HER-2/neu is a protein present on the surface of specific cancer cells and has been linked to the development and progression of certain cancer types. It is present in 15 to 20% of breast cancers and is clinically significant due to the availability of multiple anti-Her2 treatment options. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is the most commonly used method to evaluate and quantify the expression of Her-2/neu. Although IHC is well-standardized in clinical practice, it is still subjected to inter-observer variability. Automating Her-2/neu scoring can improve accuracy, efficiency, consistency, and cost-effectiveness while reducing pathologists' workload. A deep learning-based automatic framework was utilized for the automatic detection of Her-2/neu score from whole slide images (WSI). The framework consists of three phases: identification of tumor patches, scoring of tumor patches, and Her-2/neu score prediction for whole slide images (WSI) based on the distribution of each score. This work used the dataset from the University of Warwick HER2 challenge contest. Two expert pathologists evaluated all 86 WSIs and assigned Her-2/neu scores to them. In addition, patches were generated from 50 WSIs and annotated individually by the pathologists. A total of 6641 extracted patches were generated out of which, 947 were labeled as 0, 327 as 1+, 1401 as 2+, 2950 as 3+, and 1016 were marked for discarding. Four pre-trained image classification models, namely DenseNet201, GoogleNet, MobileNet_v2, and a Vision Transformer based model, were fine-tuned, and tested on the generated patches. In order to predict the Her-2/neu score of the entire WSI, a random forest classifier was trained to predict the Her-2/neu score from the percentages of patches of each score present in the whole slide image. In patch classification performances, the vision transformer-based model outperformed the other models by achieving an accuracy of 92.6% on tumor patch classification and 91.15% on patch score classification. The random forest classifier achieved an accuracy of 88% on four scores (0, 1+, 2+ and 3+) classification and 96% on three score classification (0/1+, 2+ and 3+). The proposed deep learning-based framework for the automatic detection and evaluation of Her-2/neu expression in breast cancer obtained encouraging results. This framework has the potential to be used as a prognostic tool, providing a cost-effective and time-efficient alternative for generating clinically relevant results. However, additional research is required to assess the applicability of this pipeline in different contexts.

Abstract Nowadays, quick, and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 is a pressing need. This study presents a multimodal system to meet this need. The presented system employs a machine learning module that learns the required knowledge from the datasets collected from 930 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Italy during the first wave of COVID-19 (March–June 2020). The dataset consists of twenty-five biomarkers from electronic health record and Chest X-ray (CXR) images. It is found that the system can diagnose low- or high-risk patients with an accuracy, sensitivity, and F1-score of 89.03%, 90.44%, and 89.03%, respectively. The system exhibits 6% higher accuracy than the systems that employ either CXR images or biomarker data. In addition, the system can calculate the mortality risk of high-risk patients using multivariate logistic regression-based nomogram scoring technique. Interested physicians can use the presented system to predict the early mortality risks of COVID-19 patients using the web-link: Covid-severity-grading-AI. In this case, a physician needs to input the following information: CXR image file, Lactate Dehydrogenase (LDH), Oxygen Saturation (O2%), White Blood Cells Count, C-reactive protein, and Age. This way, this study contributes to the management of COVID-19 patients by predicting early mortality risk.

The semantic word similarity task aims to quantify the degree of similarity between a pair of words. In literature, efforts have been made to create standard evaluation resources to develop, evaluate, and compare various methods for semantic word similarity. The majority of these efforts focused on English and some other languages. However, the problem of semantic word similarity has not been thoroughly explored for South Asian languages, particularly Urdu. To fill this gap, this study presents a large benchmark corpus of 518 word pairs for the Urdu semantic word similarity task, which were manually annotated by 12 annotators. To demonstrate how our proposed corpus can be used for the development and evaluation of Urdu semantic word similarity systems, we applied two state-of-the-art methods: (1) a word embedding–based method and (2) a Sentence Transformer–based method. As another major contribution, we proposed a feature fusion method based on Sentence Transformers and word embedding methods. The best results were obtained using our proposed feature fusion method (the combination of best features of both methods) with a Pearson correlation score of 0.67. To foster research in Urdu (an under-resourced language), our proposed corpus will be free and publicly available for research purposes.

Semantic word similarity is a quantitative measure of how much two words are contextually similar. Evaluation of semantic word similarity models requires a benchmark corpus. However, despite the millions of speakers and the large digital text of the Urdu language on the Internet, there is a lack of benchmark corpus for the Cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity task for the Urdu language. This article reports our efforts in developing such a corpus. The newly developed corpus is based on the SemEval-2017 task 2 English dataset, and it contains 1,945 cross-lingual English–Urdu word pairs. For each of these pairs of words, semantic similarity scores were assigned by 11 native Urdu speakers. In addition to corpus generation, this article also reports the evaluation results of a baseline approach, namely “Translation Plus Monolingual Analysis” for automated identification of semantic similarity between English–Urdu word pairs. The results showed that the path length similarity measure performs better for the Google and Bing translated words. The newly created corpus and evaluation results are freely available online for further research and development.

Gamification is the use of game elements in domains other than games. Gamification use is often suggested for difficult activities because it enhances users’ engagement and motivation level. Due to such benefits, the use of gamification is also proposed in education environments to improve students’ performance, engagement, and satisfaction. Computer science in higher education is a tough area of study and thus needs to utilize various already explored benefits of gamification. This research develops an empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of gamification in teaching computer science in higher education. Along with the learning outcomes, the effect of group size on students’ satisfaction level is also measured. Furthermore, the impact of gamification over time is analyzed throughout a semester to observe its effectiveness as a long-term learning technique. The analysis, covering both learning outcome and students’ satisfaction, suggests that gamification is an effective tool to teach tough courses at higher education level; however, group size should be taken into account for optimal classroom size and better learning experience.

This paper proposes a novel multidomain features-based genetic algorithm (GA) optimized artificial immune system (AIS) framework for fault detection in real systems. Different from native real-valued negative selection algorithm (RNSA) that operates in original data space, this algorithm utilizes feature space transformation and diversity factor-based GA for optimized detector distribution in nonself feature space. The proposed framework comprises three stages namely; feature extraction, unsupervised feature selection, and GA optimized AIS. In the first stage, signal processing methods are applied to extract multidomain features (time-domain statistical, frequency domain statistical, and special features) of the system. In the second stage, two unsupervised methods namely, k-NN clustering and pretraining using deep learning neural network are proposed for dominant fault-characterizing feature selection. Finally, in the third stage, the fault-characterizing feature vectors are used for system status categorization (i.e., normal, fault) using selected (fault-characterizing) features-based AIS method. The efficacy of the proposed framework is verified through experiments on motor bearing fault detection using vibration signal. The major accomplishment of the proposed combination of space transformation, feature selection and AIS (anomaly classification) techniques is the alleviation of computational burden on RNSA implementation. Moreover, GA optimized AIS fault diagnosis based on well-established features gives improved detection performance.

We present a novel unsupervised fall detection system that employs the collected acoustic signals (footstep sound signals) from an elderly person׳s normal activities to construct a data description model to distinguish falls from non-falls. The measured acoustic signals are initially processed with a source separation (SS) technique to remove the possible interferences from other background sound sources. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features are next extracted from the processed signals and used to construct a data description model based on a one class support vector machine (OCSVM) method, which is finally applied to distinguish fall from non-fall sounds. Experiments on a recorded dataset confirm that our proposed fall detection system can achieve better performance, especially with high level of interference from other sound sources, as compared with existing single microphone based methods.

In this work we propose a new binaural spectral subtraction method for the suppression of late reverberation. The proposed approach is a cascade of three stages. The first two stages exploit distinct observations to model and suppress the late reverberation by deriving a gain function. The musical noise artifacts generated due to the processing at each stage are compensated by smoothing the spectral magnitudes of the weighting gains. The third stage linearly combines the gains obtained from the first two stages and further enhances the binaural signals. The binaural gains, obtained by independently processing the left and right channel signals are combined using a new method. Experiments on real data are performed in two contexts: dereverberation-only and joint dereverberation and source separation. Objective results verify the suitability of the proposed cascaded approach in both the contexts.

Source separation algorithms that utilize only audio data can perform poorly if multiple sources or reverberation are present. In this paper we therefore propose a video-aided model-based source separation algorithm for a two-channel reverberant recording in which the sources are assumed static. By exploiting cues from video, we first localize individual speech sources in the enclosure and then estimate their directions. The interaural spatial cues, the interaural phase difference and the interaural level difference, as well as the mixing vectors are probabilistically modeled. The models make use of the source direction information and are evaluated at discrete time-frequency points. The model parameters are refined with the well-known expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The algorithm outputs time-frequency masks that are used to reconstruct the individual sources. Simulation results show that by utilizing the visual modality the proposed algorithm can produce better time-frequency masks thereby giving improved source estimates. We provide experimental results to test the proposed algorithm in different scenarios and provide comparisons with both other audio-only and audio-visual algorithms and achieve improved performance both on synthetic and real data. We also include dereverberation based pre-processing in our algorithm in order to suppress the late reverberant components from the observed stereo mixture and further enhance the overall output of the algorithm. This advantage makes our algorithm a suitable candidate for use in under-determined highly reverberant settings where the performance of other audio-only and audio-visual methods is limited.

A novel multimodal source separation approach is proposed for physically moving and stationary sources which exploits a circular microphone array, multiple video cameras, robust spatial beamforming and time-frequency masking. The challenge of separating moving sources, including higher reverberation time (RT) even for physically stationary sources, is that the mixing filters are time varying; as such the unmixing filters should also be time varying but these are difficult to determine from only audio measurements. Therefore in the proposed approach, visual modality is used to facilitate the separation for both stationary and moving sources. The movement of the sources is detected by a three-dimensional tracker based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo particle filter. The audio separation is performed by a robust least squares frequency invariant data-independent beamformer. The uncertainties in source localisation and direction of arrival information obtained from the 3D video-based tracker are controlled by using a convex optimisation approach in the beamformer design. In the final stage, the separated audio sources are further enhanced by applying a binary time-frequency masking technique in the cepstral domain. Experimental results show that using the visual modality, the proposed algorithm cannot only achieve performance better than conventional frequency-domain source separations algorithms, but also provide acceptable separation performance for moving sources.