Many health systems over the world have collapsed due to limited capacity and a dramatic increase of suspected COVID-19 cases. What has emerged is the need for finding an efficient, quick and accurate method to mitigate the overloading of radiologists’ efforts to diagnose the suspected cases. This study presents the combination of deep learning of extracted features with the Q-deformed entropy handcrafted features for discriminating between COVID-19 coronavirus, pneumonia and healthy computed tomography (CT) lung scans. In this study, pre-processing is used to reduce the effect of intensity variations between CT slices. Then histogram thresholding is used to isolate the background of the CT lung scan. Each CT lung scan undergoes a feature extraction which involves deep learning and a Q-deformed entropy algorithm. The obtained features are classified using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network classifier. Subsequently, combining all extracted features significantly improves the performance of the LSTM network to precisely discriminate between COVID-19, pneumonia and healthy cases. The maximum achieved accuracy for classifying the collected dataset comprising 321 patients is 99.68%.

This paper describes the development of an algorithm for detecting and classifying MRI brain slices into normal and abnormal by relying on prior-knowledge, that the two hemispheres of a healthy brain have approximately a bilateral symmetry. We use the modified grey level co-occurrence matrix method to analyze and measure asymmetry between the two brain hemispheres. 21 co-occurrence statistics are used to discriminate the images. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm in detecting brain abnormality with high accuracy and low computational time. The dataset used in the experiment comprises 165 patients with 88 patients having different brain abnormalities whilst the remainder do not exhibit any detectable pathology. The algorithm was tested using a tenfold cross-validation technique with 100 repetitions to avoid the result depending on the sample order. The maximum accuracy achieved for the brain tumors detection was 97.8% using a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network.

Progresses in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and medical imaging technologies have allowed the development of the medical image processing field with some astonishing results in the last two decades. These innovations enabled the clinicians to view the human body in highresolution or three-dimensional cross-sectional slices, which resulted in an increase in the accuracy of the diagnosis and the examination of patients in a non-invasive manner. The fundamental step for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans classifiers is their ability to extract meaningful features. As a result, many works have proposed different methods for features extraction to classify the abnormal growths in the brain MRI scans. More recently, the application of deep learning algorithms to medical imaging leads to impressive performance enhancements in classifying and diagnosing complicated pathologies, such as brain tumors. In this paper, a deep learning feature extraction algorithm is proposed to extract the relevant features from MRI brain scans. In parallel, handcrafted features are extracted using the modified gray level co-occurrence matrix (MGLCM) method. Subsequently, the extracted relevant features are combined with handcrafted features to improve the classification process of MRI brain scans with support vector machine (SVM) used as the classifier. The obtained results proved that the combination of the deep learning approach and the handcrafted features extracted by MGLCM improves the accuracy of classification of the SVM classifier up to 99.30%.

Brain tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered a complex procedure because of the variability of tumor shapes and the complexity of determining the tumor location, size, and texture. Manual tumor segmentation is a time-consuming task highly prone to human error. Hence, this study proposes an automated method that can identify tumor slices and segment the tumor across all image slices in volumetric MRI brain scans. First, a set of algorithms in the pre-processing stage is used to clean and standardize the collected data. A modified gray-level co-occurrence matrix and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) are employed for feature extraction and feature selection, respectively. A multi-layer perceptron neural network is adopted as a classifier, and a bounding 3D-box-based genetic algorithm is used to identify the location of pathological tissues in the MRI slices. Finally, the 3D active contour without edge is applied to segment the brain tumors in volumetric MRI scans. The experimental dataset consists of 165 patient images collected from the MRI Unit of Al-Kadhimiya Teaching Hospital in Iraq. Results of the tumor segmentation achieved an accuracy of 89% ± 4.7% compared with manual processes.

Each year, approximately 300,000 heart valve repair or replacement procedures are performed worldwide, including approximately 70,000 aortic valve replacement surgeries in the United States alone. Computational platforms for simulating cardiovascular devices such as prosthetic heart valves promise to improve device design and assist in treatment planning, including patient-specific device selection. This paper describes progress in constructing anatomically and physiologically realistic immersed boundary (IB) models of the dynamics of the aortic root and ascending aorta. This work builds on earlier IB models of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in the aortic root, which previously achieved realistic hemodynamics over multiple cardiac cycles, but which also were limited to simplified aortic geometries and idealized descriptions of the biomechanics of the aortic valve cusps. By contrast, the model described herein uses an anatomical geometry reconstructed from patient-specific computed tomography angiography (CTA) data, and employs a description of the elasticity of the aortic valve leaflets based on a fiber-reinforced constitutive model fit to experimental tensile test data. The resulting model generates physiological pressures in both systole and diastole, and yields realistic cardiac output and stroke volume at physiological Reynolds numbers. Contact between the valve leaflets during diastole is handled automatically by the IB method, yielding a fully competent valve model that supports a physiological diastolic pressure load without regurgitation. Numerical tests show that the model is able to resolve the leaflet biomechanics in diastole and early systole at practical grid spacings. The model is also used to examine differences in the mechanics and fluid dynamics yielded by fresh valve leaflets and glutaraldehyde-fixed leaflets similar to those used in bioprosthetic heart valves. Although there are large differences in the leaflet deformations during diastole, the differences in the open configurations of the valve models are relatively small, and nearly identical hemodynamics are obtained in all cases considered.

Medical practitioners should be aware of the range of complications that can occur in patients with MFS in addition to the normal ageing process. Health problems in MFS patients over 50 may require investigation and specific therapy earlier than in the normal ageing population, because of the degenerative nature of this genetic condition.

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