Our findings suggest that the combination of fetal and postnatal renal pelvic dilatation is able to increase the diagnostic accuracy for detecting infants who need a more comprehensive postnatal investigation for upper urinary tract obstruction.
The pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) which is related to new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has mobilized several scientifics to explore clinical data using soft-computing approaches. In the context of machine learning, previous studies have explored supervised algorithms to predict and support diagnosis based on several clinical parameters from patients diagnosed with and without COVID-19. However, in most of them the decision is based on a "black-box" method, making it impossible to discover the variable relevance in decision making. Hence, in this study, we introduce a non-supervised clustering analysis with neural network self-organizing maps (SOM) as a strategy of decision-making. We propose to identify potential variables in routine blood tests that can support clinician decision-making during COVID-19 diagnosis at hospital admission, facilitating rapid medical intervention. Based on SOM features (visual relationships between clusters and identification of patterns and behaviors), and using linear discriminant analysis , it was possible to detect a group of units of the map with a discrimination power around 83% to SARS-CoV-2-positive patients. In addition, we identified some variables in admission blood tests (Leukocytes, Basophils, Eosinophils, and Red cell Distribution Width) that, in combination had strong influence in the clustering performance, which could assist a possible clinical decision. Thus, although with limitations, we believe that SOM can be used as a soft-computing approach to support clinician decision-making in the context of COVID-19. Keywords Covid-19 diagnostic • SARS-CoV-2 • Self-organizing maps Communicated by Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque.
Industry is constantly seeking ways to avoid corrective maintenance so as to reduce costs. Performing regular scheduled maintenance can help to mitigate this problem, but not necessarily in the most efficient way. In the context of condition-based maintenance, the main contributions of this work were to propose a methodology to treat and transform the collected data from a vibration system that simulated a motor and to build a dataset to train and test an Artificial Neural Network capable of predicting the future condition of the equipment, pointing out when a failure can happen. To achieve this goal, a device model was built to simulate typical motor vibrations, consisting of a computer cooler fan and several magnets. Measurements were made using an accelerometer, and the data were collected and processed to produce a structured dataset. The neural network training with this dataset converged quickly and stably, while the tests performed, k-fold cross-validation and model generalization, presented excellent performance. The same tests were performed with other machine learning techniques, to demonstrate the effectiveness of neural networks mainly in their generalizability. The results of the work confirm that it is possible to use neural networks to perform predictive tasks in relation to the conditions of industrial equipment. This is an important area of study that helps to support the growth of smart industries.
Classification is a common task that humans perform when making a decision. Techniques of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) or statistics are used to help in an automatic classification. This work addresses a method based in Self-Organizing Maps ANN (SOM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) statistical classifier, called SOM-KNN, applied to digits recognition in car plates. While being much faster than more traditional methods, the proposed SOM-KNN keeps competitive classification rates with respect to them. The experiments here presented contrast SOM-KNN with individual classifiers, SOM and KNN, and the results are classification rates of 89.48±5.6, 84.23±5.9 and 91.03±5.1 percent, respectively. The equivalency between SOM-KNN and KNN recognition results are confirmed with ANOVA test, which shows a p-value of 0.27.
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