Background and Objective. To mitigate the spread of the virus responsible for COVID-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, there is an urgent need for massive population testing. Due to the constant shortage of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test reagents, which are the tests for COVID-19 by excellence, several medical centers have opted for immunological tests to look for the presence of antibodies produced against this virus. However, these tests have a high rate of false positives (positive but actually negative test results) and false negatives (negative but actually positive test results) and are therefore not always reliable. In this paper, we proposed a solution based on Data Analysis and Machine Learning to detect COVID-19 infections. Methods. Our analysis and machine learning algorithm is based on most cited two clinical datasets from the literature: one from San Raffaele Hospital Milan Italia and the other from Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein São Paulo Brasilia. The datasets were processed to select the best features that most influence the target, and it turned out that almost all of them are blood parameters. EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) methods were applied to the datasets, and a comparative study of supervised machine learning models was done, after which the support vector machine (SVM) was selected as the one with the best performance. Results. SVM being the best performant is used as our proposed supervised machine learning algorithm. An accuracy of 99.29%, sensitivity of 92.79%, and specificity of 100% were obtained with the dataset from Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/einsteindata4u/covid19) after applying optimization to SVM. The same procedure and work were performed with the dataset taken from San Raffaele Hospital (https://zenodo.org/record/3886927#.YIluB5AzbMV). Once more, the SVM presented the best performance among other machine learning algorithms, and 92.86%, 93.55%, and 90.91% for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, respectively, were obtained. Conclusion. The obtained results, when compared with others from the literature based on these same datasets, are superior, leading us to conclude that our proposed solution is reliable for the COVID-19 diagnosis.

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In this paper we have introduced and investigated the collective behavior of a network of memristive Hindmarsh-Rose (HR) neurons. The proposed model was built considering the memristive autapse of the traditional 2D HR neuron. Using the one-parameter bifurcation diagram and its corresponding maximal Lyapunov exponent graph, we showed that the proposed model was able to exhibit a reverse period doubling route to chaos, phenomenon of interior and exterior crises. Three different configurations of the ring-star network of the memristive HR neuron model, including ring-star, ring, and star, have been considered. The study of those network configurations revealed incoherent, coherent , chimera and cluster state behaviors. Coherent behavior is characterized by synchronization of the neurons of the network, while incoherent behaviors are characterized by the absence of synchronization. Chimera states refer to a differet state where there is a coexistence of synchroniaed and asynchronized nodes of the network. One of the interesting result of the paper is the prevalence of double-well chimera states in both ring and ring-star network and has been first mentioned in the case of memrisitve HR neuron model.

Contour is an important pattern descriptor in image processing and particularly in region description, registration and length estimation. In many applications where contour is used, a good segmentation and an efficient smoothing method are needed. In X-ray images, such as mammograms, where object edge is not clearly discernible, estimating the object's contour may yield substantial shift along the boundary due to noise or segmentation drawbacks. An appropriate smoothing is therefore required to reduce these effects. In this paper, an approach based on local adaptive threshold segmentation to extract contour and a new smoothing approach founded on Fourier descriptors are introduced. The experimental results of extraction obtained from a set of mammograms and compared with the breast regions delineated by radiologists yielded a percent overlap area of 98.7% ± 0.9% with false positive and negative rates of 0.36 ± 0.74 and 0.93 ± 0.44 respectively. The proposed method was tested on a set of images and improved the accuracy, leading to an average error of less than one pixel.

A mammogram is the standard modality used for breast cancer screening. Computer-aided detection (CAD) approaches are helpful for improving breast cancer detection rates when applied to mammograms. However, automated analysis of a mammogram often leads to inaccurate results in the presence of the pectoral muscle. Therefore, it is necessary to first handle pectoral muscle segmentation separately before any further analysis of a mammogram. One difficulty to overcome when segmenting out pectoral muscle is its strong overlapping with dense glandular tissue which tampers with its extraction. This paper introduces an automated two-step approach for pectoral muscle extraction. The pectoral region is firstly estimated through segmentation by mean of a modified Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm. After contour validation, the final boundary is delineated through iterative refinement of edge point using average gradient. The proposed method is quite simple in implementation and yields accurate results. It was tested on a set of images from the MIAS database and yielded results which, compared to those of some state-of-the-art approaches, were better.

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This paper demonstrates the predictive superiority of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) over previously used methods of feature extraction in the diagnosis of epileptic seizures from EEG data. Classification accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity are used as evaluation metrics. We specifically show the immense potential of 2 combinations (DWT-db4 combined with SVM and DWT-db2 combined with RF) as compared to others when it comes to diagnosing epileptic seizures either in the balanced or the imbalanced dataset. The results also highlight that MFCC performs less than all the DWT used in this study and that, The mean-differences are statistically significant respectively in the imbalanced and balanced dataset. Finally, either in the balanced or the imbalanced dataset, the feature extraction techniques, the models, and the interaction between them have a statistically significant effect on the classification accuracy. ⋆ This document is the results of the research project funded by AIMS CAMEROON with the help of Mastercard Foundation. In this work, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of discrete wavelet transform over previously used methods of feature extraction in the diagnosis epileptic seizures from EEG data.

In this paper, we propose a new and simple method for image encryption. It uses an external secret key of 128 bits long and an internal secret key. The novelties of the proposed encryption process are the methods used to extract an internal key to apply the zigzag process, affine transformation, and substitution-diffusion process. Initially, an original gray-scale image is converted into binary images. An internal secret key is extracted from binary images. The two keys are combined to compute the substitution-diffusion keys. The zigzag process is firstly applied on each binary image. Using an external key, every zigzag binary image is reflected or rotated and a new gray-scale image is reconstructed. The new image is divided into many nonoverlapping subblocks, and each subblock uses its own key to take out a substitution-diffusion process. We tested our algorithms on many biomedical and nonmedical images. It is seen from evaluation metrics that the proposed image encryption scheme provides good statistical and diffusion properties and can resist many kinds of attacks. It is an efficient and secure scheme for real-time encryption and transmission of biomedical images in telemedicine.