Elhadj Benkhelifa

Mohamed Shahawy, Elhadj Benkhelifa, David White

Despite the significant advances achieved in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), their design process remains notoriously tedious, depending primarily on intuition, experience and trial-and-error. This human-dependent process is often time-consuming and prone to errors. Furthermore, the models are generally bound to their training contexts, with no considerations to their surrounding environments. Continual adaptiveness and automation of neural networks is of paramount importance to several domains where model accessibility is limited after deployment (e.g IoT devices, self-driving vehicles, etc.). Additionally, even accessible models require frequent maintenance post-deployment to overcome issues such as Concept/Data Drift, which can be cumbersome and restrictive. By leveraging and combining approaches from Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and Continual Learning (CL), more robust and adaptive agents can be developed. This study conducts the first extensive review on the intersection between NAS and CL, formalizing the prospective Continually-Adaptive Neural Networks (CANNs) paradigm and outlining research directions for lifelong autonomous ANNs.

Ayat Abedalla, Malak Abdullah, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub et al.

Pneumothorax, also called a collapsed lung, refers to the presence of the air in the pleural space between the lung and chest wall. It can be small (no need for treatment), or large and causes death if it is not identified and treated on time. It is easily seen and identified by experts using a chest X-ray. Although this method is mostly error-free, it is time-consuming and needs expert radiologists. Recently, Computer Vision has been providing great assistance in detecting and segmenting pneumothorax. In this paper, we propose a 2-Stage Training system (2ST-UNet) to segment images with pneumothorax. This system is built based on U-Net with Residual Networks (ResNet-34) backbone that is pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. We start with training the network at a lower resolution before we load the trained model weights to retrain the network with a higher resolution. Moreover, we utilize different techniques including Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), data augmentation, and Test-Time Augmentation (TTA). We use the chest X-ray dataset that is provided by the 2019 SIIM-ACR Pneumothorax Segmentation Challenge, which contains 12,047 training images and 3,205 testing images. Our experiments show that 2-Stage Training leads to better and faster network convergence. Our method achieves 0.8356 mean Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) placing it among the top 9% of models with a rank of 124 out of 1,475.

Abdelkader Nasreddine Belkacem, Sofia Ouhbi, Abderrahmane Lakas et al.

Respiratory symptoms can be a caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms, including coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the factors that contributed to the spread of the pandemic, was the late diagnosis or confusing it with regular flu-like symptoms. Science has proved that one of the possible differentiators of the underlying causes of these different respiratory diseases is coughing, which comes in different types and forms. Therefore, a reliable lab-free tool for early and more accurate diagnosis that can differentiate between different respiratory diseases is very much needed. This paper proposes an end-to-end portable system that can record data from patients with symptom, including coughs (voluntary or involuntary) and translate them into health data for diagnosis, and with the aid of machine learning, classify them into different respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. With the ongoing efforts to stop the spread of the COVID-19 disease everywhere today, and against similar diseases in the future, our proposed low cost and user-friendly solution can play an important part in the early diagnosis.