Chest radiography is a relatively cheap, widely available medical procedure that conveys key information for making diagnostic decisions. Chest X-rays are frequently used in the diagnosis of respiratory diseases such as pneumonia or COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised deep neural network that is pretrained on an unlabeled chest X-ray dataset. Pretraining is achieved through the contrastive learning approach by comparing representations of differently augmented input images. The learned representations are transferred to downstream tasks – the classification of respiratory diseases. We evaluate the proposed approach on two tasks for pneumonia classification, one for COVID-19 recognition and one for discrimination of different pneumonia types. The results show that our approach yields competitive results without requiring large amounts of labeled training data.

Existing decision support system frameworks for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease (PD) through handwriting, speech, or gait characteristics share very similar pipelines. Although in some cases, patient data can be captured by commercially available devices, specialized devices or even custom-made prototypes are often required for such tasks. Captured data are used for extracting features that are carefully designed on the basis of domain and problem knowledge. These features are then fed to classifiers that provide a final decision. In this article, we present an approach in which end-to-end processing by a convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized to diagnose PD from handwriting images, without the use of additional signals. This eliminates any need for specialized devices or feature engineering. To improve the performance of the proposed pretrained CNN, we propose the idea of multiple fine tuning to bridge the gap between semantically different source and target datasets and facilitate more efficient transfer learning. The proposed architecture, which is based on multiple fine tuning and an ensemble of multiple-fine-tuned CNNs, achieves 94.7% accuracy in the classification of PD from offline handwriting.

Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is a brain dysfunction caused by liver insufficiency and/or portosystemic shunting. HE manifests as a spectrum of neurological or psychiatric abnormalities. Diagnosis of overt HE (OHE) is based on the typical clinical manifestation, but covert HE (CHE) has only very subtle clinical signs and minimal HE (MHE) is detected only by specialized time-consuming psychometric tests, for which there is still no universally accepted gold standard. Significant progress has been made in artificial intelligence and its application to medicine. In this review, we introduce how artificial intelligence has been used to diagnose minimal hepatic encephalopathy thus far, and we discuss its further potential in analyzing speech and handwriting data, which are probably the most accessible data for evaluating the cognitive state of the patient.