Disease Severity Estimation Research Articles

Spectral sensor‐based device for real‐time detection and severity estimation of groundnut bud necrosis virus in tomato

AbstractA machine learning‐based approach was utilized to develop a device for groundnut bud necrosis virus (GBNV) disease severity detection and estimation in tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum L.). The study involved inoculating tomato plants with GBNV, monitoring changes in morphological and spectral characteristics, evaluating machine learning algorithms (decision tree [DT] classifier) for analysis and classification of disease severity, and developing and validating a device for disease detection and severity estimation. Spectral data analysis revealed distinct patterns in reflectance, with notable peaks observed in the 680 and 760 nm bands, while reflectance remained low and constant beyond 900 nm. Machine learning techniques, specifically a DT model, were employed to classify disease severity based on spectral data with high accuracy (95.01% training accuracy and 93.65% testing accuracy). The model identified the near‐infrared band as highly correlated (correlation coefficient of 0.82) with disease severity. Furthermore, a compact handheld device integrating a spectral sensor, organic light‐emitting diode display, and Raspberry Pi 3B was developed for real‐time disease severity estimation. The device demonstrated robust performance, accurately predicting disease severity at different growth stages, even in the absence of visible symptoms. Additionally, disease severity percentages obtained via reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction were used to validate the accuracy of the device's estimations. Its responsive nature, with estimated response times ranging from milliseconds to seconds, facilitates timely interventions in agricultural settings. Overall, this interdisciplinary approach, combining spectral analysis, machine learning, and device development, presents a promising solution for efficient disease monitoring and management in agriculture, contributing to enhanced crop health and food security.

Tomato leaf disease detection and management using VARMAx-CNN-GAN integration

In contemporary agriculture, farmers confront substantial challenges in maintaining crop yields and mitigating agricultural losses attributable to diseases. The existing methods for diagnosing and managing tomato leaf diseases often exhibit deficiencies in terms of accuracy, robustness, and interpretability. Typically, these methods are reactive, addressing symptoms after the disease has already impacted the plants, resulting in delayed and often ineffective interventions. The precision of disease localization and severity estimation plays a crucial role in efficient disease treatment; regrettably, existing post-processing techniques frequently fall short in this regard. While these methods have their flaws, our proposed method uses the best parts of deep learning and vector autoregressive moving average processes with eXogenous regressors (VARMAx processes) to quickly and accurately find tomato leaf diseases. Our approach represents an innovative solution to the challenges currently confronting the agriculture sector, thanks to its proactive attributes, improved categorization capabilities, and advanced post-processing stages. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs), built upon the “VARMAx-CNN-GAN Integration” framework, form the core of our method. In this integrated model, convolutional neural networks serve the purpose of extracting features and performing early disease classification, whereas generative adversarial networks come into play for generating synthetic images, expanding the dataset, and enhancing the model’s ability to generalize. The “VARMAx-CNN-GAN Integration” model improves disease classification and decision-making for farmers and agronomists by providing insights into critical leaf images. Compared to traditional methods, it improves precision, accuracy, recall, AUC, and delay in identifying tomato diseases. The approach also shows potential for disease prevention, revolutionizing tomato leaf disease identification and management.

Tobacco smoking negatively influences the achievement of greater than three-quarters reduction in psoriasis area and severity index after eight weeks of treatment among patients with psoriasis: Findings from a prospective study.

Smoking is an independent and modifiable risk factor for the onset and development of psoriasis; however, evidence on the association between tobacco smoking and psoriasis treatment efficacy is limited. This study aimed to explore the influence of smoking on treatment efficacy in a cohort of patients with psoriasis in Shanghai, China. Patients with psoriasis were recruited from the Shanghai Skin Disease Hospital between 2021 and 2022. The treatment for patients with psoriasis includes acitretin, methotrexate, narrow-band ultraviolet/benvitimod, and biologics. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, physical examination, and disease severity estimation at baseline, week four, and week eight. The achievement of a ≥75% reduction in psoriasis area and severity index (PASI75) score from baseline to week 8 was set as the primary outcome for treatment efficacy estimation. Data were analyzed using SAS 9.4. A total of 560 patients with psoriasis were enrolled in this study, who were predominantly males (72.9%). The average age of patients was 48.4 years, and 38.8% of them were current smokers, 5.0% of them were former smokers. The median score of PASI among patients changed from 11.1 (interquartile range, IQR: 7.9-16.6) at baseline to 6.2 at week 4 and 3.1 at week 8, and 13.8% and 47.3% of patients with psoriasis achieved PASI75 at weeks 4 and 8, respectively. Logistic regression indicated that patients without tobacco smoking had a higher proportion of PASI75 achievement at week 8. The adjusted odds ratio (AOR) was 11.43 (95% CI: 6.91-18.89), 14.14 (95% CI: 8.27-24.20), and 3.05 (95% CI: 1.20-7.76) for non-smokers compared with smokers, current smokers, and former smokers, respectively. Moreover, former smokers had higher PASI75 achievement than current smokers (AOR=3.37), and patients with younger smoking initiation age, longer smoking duration, and higher smoking intensity had lower PASI75 achievement. Tobacco smoking was negatively associated with PASI75 achievement both in current and former smokers, and former smokers had higher PASI75 achievement than current smokers. The implementation of tobacco control measures is beneficial for improving treatment responses.

A deep multi-task learning approach to identifying mummy berry infection sites, the disease stage, and severity.

Mummy berry is a serious disease that may result in up to 70 percent of yield loss for lowbush blueberries. Practical mummy berry disease detection, stage classification and severity estimation remain great challenges for computer vision-based approaches because images taken in lowbush blueberry fields are usually a mixture of different plant parts (leaves, bud, flowers and fruits) with a very complex background. Specifically, typical problems hindering this effort included data scarcity due to high manual labelling cost, tiny and low contrast disease features interfered and occluded by healthy plant parts, and over-complicated deep neural networks which made deployment of a predictive system difficult. Using real and raw blueberry field images, this research proposed a deep multi-task learning (MTL) approach to simultaneously accomplish three disease detection tasks: identification of infection sites, classification of disease stage, and severity estimation. By further incorporating novel superimposed attention mechanism modules and grouped convolutions to the deep neural network, enabled disease feature extraction from both channel and spatial perspectives, achieving better detection performance in open and complex environments, while having lower computational cost and faster convergence rate. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach achieved higher detection efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning models in terms of detection accuracy, while having three main advantages: 1) field images mixed with various types of lowbush blueberry plant organs under a complex background can be used for disease detection; 2) parameter sharing among different tasks greatly reduced the size of training samples and saved 60% training time than when the three tasks (data preparation, model development and exploration) were trained separately; and 3) only one-sixth of the network parameter size (23.98M vs. 138.36M) and one-fifteenth of the computational cost (1.13G vs. 15.48G FLOPs) were used when compared with the most popular Convolutional Neural Network VGG16. These features make our solution very promising for future mobile deployment such as a drone carried task unit for real-time field surveillance. As an automatic approach to fast disease diagnosis, it can be a useful technical tool to provide growers real time disease information that can prevent further disease transmission and more severe effects on yield due to fruit mummification.

Cotton Verticillium wilt monitoring based on UAV multispectral-visible multi-source feature fusion

Verticillium wilt seriously jeopardizes cotton growth and restricts cotton yields. Therefore, it is important to accurately, rapidly, and non-destructively estimate the extent of cotton Verticillium wilt (CVW). The focus of this study was to explore the potential of combining the vegetation index (VI), color index (CI), and texture features to improve the accuracy of CVW disease severity estimation based on hexacopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images. Simple Linear Regression (LR) and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) methods were used to determine correlations between VI, CI, texture, and normalized difference texture index (NDTI) variables and cotton Verticillium wilt disease index (DI). The LR model based on VI, CI, and NDTI was constructed, VIs, CIs, and NDTIs were fused, and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Backpropagation Neural Network (BP) models were constructed to comparatively explore the estimation ability of each model on the degree of CVW disease. The results showed that VI was significantly correlated with DI, followed by NDTI, and CI. Compared with texture, NDTI containing both texture features was more significantly correlated with DI. The accuracy of the DI estimation using LR was highest for the one-factor VI model (R2 > 0.48, RRMSE < 51.48), followed by the NDTI model (R2 > 0.47, RRMS < 60.81) and the CI model (R2 > 0.33, RRMSE < 52.58). The PSO-BP and GWO-ELM were further used to model the DI estimation with different input variables. Regardless of the period, the fusion of three data sources (VIs + CIs + TIs) was preferable to a single data source or a combination of two data sources for different model inputs. In terms of different modeling algorithms, GWO-ELM combining VIs, CIs, and NDTIs had the highest estimation accuracy compared with SR and PSO-BP, with a validated R2 values of 0.65 (RRMSE = 42.96) at the flowering stage, 0.66 (RRMSE = 20.00) at the flower and boll stage, and 0.88 (RRMSE = 10.53) at the boll stage. This study demonstrated that the estimation accuracy of DI was significantly improved using collaborative modeling with multiple data sources. This study provides ideas and methods for monitoring crop disease conditions using low-altitude remote sensing.

PDSE-Lite: lightweight framework for plant disease severity estimation based on Convolutional Autoencoder and Few-Shot Learning.

Plant disease diagnosis with estimation of disease severity at early stages still remains a significant research challenge in agriculture. It is helpful in diagnosing plant diseases at the earliest so that timely action can be taken for curing the disease. Existing studies often rely on labor-intensive manually annotated large datasets for disease severity estimation. In order to conquer this problem, a lightweight framework named "PDSE-Lite" based on Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE) and Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is proposed in this manuscript for plant disease severity estimation with few training instances. The PDSE-Lite framework is designed and developed in two stages. In first stage, a lightweight CAE model is built and trained to reconstruct leaf images from original leaf images with minimal reconstruction loss. In subsequent stage, pretrained layers of the CAE model built in the first stage are utilized to develop the image classification and segmentation models, which are then trained using FSL. By leveraging FSL, the proposed framework requires only a few annotated instances for training, which significantly reduces the human efforts required for data annotation. Disease severity is then calculated by determining the percentage of diseased leaf pixels obtained through segmentation out of the total leaf pixels. The PDSE-Lite framework's performance is evaluated on Apple-Tree-Leaf-Disease-Segmentation (ATLDS) dataset. However, the proposed framework can identify any plant disease and quantify the severity of identified diseases. Experimental results reveal that the PDSE-Lite framework can accurately detect healthy and four types of apple tree diseases as well as precisely segment the diseased area from leaf images by using only two training samples from each class of the ATLDS dataset. Furthermore, the PDSE-Lite framework's performance is compared with existing state-of-the-art techniques, and it is found that this framework outperformed these approaches. The proposed framework's applicability is further verified by statistical hypothesis testing using Student t-test. The results obtained from this test confirm that the proposed framework can precisely estimate the plant disease severity with a confidence interval of 99%. Hence, by reducing the reliance on large-scale manual data annotation, the proposed framework offers a promising solution for early-stage plant disease diagnosis and severity estimation.

Leaf Spectral Analysis for Detection and Differentiation of Three Major Rice Diseases in the Philippines

Monitoring the plant’s health and early detection of disease are essential to facilitate effective management, decrease disease spread, and minimize yield loss. Spectroscopic techniques in remote sensing offer less laborious methods and high spatiotemporal scale to monitor diseases in crops. Spectral measurements during the development of disease infection may reveal differences among diseases and determine the stage it can be effectively detected. In this study, spectral analysis was performed over the visible and near-infrared (400–850 nm) portions of the spectrum to detect and differentiate three major rice diseases in the Philippines, namely tungro, BLB, and blast disease. Reflectance of infected rice leaves was recorded repeatedly from inoculation to the late stage of each disease. Results show that spectral reflectance is characteristically affected by each disease, resulting in different spectral, signature sensitivity, and first-order derivatives. Red and red-edge wavelength ranges are the most sensitive to the three diseases. Near-infrared wavelengths decreased as tungro and blast diseases progressed. In addition, the spectral reflectance was resampled to common reflectance sensitivity bands of optical sensors and used in the cluster analysis. It showed that BLB and blast can be detected in the early disease stage on the IRRI Standard Evaluation System (SES) scale of 1 and 3, respectively. Alternatively, tungro was detected in its later stage, with an 11–30% height reduction and no distinct yellow to yellow-orange discoloration (5 SES scale). Three regression techniques, Partial Least Square, Random Forest, and Support Vector Regression were performed separately on each disease to develop models predicting its severity. The validation results of the PLSR and SVR models in tungro and blast show accuracy levels that are promising to be used in estimating the severity of the disease in leaves while RFR shows the best results for BLB. Early disease detection and regression models from spectral measurements and analysis for disease severity estimation can help in disease monitoring and proper disease management implementation.

PDS-MCNet: a hybrid framework using MobileNetV2 with SiLU6 activation function and capsule networks for disease severity estimation in plants

PDS-MCNet: a hybrid framework using MobileNetV2 with SiLU6 activation function and capsule networks for disease severity estimation in plants

A grape disease identification and severity estimation system

A grape disease identification and severity estimation system

Examining the Effect of Beech Bark Disease on Radial Growth in American Beech

Beech bark disease (BBD) is a significant threat to forests of North America and the impact of BBD on radial growth in the American beech is substantial. We developed a novel hierarchical Bayesian (HB) model to simultaneously model disease dynamics, tree growth, and the interaction of the two. Our model can be adapted to both emerging and more mature forest–pathogen systems to aid in ecosystem loss predictions. Long-term data from a single site minimized potential confounding variables such as climate change, precipitation, land use history, and soil conditions that may influence radial growth. Here, 206 beech trees were monitored over 15 years at an 85-acre site in southwestern Vermont, measuring diameter at breast height (DBH) and progression of BBD. Our model allows us to accurately estimate error rates in disease severity estimation and DBH measurements, and estimate the true state based on environmental variables. As disease poses significant threats to many tree species around the world, researchers can obtain more value and information from their datasets utilizing an adapted HB model.

An Artificial-Intelligence-Based Novel Rice Grade Model for Severity Estimation of Rice Diseases

The pathogens such as fungi and bacteria can lead to rice diseases that can drastically impair crop production. Because the illness is difficult to control on a broad scale, crop field monitoring is one of the most effective methods of control. It allows for early detection of the disease and the implementation of preventative measures. Disease severity estimation based on digital picture analysis, where the pictures are obtained from the rice field using mobile devices, is one of the most effective control strategies. This paper offers a method for quantifying the severity of three rice crop diseases (brown spot, blast, and bacterial blight) that can determine the stage of plant disease. A total of 1200 images of rice illnesses and healthy images make up the input dataset. With the help of agricultural experts, the diseased zone was labeled according to the disease type using the Make Sense tool. More than 75% of the images in the dataset correspond to one disease label, healthy plants represent more than 15%, and multiple diseases represent 5% of the images labeled. This paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence rice grade model that uses an optimized faster-region-based convolutional neural network (FRCNN) approach to calculate the area of leaf instances and the infected regions. EfficientNet-B0 architecture was used as a backbone as the network shows the best accuracy (96.43%). The performance was compared with the CNN architectures: VGG16, ResNet101, and MobileNet. The model evaluation parameters used to measure the accuracy are positive predictive value, sensitivity, and intersection over union. This severity estimation method can be further deployed as a tool that allows farmers to obtain perfect predictions of the disease severity level based on lesions in the field conditions and produce crops more organically.

Multi-resolution analysis and deep neural network architecture based hybrid feature extraction technique for plant disease identification and severity estimation

Multi-resolution analysis and deep neural network architecture based hybrid feature extraction technique for plant disease identification and severity estimation

Attention-optimized DeepLab V3 + for automatic estimation of cucumber disease severity

BackgroundAutomatic and accurate estimation of disease severity is critical for disease management and yield loss prediction. Conventional disease severity estimation is performed using images with simple backgrounds, which is limited in practical applications. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a method for estimating the disease severity of plants based on leaf images captured in field conditions, which is very challenging since the intensity of sunlight is constantly changing, and the image background is complicated.ResultsThis study developed a simple and accurate image-based disease severity estimation method using an optimized neural network. A hybrid attention and transfer learning optimized semantic segmentation model was proposed to obtain the disease segmentation map. The severity was calculated by the ratio of lesion pixels to leaf pixels. The proposed method was validated using cucumber downy mildew, and powdery mildew leaves collected under natural conditions. The results showed that hybrid attention with the interaction of spatial attention and channel attention can extract fine lesion and leaf features, and transfer learning can further improve the segmentation accuracy of the model. The proposed method can accurately segment healthy leaves and lesions (MIoU = 81.23%, FWIoU = 91.89%). In addition, the severity of cucumber leaf disease was accurately estimated (R2 = 0.9578, RMSE = 1.1385). Moreover, the proposed model was compared with six different backbones and four semantic segmentation models. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the compared models under complex conditions, and can refine lesion segmentation and accurately estimate the disease severity.ConclusionsThe proposed method was an efficient tool for disease severity estimation in field conditions. This study can facilitate the implementation of artificial intelligence for rapid disease severity estimation and control in agriculture.

Adaptive Thresholding of CNN Features for Maize Leaf Disease Classification and Severity Estimation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the gold standard in the machine learning (ML) community. As a result, most of the recent studies have relied on CNNs, which have achieved higher accuracies compared with traditional machine learning approaches. From prior research, we learned that multi-class image classification models can solve leaf disease identification problems, and multi-label image classification models can solve leaf disease quantification problems (severity analysis). Historically, maize leaf disease severity analysis or quantification has always relied on domain knowledge—that is, experts evaluate the images and train the CNN models based on their knowledge. Here, we propose a unique system that achieves the same objective while excluding input from specialists. This avoids bias and does not rely on a “human in the loop model” for disease quantification. The advantages of the proposed system are many. Notably, the conventional system of maize leaf disease quantification is labor intensive, time-consuming and prone to errors since it lacks standardized diagnosis guidelines. In this work, we present an approach to quantify maize leaf disease based on adaptive thresholding. The experimental work of our study is in three parts. First, we train a wide variety of well-known deep learning models for maize leaf disease classification, then we compare the performance of the deep learning models and finally extract the class activation heatmaps from the prediction layers of the CNN models. Second, we develop an adaptive thresholding technique that automatically extracts the regions of interest from the class activation maps without any prior knowledge. Lastly, we use these regions of interest to estimate image leaf disease severity. Experimental results show that transfer learning approaches can classify maize leaf diseases with up to 99% accuracy. With a high quantification accuracy, our proposed adaptive thresholding method for CNN class activation maps can be a valuable contribution to quantifying maize leaf diseases without relying on domain knowledge.

A system-theoretic approach for image-based infectious plant disease severity estimation.

The demand for high level of safety and superior quality in agricultural products is of prime concern. The introduction of new technologies for supporting crop management allows the efficiency and quality of production to be improved and, at the same time, reduces the environmental impact. Common strategies to disease control are mainly oriented on spraying pesticides uniformly over cropping areas at different times during the growth cycle. Even though these methodologies can be effective, they present a negative impact in ecological and economic terms, introducing new pests and elevating resistance of the pathogens. Therefore, consideration for new automatic and accurate along with inexpensive and efficient techniques for the detection and severity estimation of pathogenic diseases before proper control measures can be suggested is of great realistic significance and may reduce the likelihood of an infection spreading. In this work, we present a novel system-theoretic approach for leaf image-based automatic quantitative assessment of pathogenic disease severity regardless of disease type. The proposed method is based on a highly efficient and noise-rejecting positive non-linear dynamical system that recursively transforms the leaf image until only the symptomatic disease patterns are left. The proposed system does not require any training to automatically discover the discriminative features. The experimental setup allowed to assess the system ability to generalise symptoms detection beyond any previously seen conditions achieving excellent results. The main advantage of the approach relies in the robustness when dealing with low-resolution and noisy images. Indeed, an essential issue related to digital image processing is to effectively reduce noise from an image whilst keeping its features intact. The impact of noise is effectively reduced and does not affect the final result allowing the proposed system to ensure a high accuracy and reliability.

Machine Learning-Based Analysis of Digital Movement Assessment and ExerGame Scores for Parkinson's Disease Severity Estimation.

Neurodegenerative Parkinson's Disease (PD) is one of the common incurable diseases among the elderly. Clinical assessments are characterized as standardized means for PD diagnosis. However, relying on medical evaluation of a patient's status can be subjective to physicians' experience, making the assessment process susceptible to human errors. The use of ICT-based tools for capturing the status of patients with PD can provide more objective and quantitative metrics. In this vein, the Personalized Serious Game Suite (PGS) and intelligent Motor Assessment Tests (iMAT), produced within the i-PROGNOSIS European project (www.i-prognosis.eu), are explored in the current study. More specifically, data from 27 patients with PD at Stage 1 (9) and Stage 3 (18) produced from their interaction with PGS/iMAT are analyzed. Five feature vector (FV) scenarios are set, including features from PGS or iMAT scores or their combination, after also taking into consideration the age of patients with PD. These FVs are fed into three machine learning classifiers, i.e., K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Random Forest (RF), to infer the stage of each patient with PD. A Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) method is adopted for testing the classification performance. The experimental results show that a high (>90%) classification accuracy is achieved from both data sources (PGS/iMAT), justifying the effectiveness of PGS/iMAT to efficiently reflect the motor skill status of patients with PD and further potentiating PGS/iMAT enhancement with a machine learning a part to infer for the stage of patients with PD. Clearly, this integrated approach provides new opportunities for remote monitoring of the stage of patients with PD, contributing to a more efficient organization and set up of personalized interventions.

Influence of the NAT2 gene polymorphic markers on the effectiveness and safety of treatment in patients with newly diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis based on peripheral red blood cell dynamics

Background. Individual sensitivity to isoniazid in tuberculosis patients is determined by the presence of N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2) enzyme gene allelic variants in genome. Evaluation of quantitative and qualitative alterations in peripheral blood can be used for diagnosis, disease severity estimation, or as a clue for estimation of anti-tuberculosis chemotherapy effectiveness and safety.Aim: Find associations between acetylation type and peripheral red blood cell (RBC) dynamics; determine the effect of NAT2 acetylation rate on the effectiveness and safety of treatment in patients with newly identified pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) residing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia).Methods. This study included 146 patients with various clinical forms of newly diagnosed pulmonary TB. Oral isoniazid, rifampicin, pyrazinamide, and ethambutol were administered patients. Genotyping was performed via real time PCR.Results. Rapid and intermediate acetylators showed an increase in hemoglobin concentrations and RBC erythrocyte hemoglobin content by the end of chemotherapy (P&lt;0.05). Incidence of anemia was lower in intermediate acetylators, compared to rapid or slow acetylators (P=0.013). Negative correlation was established between absolute RBC count and slow acetylation type (P=0.017). Patients with rapid acetylation type showed increased RBC distribution width indexes RDW-CV and RDW-SD (P&lt;0.05).Conclusions. An adequate therapeutic effect was achieved with standard doses of anti-TB medications in patients with intermediate acetylation type. Rapid and slow acetylators required anti-TB medication dose correction. Genotyping for NAT2 gene in patients with pulmonary TB enables clinicians to choose the optimal dose of anti-TB medications, specifically, isoniazid dose.

Plant disease severity estimation by computer vision methods

The first stage results within the framework of the thesis “Investigation of computer vision methods and algorithms in the field of plant diseases detection” are presented. The analysis of the work related to the automatic assessment of plant disease severity was carried out. It was established that for solving problems in this field, convolution neural networks are promising methods, which are currently superior to classical methods of computer vision in terms of accuracy. To assess the severity degree, classification and segmentation architectures of convolutional neural networks are used. Classification architectures are able to take into account disease visual features at different stages of the disease development, but information about the actual affected area is unavailable. On the other hand, solutions based on segmentation architectures provide actual data on the lesion area, but do not grade severity levels according to disease visual features. Based on the result of the research into the application of convolutional neural networks and options for their use, the goal of this study was determined, which is to develop an automatic system capable of determining the lesion area, as well as to take into account disease visual features and the type of immunological reaction of the plant at different stages of disease progress. It is planned to build a system based on the segmentation architecture of a convolutional neural network, which will produce multi-class image segmentation. Such a network is able to divide image pixels into several classes: background, healthy leaf area, affected leaf area. In turn, the class "affected leaf area" will include several subclasses corresponding to the disease visual features at different stages of disease progress.

An Approach for Rice Bacterial Leaf Streak Disease Segmentation and Disease Severity Estimation

Rice bacterial leaf streak (BLS) is a serious disease in rice leaves and can seriously affect the quality and quantity of rice growth. Automatic estimation of disease severity is a crucial requirement in agricultural production. To address this, a new method (termed BLSNet) was proposed for rice and BLS leaf lesion recognition and segmentation based on a UNet network in semantic segmentation. An attention mechanism and multi-scale extraction integration were used in BLSNet to improve the accuracy of lesion segmentation. We compared the performance of the proposed network with that of DeepLabv3+ and UNet as benchmark models used in semantic segmentation. It was found that the proposed BLSNet model demonstrated higher segmentation and class accuracy. A preliminary investigation of BLS disease severity estimation was carried out based on our BLS segmentation results, and it was found that the proposed BLSNet method has strong potential to be a reliable automatic estimator of BLS disease severity.

An integrated autoencoder-based hybrid CNN-LSTM model for COVID-19 severity prediction from lung ultrasound

The COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the biggest threats to the global healthcare system, creating an unprecedented condition worldwide. The necessity of rapid diagnosis calls for alternative methods to predict the condition of the patient, for which disease severity estimation on the basis of Lung Ultrasound (LUS) can be a safe, radiation-free, flexible, and favorable option. In this paper, a frame-based 4-score disease severity prediction architecture is proposed with the integration of deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks to consider both spatial and temporal features of the LUS frames. The proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture implements an autoencoder network and separable convolutional branches fused with a modified DenseNet-201 network to build a vigorous, noise-free classification model. A five-fold cross-validation scheme is performed to affirm the efficacy of the proposed network. In-depth result analysis shows a promising improvement in the classification performance by introducing the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers after the proposed CNN architecture by an average of 7−12%, which is approximately 17% more than the traditional DenseNet architecture alone. From an extensive analysis, it is found that the proposed end-to-end scheme is very effective in detecting COVID-19 severity scores from LUS images.