-19,LO,and VP groups,motivating the incorporation of additional features such as mean,standard deviation,skewness,and percentile based on the filtered images.Notably,the study achieves a considerable improvement in categorizing COVID-19 from LO,with a true positive rate of 97%,further substantiating the effectiveness of the methodology implemented.