Designing an Improved Deep Learning-based Model for COVID-19 Recognition in Chest X-ray Images: A Knowledge Distillation Approach

COVID-19 has adversely affected humans and societies in different aspects. Numerous people have perished due to inaccurate COVID-19 identification and, consequently, a lack of appropriate medical treatment. Numerous solutions based on manual and automatic feature extraction techniques have been investigated to address this issue by researchers worldwide. Typically, automatic feature extraction methods, particularly deep learning models, necessitate a powerful hardware system to perform the necessary computations. Unfortunately, many institutions and societies cannot benefit from these advancements due to the prohibitively high cost of high-quality hardware equipment. As a result, this study focused on two primary goals: first, lowering the computational costs associated with running the proposed model on embedded devices, mobile devices, and conventional computers; and second, improving the model's performance in comparison to previously published methods (at least performs on par with state-of-the-art models) in order to ensure its performance and accuracy for the medical recognition task. This study used two neural networks to improve feature extraction from our dataset: VGG19 and ResNet50V2. Both of these networks are capable of providing semantic features from the nominated dataset. To this end, An alternative network was considered, namely MobileNetV2, which excels at extracting semantic features while requiring minimal computation on mobile and embedded devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) was used to transfer knowledge from the teacher network (concatenated ResNet50V2 and VGG19) to the student network (MobileNetV2) to improve MobileNetV2 performance and to achieve a robust and accurate model for the COVID-19 identification task from chest X-ray images.

Designing an AI-Based Adaptive Controller Augmented with a System Identifier for a Micro-Class Robot Equipped with a Vibrating Actuator

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme based on using neural networks is designed to guarantee the desired behavior of a micro-robot which is equipped with vibrating actuators and follows the principle of slip-stick movement. There are two tiny shaking motors which have been utilized to run the micro-class robotic system. Dynamic modeling equations are expressed by considering the spring coefficient of the bases. After that, the effect of the spring on the foundations was investigated. In addition to designing neural-based controller, an AI-based system identifier has been developed to help the controller update its parameters and achieve its desired targets. Using this method, several specific paths for the movement of this micro robot are simulated. Based on the simulation results, the proposed controlling strategy guarantees acceptable performance for tracking different paths due to plotted near-zero errors and handles the nonlinear behavior of the micro-robot system.