Md Rakibul Hasan

Xuehan Liu, Md Rakibul Hasan, Tom Gedeon et al.

In response to the global need for efficient early diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), this paper bridges the gap between traditional, time-consuming diagnostic methods and potential automated solutions. We propose a multi-atlas deep ensemble network, MADE-for-ASD, that integrates multiple atlases of the brain's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data through a weighted deep ensemble network. Our approach integrates demographic information into the prediction workflow, which enhances ASD diagnosis performance and offers a more holistic perspective on patient profiling. We experiment with the well-known publicly available ABIDE (Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange) I dataset, consisting of resting state fMRI data from 17 different laboratories around the globe. Our proposed system achieves 75.20% accuracy on the entire dataset and 96.40% on a specific subset $-$ both surpassing reported ASD diagnosis accuracy in ABIDE I fMRI studies. Specifically, our model improves by 4.4 percentage points over prior works on the same amount of data. The model exhibits a sensitivity of 82.90% and a specificity of 69.70% on the entire dataset, and 91.00% and 99.50%, respectively, on the specific subset. We leverage the F-score to pinpoint the top 10 ROI in ASD diagnosis, such as precuneus and anterior cingulate/ventromedial. The proposed system can potentially pave the way for more cost-effective, efficient and scalable strategies in ASD diagnosis. Codes and evaluations are publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/MADE-for-ASD.

Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Shreya Ghosh et al.

Empathy indicates an individual's ability to understand others. Over the past few years, empathy has drawn attention from various disciplines, including but not limited to Affective Computing, Cognitive Science, and Psychology. Detecting empathy has potential applications in society, healthcare and education. Despite being a broad and overlapping topic, the avenue of empathy detection leveraging Machine Learning remains underexplored from a systematic literature review perspective. We collected 849 papers from 10 well-known academic databases, systematically screened them and analysed the final 82 papers. Our analyses reveal several prominent task formulations - including empathy on localised utterances or overall expressions, unidirectional or parallel empathy, and emotional contagion - in monadic, dyadic and group interactions. Empathy detection methods are summarised based on four input modalities - text, audiovisual, audio and physiological signals - thereby presenting modality-specific network architecture design protocols. We discuss challenges, research gaps and potential applications in the Affective Computing-based empathy domain, which can facilitate new avenues of exploration. We further enlist the public availability of datasets and codes. This paper, therefore, provides a structured overview of recent advancements and remaining challenges towards developing a robust empathy detection system that could meaningfully contribute to enhancing human well-being.

Ramya Chandrasekar, Md Rakibul Hasan, Shreya Ghosh et al.

Anxiety is a common mental health condition characterised by excessive worry, fear and apprehension about everyday situations. Even with significant progress over the past few years, predicting anxiety from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, specifically using error-related negativity (ERN), still remains challenging. Following the PRISMA protocol, this paper systematically reviews 54 research papers on using EEG and ERN markers for anxiety detection published in the last 10 years (2013 -- 2023). Our analysis highlights the wide usage of traditional machine learning, such as support vector machines and random forests, as well as deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks across different data types. Our analysis reveals that the development of a robust and generic anxiety prediction method still needs to address real-world challenges, such as task-specific setup, feature selection and computational modelling. We conclude this review by offering potential future direction for non-invasive, objective anxiety diagnostics, deployed across diverse populations and anxiety sub-types.

Md Rakibul Hasan, Pouria Behnoudfar, Dan MacKinlay et al.

Machine Learning, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has revolutionised Super-Resolution (SR). However, generated images often lack physical meaningfulness, which is essential for scientific applications. Our approach, PC-SRGAN, enhances image resolution while ensuring physical consistency for interpretable simulations. PC-SRGAN significantly improves both the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio and the Structural Similarity Index Measure compared to conventional SR methods, even with limited training data (e.g., only 13% of training data is required to achieve performance similar to SRGAN). Beyond SR, PC-SRGAN augments physically meaningful machine learning, incorporating numerically justified time integrators and advanced quality metrics. These advancements promise reliable and causal machine-learning models in scientific domains. A significant advantage of PC-SRGAN over conventional SR techniques is its physical consistency, which makes it a viable surrogate model for time-dependent problems. PC-SRGAN advances scientific machine learning by improving accuracy and efficiency, enhancing process understanding, and broadening applications to scientific research. We publicly release the complete source code of PC-SRGAN and all experiments at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/PC-SRGAN.

Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Aneesh Krishna et al.

Detecting empathy from video interactions is an emerging area of research, particularly in healthcare and social robotics. However, privacy and ethical concerns often prevent the release of raw video data, with many datasets instead shared as pre-extracted tabular features. Previous work on such datasets has established classical tree-based models as the state of the art. Motivated by recent successes of large-scale foundation models for text, we investigate the potential of tabular foundation models (TFMs) for empathy detection from video-derived tabular data. Our proposed system, TFMPathy, is demonstrated with two recent TFMs (TabPFN v2 and TabICL) under both in-context learning and fine-tuning paradigms. On a public human-robot interaction benchmark, TFMPathy significantly improves empathy detection accuracy reported in the literature. While the established evaluation protocol in the literature does not ensure cross-subject generalisation, our evaluation scheme also captures such generalisation. We show that TFMPathy under a fine-tuning setup has better cross-subject generalisation capacity over baseline methods (accuracy: $0.590 \rightarrow 0.730$; AUC: $0.564 \rightarrow 0.669$). Given the ongoing privacy and ethical constraints around raw video sharing, the proposed TFMPathy system provides a practical and scalable path toward building AI systems dependent on human-centred video datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/TFMPathy (will be made available upon acceptance of this paper).

Md Rakibul Hasan, Yue Yao, Md Zakir Hossain et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised many fields, with LLM-as-a-service (LLMSaaS) offering accessible, general-purpose solutions without costly task-specific training. In contrast to the widely studied prompt engineering for directly solving tasks (in vivo), this paper explores LLMs' potential for in-vitro applications: using LLM-generated labels to improve supervised training of mainstream models. We examine two strategies - (1) noisy label correction and (2) training data augmentation - in empathy computing, an emerging task to predict psychology-based questionnaire outcomes from inputs like textual narratives. Crowdsourced datasets in this domain often suffer from noisy labels that misrepresent underlying empathy. We show that replacing or supplementing these crowdsourced labels with LLM-generated labels, developed using psychology-based scale-aware prompts, achieves statistically significant accuracy improvements. Notably, the RoBERTa pre-trained language model (PLM) trained with noise-reduced labels yields a state-of-the-art Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.648 on the public NewsEmp benchmarks. This paper further analyses evaluation metric selection and demographic biases to help guide the future development of more equitable empathy computing models. Code and LLM-generated labels are available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLMPathy.

Mst. Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Adnan Ibney Faruq, Mostafa Rifat Tazwar et al.

A radiology report comprises several sections, including the Findings and Impression of the diagnosis. Automatically generating the Impression from the Findings is crucial for reducing radiologists' workload and improving diagnostic accuracy. Pretrained models that excel in common abstractive summarization problems encounter challenges when applied to specialized medical domains largely due to the complex terminology and the necessity for accurate clinical context. Such tasks in medical domains demand extracting core information, avoiding context shifts, and maintaining proper flow. Misuse of medical terms can lead to drastic clinical errors. To address these issues, we introduce a sequential transfer learning that ensures key content extraction and coherent summarization. Sequential transfer learning often faces challenges like initial parameter decay and knowledge loss, which we resolve with the Fisher matrix regularization. Using MIMIC-CXR and Open-I datasets, our model, CSTRL - Context-driven Sequential TRansfer Learning - achieved state-of-the-art performance, showing 56.2% improvement in BLEU-1, 40.5% in BLEU-2, 84.3% in BLEU-3, 28.9% in ROUGE-1, 41.0% in ROUGE-2 and 26.5% in ROGUE-3 score over benchmark studies. We also analyze factual consistency scores while preserving the medical context. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/fahmidahossain/Report_Summarization.

Md Rakibul Hasan, Shreya Ghosh, Pradyumna Agrawal et al.

This paper proposes an atomic behaviour intervention strategy using the Pavlok wearable device. Pavlok utilises beeps, vibration and shocks as a mode of aversion technique to help individuals with behaviour modification. While the device can be useful in certain periodic daily life situations, like alarms and exercise notifications, it relies on manual operations that limit its usage. To automate behaviour modification, we propose a framework that first detects targeted behaviours through a lightweight deep learning model and subsequently nudges the user. Our proposed solution is implemented and verified in the context of snoring, which captures audio from the environment following a prediction of whether the audio content is a snore or not using a lightweight 1D convolutional neural network. Based on the prediction, we use Pavlok to nudge users for preventive measures, such as a change in sleeping posture. We believe that this simple solution can help people change their atomic habits, which may lead to long-term health benefits. Our proposed lightweight model (99.8% fewer parameters over SOTA; 790,273$\rightarrow$1,337) achieves SOTA test accuracy of 0.99 on a public benchmark. The code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/pavlok-nudge-snore.

Zeyu Zhang, Khandaker Asif Ahmed, Md Rakibul Hasan et al.

Diabetes, resulting from inadequate insulin production or utilization, causes extensive harm to the body. Existing diagnostic methods are often invasive and come with drawbacks, such as cost constraints. Although there are machine learning models like Classwise k Nearest Neighbor (CkNN) and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), they struggle with imbalanced data and result in under-performance. Leveraging advancements in sensor technology and machine learning, we propose a non-invasive diabetes diagnosis using a Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) with batch normalization, incorporating data re-sampling and normalization for class balancing. Our method addresses existing challenges such as limited performance associated with traditional machine learning. Experimental results on three datasets show significant improvements in overall accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity compared to traditional methods. Notably, we achieve accuracies of 89.81% in Pima diabetes dataset, 75.49% in CDC BRFSS2015 dataset, and 95.28% in Mesra Diabetes dataset. This underscores the potential of deep learning models for robust diabetes diagnosis. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/DiabetesDiagnosis/

Md Jobayer, Md. Mehedi Hasan Shawon, Md Rakibul Hasan et al.

Objective: Heart murmurs are abnormal sounds caused by turbulent blood flow within the heart. Several diagnostic methods are available to detect heart murmurs and their severity, such as cardiac auscultation, echocardiography, phonocardiogram (PCG), etc. However, these methods have limitations, including extensive training and experience among healthcare providers, cost and accessibility of echocardiography, as well as noise interference and PCG data processing. This study aims to develop a novel end-to-end real-time heart murmur detection approach using traditional and depthwise separable convolutional networks. Methods: Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was applied to extract meaningful features from the PCG data. The proposed network has three parts: the Squeeze net, the Bottleneck, and the Expansion net. The Squeeze net generates a compressed data representation, whereas the Bottleneck layer reduces computational complexity using a depthwise-separable convolutional network. The Expansion net is responsible for up-sampling the compressed data to a higher dimension, capturing tiny details of the representative data. Results: For evaluation, we used four publicly available datasets and achieved state-of-the-art performance in all datasets. Furthermore, we tested our proposed network on two resource-constrained devices: a Raspberry PI and an Android device, stripping it down into a tiny machine learning model (TinyML), achieving a maximum of 99.70%. Conclusion: The proposed model offers a deep learning framework for real-time accurate heart murmur detection within limited resources. Significance: It will significantly result in more accessible and practical medical services and reduced diagnosis time to assist medical professionals. The code is publicly available at TBA.

Mst. Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Adnan Ibney Faruq, Mushfiqur Rahman et al.

Automated radiology report summarization aims to distill verbose findings into concise clinical impressions, but existing multimodal models often struggle with visual noise and fail to meaningfully improve over strong text-only baselines in the FINDINGS $\to$ IMPRESSION transformation. We challenge two prevailing assumptions: (1) that more visual input is always better, and (2) that multimodal models add limited value when findings already contain rich image-derived detail. Through controlled ablations on MIMIC-CXR benchmark, we show that selectively focusing on pathology-relevant visual patches rather than full images yields substantially better performance. We introduce ViTAS, Visual-Text Attention Summarizer, a multi-stage pipeline that combines ensemble-guided MedSAM2 lung segmentation, bidirectional cross-attention for multi-view fusion, Shapley-guided adaptive patch clustering, and hierarchical visual tokenization feeding a ViT. ViTAS achieves SOTA results with 29.25% BLEU-4 and 69.83% ROUGE-L, improved factual alignment in qualitative analysis, and the highest expert-rated human evaluation scores. Our findings demonstrate that less but more relevant visual input is not only sufficient but superior for multimodal radiology summarization.

Ummy Maria Muna, Md Mehedi Hasan Shawon, Md Jobayer et al.

The automated analysis of phonocardiograms is vital for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, yet supervised deep learning is often constrained by the scarcity of expert-annotated data. In this paper, we propose the Self-Supervised Dual-Path Prototypical Network (SS-DPPN), a foundation model for cardiac audio representation and classification from unlabeled data. The framework introduces a dual-path contrastive learning based architecture that simultaneously processes 1D waveforms and 2D spectrograms using a novel hybrid loss. For the downstream task, a metric-learning approach using a Prototypical Network was used that enhances sensitivity and produces well-calibrated and trustworthy predictions. SS-DPPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on four cardiac audio benchmarks. The framework demonstrates exceptional data efficiency with a fully supervised model on three-fold reduction in labeled data. Finally, the learned representations generalize successfully across lung sound classification and heart rate estimation. Our experiments and findings validate SS-DPPN as a robust, reliable, and scalable foundation model for physiological signals.

Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Aneesh Krishna et al.

Supervised learning for empathy regression is challenged by noisy self-reported empathy scores. While many algorithms have been proposed for learning with noisy labels in textual classification problems, the regression counterpart is relatively under-explored. We propose UPLME, an uncertainty-aware probabilistic language modelling framework to capture label noise in the regression setting of empathy detection. UPLME includes a probabilistic language model that predicts both empathy score and heteroscedastic uncertainty and is trained using Bayesian concepts with variational model ensembling. We further introduce two novel loss components: one penalises degenerate Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), and another enforces the similarity between the input pairs on which we predict empathy. UPLME provides state-of-the-art performance (Pearson Correlation Coefficient: $0.558\rightarrow0.580$ and $0.629\rightarrow0.634$) in terms of the performance reported in the literature in two public benchmarks, having label noise. Through synthetic label noise injection, we show that UPLME is effective in separating noisy and clean samples based on the predicted uncertainty. UPLME further outperform (Calibration error: $0.571\rightarrow0.376$) a recent variational model ensembling-based UQ method designed for regression problems.