Afifa Khaled

Afifa Khaled, Ahmed A. Mubarak, Kun He

Recent deep learning models have attracted substantial attention in infant brain analysis. These models have performed state-of-the-art performance, such as semi-supervised techniques (e.g., Temporal Ensembling, mean teacher). However, these models depend on an encoder-decoder structure with stacked local operators to gather long-range information, and the local operators limit the efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, the $MRI$ data contain different tissue properties ($TPs$) such as $T1$ and $T2$. One major limitation of these models is that they use both data as inputs to the segment process, i.e., the models are trained on the dataset once, and it requires much computational and memory requirements during inference. In this work, we address the above limitations by designing a new deep-learning model, called 3D-DenseUNet, which works as adaptable global aggregation blocks in down-sampling to solve the issue of spatial information loss. The self-attention module connects the down-sampling blocks to up-sampling blocks, and integrates the feature maps in three dimensions of spatial and channel, effectively improving the representation potential and discriminating ability of the model. Additionally, we propose a new method called Two Independent Teachers ($2IT$), that summarizes the model weights instead of label predictions. Each teacher model is trained on different types of brain data, $T1$ and $T2$, respectively. Then, a fuse model is added to improve test accuracy and enable training with fewer parameters and labels compared to the Temporal Ensembling method without modifying the network architecture. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/AfifaKhaled/Two-Independent-Teachers-are-Better-Role-Model.

Afifa Khaled, Ebrahim Hamid Sumiea

Medical imaging and multi-modal clinical settings often face the challange of missing modality in their diagnostic pipelines. Existing imputation methods either lack representational capacity or are computationally expensive. We propose PI-NAIM, a novel dual-path architecture that dynamically routes samples to optimized imputation approaches based on missingness complexity. Our framework integrates: (1) intelligent path routing that directs low missingness samples to efficient statistical imputation (MICE) and complex patterns to powerful neural networks (GAIN with temporal analysis); (2) cross-path attention fusion that leverages missingness-aware embeddings to intelligently combine both branches; and (3) end-to-end joint optimization of imputation accuracy and downstream task performance. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving RMSE of 0.108 (vs. baselines' 0.119-0.152) and substantial gains in downstream tasks with an AUROC of 0.812 for mortality prediction. PI-NAIM's modular design enables seamless integration into vision pipelines handling incomplete sensor measurements, missing modalities, or corrupted inputs, providing a unified solution for real-world scenario. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AfifaKhaled/PI-NAIM-Path-Integrated-Neural-Adaptive-Imputation-Model

Afifa Khaled, Mohammed Sabir, Rizwan Qureshi et al.

The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) datasets have become the Kernel of Digital Health Research by providing freely accessible, deidentified records from tens of thousands of critical care admissions, enabling a broad spectrum of applications in clinical decision support, outcome prediction, and healthcare analytics. Although numerous studies and surveys have explored the predictive power and clinical utility of MIMIC based models, critical challenges in data integration, representation, and interoperability remain underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive survey that focuses uniquely on open problems. We identify persistent issues such as data granularity, cardinality limitations, heterogeneous coding schemes, and ethical constraints that hinder the generalizability and real-time implementation of machine learning models. We highlight key progress in dimensionality reduction, temporal modelling, causal inference, and privacy preserving analytics, while also outlining promising directions including hybrid modelling, federated learning, and standardized preprocessing pipelines. By critically examining these structural limitations and their implications, this survey offers actionable insights to guide the next generation of MIMIC powered digital health innovations.