IEEE Access (Jan 2021)

Early Recognition and Discrimination of COVID-19 Severity Using Slime Mould Support Vector Machine for Medical Decision-Making

  • Beibei Shi,
  • Hua Ye,
  • Jian Zheng,
  • Yefei Zhu,
  • Ali Asghar Heidari,
  • Long Zheng,
  • Huiling Chen,
  • Liangxing Wang,
  • Peiliang Wu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3108447
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9
pp. 121996 – 122015

Abstract

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COVID-19 has spread rapidly across the world, leading to the insufficiency of medical resources in many regions. Early detection and identification of high-risk COVID-19 patients will contribute to early intervention and optimize medical resource allocation. Using the clinical data from the Affiliated Yueqing Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University (Yueqing, China), an evolutionary support vector machine model is designed to recognize and discriminate the severity of the COVID-19 by patients basic information and hematological indexes. The support vector machine is a frequently used pattern classification tool affected by both the kernel parameter setting and feature selection for its classification accuracy. This study recommends an enhanced Slime Mould Algorithm (ESMA), mixing a new movement strategy of white holes, black holes, and wormholes, to perform parameter optimization and feature selection simultaneously for SVM. Therefore, the proposed SVM framework (ESMA-SVM) can also obtain high-quality classification results, and it is less prone to stagnation in the classification process. To verify the capabilities of the proposed methodology, first, the performance of the ESMA is thoroughly verified by using IEEE CEC2017 benchmark functions and the diversity and compared with other similar methods experimentally using these standard benchmark functions. Moreover, the balance between diversification and intensification capability of the enhanced ESMA and the original SMA is also investigated statistically. Finally, the designed model ESMA-SVM and other competitive SVM models based on other optimization algorithms are applied to early recognition and discrimination of COVID-19 severity. Through the analysis of experimental results, the core compensations of ESMA are confirmed, and the ESMA-SVM can obtain strong performance in terms of several performance evaluation indexes on discrimination of COVID-19 severity.

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