Exploring gene regulatory interaction networks and predicting therapeutic molecules for hypopharyngeal cancer and EGFR-mutated lung adenocarcinoma.

Hypopharyngeal cancer is a disease that is associated with EGFR-mutated lung adenocarcinoma. Here we utilized a bioinformatics approach to identify genetic commonalities between these two diseases. To this end, we examined microarray datasets from GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) to identify differentially expressed genes, common genes, and hub genes between the selected two diseases. Our analyses identified potential therapeutic molecules for the selected diseases based on 10 hub genes with the highest interactions according to the degree topology method and the maximum clique centrality (MCC). These therapeutic molecules may have the potential for simultaneous treatment of these diseases.

An Explainable EEG-Based Human Activity Recognition Model Using Machine-Learning Approach and LIME.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive method employed to discern human behaviors by monitoring the neurological responses during cognitive and motor tasks. Machine learning (ML) represents a promising tool for the recognition of human activities (HAR), and eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can elucidate the role of EEG features in ML-based HAR models. The primary objective of this investigation is to investigate the feasibility of an EEG-based ML model for categorizing everyday activities, such as resting, motor, and cognitive tasks, and interpreting models clinically through XAI techniques to explicate the EEG features that contribute the most to different HAR states. The study involved an examination of 75 healthy individuals with no prior diagnosis of neurological disorders. EEG recordings were obtained during the resting state, as well as two motor control states (walking and working tasks), and a cognition state (reading task). Electrodes were placed in specific regions of the brain, including the frontal, central, temporal, and occipital lobes (Fz, C1, C2, T7, T8, Oz). Several ML models were trained using EEG data for activity recognition and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations) was employed for interpreting clinically the most influential EEG spectral features in HAR models. The classification results of the HAR models, particularly the Random Forest and Gradient Boosting models, demonstrated outstanding performances in distinguishing the analyzed human activities. The ML models exhibited alignment with EEG spectral bands in the recognition of human activity, a finding supported by the XAI explanations. To sum up, incorporating eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) into Human Activity Recognition (HAR) studies may improve activity monitoring for patient recovery, motor imagery, the healthcare metaverse, and clinical virtual reality settings.

FP-CNN: Fuzzy pooling-based convolutional neural network for lung ultrasound image classification with explainable AI.

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc on healthcare systems all across the world. In pandemic scenarios like COVID-19, the applicability of diagnostic modalities is crucial in medical diagnosis, where non-invasive ultrasound imaging has the potential to be a useful biomarker. This research develops a computer-assisted intelligent methodology for ultrasound lung image classification by utilizing a fuzzy pooling-based convolutional neural network FP-CNN with underlying evidence of particular decisions. The fuzzy-pooling method finds better representative features for ultrasound image classification. The FPCNN model categorizes ultrasound images into one of three classes: covid, disease-free (normal), and pneumonia. Explanations of diagnostic decisions are crucial to ensure the fairness of an intelligent system. This research has used Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) to explain the prediction of the FP-CNN models. The prediction of the black-box model is illustrated using the SHAP explanation of the intermediate layers of the black-box model. To determine the most effective model, we have tested different state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures with various training strategies, including fine-tuned models, single-layer fuzzy pooling models, and fuzzy pooling at all pooling layers. Among different architectures, the Xception model with all pooling layers having fuzzy pooling achieves the best classification results of 97.2% accuracy. We hope our proposed method will be helpful for the clinical diagnosis of covid-19 from lung ultrasound (LUS) images.

Cancer Classification Utilizing Voting Classifier with Ensemble Feature Selection Method and Transcriptomic Data.

Biomarker-based cancer identification and classification tools are widely used in bioinformatics and machine learning fields. However, the high dimensionality of microarray gene expression data poses a challenge for identifying important genes in cancer diagnosis. Many feature selection algorithms optimize cancer diagnosis by selecting optimal features. This article proposes an ensemble rank-based feature selection method (EFSM) and an ensemble weighted average voting classifier (VT) to overcome this challenge. The EFSM uses a ranking method that aggregates features from individual selection methods to efficiently discover the most relevant and useful features. The VT combines support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and decision tree algorithms to create an ensemble model. The proposed method was tested on three benchmark datasets and compared to existing built-in ensemble models. The results show that our model achieved higher accuracy, with 100% for leukaemia, 94.74% for colon cancer, and 94.34% for the 11-tumor dataset. This study concludes by identifying a subset of the most important cancer-causing genes and demonstrating their significance compared to the original data. The proposed approach surpasses existing strategies in accuracy and stability, significantly impacting the development of ML-based gene analysis. It detects vital genes with higher precision and stability than other existing methods.

WheatSpikeNet: an improved wheat spike segmentation model for accurate estimation from field imaging.

Phenotyping is used in plant breeding to identify genotypes with desirable characteristics, such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, and high-yield potentials. It may also be used to evaluate the effect of environmental circumstances, such as drought, heat, and salt, on plant growth and development. Wheat spike density measure is one of the most important agronomic factors relating to wheat phenotyping. Nonetheless, due to the diversity of wheat field environments, fast and accurate identification for counting wheat spikes remains one of the challenges. This study proposes a meticulously curated and annotated dataset, named as SPIKE-segm, taken from the publicly accessible SPIKE dataset, and an optimal instance segmentation approach named as WheatSpikeNet for segmenting and counting wheat spikes from field imagery. The proposed method is based on the well-known Cascade Mask RCNN architecture with model enhancements and hyperparameter tuning to provide state-of-the-art detection and segmentation performance. A comprehensive ablation analysis incorporating many architectural components of the model was performed to determine the most efficient version. In addition, the model's hyperparameters were fine-tuned by conducting several empirical tests. ResNet50 with Deformable Convolution Network (DCN) as the backbone architecture for feature extraction, Generic RoI Extractor (GRoIE) for RoI pooling, and Side Aware Boundary Localization (SABL) for wheat spike localization comprises the final instance segmentation model. With bbox and mask mean average precision (mAP) scores of 0.9303 and 0.9416, respectively, on the test set, the proposed model achieved superior performance on the challenging SPIKE datasets. Furthermore, in comparison with other existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model achieved up to a 0.41% improvement of mAP in spike detection and a significant improvement of 3.46% of mAP in the segmentation tasks that will lead us to an appropriate yield estimation from wheat plants.

Binocular Rivalry Impact on Macroblock-Loss Error Concealment for Stereoscopic 3D Video Transmission.

Three-dimensional video services delivered through wireless communication channels have to deal with numerous challenges due to the limitations of both the transmission channel's bandwidth and receiving devices. Adverse channel conditions, delays, or jitters can result in bit errors and packet losses, which can alter the appearance of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) video. Due to the perception of dissimilar patterns by the two human eyes, they can not be fused into a stable composite pattern in the brain and hence try to dominate by suppressing each other. Thus, a psychovisual sensation that is called binocular rivalry occurs. As a result, undetectable changes causing irritating flickering effects are seen, leading to visual discomforts such as eye strain, headache, nausea, and weariness. This study addresses the observer's quality of experience (QoE) by analyzing the binocular rivalry impact on the macroblock (MB) losses in a frame and its error propagation due to predictive frame encoding in stereoscopic video transmission systems. To simulate the processing of experimental videos, the Joint Test Model (JM) reference software has been used as it is recommended by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Existing error concealing techniques were then applied to the contiguous lost MBs for a variety of transmission impairments. In order to validate the authenticity of the simulated packet loss environment, several objective evaluations were carried out. Standard numbers of subjects were then engaged in the subjective testing of common 3D video sequences. The results were then statistically examined using a standard Student's t-test, allowing the impact of binocular rivalry to be compared to that of a non-rivalry error condition. The major goal is to assure error-free video communication by minimizing the negative impacts of binocular rivalry and boosting the ability to efficiently integrate 3D video material to improve viewers' overall QoE.

Particle Swarm Optimized Fuzzy CNN With Quantitative Feature Fusion for Ultrasound Image Quality Identification.

Inherently ultrasound images are susceptible to noise which leads to several image quality issues. Hence, rating of an image's quality is crucial since diagnosing diseases requires accurate and high-quality ultrasound images. This research presents an intelligent architecture to rate the quality of ultrasound images. The formulated image quality recognition approach fuses feature from a Fuzzy convolutional neural network (fuzzy CNN) and a handcrafted feature extraction method. We implement the fuzzy layer in between the last max pooling and the fully connected layer of the multiple state-of-the-art CNN models to handle the uncertainty of information. Moreover, the fuzzy CNN uses Particle swarm optimization (PSO) as an optimizer. In addition, a novel Quantitative feature extraction machine (QFEM) extracts hand-crafted features from ultrasound images. Next, the proposed method uses different classifiers to predict the image quality. The classifiers categories ultrasound images into four types (normal, noisy, blurry, and distorted) instead of binary classification into good or poor-quality images. The results of the proposed method exhibit a significant performance in accuracy (99.62%), precision (99.62%), recall (99.61%), and f1-score (99.61%). This method will assist a physician in automatically rating informative ultrasound images with steadfast operation in real-time medical diagnosis.

Deep CNN-LSTM With Self-Attention Model for Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensor.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems are devised for continuously observing human behavior - primarily in the fields of environmental compatibility, sports injury detection, senior care, rehabilitation, entertainment, and the surveillance in intelligent home settings. Inertial sensors, e.g., accelerometers, linear acceleration, and gyroscopes are frequently employed for this purpose, which are now compacted into smart devices, e.g., smartphones. Since the use of smartphones is so widespread now-a-days, activity data acquisition for the HAR systems is a pressing need. In this article, we have conducted the smartphone sensor-based raw data collection, namely H-Activity, using an Android-OS-based application for accelerometer, gyroscope, and linear acceleration. Furthermore, a hybrid deep learning model is proposed, coupling convolutional neural network and long-short term memory network (CNN-LSTM), empowered by the self-attention algorithm to enhance the predictive capabilities of the system. In addition to our collected dataset (H-Activity), the model has been evaluated with some benchmark datasets, e.g., MHEALTH, and UCI-HAR to demonstrate the comparative performance of our model. When compared to other models, the proposed model has an accuracy of 99.93% using our collected H-Activity data, and 98.76% and 93.11% using data from MHEALTH and UCI-HAR databases respectively, indicating its efficacy in recognizing human activity recognition. We hope that our developed model could be applicable in the clinical settings and collected data could be useful for further research.

Early-Stage Detection of Ovarian Cancer Based on Clinical Data Using Machine Learning Approaches.

One of the common types of cancer for women is ovarian cancer. Still, at present, there are no drug therapies that can properly cure this deadly disease. However, early-stage detection could boost the life expectancy of the patients. The main aim of this work is to apply machine learning models along with statistical methods to the clinical data obtained from 349 patient individuals to conduct predictive analytics for early diagnosis. In statistical analysis, Student's t-test as well as log fold changes of two groups are used to find the significant blood biomarkers. Furthermore, a set of machine learning models including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine (XGBoost), Logistic Regression (LR), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) are used to build classification models to stratify benign-vs.-malignant ovarian cancer patients. Both of the analysis techniques recognized that the serumsamples carbohydrate antigen 125, carbohydrate antigen 19-9, carcinoembryonic antigen and human epididymis protein 4 are the top-most significant biomarkers as well as neutrophil ratio, thrombocytocrit, hematocrit blood samples, alanine aminotransferase, calcium, indirect bilirubin, uric acid, natriumas as general chemistry tests. Moreover, the results from predictive analysis suggest that the machine learning models can classify malignant patients from benign patients with accuracy as good as 91%. Since generally, early-stage detection is not available, machine learning detection could play a significant role in cancer diagnosis.

Improved Transfer-Learning-Based Facial Recognition Framework to Detect Autistic Children at an Early Stage.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neuro-developmental disorder that affects social skills, language, speech and communication. Early detection of ASD individuals, especially children, could help to devise and strategize right therapeutic plan at right time. Human faces encode important markers that can be used to identify ASD by analyzing facial features, eye contact, and so on. In this work, an improved transfer-learning-based autism face recognition framework is proposed to identify kids with ASD in the early stages more precisely. Therefore, we have collected face images of children with ASD from the Kaggle data repository, and various machine learning and deep learning classifiers and other transfer-learning-based pre-trained models were applied. We observed that our improved MobileNet-V1 model demonstrates the best accuracy of 90.67% and the lowest 9.33% value of both fall-out and miss rate compared to the other classifiers and pre-trained models. Furthermore, this classifier is used to identify different ASD groups investigating only autism image data using k-means clustering technique. Thus, the improved MobileNet-V1 model showed the highest accuracy (92.10%) for k = 2 autism sub-types. We hope this model will be useful for physicians to detect autistic children more explicitly at the early stage.

Clinically Applicable Machine Learning Approaches to Identify Attributes of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) for Use in Low-Cost Diagnostic Screening.

OBJECTIVE: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major public health concern worldwide. High costs of late-stage diagnosis and insufficient testing facilities can contribute to high morbidity and mortality rates in CKD patients, particularly in less developed countries. Thus, early diagnosis aided by vital parameter analytics using affordable computer-aided diagnosis could not only reduce diagnosis costs but improve patient management and outcomes. METHODS: In this study, we developed machine learning models using selective key pathological categories to identify clinical test attributes that will aid in accurate early diagnosis of CKD. Such an approach will save time and costs for diagnostic screening. We have also evaluated the performance of several classifiers with k-fold cross-validation on optimized datasets derived using these selected clinical test attributes. RESULTS: Our results suggest that the optimized datasets with important attributes perform well in diagnosis of CKD using our proposed machine learning models. Furthermore, we evaluated clinical test attributes based on urine and blood tests along with clinical parameters that have low costs of acquisition. The predictive models with the optimized and pathologically categorized attributes set yielded high levels of CKD diagnosis accuracy with random forest (RF) classifier being the best performing. CONCLUSIONS: Our machine learning approach has yielded effective predictive analytics for CKD screening which can be developed as a resource to facilitate improved CKD screening for enhanced and timely treatment plans.

Machine Learning Approach to Predicting COVID-19 Disease Severity Based on Clinical Blood Test Data: Statistical Analysis and Model Development.

BACKGROUND: Accurate prediction of the disease severity of patients with COVID-19 would greatly improve care delivery and resource allocation and thereby reduce mortality risks, especially in less developed countries. Many patient-related factors, such as pre-existing comorbidities, affect disease severity and can be used to aid this prediction. OBJECTIVE: Because rapid automated profiling of peripheral blood samples is widely available, we aimed to investigate how data from the peripheral blood of patients with COVID-19 can be used to predict clinical outcomes. METHODS: We investigated clinical data sets of patients with COVID-19 with known outcomes by combining statistical comparison and correlation methods with machine learning algorithms; the latter included decision tree, random forest, variants of gradient boosting machine, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and deep learning methods. RESULTS: Our work revealed that several clinical parameters that are measurable in blood samples are factors that can discriminate between healthy people and COVID-19-positive patients, and we showed the value of these parameters in predicting later severity of COVID-19 symptoms. We developed a number of analytical methods that showed accuracy and precision scores >90% for disease severity prediction. CONCLUSIONS: We developed methodologies to analyze routine patient clinical data that enable more accurate prediction of COVID-19 patient outcomes. With this approach, data from standard hospital laboratory analyses of patient blood could be used to identify patients with COVID-19 who are at high risk of mortality, thus enabling optimization of hospital facilities for COVID-19 treatment.