With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the automated diagnosis has become one of the most trending topics of research for faster mass screening. Deep learning-based approaches have been established as the most promising methods in this regard. However, the limitation of the labeled data is the main bottleneck of the data-hungry deep learning methods. In this paper, a two-stage deep CNN based scheme is proposed to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images for achieving optimum performance with limited training images. In the first stage, an encoder-decoder based autoencoder network is proposed, trained on chest X-ray images in an unsupervised manner, and the network learns to reconstruct the X-ray images. An encoder-merging network is proposed for the second stage that consists of different layers of the encoder model followed by a merging network. Here the encoder model is initialized with the weights learned on the first stage and the outputs from different layers of the encoder model are used effectively by being connected to a proposed merging network. An intelligent feature merging scheme is introduced in the proposed merging network. Finally, the encoder-merging network is trained for feature extraction of the X-ray images in a supervised manner and resulting features are used in the classification layers of the proposed architecture. Considering the final classification task, an EfficientNet-B4 network is utilized in both stages. An end to end training is performed for datasets containing classes: COVID-19, Normal, Bacterial Pneumonia, Viral Pneumonia. The proposed method offers very satisfactory performances compared to the state of the art methods and achieves an accuracy of 90:13% on the 4-class, 96:45% on a 3-class, and 99:39% on 2-class classification. 

Radiology examination of chest radiography or chest X-ray (CXR), is currently performed manually by radiologists. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is now a need to automate this process which is currently one of the key methods of primary detection of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. This will lead to shorter diagnosis time and less human error. In this study, we try to perform three-class image classification on a dataset of chest X-rays of confirmed COVID-19 patients(408 images), confirmed pneumonia patients(4273 images), and chest X-rays of healthy people(1590 images). In total the dataset consists of 6271 people. We aim to use a Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) and transfer learning to perform this image classification task. Our model is based on a pre-trained InceptionV3 network with weights trained on the ImageNet dataset. We fine-tune the layers of the Inception network to train it to our specific task. We try fine-tuning the network to different extents by freezing a different number of layers and then comparing accuracy for each variation of the network. To evaluate the performance of our network we use several metrics which include Classification accuracy, Precision, Sensitivity, and Specificity. Our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 96.33% on a 3-class classification task (Normal, COVID-19, Pneumonia) and an accuracy of 99.39% on a 2-class (COVID and Non-COVID) classification task.

The number of patients with muscle disorders are increasing day by day for corporate jobs and less physical activity. Moreover, many people injure their muscles from sports or accidents. In most of these cases they need muscle stimulation treatment to gain the nerve sensitivity back. Muscle stimulator is frequently used in such cases. However, most of the people cannot get the service of a physiotherapist every day for muscle stimulation. On the other hand, the muscle stimulators are very costly and hard to use. Several conditions of muscle need a change of settings of the machine which also requires experts help. For this purpose, this paper suggests an Internet of thing (IoT) based cost efficient muscle stimulator which combines the facility of being affordable, providing better safety for current and easy to operate. This process can further be integrated with telemedicine and a smart hospital system.

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the leading cause of death in today's world and early screening of heart condition plays a crucial role in preventing them. The heart sound signal is one of the primary indicator of heart condition and can be used to detect abnormality in the heart. The acquisition of heart sound signal is non-invasive, cost effective and requires minimum equipment. But currently the detection of heart abnormality from heart sound signal depends largely on the expertise and experience of the physician. As such an automatic detection system for heart abnormality detection from heart sound signal can be a great asset for the people living in underdeveloped areas. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning based dual stream network with attention mechanism that uses both the raw heart sound signal and the MFCC features to detect abnormality in heart condition of a patient. The deep neural network has a convolutional stream that uses the raw heart sound signal and a recurrent stream that uses the MFCC features of the signal. The features from these two streams are merged together using a novel attention network and passed through the classification network. The model is trained on the largest publicly available dataset of PCG signal and achieves an accuracy of 87.11, sensitivity of 82.41, specificty of 91.8 and a MACC of 87.12.