Danish Raza Rizvi

Danish Rizvi, David Boyle

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used as aerial base stations to provide ad hoc communications infrastructure. Building upon prior research efforts which consider either static nodes, 2D trajectories or single UAV systems, this paper focuses on the use of multiple UAVs for providing wireless communication to mobile users in the absence of terrestrial communications infrastructure. In particular, we jointly optimize UAV 3D trajectory and NOMA power allocation to maximize system throughput. Firstly, a weighted K-means-based clustering algorithm establishes UAV-user associations at regular intervals. The efficacy of training a novel Shared Deep Q-Network (SDQN) with action masking is then explored. Unlike training each UAV separately using DQN, the SDQN reduces training time by using the experiences of multiple UAVs instead of a single agent. We also show that SDQN can be used to train a multi-agent system with differing action spaces. Simulation results confirm that: 1) training a shared DQN outperforms a conventional DQN in terms of maximum system throughput (+20%) and training time (-10%); 2) it can converge for agents with different action spaces, yielding a 9% increase in throughput compared to mutual learning algorithms; and 3) combining NOMA with an SDQN architecture enables the network to achieve a better sum rate compared with existing baseline schemes.

Aqib Nazir Mir, Iqra Nissar, Mumtaz Ahmed et al.

Deep learning holds tremendous potential in healthcare for uncovering hidden patterns within extensive clinical datasets, aiding in the diagnosis of various diseases. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by the deterioration of brain function. In the initial stages of PD, automatic diagnosis poses a challenge due to the similarity in behavior between individuals with PD and those who are healthy. Our objective is to propose an effective model that can aid in the early detection of Parkinson's disease. We employed the VGRF gait signal dataset sourced from Physionet for distinguishing between healthy individuals and those diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. This paper introduces a novel deep learning architecture based on the LSTM network for automatically detecting freezing of gait episodes in Parkinson's disease patients. In contrast to conventional machine learning algorithms, this method eliminates manual feature engineering and proficiently captures prolonged temporal dependencies in gait patterns, thereby improving the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. The LSTM network resolves the issue of vanishing gradients by employing memory blocks in place of self-connected hidden units, allowing for optimal information assimilation. To prevent overfitting, dropout and L2 regularization techniques have been employed. Additionally, the stochastic gradient-based optimizer Adam is used for the optimization process. The results indicate that our proposed approach surpasses current state-of-the-art models in FOG episode detection, achieving an accuracy of 97.71%, sensitivity of 99%, precision of 98%, and specificity of 96%. This demonstrates its potential as a superior classification method for Parkinson's disease detection.

Ovais Iqbal Shah, Danish Raza Rizvi, Aqib Nazir Mir

Medical image segmentation is pivotal in healthcare, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, informing treatment strategies, and tracking disease progression. This process allows clinicians to extract critical information from visual data, enabling personalized patient care. However, developing neural networks for segmentation remains challenging, especially when preserving image resolution, which is essential in detecting subtle details that influence diagnoses. Moreover, the lack of transparency in these deep learning models has slowed their adoption in clinical practice. Efforts in model interpretability are increasingly focused on making these models' decision-making processes more transparent. In this paper, we introduce MAPUNetR, a novel architecture that synergizes the strengths of transformer models with the proven U-Net framework for medical image segmentation. Our model addresses the resolution preservation challenge and incorporates attention maps highlighting segmented regions, increasing accuracy and interpretability. Evaluated on the BraTS 2020 dataset, MAPUNetR achieved a dice score of 0.88 and a dice coefficient of 0.92 on the ISIC 2018 dataset. Our experiments show that the model maintains stable performance and potential as a powerful tool for medical image segmentation in clinical practice.

Aqib Nazir Mir, Danish Raza Rizvi

This study comprehensively explores knowledge distillation frameworks for COVID-19 and lung cancer classification using chest X-ray (CXR) images. We employ high-capacity teacher models, including VGG19 and lightweight Vision Transformers (Visformer-S and AutoFormer-V2-T), to guide the training of a compact, hardware-aware student model derived from the OFA-595 supernet. Our approach leverages hybrid supervision, combining ground-truth labels with teacher models' soft targets to balance accuracy and computational efficiency. We validate our models on two benchmark datasets: COVID-QU-Ex and LCS25000, covering multiple classes, including COVID-19, healthy, non-COVID pneumonia, lung, and colon cancer. To interpret the spatial focus of the models, we employ Score-CAM-based visualizations, which provide insight into the reasoning process of both teacher and student networks. The results demonstrate that the distilled student model maintains high classification performance with significantly reduced parameters and inference time, making it an optimal choice in resource-constrained clinical environments. Our work underscores the importance of combining model efficiency with explainability for practical, trustworthy medical AI solutions.