The early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) presents a significant challenge due to the subtle biomarker changes often overlooked. Machine learning (ML) models offer a promising tool for identifying individuals at risk of AD. However, current research tends to prioritize ML accuracy while neglecting the crucial aspect of model explainability. The diverse nature of AD data and the limited dataset size introduce additional challenges, primarily related to high dimensionality. In this study, we leveraged a dataset obtained from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center, comprising 169,408 records and 1024 features. After applying various steps to reduce the feature space. Notably, support vector machine (SVM) models trained on the selected features exhibited high performance when tested on an external dataset. SVM achieved a high F1 score of 98.9% for binary classification (distinguishing between NC and AD) and 90.7% for multiclass classification. Furthermore, SVM was able to predict AD progression over a 4-year period, with F1 scores reached 88% for binary task and 72.8% for multiclass task. To enhance model explainability, we employed two rule-extraction approaches: class rule mining and stable and interpretable rule set for classification model. These approaches generated human-understandable rules to assist domain experts in comprehending the key factors involved in AD development. We further validated these rules using SHAP and LIME models, underscoring the significance of factors such as MEMORY, JUDGMENT, COMMUN, and ORIENT in determining AD risk. Our experimental outcomes also shed light on the crucial role of the Clinical Dementia Rating tool in predicting AD.

Detection of abnormalities in wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images is a challenging task. Typically, these images suffer from low contrast, complex background, variations in lesion shape and color, which affect the accuracy of their segmentation and subsequent classification. This research proposes an automated system for detection and classification of ulcers in WCE images, based on state-of-the-art deep learning networks. Deep learning techniques, and in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have recently become popular in the analysis and recognition of medical images. The medical image datasets used in this study were obtained from WCE video frames. In this work, two milestone CNN architectures, namely the AlexNet and the GoogLeNet are extensively evaluated in object classification into ulcer or non-ulcer. Furthermore, we examine and analyze the images identified as containing ulcer objects to evaluate the efficiency of the utilized CNNs. Extensive experiments show that CNNs deliver superior performance, surpassing traditional machine learning methods by large margins, which supports their effectiveness as automated diagnosis tools.

The epilepsies are a heterogeneous group of neurological disorders and syndromes characterised by recurrent, involuntary, paroxysmal seizure activity, which is often associated with a clinicoelectrical correlate on the electroencephalogram. The diagnosis of epilepsy is usually made by a neurologist but can be difficult to be made in the early stages. Supporting paraclinical evidence obtained from magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography may enable clinicians to make a diagnosis of epilepsy and investigate treatment earlier. However, electroencephalogram capture and interpretation are time consuming and can be expensive due to the need for trained specialists to perform the interpretation. Automated detection of correlates of seizure activity may be a solution. In this paper, we present a supervised machine learning approach that classifies seizure and nonseizure records using an open dataset containing 342 records. Our results show an improvement on existing studies by as much as 10% in most cases with a sensitivity of 93%, specificity of 94%, and area under the curve of 98% with a 6% global error using ak-class nearest neighbour classifier. We propose that such an approach could have clinical applications in the investigation of patients with suspected seizure disorders.

Diabetic Retinopathy is one of the leading global causes of vision impairment and blindness in humans. It has seen a rise in prevalence, necessitating the development of advanced automatic detection methods. This paper presents a survey of the evolution in deep learning techniques for diabetic retinopathy detection, emphasizing the transition from traditional machine learning to sophisticated deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks. It discusses the role of transfer learning, end-to-end learning, and hybrid models in overcoming medical detection challenges while highlighting the need for artificial intelligence interpretability and real-time screening integration in clinical workflows. Building on this survey, the paper introduces a focused study on cross-dataset deployment of transfer learning for diabetic retinopathy detection and grading. Consequently, this paper evaluates 26 pre-trained models from various convolutional neural network families to provide a comprehensive comparison between the state-of-the-art CNN architectures in the field. Additionally, this study also employs Grad-CAM visualization to interpret the model’s decision-making, bridging advanced artificial intelligence techniques with practical healthcare applications for diabetic retinopathy.

We propose a methodology to aid clinicians in performing lumbar spinal stenosis detection through semantic segmentation and delineation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of lumbar spine using deep learning. Our dataset contains MRI studies of 515 patients with symptomatic back pains. Each study is annotated by expert radiologists with notes regarding the observed characteristics and condition of the lumbar spine. We have developed a ground truth dataset, containing image labels of four important regions in the lumbar spine, to be used as training and test images to develop classification models for segmentation. We developed two novel metrics, namely confidence and consistency, to assess the quality of the ground truth dataset through a derivation of the Jaccard Index. We experimented with semantic segmentation of our dataset using SegNet. Our evaluation of the segmentation and the delineation results show that our proposed methodology produces very good performance as measured by several contour-based and region-based metrics. Additionally, using the Cohen’s kappa and frequency-weighted confidence metrics, we can show that 1) the model’s performance is within the range of the worst and the best manual labelling results, and 2) the ground-truth dataset has an excellent inter-rater agreement score. We also presented two representative delineation results of the worst and best segmentation based on their BF-score to show visually how accurate and suitable the results are for computer-aided-diagnosis purposes.