Assim Sagahyroon

Dr. Assim Sagahyroon


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

21Years (2006-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

View All Publications
2 May 2021 in Healthcare Technology Letters
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
JRJayroop Ramesh
Jayroop Ramesh
RARaafat Aburukba
Raafat Aburukba
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
Diabetes is a metabolic disease that affects millions of people each year. It is associated with an increased likelihood of vital organ failures and decreased quality of life. Early detection and regular monitoring are crucial for managing diabetes. Remote patient monitoring can facilitate effective intervention and treatment paradigms using current technology. This work proposes an end‐to‐end remote monitoring framework for automated diabetes risk prediction and management, using personal health devices, smart wearables and smartphones. A support vector machine was developed for diabetes risk prediction using the Pima Indian Diabetes Database, after feature scaling, imputation, selection and augmentation. This work achieved the performance metrics of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity scores at 83.20%, 87.20% and 79% respectively through the tenfold stratified cross validation method, which is competitive with existing methods. Patients can use multiple healthcare devices, smartphones and smartwatches to measure vital parameters, curb the progression of diabetes and close the communication loop with medical professionals. The proposed framework enables medical professionals to make informed decisions based on the latest diabetes risk predictions and lifestyle insights while attaining unobtrusiveness, reduced cost, and vendor interoperability.

9 December 2021 in Healthcare
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
YJYazan Khaled Jian
Yazan Khaled Jian
MPMichel Pasquier
Michel Pasquier
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
FAFadi Aloul
Fadi Aloul
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease that is considered to be life-threatening. It can affect any part of the body over time, resulting in serious complications such as nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy. In this work, several supervised classification algorithms were applied for building different models to predict and classify eight diabetes complications. The complications include metabolic syndrome, dyslipidemia, neuropathy, nephropathy, diabetic foot, hypertension, obesity, and retinopathy. For this study, a dataset collected by the Rashid Center for Diabetes and Research (RCDR) located in Ajman, UAE, was utilized. The dataset consists of 884 records with 79 features. Some essential preprocessing steps were applied to handle the missing values and unbalanced data problems. Furthermore, feature selection was performed to select the top five and ten features for each complication. The final number of records used to train and build the binary classifiers for each complication was as follows: 428—metabolic syndrome, 836—dyslipidemia, 223—neuropathy, 233—nephropathy, 240—diabetic foot, 586—hypertension, 498—obesity, 228—retinopathy. Repeated stratified k-fold cross-validation (with k = 10 and a total of 10 repetitions) was employed for a better estimation of the performance. Accuracy and F1-score were used to evaluate the models’ performance reaching a maximum of 97.8% and 97.7% for accuracy and F1-scores, respectively. Moreover, by comparing the performance achieved using different attributes’ sets, it was found that by using a selected number of features, we can still build adequate classifiers.

1 December 2014 in Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
MAMamoun Al-Mardini
Mamoun Al-Mardini
FAFadi Aloul
Fadi Aloul
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
LALuai Al-Husseini
Luai Al-Husseini

30 October 2021 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
JRJayroop Ramesh
Jayroop Ramesh
ZSZahra Solatidehkordi
Zahra Solatidehkordi
RARaafat Aburukba
Raafat Aburukba
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a type of cardiac arrhythmia affecting millions of people every year. This disease increases the likelihood of strokes, heart failure, and even death. While dedicated medical-grade electrocardiogram (ECG) devices can enable gold-standard analysis, these devices are expensive and require clinical settings. Recent advances in the capabilities of general-purpose smartphones and wearable technology equipped with photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors increase diagnostic accessibility for most populations. This work aims to develop a single model that can generalize AF classification across the modalities of ECG and PPG with a unified knowledge representation. This is enabled by approximating the transformation of signals obtained from low-cost wearable PPG sensors in terms of Pulse Rate Variability (PRV) to temporal Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features extracted from medical-grade ECG. This paper proposes a one-dimensional deep convolutional neural network that uses HRV-derived features for classifying 30-s heart rhythms as normal sinus rhythm or atrial fibrillation from both ECG and PPG-based sensors. The model is trained with three MIT-BIH ECG databases and is assessed on a dataset of unseen PPG signals acquired from wrist-worn wearable devices through transfer learning. The model achieved the aggregate binary classification performance measures of accuracy: 95.50%, sensitivity: 94.50%, and specificity: 96.00% across a five-fold cross-validation strategy on the ECG datasets. It also achieved 95.10% accuracy, 94.60% sensitivity, 95.20% specificity on an unseen PPG dataset. The results show considerable promise towards seamless adaptation of gold-standard ECG trained models for non-ambulatory AF detection with consumer wearable devices through HRV-based knowledge transfer.

27 October 2021 in Healthcare
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
JRJayroop Ramesh
Jayroop Ramesh
NKNiha Keeran
Niha Keeran
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
FAFadi Aloul
Fadi Aloul
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common, chronic, sleep-related breathing disorder characterized by partial or complete airway obstruction in sleep. The gold standard diagnosis method is polysomnography, which estimates disease severity through the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI). However, this is expensive and not widely accessible to the public. For effective screening, this work implements machine learning algorithms for classification of OSA. The model is trained with routinely acquired clinical data of 1479 records from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort dataset. Extracted features from the electronic health records include patient demographics, laboratory blood reports, physical measurements, habitual sleep history, comorbidities, and general health questionnaire scores. For distinguishing between OSA and non-OSA patients, feature selection methods reveal the primary important predictors as waist-to-height ratio, waist circumference, neck circumference, body-mass index, lipid accumulation product, excessive daytime sleepiness, daily snoring frequency and snoring volume. Optimal hyperparameters were selected using a hybrid tuning method consisting of Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Algorithms through a five-fold cross-validation strategy. Support vector machines achieved the highest evaluation scores with accuracy: 68.06%, sensitivity: 88.76%, specificity: 40.74%, F1-score: 75.96%, PPV: 66.36% and NPV: 73.33%. We conclude that routine clinical data can be useful in prioritization of patient referral for further sleep studies.

25 September 2020 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
MEMohammed Elnawawy
Mohammed Elnawawy
ASAssim Sagahyroon
Assim Sagahyroon
TSTamer Shanableh
Tamer Shanableh
Real-time classification of internet traffic is critical for the efficient management of networks. Classification approaches based on machine learning techniques have shown promising results with high levels of accuracy. In this article, the suitability of packet-level and flow-level features is validated using stepwise regression and random forest feature selection. Moreover, the optimal percentage of packets considered within a flow while extracting flow-level features is determined. Several experiments are conducted using naïve Bayes, support vector machine, $k$ -nearest neighbor, random forest, and artificial neural networks on the University of Brescia (UNIBS) and the University of New Brunswick (UNB) datasets, which are both publicly available. The performed experiments show that 60% of flow packets are a good compromise that ensures high performance in the least processing time. The results of the conducted experiments indicate that random forest outperforms other algorithms achieving a maximum accuracy of 98.5% and an F-score of 0.932. Further, and since software-based classifiers cannot meet the anticipated real-time requirements, we propose a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based random forest implementation that utilizes a highly pipelined architecture to accelerate such a time-consuming task. The proposed design achieves an average throughput of 163.24 Gbps, exceeding throughputs of reported hardware-based classifiers that use comparable approaches, which in turn ensures the continuity of real-time traffic classification at congested data centers.