Mohammad Saifur Rahman

Tariq Adnan, Md Saiful Islam, Wasifur Rahman et al.

We present an efficient and accessible PD screening method by leveraging AI-driven models enabled by the largest video dataset of facial expressions from 1,059 unique participants. This dataset includes 256 individuals with PD, 165 clinically diagnosed, and 91 self-reported. Participants used webcams to record themselves mimicking three facial expressions (smile, disgust, and surprise) from diverse sources encompassing their homes across multiple countries, a US clinic, and a PD wellness center in the US. Facial landmarks are automatically tracked from the recordings to extract features related to hypomimia, a prominent PD symptom characterized by reduced facial expressions. Machine learning algorithms are trained on these features to distinguish between individuals with and without PD. The model was tested for generalizability on external (unseen during training) test videos collected from a US clinic and Bangladesh. An ensemble of machine learning models trained on smile videos achieved an accuracy of 87.9+-0.1% (95% Confidence Interval) with an AUROC of 89.3+-0.3% as evaluated on held-out data (using k-fold cross-validation). In external test settings, the ensemble model achieved 79.8+-0.6% accuracy with 81.9+-0.3% AUROC on the clinical test set and 84.9+-0.4% accuracy with 81.2+-0.6% AUROC on participants from Bangladesh. In every setting, the model was free from detectable bias across sex and ethnic subgroups, except in the cohorts from Bangladesh, where the model performed significantly better for female participants than males. Smiling videos can effectively differentiate between individuals with and without PD, offering a potentially easy, accessible, and cost-efficient way to screen for PD, especially when a clinical diagnosis is difficult to access.

Joydeb Kumar Sana, Mohammad M. Masud, M Sohel Rahman et al.

Patient similarity computation (PSC) is a fundamental problem in healthcare informatics. The aim of the patient similarity computation is to measure the similarity among patients according to their historical clinical records, which helps to improve clinical decision support. This paper presents a novel distributed patient similarity computation (DPSC) technique based on data transformation (DT) methods, utilizing an effective combination of time series and static data. Time series data are sensor-collected patients' information, including metrics like heart rate, blood pressure, Oxygen saturation, respiration, etc. The static data are mainly patient background and demographic data, including age, weight, height, gender, etc. Static data has been used for clustering the patients. Before feeding the static data to the machine learning model adaptive Weight-of-Evidence (aWOE) and Z-score data transformation (DT) methods have been performed, which improve the prediction performances. In aWOE-based patient similarity models, sensitive patient information has been processed using aWOE which preserves the data privacy of the trained models. We used the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) approach, which is robust and very popular, for time series similarity. However, DTW is not suitable for big data due to the significant computational run-time. To overcome this problem, distributed DTW computation is used in this study. For Coronary Artery Disease, our DT based approach boosts prediction performance by as much as 11.4%, 10.20%, and 12.6% in terms of AUC, accuracy, and F-measure, respectively. In the case of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), our proposed method achieves performance enhancement up to 15.9%, 10.5%, and 21.9% for the same measures, respectively. The proposed method reduces the computation time by as high as 40%.

Md. Zarif Ul Alam, Md Saiful Islam, Ehsan Hoque et al.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neuro-degenerative disorder that affects movement, speech, and coordination. Timely diagnosis and treatment can improve the quality of life for PD patients. However, access to clinical diagnosis is limited in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Therefore, development of automated screening tools for PD can have a huge social impact, particularly in the public health sector. In this paper, we present PULSAR, a novel method to screen for PD from webcam-recorded videos of the finger-tapping task from the Movement Disorder Society - Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). PULSAR is trained and evaluated on data collected from 382 participants (183 self-reported as PD patients). We used an adaptive graph convolutional neural network to dynamically learn the spatio temporal graph edges specific to the finger-tapping task. We enhanced this idea with a multi stream adaptive convolution model to learn features from different modalities of data critical to detect PD, such as relative location of the finger joints, velocity and acceleration of tapping. As the labels of the videos are self-reported, there could be cases of undiagnosed PD in the non-PD labeled samples. We leveraged the idea of Positive Unlabeled (PU) Learning that does not need labeled negative data. Our experiments show clear benefit of modeling the problem in this way. PULSAR achieved 80.95% accuracy in validation set and a mean accuracy of 71.29% (2.49% standard deviation) in independent test, despite being trained with limited amount of data. This is specially promising as labeled data is scarce in health care sector. We hope PULSAR will make PD screening more accessible to everyone. The proposed techniques could be extended for assessment of other movement disorders, such as ataxia, and Huntington's disease.

Junaed Younus Khan, Md. Tawkat Islam Khondaker, Iram Tazim Hoque et al.

We are presenting COVID-19Base, a knowledgebase highlighting the biomedical entities related to COVID-19 disease based on literature mining. To develop COVID-19Base, we mine the information from publicly available scientific literature and related public resources. We considered seven topic-specific dictionaries, including human genes, human miRNAs, human lncRNAs, diseases, Protein Databank, drugs, and drug side effects, are integrated to mine all scientific evidence related to COVID-19. We have employed an automated literature mining and labeling system through a novel approach to measure the effectiveness of drugs against diseases based on natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and deep learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first knowledgebase dedicated to COVID-19, which integrates such large variety of related biomedical entities through literature mining. Proper investigation of the mined biomedical entities along with the identified interactions among those, reported in COVID-19Base, would help the research community to discover possible ways for the therapeutic treatment of COVID-19.

Nabil Ibtehaz, M. Saifur Rahman, M. Sohel Rahman

Ventricular Fibrillation (VF), one of the most dangerous arrhythmias, is responsible for sudden cardiac arrests. Thus, various algorithms have been developed to predict VF from Electrocardiogram (ECG), which is a binary classification problem. In the literature, we find a number of algorithms based on signal processing, where, after some robust mathematical operations the decision is given based on a predefined threshold over a single value. On the other hand, some machine learning based algorithms are also reported in the literature; however, these algorithms merely combine some parameters and make a prediction using those as features. Both the approaches have their perks and pitfalls; thus our motivation was to coalesce them to get the best out of the both worlds. Hence we have developed, VFPred that, in addition to employing a signal processing pipeline, namely, Empirical Mode Decomposition and Discrete Time Fourier Transform for useful feature extraction, uses a Support Vector Machine for efficient classification. VFPred turns out to be a robust algorithm as it is able to successfully segregate the two classes with equal confidence (Sensitivity = 99.99%, Specificity = 98.40%) even from a short signal of 5 seconds long, whereas existing works though requires longer signals, flourishes in one but fails in the other.