Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
RBS-Net: Hippocampus segmentation using multi-layer feature learning with the region, boundary and structure loss

Hippocampus has great influence over the Alzheimer's disease (AD) research because of its essential role as a biomarker in the human brain. Thus the performance of hippocampus segmentation influences the development of clinical research for brain disorders. Deep learning using U-net-like networks becomes prevalent in hippocampus segmentation on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) due to its efficiency and accuracy. However, current methods lose sufficient detailed information during pooling, which hinders the segmentation results. And weak supervision on the details like edges or positions results in fuzzy and coarse boundary segmentation, causing great differences between the segmentation and ground-truth. In view of these drawbacks, we propose a Region-Boundary and Structure Net (RBS-Net), which consists of a primary net and an auxiliary net. (1) Our primary net focuses on the region distribution of hippocampus and introduces a distance map for boundary supervision. Furthermore the primary net adds a multi-layer feature learning module to compensate the information loss during pooling and strengthen the differences between the foreground and background, improving the region and boundary segmentation. (2) The auxiliary net concentrates on the structure similarity and also utilizes the multi-layer feature learning module, and this parallel task can refine encoders by similarizing the structure of the segmentation and ground-truth. We train and test our network using 5-fold cross-validation on HarP, a public available hippocampus dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed RBS-Net achieves a Dice of 89.76% in average, outperforming several state-of-the-art hippocampus segmentation methods. Furthermore, in few shot circumstances, our proposed RBS-Net achieves better results in terms of a comprehensive evaluation compared to several state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods. Finally we can observe that visual segmentation results for the boundary and detailed regions are improved by our proposed RBS-Net.
Impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) countries

Purpose This paper aims to assess the impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). This paper evaluates the dynamic relationship between digital financial innovation measures and financial system development using time series data from COMESA countries for the period 1997–2019. Design/methodology/approach A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) was adopted and the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG) and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) of the model were estimated to evaluate the short- and long-run impact. In addition, the dynamic generalized method of moments (DGMM) was adopted for a robustness check. The Hausman test results show PMG to be the most consistent and efficient estimator, while the coefficient of lagged dependent variable of different GMM is less than the fixed effect coefficient, and, as such, suggests system GMM is the most suitable estimator. Data for the study were sourced from World Bank Development Indicator (WDI, 2020), World Governance Indicator (WGI, 2020) and World Bank Global Financial Development Database (GFD, 2020). Findings The result shows that digital financial innovation significantly impacts financial system development in the long run. As such, the evidence revealed that automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS), mobile payments (MP) and mobile banking are significant and contribute positively to financial system development in the long run, while mobile money (MM) and Internet banking (INB) are insignificant but exhibit positive and inverse relationship with financial development respectively. Further investigation revealed that institutional quality and a stable macroeconomic environment including their interactive term are significantly imperative in predicting financial system development in the COMESA region. Practical implications Researchers recommend a cohesive and conscious policy that would checkmate the divergence in the short run and suggest a common regional innovative financial strategy that could be pursued to incentivize technology transfer needed to promote financial system development in the long run. More so, plausible product and process innovations may be adapted to complement innovative institutions in the different components of the COMESA financial system. Social implications Digital financial innovation services if well managed increase the inherent benefits in financial system development. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents new background information on digital financial innovation that may stimulate the development of the financial system, particularly in the COMESA region. It also exposes the relevance of digital financial innovation, institutional quality and stable macroeconomic environment as well as their interactive effect on COMESA financial system development.
Transformer-Based Approach Via Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Detection

Zero-shot detection (ZSD) aims to locate and classify unseen objects in pictures or videos by semantic auxiliary information without additional training examples. Most of the existing ZSD methods are based on two-stage models, which achieve the detection of unseen classes by aligning object region proposals with semantic embeddings. However, these methods have several limitations, including poor region proposals for unseen classes, lack of consideration of semantic representations of unseen classes or their inter-class correlations, and domain bias towards seen classes, which can degrade overall performance. To address these issues, the Trans-ZSD framework is proposed, which is a transformer-based multi-scale contextual detection framework that explicitly exploits inter-class correlations between seen and unseen classes and optimizes feature distribution to learn discriminative features. Trans-ZSD is a single-stage approach that skips proposal generation and performs detection directly, allowing the encoding of long-term dependencies at multiple scales to learn contextual features while requiring fewer inductive biases. Trans-ZSD also introduces a foreground–background separation branch to alleviate the confusion of unseen classes and backgrounds, contrastive learning to learn inter-class uniqueness and reduce misclassification between similar classes, and explicit inter-class commonality learning to facilitate generalization between related classes. Trans-ZSD addresses the domain bias problem in end-to-end generalized zero-shot detection (GZSD) models by using balance loss to maximize response consistency between seen and unseen predictions, ensuring that the model does not bias towards seen classes. The Trans-ZSD framework is evaluated on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing ZSD models.
Assessment of experimental OpenCV tracking algorithms for ultrasound videos

This study aims to compare the tracking algorithms provided by the OpenCV library to use on ultrasound video. Despite the widespread application of this computer vision library, few works describe the attempts to use it to track the movement of liver tumors on ultrasound video. Movements of the neoplasms caused by the patient`s breath interfere with the positioning of the instruments during the process of biopsy and radio-frequency ablation. The main hypothesis of the experiment was that tracking neoplasms and correcting the position of the manipulator in case of using robotic-assisted surgery will allow positioning the instruments more precisely. Another goal of the experiment was to check if it is possible to ensure real-time tracking with at least 25 processed frames per second for standard definition video. OpenCV version 4.5.0 was used with 7 tracking algorithms from the extra modules package. They are: Boosting, CSRT, KCF, MedianFlow, MIL, MOSSE, TLD. More than 5600 frames of standard definition were processed during the experiment. Analysis of the results shows that two algorithms-CSRT and KCF-could solve the problem of tumor tracking. They lead the test with 70% and more of Intersection over Union and more than 85% successful searches. They could also be used in real-time processing with an average processing speed of up to frames per second in CSRT and 100 + frames per second for KCF. Tracking results reach the average deviation between centers of neoplasms to 2 mm and maximum deviation less than 5 mm. This experiment also shows that no frames made CSRT and KCF algorithms fail simultaneously. So, the hypothesis for future work is combining these algorithms to work together, with one of them-CSRT-as support for the KCF tracker on the rarely failed frames.
Healthcare: In the Era of Blockchain

Blockchain technology has gained recognition for its capability to enhance security, reliability, and robustness of distributed systems. Blockchain has been well recognized for its potential applications in the different sectors. Over the last few years, this technology has gained popularity and has permeated a number of different sectors. Decentralized and distributed environments can be created through this technology without a central authority. Healthcare is one of the most important application areas where blockchain is expected to have a significant impact, among others. It has allowed for more effective and efficient patient care administration. It aided in the development of the next era of healthcare environment. Blockchain helped this sector due to its useful characteristics which are peer-to-peer, protected, and transparent technologies. As blockchain allows for transparent data inspection, permitted data access, and immutability, it can be used to handle health records in a secure manner.
Software Effort Estimation using Machine Learning Technique

Software engineering effort estimation plays a significant role in managing project cost, quality, and time and creating software.Researchers have been paying close attention to software estimation during the past few decades, and a great amount of work has been done utilizing a variety of machinelearning techniques and algorithms.In order to better effectively evaluate predictions, this study recommends various machine learning algorithms for estimating, including k-nearest neighbor regression, support vector regression, and decision trees.These methods are now used by the software development industry for software estimating with the goal of overcoming the limitations of parametric and conventional estimation techniques and advancing projects.Our dataset, which was created by a software company called Edusoft Consulted LTD, was used to assess the effectiveness of the established method.The three commonly used performance evaluation measures, mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), and R square error, represent the base for these.Comparative experimental results demonstrate that decision trees perform better at predicting effort than other techniques.
Using AraGPT and ensemble deep learning model for sentiment analysis on Arabic imbalanced dataset

With the fast growth of mobile technology, social media has become important for people to share their thoughts and feelings. Businesses and governments can make better strategic decisions when they know what the public thinks. Because of this, sentiment analysis is an important tool for figuring out how different people’s opinions are. This article presents a deeplearning ensemble model for sentiment analysis. The ensemble model proposed consists of three deep-learning models, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), as base classifiers. AraBERT is responsible for presenting the textual input data into representative embeddings. The stacking ensemble model then captures the long-range dependencies in the embedding for a given class. As a meta-classifier, Support Vector Machine (SVM) then combines the predictions made by the stacking deep learning model. In addition, data augmentation with AraGPT was implemented to address the imbalanced dataset issues. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models with an accuracy of 88.89%, 90.88%, and 88.23% on the HARD, BRAD, and Twitter datasets, respectively.
XAI–reduct: accuracy preservation despite dimensionality reduction for heart disease classification using explainable AI

Machine learning (ML) has been used for classification of heart diseases for almost a decade, although understanding of the internal working of the black boxes, i.e., non-interpretable models, remain a demanding problem. Another major challenge in such ML models is the curse of dimensionality leading to resource intensive classification using the comprehensive set of feature vector (CFV). This study focuses on dimensionality reduction using explainable artificial intelligence, without negotiating on accuracy for heart disease classification. Four explainable ML models, using SHAP, were used for classification which reflected the feature contributions (FC) and feature weights (FW) for each feature in the CFV for generating the final results. FC and FW were taken into account in generating the reduced dimensional feature subset (FS). The findings of the study are as follows: (a) XGBoost classifies heart diseases best with explanations, with an increase in 2% in model accuracy over existing best proposals, (b) explainable classification using FS exhibits better accuracy than most of the literary proposals, and (c) with the increase in explainability, accuracy can be preserved using XGBoost classifier for classifying heart diseases, and (d) the top four features responsible for diagnosis of heart disease have been exhibited which have common occurrences in all the explanations reflected by the five explainable techniques used on XGBoost classifier based on feature contributions. To the best of our knowledge, this is first attempt to explain XGBoost classification for diagnosis of heart diseases using five explainable techniques.
Use of digital technologies for public health surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic: A scoping review

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a variety of digital technologies have been leveraged for public health surveillance worldwide. However, concerns remain around the rapid development and deployment of digital technologies, how these technologies have been used, and their efficacy in supporting public health goals. Following the five-stage scoping review framework, we conducted a scoping review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature to identify the types and nature of digital technologies used for surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of these measures. We conducted a search of the peer-reviewed and grey literature published between 1 December 2019 and 31 December 2020 to provide a snapshot of questions, concerns, discussions, and findings emerging at this pivotal time. A total of 147 peer-reviewed and 79 grey literature publications reporting on digital technology use for surveillance across 90 countries and regions were retained for analysis. The most frequently used technologies included mobile phone devices and applications, location tracking technologies, drones, temperature scanning technologies, and wearable devices. The utility of digital technologies for public health surveillance was impacted by factors including uptake of digital technologies across targeted populations, technological capacity and errors, scope, validity and accuracy of data, guiding legal frameworks, and infrastructure to support technology use. Our findings raise important questions around the value of digital surveillance for public health and how to ensure successful use of technologies while mitigating potential harms not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also during other infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics.
Role of federated learning in healthcare systems: A survey

Nowadays, machine learning affects practically every industry, but the effectiveness of these systems depends on the accessibility of training data sets.Every device now produces data, and that data can serve as the foundation for upcoming technologies.Traditional machine learning systems need centralised data for their training, but the availability of valid and good amounts of data is not always possible due to various privacy risks.But federated learning can solve this issue [78].In a federated learning (FL) environment, a model can be trained on decentralised datasets by involving a large number of participants, such as mobile devices or entire enterprises.Researchers are using this technique in various fields and getting great responses.The importance of using federated learning in the healthcare industry is highlighted in this paper since there is a wealth of data available in hospitals or electronic health records that may be used to train medical systems but cannot be shared due to privacy issues.The main contribution of this paper is to highlight the role of federated learning in the medical field.It also presents a list of frameworks available to implement federated learning models.The paper also listed the evaluation metrics used to check the efficiency of a federated learning model.Broadly used evaluation metrics are accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score.Open issues for research in this area are also discussed at the end of this paper.
EfficientNet - XGBoost: An Effective White-Blood-Cell Segmentation and Classification Framework

In the human body, white blood cells (WBCs) are crucial immune cells that help in the early detection of a variety of illnesses.Determination of the number of WBCs can be used to diagnose conditions such as hematological, immunological, and autoimmune diseases, as well as AIDS and leukemia.However, the conventional method of classifying and counting WBCs is time-consuming, laborious, and potentially erroneous.Therefore, this paper presents a computer-assisted automated method for recognizing and detecting WBC categories from blood images.Initially, the blood cell image is preprocessed and then segmented using an effective deep learning architecture called SegNet.Then, the important features are devised and extracted using the EfficientNet architecture.Finally, the WBCs are categorized into four different types using the XGBoost classifier: neutrophils, eosinophils, monocytes, and lymphocytes.The advantages of SegNet, EfficientNet, and XGBoost make the proposed model more robust and achieve a more efficient classification of the WBCs.The BCCD dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, and the findings are compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches based on accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score.Evaluation results show that the proposed approach has a higher rank-1 accuracy of 99.02% and outperformed other existing techniques.
Development of an augmented reality simulator for a robotic system used in single incision laparoscopic surgery

Augmented Reality (AR) became a very useful tool for various domains, with multiple applications in different medical fields, where this technology is integrated in medical training, image-based diagnosis, simulation of medical tasks, or in guiding systems for surgical procedures. The introduction of AR technology in robotic assisted surgery is relatively new and challenging considering the required precision for this type of medical task. The objective of this study is to develop an AR simulator for robotic assisted Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS) where the robot performing the procedure is embedded in a virtual environment, providing both an interactive training and a simulation environment. The architecture and particularities of the proposed robot for SILS are analyzed for a better understanding of the structure, to obtain the validation of the kinematic model. The final result is represented in the form of an application which can be operated with Hololens 2 device.
Blood Slide Image Analysis to Classify WBC Types for Prediction Haematology Based on a Hybrid Model of CNN and Handcrafted Features

White blood cells (WBCs) are one of the main components of blood produced by the bone marrow. WBCs are part of the immune system that protects the body from infectious diseases and an increase or decrease in the amount of any type that causes a particular disease. Thus, recognizing the WBC types is essential for diagnosing the patient's health and identifying the disease. Analyzing blood samples to determine the amount and WBC types requires experienced doctors. Artificial intelligence techniques were applied to analyze blood samples and classify their types to help doctors distinguish between types of infectious diseases due to increased or decreased WBC amounts. This study developed strategies for analyzing blood slide images to classify WBC types. The first strategy is to classify WBC types by the SVM-CNN technique. The second strategy for classifying WBC types is by SVM based on hybrid CNN features, which are called VGG19-ResNet101-SVM, ResNet101-MobileNet-SVM, and VGG19-ResNet101-MobileNet-SVM techniques. The third strategy for classifying WBC types by FFNN is based on a hybrid model of CNN and handcrafted features. With MobileNet and handcrafted features, FFNN achieved an AUC of 99.43%, accuracy of 99.80%, precision of 99.75%, specificity of 99.75%, and sensitivity of 99.68%.
A new hybrid model of convolutional neural networks and hidden Markov chains for image classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have lately proven to be extremely effective in image recognition. Besides CNN, hidden Markov chains (HMCs) are probabilistic models widely used in image processing. This paper presents a new hybrid model composed of both CNNs and HMCs. The CNN model is used for feature extraction and dimensionality reduction and the HMC model for classification. In the new model, named CNN-HMC, convolutional and pooling layers of the CNN model are applied to extract features maps. Also a Peano scan is applied to obtain several HMCs. Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate HMC's parameters and to make the Bayesian Maximum Posterior Mode (MPM) classification method used unsupervised. The objective is to enhance the performances of the CNN models for the image classification task. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, it is compared to six models in two series of experiments. In the first series, we consider two CNN-HMC and compare them to two CNNs, 4Conv and Mini AlexNet, respectively. The results show that CNN-HMC model outperforms the classical CNN model, and significantly improves the accuracy of the Mini AlexNet. In the second series, it is compared to four models CNN-SVMs, CNN-LSTMs, CNN-RFs, and CNN-gcForests, which only differ from CNN-HMC by the second classification step. Based on five datasets and four metrics recall, precision, F1-score, and accuracy, results of these comparisons show again the interest of the proposed CNN-HMC. In particular, with a CNN model of 71% of accuracy, the CNN-HMC gives an accuracy ranging between 81.63% and 92.5%.