COVED: A Hardware Accelerated Soft Computing Enabled Intelligent Value Chain Based Diagnostic Automation for nCOVID-19 Estimation and Identification

Purpose: COVID-19, a global pandemic, first appeared in the city of Wuhan, China, and has since spread differently across geographical borders, classes, and genders from various age groups, sometimes mutating its DNA strands in the process. The sheer magnitude of the pandemic's spread is putting a strain on hospitals and medical facilities. The need of the hour is to deploy IoT devices and robots to monitor patients' body vitals as well as their other pathological data to further control the spread. There has not been a more compelling need to use digital advances to remotely provide quality healthcare via computing devices and AI-powered medical aids. Method: This research developed a deployable Internet of Things (IoT) based infrastructure for the early and simple detection and isolation of suspected coronavirus patients, which was accomplished via the use of ensemble deep transfer learning. The proposed Internet of Things framework combines 4 different deep learning models: DenseNet201, VGG16, InceptionResNetV2, and ResNet152V2. Utilizing the deep ensemble model, the medical modalities are used to obtain chest high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) images and diagnose the infection. Results: Over the HRCT image dataset, the developed deep ensemble model is collated to different state-of-the-art transfer learning (TL) models. The comparative investigation demonstrated that the suggested approach can aid radiologists inefficiently and swiftly diagnosing probable coronavirus patients. Conclusion: For the first time, our group has developed an AI-enabled Decision Support System to automate the entire process flow from estimation to detection of COVID-19 subjects as part of an Intelligent Value Chain algorithm. The screening is expected to eliminate the false negatives and asymptomatic ones out of the equation and hence the affected individuals could be identified in a total process time of 15 minutes to 1 hour. A Complete Deployable System with AI Influenced Prediction is described here for the first time. Not only did the authors suggest a Multiple Hypothesis based Decision Fusion Algorithm for forecasting the outcome, but they also did the predictive analytics. For simple confined isolation or hospitalization, this complete Predictive System was encased within an IoT ecosystem.