Retinoblastoma is a rare and aggressive form of childhood eye cancer that requires prompt diagnosis and treatment to prevent vision loss and even death. Deep learning models have shown promising results in detecting retinoblastoma from fundus images, but their decision-making process is often considered a “black box” that lacks transparency and interpretability. In this project, we explore the use of LIME and SHAP, two popular explainable AI techniques, to generate local and global explanations for a deep learning model based on InceptionV3 architecture trained on retinoblastoma and non-retinoblastoma fundus images. We collected and labeled a dataset of 400 retinoblastoma and 400 non-retinoblastoma images, split it into training, validation, and test sets, and trained the model using transfer learning from the pre-trained InceptionV3 model. We then applied LIME and SHAP to generate explanations for the model’s predictions on the validation and test sets. Our results demonstrate that LIME and SHAP can effectively identify the regions and features in the input images that contribute the most to the model’s predictions, providing valuable insights into the decision-making process of the deep learning model. In addition, the use of InceptionV3 architecture with spatial attention mechanism achieved high accuracy of 97% on the test set, indicating the potential of combining deep learning and explainable AI for improving retinoblastoma diagnosis and treatment.

Pressure ulcers are significant healthcare concerns affecting millions of people worldwide, particularly those with limited mobility. Early detection and classification of pressure ulcers are crucial in preventing their progression and reducing associated morbidity and mortality. In this work, we present a novel approach that uses YOLOv5, an advanced and robust object detection model, to detect and classify pressure ulcers into four stages and non-pressure ulcers. We also utilize data augmentation techniques to expand our dataset and strengthen the resilience of our model. Our approach shows promising results, achieving an overall mean average precision of 76.9% and class-specific mAP50 values ranging from 66% to 99.5%. Compared to previous studies that primarily utilize CNN-based algorithms, our approach provides a more efficient and accurate solution for the detection and classification of pressure ulcers. The successful implementation of our approach has the potential to improve the early detection and treatment of pressure ulcers, resulting in better patient outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.

E-Prescription systems are key components and drivers of digital health. They can enhance the safety of the patients, and are gaining popularity in health care systems around the world. Yet, there is little knowledge on comparative international analysis of e-Prescription systems' architecture and digital security. We report, in this study, original findings from a comparative analysis of the e-Prescription systems in eight different countries, namely, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Japan, Sweden, and Denmark. We surveyed the databases related to pharmacies, eHealth, e-Prescriptions, and related digital health websites for each country, and their system architectures. We also compared the digital security and privacy protocols in place within and across these digital systems. We evaluated the systems' authentication protocols used by pharmacies to verify patients' identities during the medication dispensing process. Furthermore, we examined the supporting systems/services used to manage patients' medication histories and enhance patients' medication safety. Taken together, we report, in this study, original comparative findings on the limitations and challenges of the surveyed systems as well as in adopting e-Prescription systems. While the present study was conducted before the onset of COVID-19, e-Prescription systems have become highly relevant during the current pandemic and hence, a deeper understanding of the country systems' architecture and digital security that can help design effective strategies against the pandemic. e-Prescription systems can help reduce physical contact and the risk of exposure to the virus, as well as the wait times in pharmacies, thus enhancing patient safety and improving planetary health.

Atrial fibrillation is a prevalent cardiac arrhythmia that poses significant health risks to patients. The use of non-invasive methods for AF detection, such as Electrocardiogram and Photoplethysmogram, has gained attention due to their accessibility and ease of use. However, there are challenges associated with ECG-based AF detection, and the significance of PPG signals in this context has been increasingly recognized. The limitations of ECG and the untapped potential of PPG are taken into account as this work attempts to classify AF and non-AF using PPG time series data and deep learning. In this work, we emploted a hybrid deep neural network comprising of 1D CNN and BiLSTM for the task of AF classification. We addressed the under-researched area of applying deep learning methods to transmissive PPG signals by proposing a novel approach. Our approach involved integrating ECG and PPG signals as multi-featured time series data and training deep learning models for AF classification. Our hybrid 1D CNN and BiLSTM model achieved an accuracy of 95% on test data in identifying atrial fibrillation, showcasing its strong performance and reliable predictive capabilities. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of our model using additional metrics. The precision of our classification model was measured at 0.88, indicating its ability to accurately identify true positive cases of AF. The recall, or sensitivity, was measured at 0.85, illustrating the model’s capacity to detect a high proportion of actual AF cases. Additionally, the F1 score, which combines both precision and recall, was calculated at 0.84, highlighting the overall effectiveness of our model in classifying AF and non-AF cases.

Cell counting in fluorescence microscopy is an essential task in biomedical research for analyzing cellular dynamics and studying disease progression. Traditional methods for cell counting involve manual counting or threshold-based segmentation, which are time-consuming and prone to human error. Recently, deep learning-based object detection methods have shown promising results in automating cell counting tasks. However, the existing methods mainly focus on segmentation-based techniques that require a large amount of labeled data and extensive computational resources. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect and count multiple-size cells in a fluorescence image slide using You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) with a feature pyramid network (FPN). Our proposed method can efficiently detect multiple cells with different sizes in a single image, eliminating the need for pixel-level segmentation. We show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation-based approaches in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. The experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves an average precision of 0.8 and a processing time of 43.9 ms per image. Our approach addresses the research gap in the literature by providing a more efficient and accurate method for cell counting in fluorescence microscopy that requires less computational resources and labeled data.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are an increasingly important source of information for healthcare professionals and researchers. However, EHRs are often fragmented, unstructured, and difficult to analyze due to the heterogeneity of the data sources and the sheer volume of information. Knowledge graphs have emerged as a powerful tool for capturing and representing complex relationships within large datasets. In this study, we explore the use of knowledge graphs to capture and represent complex relationships within EHRs. Specifically, we address the following research question: Can a knowledge graph created using the MIMIC III dataset and GraphDB effectively capture semantic relationships within EHRs and enable more efficient and accurate data analysis? We map the MIMIC III dataset to an ontology using text refinement and Protege; then, we create a knowledge graph using GraphDB and use SPARQL queries to retrieve and analyze information from the graph. Our results demonstrate that knowledge graphs can effectively capture semantic relationships within EHRs, enabling more efficient and accurate data analysis. We provide examples of how our implementation can be used to analyze patient outcomes and identify potential risk factors. Our results demonstrate that knowledge graphs are an effective tool for capturing semantic relationships within EHRs, enabling a more efficient and accurate data analysis. Our implementation provides valuable insights into patient outcomes and potential risk factors, contributing to the growing body of literature on the use of knowledge graphs in healthcare. In particular, our study highlights the potential of knowledge graphs to support decision-making and improve patient outcomes by enabling a more comprehensive and holistic analysis of EHR data. Overall, our research contributes to a better understanding of the value of knowledge graphs in healthcare and lays the foundation for further research in this area.