Skin cancer poses a significant healthcare challenge, requiring precise and prompt diagnosis for effective treatment. While recent advances in deep learning have dramatically improved medical image analysis, including skin cancer classification, ensemble methods offer a pathway for further enhancing diagnostic accuracy. This study introduces a cutting-edge approach employing the Max Voting Ensemble Technique for robust skin cancer classification on ISIC 2018: Task 1-2 dataset. We incorporate a range of cutting-edge, pre-trained deep neural networks, including MobileNetV2, AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, DenseNet201, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, ResNet50V2, InceptionResNetV2, and Xception. These models have been extensively trained on skin cancer datasets, achieving individual accuracies ranging from 77.20% to 91.90%. Our method leverages the synergistic capabilities of these models by combining their complementary features to elevate classification performance further. In our approach, input images undergo preprocessing for model compatibility. The ensemble integrates the pre-trained models with their architectures and weights preserved. For each skin lesion image under examination, every model produces a prediction. These are subsequently aggregated using the max voting ensemble technique to yield the final classification, with the majority-voted class serving as the conclusive prediction. Through comprehensive testing on a diverse dataset, our ensemble outperformed individual models, attaining an accuracy of 93.18% and an AUC score of 0.9320, thus demonstrating superior diagnostic reliability and accuracy. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method on the HAM10000 dataset to ensure its generalizability. Our ensemble method delivers a robust, reliable, and effective tool for the classification of skin cancer. By utilizing the power of advanced deep neural networks, we aim to assist healthcare professionals in achieving timely and accurate diagnoses, ultimately reducing mortality rates and enhancing patient outcomes.

The ample amount of information from hyperspectral image (HSI) bands allows the non-destructive detection and recognition of earth objects. However, dimensionality reduction (DR) of hyperspectral images (HSI) is required before classification as the classifier may suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, dimensionality reduction plays a significant role in HSI data analysis (e.g., effective processing and seamless interpretation). In this article, a sophisticated technique established as t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) following the dimension reduction along with a blended CNN was implemented to improve the visualization and characterization of HSI. In the procedure, first, we employed principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the HSI dimensions and remove non-linear consistency features between the wavelengths to project them to a smaller scale. Then we proposed tSNE to preserve the local and global pixel relationships and check the HSI information visually and experimentally. Lastly, it yielded two-dimensional data, improving the visualization and classification accuracy compared to other standard dimensionality-reduction algorithms. Finally, we employed deep-learning-based CNN to classify the reduced and improved HSI intra- and inter-band relationship-feature vector. The evaluation performance of $95.21\%$ accuracy and $6.2\%$ test loss proved the superiority of the proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art DR reduction algorithms.

Obesity is a global health crisis requiring accurate and interpretable prediction models for clinical use. Current ensemble approaches lack systematic comparisons and often use suboptimal configurations. This study introduces OBES-Net, a novel framework that integrates three methodological advances: (1) exhaustive hyperparameter optimization across 50 configurations of nine machine learning algorithms, (2) systematic comparison of Hybrid Majority Voting strategies (Majority Hard vs. Weighted Hard) against Ensemble Stacking, and (3) comprehensive Explainable AI (XAI) validation using SHAP and LIME. Utilizing two diverse datasets, OBES-Net demonstrates that Stacking achieves superior performance on complex data (Accuracy: 0.991 on Dataset-2), while voting strategies remain competitive on simpler tasks. Crucially, the proposed XAI analyses reveal that Stacking’s advantage stems from synthesizing broader clinical risk factors, withWeight and Age emerging as consistent primary drivers. Extensive ablation studies validate the robustness of the proposed design choices. The OBES-Net framework establishes that combining exhaustive optimization with systematic ensemble comparison and XAI delivers both state-of-the-art performance and clinical trustworthiness, providing an advancing methodology for healthcare decision-making.

Smartwatches are increasingly used in safety-critical scenarios, yet their optical heart-rate (HR) measurements often contain noise, artifacts, and missing data, undermining clinical trust. This paper presents Edge Beats, a data-curation layer and end-to-end architecture that enables the low-cost, open source PineTime smartwatch to function as a practical HR sensing node for distributed wearable systems. Heart-rate packets are streamed from PineTime to an ESP32 at the edge layer over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), then forwarded via an embedded Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) broker to an edge server laptop for processing and visualization. A lightweight multi-stage algorithm cleans and smooths the HR stream using physiological boundary checks, a configurable data imputation technique, and exponential moving average (EMA) smoothing, all designed for real-time operation on resource-constrained hardware. We have evaluated the system over long monitoring sessions and compared the processed PineTime output against a commercial Huawei GT Pro 2 smartwatch. The system suppresses extreme spikes and short-term oscillations, yielding a more stable HR trace with qualitative agreement to the reference trends while keeping values in a physiologically plausible range. Network measurements show low latency (almost 3 ms one-way, 15 ms RTT) and stable throughput, and power measurements (100–450 mW for ESP32 and 3–70 mW for PineTime watch) confirm that continuous HR streaming over BLE and MQTT is feasible within the PineTime’s energy budget. These results imply that data stream processing combined with a modest publish–subscribe architecture improves the stability and usability of HR streams obtained from commodity wearable sensors, making PineTime a candidate as a complementary component for mission-critical health and safety systems.