COVID-19 pandemic has created an extreme pressure on the global healthcare services. Fast, reliable, and early clinical assessment of the severity of the disease can help in allocating and prioritizing resources to reduce mortality. In order to study the important blood biomarkers for predicting disease mortality, a retrospective study was conducted on a dataset made public by Yan et al. in [1] of 375 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to Tongji Hospital (China) from January 10 to February 18, 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics and patient outcomes were investigated using machine learning tools to identify key biomarkers to predict the mortality of individual patient. A nomogram was developed for predicting the mortality risk among COVID-19 patients. Lactate dehydrogenase, neutrophils (%), lymphocyte (%), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, and age (LNLCA)—acquired at hospital admission—were identified as key predictors of death by multi-tree XGBoost model. The area under curve (AUC) of the nomogram for the derivation and validation cohort were 0.961 and 0.991, respectively. An integrated score (LNLCA) was calculated with the corresponding death probability. COVID-19 patients were divided into three subgroups: low-, moderate-, and high-risk groups using LNLCA cutoff values of 10.4 and 12.65 with the death probability less than 5%, 5–50%, and above 50%, respectively. The prognostic model, nomogram, and LNLCA score can help in early detection of high mortality risk of COVID-19 patients, which will help doctors to improve the management of patient stratification.

Healthcare researchers have been working on mortality prediction for COVID-19 patients with differing levels of severity. A rapid and reliable clinical evaluation of disease intensity will assist in the allocation and prioritization of mortality mitigation resources. The novelty of the work proposed in this paper is an early prediction model of high mortality risk for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, which provides state-of-the-art performance, in an external validation cohort from a different population. Retrospective research was performed on two separate hospital datasets from two different countries for model development and validation. In the first dataset, COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients were admitted to the emergency department in Boston (24 March 2020 to 30 April 2020), and in the second dataset, 375 COVID-19 patients were admitted to Tongji Hospital in China (10 January 2020 to 18 February 2020). The key parameters to predict the risk of mortality for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients were identified and a nomogram-based scoring technique was developed using the top-ranked five parameters. Age, Lymphocyte count, D-dimer, CRP, and Creatinine (ALDCC), information acquired at hospital admission, were identified by the logistic regression model as the primary predictors of hospital death. For the development cohort, and internal and external validation cohorts, the area under the curves (AUCs) were 0.987, 0.999, and 0.992, respectively. All the patients are categorized into three groups using ALDCC score and death probability: Low (probability < 5%), Moderate (5% < probability < 50%), and High (probability > 50%) risk groups. The prognostic model, nomogram, and ALDCC score will be able to assist in the early identification of both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients with high mortality risk, helping physicians to improve patient management.

Abstract-Real face recognition is a challenging problem especially when face images are subject to distortions. This paper presents an approach to tackle partial occlusion distortions present in real face recognition using a single training sample per person. First, original images are partitioned into multiple blocks and Local Binary Patterns are applied as a local descriptor on each block separately. Then, a dimensionality reduction of the resulting descriptors is carried out using Kernel Principle Component Analysis. Once done, a random sampling method is used to select patches at random and hence build several sub-SVM classifiers. Finally, the results from each sub-classifier are combined in order to increase the recognition performance. To demonstrate the usefulness of the approach, experiments were carried on the AR Face Database and obtained results have shown the effectiveness of our technique.

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The recent years have witnessed an increased tendency to digitize historical manuscripts that not only ensures the preservation of these collections but also allows researchers and end-users’ direct access to these images. Recognition of Arabic handwriting is challenging due to the highly cursive nature of the script and other challenges associated with historical documents (degradation etc.). This paper presents an end-to-end system to recognize Arabic handwritten sub words in historical documents. More specifically, we introduce a hybrid CNN-GRU model where the shallow convolutional network learns robust feature representations while the GRU layers carry out the sequence modelling and generate the transcription of the text. The proposed system is evaluated on two different datasets, IBN SINA and VML-HD reporting recognition rates of 96.10% and 98.60% respectively. A comparison with existing techniques evaluated on the same datasets validates the effectiveness of our proposed model in characterizing Arabic subwords.

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