Diabetic retinopathy (DR), which is seen in approximately one-third of diabetes patients worldwide, leads to irreversible vision loss and even blindness if not diagnosed and treated in time. It is vital to limit the progression of DR disease in order to prevent the loss of vision in diabetic patients. It is therefore essential that DR disease is diagnosed at an early phase. Thanks to retinal screening at least twice a year, DR disease can be diagnosed in its early phases. However, due to the variations and complexity of DR, it is really difficult to determine the phase of DR disease in current clinical diagnoses. This paper presents a robust artificial intelligence (AI)-based model that can overcome nonlinear dynamics with low computational complexity and high classification accuracy using fundus images to determine the phase of DR disease. The proposed model consists of four stages, excluding the preprocessing stage. In the preprocessing stage, fractal analysis is performed to reveal the presence of chaos in the dataset consisting of 12,500 color fundus images. In the first stage, two-dimensional stationary wavelet transform (2D-SWT) is applied to the dataset consisting of color fundus images in order to prevent information loss in the images and to reveal their characteristic features. In the second stage, 96 features are extracted by applying statistical- and entropy-based feature functions to approximate, horizontal, vertical, and diagonal matrices of 2D-SWT. In the third stage, the features that keep the classifier performance high are selected by a chaotic-based wrapper approach consisting of the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and chaotic particle swarm optimization algorithms (CPSO) to cope with both chaoticity and computational complexity in the fundus images. At the last stage, an AI-based classification model is created with the recurrent neural network-long short-term memory (RNN-LSTM) architecture by selecting the lowest number of feature sets that can keep the classification performance high. The performance of the DR disease classification model was tested on 2500 color fundus image data, which included five classes: no DR, mild non-proliferative DR (NPDR), moderate NPDR, severe NPDR, and proliferative DR (PDR). The robustness of the DR disease classification model was confirmed by the 10-fold cross-validation. In addition, the classification performance of the proposed model is compared with the support vector machine (SVM), which is one of the machine learning techniques. The results obtained show that the proposed model can overcome nonlinear dynamics in color fundus images with low computational complexity and is very effective and successful in precisely diagnosing all phases of DR disease.

Accurate identification of growth and development stages is critical for orthodontic diagnosis, treatment planning, and post-treatment retention. While hand–wrist radiographs are the traditional gold standard, the associated radiation exposure necessitates alternative imaging methods. Lateral cephalometric radiographs, particularly the maturation stages of the second, third, and fourth cervical vertebrae (C2, C3, and C4), have emerged as a promising alternative. However, the nonlinear dynamics of these images pose significant challenges for reliable detection. This study presents a novel approach that integrates chaotic functional connectivity (FC) matrices and fractal dimension analysis to address these challenges. The fractal dimensions of C2, C3, and C4 vertebrae were calculated from 945 lateral cephalometric radiographs using three methods: fast Fourier transform (FFT), box counting, and a pre-processed FFT variant. These results were used to construct chaotic FC matrices based on correlations between the calculated fractal dimensions. To effectively model the nonlinear dynamics, chaotic maps were generated, representing a significant advance over traditional methods. Feature selection was performed using a wrapper-based approach combining k-nearest neighbors (kNN) and the Puma optimization algorithm, which efficiently handles the chaotic and computationally complex nature of cervical vertebrae images. This selection minimized the number of features while maintaining high classification performance. The resulting AI-driven model was validated with 10-fold cross-validation and demonstrated high accuracy in identifying growth stages. Our results highlight the effectiveness of integrating chaotic FC matrices and AI in orthodontic practice. The proposed model, with its low computational complexity, successfully handles the nonlinear dynamics in C2, C3, and C4 vertebral images, enabling accurate detection of growth and developmental stages. This work represents a significant step in the detection of growth and development stages and provides a practical and effective solution for future orthodontic diagnosis.

Background/Objectives: Brain tumors are among the most severe neurological disorders, and their variability in size, morphology, and anatomical location complicates early and accurate diagnosis. Although magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most reliable non-invasive modality for tumor detection, manual interpretation remains time-consuming, subjective, and susceptible to human error. This study aims to develop an optimization-driven hybrid machine learning framework for accurate and computationally efficient automatic brain tumor classification. Methods: The dataset includes 834 MRI images (583-training, 123-validation, 128-independent test). Because YOLOv11 detects tumor and non-tumor regions separately, the sample size doubled during region-based analysis, and all subsequent stages were conducted at the regions of interest (ROI) level. On the independent test set, YOLOv11 achieved 98.87% mAP@50, 98.54% precision, and 98.21% recall. The proposed framework combines automated tumor localization with image standardization using Gaussian noise reduction and bilinear interpolation. From the processed MR images, 39 entropy-based features were extracted. To enhance diagnostic performance and eliminate redundant information, the superb fairy-wren optimization algorithm (SFOA) was applied for feature selection and compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO), Harris hawk optimization (HHO), and puma optimization (PO). Final classification was primarily performed using k-nearest neighbors (kNN), while support vector machines (SVM) were used for comparative evaluation. Results: SFOA reduced the feature dimensionality from 39 to 5 features while achieving 99.20% classification accuracy on the independent test set. In comparison, PSO selected 10 features, HHO selected 6 features and PO selected 10 features, all achieving 98.45% accuracy. The best performance obtained with SVM was 98.45% accuracy (HHO-SVM), which remained lower than the 99.20% achieved by the proposed SFOA-kNN model. Conclusions: The results indicate that combining entropy-based feature extraction with SFOA-driven feature selection and kNN classification significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy while reducing computational complexity, highlighting the strong potential of the proposed framework for integration into computer-aided diagnosis systems to support clinical decision-making.

Water and sanitation governance sits at the intersection of global development ambitions and highly localized service realities. While SDG6 sets universal targets for clean water and sanitation, the institutional and fiscal arrangements that translate those targets into actual service outcomes operate primarily at the subnational level. The discrepancy between globally defined objectives and locally executed delivery creates a structural research gap: how do the fiscal architectures of local governments influence progress towards SDG6? This study addresses this question for a panel of OECD countries by developing a deep learning-based estimation framework that combines bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks with Tianji’s horse racing optimization (THRO) algorithm. Three distinct operationalizations of fiscal decentralization are tested against SDG6 outcomes: subnational expenditure share (EFDM), subnational revenue share (RFDM), and a composite index balancing both dimensions (CFDM). Model adequacy is assessed using a layered diagnostic protocol involving regression fit, country-level residual patterns, error density profiles, Bland–Altman limits of agreement and inter-annual error trajectories. Among the three configurations, CFDM consistently records superior performance ($R^2=0.9216$; $RMSE = 1.4465$; $MAE = 1.0712$), while even the weakest specification clears $R^2=0.89$, attesting to the overall robustness of the proposed architecture. The margin by which CFDM outperforms its alternatives highlights a key finding: neither spending authority nor revenue capacity alone accurately reflects the fiscal reality of local water and sanitation governance; it is their combined effect that is important. The expenditure dimension is further proven to be the more influential of the two unidimensional proxies, consistent with the capital-intensive and maintenance-heavy nature of water infrastructure. On the other hand, coefficient findings show that fiscal decentralization is positively associated with SDG6 achievement for all models. Beyond its empirical contributions, the study introduces a methodological template for applying hybrid AI optimization to policy-relevant sustainability panels. It also connects two largely parallel bodies of scholarship, fiscal federalism and SDG research, that have rarely been examined together.

Industrialization and mining raise the heavy metal burden of soil ecosystems and create risks for both the environment and human health. Apportionment becomes difficult when neighboring facilities emit overlapping metal signatures, and conventional receptor models compound the difficulty by returning contribution shares without an attached uncertainty statement. This study develops a probabilistic apportionment framework for the coal–steel industrial zone of Zonguldak, Turkey, using 93 georeferenced topsoil stations and eight priority metals. Graphical Lasso estimates a sparse conditional dependency graph whose nodes are the measured metals; fixed propagation over that graph expands each observation into a 24-dimensional relational representation; and a Dirichlet neural posterior estimator maps the representation to source contribution distributions. The Dirichlet parameterization enforces non-negativity and unit sum by construction and delivers 95% credible intervals at every station; empirical coverage on held-out simulations was 0.957 against a nominal 0.95. Averaged across the province, posterior mean contributions were 0.25 for the iron-and-steel sector, 0.25 for thermal power generation, and 0.50 for a composite residual class that combines geogenic background with unmodelled anthropogenic inputs. The two industrial signals concentrate around Ereğli and Çatalağzı, while the residual class dominates elsewhere. The graph employed here encodes chemical relationships among metals and not geographical relationships among stations; maps of the posterior estimates are reported as post hoc visualizations. The framework is offered as an uncertainty-aware methodological contribution, and comparison against established receptor models remains to be carried out.