Akwasi Asare

Stephen E. Moore, Mich-Seth Owusu, Akwasi Asare et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multilingual capabilities for well-resourced languages, yet their performance on low-resource African languages remains poorly understood and largely unevaluated. This paper presents Nsanku, a systematic benchmark that evaluates the zero-shot machine translation performance of 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs across 43 Ghanaian languages paired with English. Evaluation sentences were sourced from the YouVersion Bible platform, providing 300 sentence pairs per language. Two complementary automatic metrics are employed: Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) and Character n-gram F-Score (chrF), alongside an average accuracy score and a cross-language consistency dimension. Nsanku represents the most comprehensive LLM translation evaluation for Ghanaian languages conducted to date. Results show that gemini-2.5-flash achieves the highest overall average score of 26.88 (BLEU: 24.60, chrF: 29.16), followed by claude-sonnet-4-5 at 24.87 (BLEU: 22.46, chrF: 27.28) and gpt-4.1 at 23.20 (BLEU: 21.15, chrF: 25.24). Among open-weight models, kimi-k2-instruct-0905 leads at an average score of 20.87. A critical finding from the consistency analysis is that no model and no language reached the Leaders quadrant of high performance and high consistency simultaneously, indicating that current LLMs are not yet reliably usable for Ghanaian language translation at scale. Siwu achieved the highest per-language average score at 25.73 while Nkonya scored lowest at 11.65. Nsanku establishes a publicly available, community-extensible evaluation infrastructure for African language NLP research.

Lawrence Adu Gyamfi, Paul Azunre, Stephen Edward Moore et al.

Low resource languages present unique challenges for natural language processing due to the limited availability of digitized and well structured linguistic data. To address this gap, the GhanaNLP initiative has developed and curated 41,513 parallel sentence pairs for the Twi, Fante, Ewe, Ga, and Kusaal languages, which are widely spoken across Ghana yet remain underrepresented in digital spaces. Each dataset consists of carefully aligned sentence pairs between a local language and English. The data were collected, translated, and annotated by human professionals and enriched with standard structural metadata to ensure consistency and usability. These corpora are designed to support research, educational, and commercial applications, including machine translation, speech technologies, and language preservation. This paper documents the dataset creation methodology, structure, intended use cases, and evaluation, as well as their deployment in real world applications such as the Khaya AI translation engine. Overall, this work contributes to broader efforts to democratize AI by enabling inclusive and accessible language technologies for African languages.

Akwasi Asare, Dennis Agyemanh Nana Gookyi, Derrick Boateng et al.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a leading cause of vision impairment in individuals with diabetes, affects approximately 34.6% of diabetes patients globally, with the number of cases projected to reach 242 million by 2045. Traditional DR diagnosis relies on the manual examination of retinal fundus images, which is both time-consuming and resource intensive. This study presents a novel solution using Edge Impulse to deploy multiple deep learning models for real-time DR detection on edge devices. A robust dataset of over 3,662 retinal fundus images, sourced from the Kaggle EyePACS dataset, was curated, and enhanced through preprocessing techniques, including augmentation and normalization. Using TensorFlow, various Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, and a custom Deep Neural Network (DNN), were designed, trained, and optimized for edge deployment. The models were converted to TensorFlowLite and quantized to 8-bit integers to reduce their size and enhance inference speed, with minimal trade-offs in accuracy. Performance evaluations across different edge hardware platforms, including smartphones and microcontrollers, highlighted key metrics such as inference speed, accuracy, precision, and resource utilization. MobileNet achieved an accuracy of 96.45%, while SqueezeNet demonstrated strong real-time performance with a small model size of 176 KB and latency of just 17 ms on GPU. ShuffleNet and the custom DNN achieved moderate accuracy but excelled in resource efficiency, making them suitable for lower-end devices. This integration of edge AI technology into healthcare presents a scalable, cost-effective solution for early DR detection, providing timely and accurate diagnosis, especially in resource-constrained and remote healthcare settings.

Akwasi Asare, Mary Sagoe, Justice Williams Asare

Automated segmentation of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis, therapeutic planning, and longitudinal wound monitoring. However, this task remains challenging due to the heterogeneous appearance, irregular morphology, and complex backgrounds associated with ulcer regions in clinical photographs. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as U-Net, provide strong localization capabilities but struggle to model long-range spatial dependencies due to their inherently limited receptive fields. To address this, we propose FUTransUNet, a hybrid architecture that integrates the global attention mechanism of Vision Transformers (ViTs) into the U-Net framework. This combination allows the model to extract global contextual features while maintaining fine-grained spatial resolution through skip connections and an effective decoding pathway. We trained and validated FUTransUNet on the public Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge (FUSeg) dataset. FUTransUNet achieved a training Dice Coefficient of 0.8679, an IoU of 0.7672, and a training loss of 0.0053. On the validation set, the model achieved a Dice Coefficient of 0.8751, an IoU of 0.7780, and a validation loss of 0.009045. To ensure clinical transparency, we employed Grad-CAM visualizations, which highlighted model focus areas during prediction. These quantitative outcomes clearly demonstrate that our hybrid approach successfully integrates global and local feature extraction paradigms, thereby offering a highly robust, accurate, explainable, and interpretable solution and clinically translatable solution for automated foot ulcer analysis. The approach offers a reliable, high-fidelity solution for DFU segmentation, with implications for improving real-world wound assessment and patient care.

Akwasi Asare, Isaac Baffour Senkyire, Emmanuel Freeman et al.

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of vision loss among adults and a major global health challenge, particularly in underserved regions. This study presents PerceptronCARE, a deep learning-based teleophthalmology application designed for automated diabetic retinopathy detection using retinal images. The system was developed and evaluated using multiple convolutional neural networks, including ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0, and SqueezeNet, to determine the optimal balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. The final model classifies disease severity with an accuracy of 85.4%, enabling real-time screening in clinical and telemedicine settings. PerceptronCARE integrates cloud-based scalability, secure patient data management, and a multi-user framework, facilitating early diagnosis, improving doctor-patient interactions, and reducing healthcare costs. This study highlights the potential of AI-driven telemedicine solutions in expanding access to diabetic retinopathy screening, particularly in remote and resource-constrained environments.

Akwasi Asare, Ulas Bagci

Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related morbidity and mortality worldwide, with gastrointestinal (GI) polyps serving as critical precursors according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Early and accurate segmentation of polyps during colonoscopy is essential for reducing CRC progression, yet manual delineation is labor-intensive and prone to observer variability. Deep learning methods have demonstrated strong potential for automated polyp analysis, but their limited interpretability remains a barrier to clinical adoption. In this study, we present PolypSeg-GradCAM, an explainable deep learning framework that integrates the U-Net architecture with Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) for transparent polyp segmentation. The model was trained and evaluated on the Kvasir-SEG dataset of 1000 annotated endoscopic images. Experimental results demonstrate robust segmentation performance, achieving a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.9257 on the test set and consistently high Dice coefficients (F-score > 0.96) on training and validation sets. Grad-CAM visualizations further confirmed that predictions were guided by clinically relevant regions, enhancing transparency and trust in the model's decisions. By coupling high segmentation accuracy with interpretability, PolypSeg-GradCAM represents a step toward reliable, trustworthy AI-assisted colonoscopy and improved early colorectal cancer prevention.