-- This study conducts a computational linguistic analysis of pandemic - related online discourse to examine how language distinguishes health misinformation from factual communication. Drawing on three corpora -- COVID - 19 false narratives (n = 7,588), general COVID - 19 content (n = 10,700), and Monkeypox - related posts (n = 5,787) -- we identify significant differences in readability, rhetorical markers, and persuasive language use. COVID - 19 misinformation exhibited markedly lower readability scores and contained over twice the frequency of fear - related or persuasi ve terms compared to the other datasets. It also showed minimal use of exclamation marks, contrasting with the more emotive style of Monkeypox content. These patterns suggest that misinformation employs a deliberately complex rhetorical style embedded with em otional cues, a combination that may enhance its perceived credibility. Our findings contribute to the growing body of work on digital health misinformation by highlighting linguistic indicators that may aid detection efforts. They also inform public health messaging strategies and theoretical models of crisis communication in networked media environments. At the same time, the study acknowledges certain limitations, including reliance on traditional readability indices, use of a deliberately narrow persuasive lexicon, and reliance on static aggregate analysis. Future research should therefore incorporate longitudinal designs, broader emotion lexicons, and platform - sensitive approaches to strengthe n robustness. The data and code is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17024569 The COVID - 19 pandemic challenged global health systems. The proliferation of health - related information on digital platforms accelerates dramatically during public health crises, creating opportunities for rapid knowledge dissemination but also challenges related to misinformation (Sikosana et al., 2024; Sikosana et al., 2025). This dual nature of digital communication became particularly evident during the COVID - 19 pandemic, which sparked an unprecedented volume of online discourse and was accompanied by w hat the World Health Organisation (WHO) termed an "infodemic" - an overabundance of information (both accurate and not) that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy guidance (WHO, 2020). This infodemic phenomenon presents a communication challenge and a substantive threat to public health. Research has shown that exposure to COVID - 19 misinformation can directly impact health behaviours. For example, exposure to false COVID - 19 vaccine information was associated with a reduction in vaccination intent by about 6.4 percentage points in the UK (and a similar 6.2 - point drop in the USA) (Chen et al., 2022; Loomba et al., 2021). Such an effect size is sufficient to undermine herd immunity thresholds.

The emergence of global health crises, such as COVID-19 and Monkeypox (mpox), has underscored the importance of understanding public sentiment to inform effective public health strategies. This study conducts a comparative sentiment analysis of public perceptions surrounding COVID-19 and mpox by leveraging extensive datasets of 147,475 and 106,638 tweets, respectively. Advanced machine learning models, including Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, RoBERTa, DistilRoBERTa and XLNet, were applied to perform sentiment classification, with results indicating key trends in public emotion and discourse. The analysis highlights significant differences in public sentiment driven by disease characteristics, media representation, and pandemic fatigue. Through the lens of sentiment polarity and thematic trends, this study offers valuable insights into tailoring public health messaging, mitigating misinformation, and fostering trust during concurrent health crises. The findings contribute to advancing sentiment analysis applications in public health informatics, setting the groundwork for enhanced real-time monitoring and multilingual analysis in future research.

Monkeypox is a viral disease characterized by distinctive skin lesions and has been reported in many countries. The recent global outbreak has emphasized the urgent need for scalable, accessible, and accurate diagnostic solutions to support public health responses. In this study, we developed ITMAINN, an intelligent, AI-driven healthcare system specifically designed to detect Monkeypox from skin lesion images using advanced deep learning techniques. Our system consists of three main components. First, we trained and evaluated several pretrained models using transfer learning on publicly available skin lesion datasets to identify the most effective models. For binary classification (Monkeypox vs. non-Monkeypox), the Vision Transformer, MobileViT, Transformer-in-Transformer, and VGG16 achieved the highest performance, each with an accuracy and F1-score of 97.8%. For multiclass classification, which contains images of patients with Monkeypox and five other classes (chickenpox, measles, hand-foot-mouth disease, cowpox, and healthy), ResNetViT and ViT Hybrid models achieved 92% accuracy, with F1 scores of 92.24% and 92.19%, respectively. The best-performing and most lightweight model, MobileViT, was deployed within the mobile application. The second component is a cross-platform smartphone application that enables users to detect Monkeypox through image analysis, track symptoms, and receive recommendations for nearby healthcare centers based on their location. The third component is a real-time monitoring dashboard designed for health authorities to support them in tracking cases, analyzing symptom trends, guiding public health interventions, and taking proactive measures. This system is fundamental in developing responsive healthcare infrastructure within smart cities. Our solution, ITMAINN, is part of revolutionizing public health management.

Background: Online toxicity, encompassing behaviors such as harassment, bullying, hate speech, and the dissemination of misinformation, has become a pressing social concern in the digital age. The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed "Monkeypox" but subsequently renamed to mitigate associated stigmas and societal concerns, serves as a poignant backdrop to this issue. Objective: In this research, we undertake a comprehensive analysis of the toxic online discourse surrounding the 2022 Mpox outbreak. Our objective is to dissect its origins, characterize its nature and content, trace its dissemination patterns, and assess its broader societal implications, with the goal of providing insights that can inform strategies to mitigate such toxicity in future crises. Methods: We collected more than 1.6 million unique tweets and analyzed them from five dimensions, including context, extent, content, speaker, and intent. Utilizing BERT-based topic modeling and social network community clustering, we delineated the toxic dynamics on Twitter. Results: We identified five high-level topic categories in the toxic online discourse on Twitter, including disease (46.6%), health policy and healthcare (19.3%), homophobia (23.9%), politics (6.0%), and racism (4.1%). Through the toxicity diffusion networks of mentions, retweets, and the top users, we found that retweets of toxic content were widespread, while influential users rarely engaged with or countered this toxicity through retweets. Conclusions: By tracking topical dynamics, we can track the changing popularity of toxic content online, providing a better understanding of societal challenges. Network dynamics spotlight key social media influencers and their intents, indicating that addressing these central figures in toxic discourse can enhance crisis communication and inform policy-making.

Social media is an easy-to-access platform providing timely updates about societal trends and events. Discussions regarding epidemic-related events such as infections, symptoms, and social interactions can be crucial for informing policymaking during epidemic outbreaks. In our work, we pioneer exploiting Event Detection (ED) for better preparedness and early warnings of any upcoming epidemic by developing a framework to extract and analyze epidemic-related events from social media posts. To this end, we curate an epidemic event ontology comprising seven disease-agnostic event types and construct a Twitter dataset SPEED with human-annotated events focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. Experimentation reveals how ED models trained on COVID-based SPEED can effectively detect epidemic events for three unseen epidemics of Monkeypox, Zika, and Dengue; while models trained on existing ED datasets fail miserably. Furthermore, we show that reporting sharp increases in the extracted events by our framework can provide warnings 4-9 weeks earlier than the WHO epidemic declaration for Monkeypox. This utility of our framework lays the foundations for better preparedness against emerging epidemics.

Due to the lack of efficient mpox diagnostic technology, mpox cases continue to increase. Recently, the great potential of deep learning models in detecting mpox and non-mpox has been proven. However, existing models learn image representations via image classification, which results in they may be easily susceptible to interference from real-world noise, require diverse non-mpox images, and fail to detect abnormal input. These drawbacks make classification models inapplicable in real-world settings. To address these challenges, we propose "Mask, Inpainting, and Measure" (MIM). In MIM's pipeline, a generative adversarial network only learns mpox image representations by inpainting the masked mpox images. Then, MIM determines whether the input belongs to mpox by measuring the similarity between the inpainted image and the original image. The underlying intuition is that since MIM solely models mpox images, it struggles to accurately inpaint non-mpox images in real-world settings. Without utilizing any non-mpox images, MIM cleverly detects mpox and non-mpox and can handle abnormal inputs. We used the recognized mpox dataset (MSLD) and images of eighteen non-mpox skin diseases to verify the effectiveness and robustness of MIM. Experimental results show that the average AUROC of MIM achieves 0.8237. In addition, we demonstrated the drawbacks of classification models and buttressed the potential of MIM through clinical validation. Finally, we developed an online smartphone app to provide free testing to the public in affected areas. This work first employs generative models to improve mpox detection and provides new insights into binary decision-making tasks in medical images.

Due to the lack of more efficient diagnostic tools for monkeypox, its spread remains unchecked, presenting a formidable challenge to global health. While the high efficacy of deep learning models for monkeypox diagnosis has been demonstrated in related studies, the overlook of inference speed, the parameter size and diagnosis performance for early-stage monkeypox renders the models inapplicable in real-world settings. To address these challenges, we proposed an ultrafast and ultralight network named Fast-MpoxNet. Fast-MpoxNet possesses only 0.27M parameters and can process input images at 68 frames per second (FPS) on the CPU. To counteract the diagnostic performance limitation brought about by the small model capacity, it integrates the attention-based feature fusion module and the multiple auxiliary losses enhancement strategy for better detecting subtle image changes and optimizing weights. Using transfer learning and five-fold cross-validation, Fast-MpoxNet achieves 94.26% Accuracy on the Mpox dataset. Notably, its recall for early-stage monkeypox achieves 93.65%. By adopting data augmentation, our model's Accuracy rises to 98.40% and attains a Practicality Score (A new metric for measuring model practicality in real-time diagnosis application) of 0.80. We also developed an application system named Mpox-AISM V2 for both personal computers and mobile phones. Mpox-AISM V2 features ultrafast responses, offline functionality, and easy deployment, enabling accurate and real-time diagnosis for both the public and individuals in various real-world settings, especially in populous settings during the outbreak. Our work could potentially mitigate future monkeypox outbreak and illuminate a fresh paradigm for developing real-time diagnostic tools in the healthcare field.

Monkeypox is a rare disease that raised concern among medical specialists following the convi-19 pandemic. It's concerning since monkeypox is difficult to diagnose early on because of symptoms that are similar to chickenpox and measles. Furthermore, because this is a rare condition, there is a knowledge gap among healthcare professionals. As a result, there is an urgent need for a novel technique to combat and anticipate the disease in the early phases of individual virus infection. Multiple CNN-based pre-trained models, including VGG-16, VGG-19, Restnet50, Inception-V3, Densnet, Xception, MobileNetV2, Alexnet, Lenet, and majority Voting, were employed in classification in this study. For this study, multiple data sets were combined, such as monkeypox vs chickenpox, monkeypox versus measles, monkeypox versus normal, and monkeypox versus all diseases. Majority voting performed 97% in monkeypox vs chickenpox, Xception achieved 79% in monkeypox against measles, MobileNetV2 scored 96% in monkeypox vs normal, and Lenet performed 80% in monkeypox versus all.

Automatic infectious disease classification from images can facilitate needed medical diagnoses. Such an approach can identify diseases, like tuberculosis, which remain under-diagnosed due to resource constraints and also novel and emerging diseases, like monkeypox, which clinicians have little experience or acumen in diagnosing. Avoiding missed or delayed diagnoses would prevent further transmission and improve clinical outcomes. In order to understand and trust neural network predictions, analysis of learned representations is necessary. In this work, we argue that automatic discovery of concepts, i.e., human interpretable attributes, allows for a deep understanding of learned information in medical image analysis tasks, generalizing beyond the training labels or protocols. We provide an overview of existing concept discovery approaches in medical image and computer vision communities, and evaluate representative methods on tuberculosis (TB) prediction and monkeypox prediction tasks. Finally, we propose NMFx, a general NMF formulation of interpretability by concept discovery that works in a unified way in unsupervised, weakly supervised, and supervised scenarios.

Following recent outbreaks, monkeypox-related misinformation continues to rapidly spread online. This negatively impacts response strategies and disproportionately harms LGBTQ+ communities in the short-term, and ultimately undermines the overall effectiveness of public health responses. In an attempt to combat monkeypox-related misinformation, we present PoxVerifi, an open-source, extensible tool that provides a comprehensive approach to assessing the accuracy of monkeypox related claims. Leveraging information from existing fact checking sources and published World Health Organization (WHO) information, we created an open-sourced corpus of 225 rated monkeypox claims. Additionally, we trained an open-sourced BERT-based machine learning model for specifically classifying monkeypox information, which achieved 96% cross-validation accuracy. PoxVerifi is a Google Chrome browser extension designed to empower users to navigate through monkeypox-related misinformation. Specifically, PoxVerifi provides users with a comprehensive toolkit to assess the veracity of headlines on any webpage across the Internet without having to visit an external site. Users can view an automated accuracy review from our trained machine learning model, a user-generated accuracy review based on community-member votes, and have the ability to see similar, vetted, claims. Besides PoxVerifi's comprehensive approach to claim-testing, our platform provides an efficient and accessible method to crowdsource accuracy ratings on monkeypox related-claims, which can be aggregated to create new labeled misinformation datasets.