An Integrated Deep Learning and Belief Rule Base Intelligent System to Predict Survival of COVID-19 Patient under Uncertainty

Cognit Comput. 2022;14(2):660-676. doi: 10.1007/s12559-021-09978-8. Epub 2021 Dec 16.

Abstract

The novel Coronavirus-induced disease COVID-19 is the biggest threat to human health at the present time, and due to the transmission ability of this virus via its conveyor, it is spreading rapidly in almost every corner of the globe. The unification of medical and IT experts is required to bring this outbreak under control. In this research, an integration of both data and knowledge-driven approaches in a single framework is proposed to assess the survival probability of a COVID-19 patient. Several neural networks pre-trained models: Xception, InceptionResNetV2, and VGG Net, are trained on X-ray images of COVID-19 patients to distinguish between critical and non-critical patients. This prediction result, along with eight other significant risk factors associated with COVID-19 patients, is analyzed with a knowledge-driven belief rule-based expert system which forms a probability of survival for that particular patient. The reliability of the proposed integrated system has been tested by using real patient data and compared with expert opinion, where the performance of the system is found promising.

Keywords: Belief Rule Base; COVID-19; Transfer Learning; VGG Net; Validation Accuracy.