Background/Objectives: With the increasing life expectancy and, as a result, the aging of the global population, there has been a rise in the prevalence of chronic conditions, which can significantly impact individuals’ health-related quality of life, a multidimensional concept that comprises an individual’s physical, mental, and social wellbeing. While a balanced, nutrient-dense diet, such as Mediterranean diet, is widely recognized for its role in chronic disease prevention, particularly in reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and certain cancers, its potential benefits extend beyond these well-known effects, showing promise in improving physical and mental wellbeing, and promoting health-related quality of life. Methods: A systematic search of the scientific literature in electronic databases (Pubmed/Medline) was performed to identify potentially eligible studies reporting on the relation between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and health-related quality of life, published up to December 2024. Results: A total of 28 studies were included in this systematic review, comprising 13 studies conducted among the general population and 15 studies involving various types of patients. Overall, most studies showed a significant association between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and HRQoL, with the most significant results retrieved for physical domains of quality of life, suggesting that diet seems to play a relevant role in both the general population and people affected by chronic conditions with an inflammatory basis. Conclusions: Adherence to the Mediterranean diet provides significant benefits in preventing and managing various chronic diseases commonly associated with aging populations. Furthermore, it enhances the overall health and quality of life of aging individuals, ultimately supporting more effective and less invasive treatment approaches for chronic diseases.

Artificial intelligence has made substantial progress in medicine. Automated dental imaging interpretation is one of the most prolific areas of research using AI. X-ray and infrared imaging systems have enabled dental clinicians to identify dental diseases since the 1950s. However, the manual process of dental disease assessment is tedious and error-prone when diagnosed by inexperienced dentists. Thus, researchers have employed different advanced computer vision techniques, and machine- and deep-learning models for dental disease diagnoses using X-ray and near-infrared imagery. Despite the notable development of AI in dentistry, certain factors affect the performance of the proposed approaches, including limited data availability, imbalanced classes, and lack of transparency and interpretability. Hence, it is of utmost importance for the research community to formulate suitable approaches, considering the existing challenges and leveraging findings from the existing studies. Based on an extensive literature review, this survey provides a brief overview of X-ray and near-infrared imaging systems. Additionally, a comprehensive insight into challenges faced by researchers in the dental domain has been brought forth in this survey. The article further offers an amalgamative assessment of both performances and methods evaluated on public benchmarks and concludes with ethical considerations and future research avenues.

Breast cancer is one of the most common invasive cancers in women and it continues to be a worldwide medical problem since the number of cases has significantly increased over the past decade. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer in women. The early detection of breast cancer can save human life but the traditional approach for detecting breast cancer disease needs various laboratory tests involving medical experts. To reduce human error and speed up breast cancer detection, an automatic system is required that would perform the diagnosis accurately and timely. Despite the research efforts for automated systems for cancer detection, a wide gap exists between the desired and provided accuracy of current approaches. To overcome this issue, this research proposes an approach for breast cancer prediction by selecting the best fine needle aspiration features. To enhance the prediction accuracy, several feature selection techniques are applied to analyze their efficacy, such as principal component analysis, singular vector decomposition, and chi-square (Chi2). Extensive experiments are performed with different features and different set sizes of features to investigate the optimal feature set. Additionally, the influence of imbalanced and balanced data using the SMOTE approach is investigated. Six classifiers including random forest, support vector machine, gradient boosting machine, logistic regression, multilayer perceptron, and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) are tuned to achieve increased classification accuracy. Results indicate that KNN outperforms all other classifiers on the used dataset with 20 features using SVD and with the 15 most important features using a PCA with a 100% accuracy score.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) poses an enormous challenge to modern healthcare. Since 2017, researchers have been using deep learning (DL) models for the early detection of AD using neuroimaging biomarkers. In this paper, we implement the EfficietNet-b0 convolutional neural network (CNN) with a novel approach—"fusion of end-to-end and transfer learning"—to classify different stages of AD. 245 T1W MRI scans of cognitively normal (CN) subjects, 229 scans of AD subjects, and 229 scans of subjects with stable mild cognitive impairment (sMCI) were employed. Each scan was preprocessed using a standard pipeline. The proposed models were trained and evaluated using preprocessed scans. For the sMCI vs. AD classification task we obtained 95.29% accuracy and 95.35% area under the curve (AUC) for model training and 93.10% accuracy and 93.00% AUC for model testing. For the multiclass AD vs. CN vs. sMCI classification task we obtained 85.66% accuracy and 86% AUC for model training and 87.38% accuracy and 88.00% AUC for model testing. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that CNN-based DL models can be used to analyze complicated MRI scan features in clinical settings.

Automated dental imaging interpretation is one of the most prolific areas of research using artificial intelligence. X-ray imaging systems have enabled dental clinicians to identify dental diseases. However, the manual process of dental disease assessment is tedious and error-prone when diagnosed by inexperienced dentists. Thus, researchers have employed different advanced computer vision techniques, as well as machine and deep learning models for dental disease diagnoses using X-ray imagery. In this regard, a lightweight Mask-RCNN model is proposed for periapical disease detection. The proposed model is constructed in two parts: a lightweight modified MobileNet-v2 backbone and region-based network (RPN) are proposed for periapical disease localization on a small dataset. To measure the effectiveness of the proposed model, the lightweight Mask-RCNN is evaluated on a custom annotated dataset comprising images of five different types of periapical lesions. The results reveal that the model can detect and localize periapical lesions with an overall accuracy of 94%, a mean average precision of 85%, and a mean insection over a union of 71.0%. The proposed model improves the detection, classification, and localization accuracy significantly using a smaller number of images compared to existing methods and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

The prevalence of anxiety among university students is increasing, resulting in the negative impact on their academic and social (behavioral and emotional) development. In order for students to have competitive academic performance, the cognitive function should be strengthened by detecting and handling anxiety. Over a period of 6 weeks, this study examined how to detect anxiety and how Mano Shakti Yoga (MSY) helps reduce anxiety. Relying on cardiac signals, this study follows an integrated detection-estimation-reduction framework for anxiety using the Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) and MSY. IIoMT is the integration of Internet of Medical Things (wearable smart belt) and machine learning algorithms (Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and AdaBoost (AB)). Sixty-six eligible students were selected as experiencing anxiety detected based on the results of self-rating anxiety scale (SAS) questionnaire and a smart belt. Then, the students were divided randomly into two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group followed an MSY intervention for one hour twice a week, while the control group followed their own daily routine. Machine learning algorithms are used to analyze the data obtained from the smart belt. MSY is an alternative improvement for the immune system that helps reduce anxiety. All the results illustrate that the experimental group reduced anxiety with a significant (p < 0.05) difference in group × time interaction compared to the control group. The intelligent techniques achieved maximum accuracy of 80% on using RF algorithm. Thus, students can practice MSY and concentrate on their objectives by improving their intelligence, attention, and memory.