The Covid-19 disease has spread widely over the whole world since the beginning of 2020. Following the epidemic which started in Wuhan, China on January 30, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency and a pandemic. Researchers of different disciplines work along with public health officials to understand the SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and jointly with the policymakers urgently develop strategies to control the spread of this new disease. Recent findings have observed specific image patterns from computed tomography (CT) for patients infected by SARS-CoV-2 which are distinct from the other pulmonary diseases. In this paper, we propose an explainable-by-design that has an integrated image segmentation mechanism based on SLIC that improves the algorithm performance and the interpretability of the resulting model. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we used the SARS-CoV-2 CT scan dataset that we published recently and has been widely used in the literature. The proposed Super-xDNN could obtain statistically better results than traditional deep learning approaches as DenseNet-201 and Resnet-152. Furthermore, it also improved the explainability and interpretability of its decision mechanism when compared with the xDNN basis approach that uses the whole image as prototype. The segmentation mechanism of Super-xDNN favored a decision structure that is more close to the human logic. Moreover, it also allowed the provision of new insights as a heat-map which highlights the areas with highest similarities with Covid-19 prototypes, and an estimation of the area affected by the disease.

Microscopic blood cell analysis is an important methodology for medical diagnosis, and complete blood cell counts (CBCs) are one of the routine tests operated in hospitals. Results of the CBCs include amounts of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets in a unit blood sample. It is possible to diagnose diseases such as anemia when the numbers or shapes of red blood cells become abnormal. The percentage of white blood cells is one of the important indicators of many severe illnesses such as infection and cancer. The amounts of platelets are decreased when the patient suffers hemophilia. Doctors often use these as criteria to monitor the general health conditions and recovery stages of the patients in the hospital. However, many hospitals are relying on expensive hematology analyzers to perform these tests, and these procedures are often time consuming. There is a huge demand for an automated, fast and easily used CBCs method in order to avoid redundant procedures and minimize patients’ burden on costs of healthcare. In this research, we investigate a new CBC detection method by using deep neural networks, and discuss state of the art machine learning methods in order to meet the medical usage requirements. The approach we applied in this work is based on YOLOv3 algorithm, and our experimental results show the applied deep learning algorithms have a great potential for CBCs tests, promising for deployment of deep learning methods into microfluidic point-of-care medical devices. As a case of study, we applied our blood cell detector to the blood samples of COVID-19 patients, where blood cell clots are a typical symptom of COVID-19.