Nazar Zaki

h-index2
3papers
43citations

3 Papers

6.4AIApr 2
Abnormal Head Movements in Neurological Conditions: A Knowledge-Based Dataset with Application to Cervical Dystonia

Saja Al-Dabet, Sherzod Turaev, Nazar Zaki

Abnormal head movements (AHMs) manifest across a broad spectrum of neurological disorders; however, the absence of a multi-condition resource integrating kinematic measurements, clinical severity scores, and patient demographics constitutes a persistent barrier to the development of AI-driven diagnostic tools. To address this gap, this study introduces NeuroPose-AHM, a knowledge-based dataset of neurologically induced AHMs constructed through a multi-LLM extraction framework applied to 1,430 peer-reviewed publications. The dataset contains 2,756 patient-group-level records spanning 57 neurological conditions, derived from 846 AHM-relevant papers. Inter-LLM reliability analysis confirms robust extraction performance, with study-level classification achieving strong agreement (kappa = 0.822). To demonstrate the dataset's analytical utility, a four-task framework is applied to cervical dystonia (CD), the condition most directly defined by pathological head movement. First, Task 1 performs multi-label AHM type classification (F1 = 0.856). Task 2 constructs the Head-Neck Severity Index (HNSI), a unified metric that normalizes heterogeneous clinical rating scales. The clinical relevance of this index is then evaluated in Task 3, where HNSI is validated against real-world CD patient data, with aligned severe-band proportions (6.7%) providing a preliminary plausibility indication for index calibration within the high severity range. Finally, Task 4 performs bridge analysis between movement-type probabilities and HNSI scores, producing significant correlations (p less than 0.001). These results demonstrate the analytical utility of NeuroPose-AHM as a structured, knowledge-based resource for neurological AHM research. The NeuroPose-AHM dataset is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19386862).

8.4CVJun 20Code
One-Shot Data Selection for Medical Image Classification via Graph Coverage

Zahiriddin Rustamov, Nadia Badawi, Rafat Damseh et al.

Training medical image classifiers on entire datasets is wasteful when annotation budgets are limited: not all samples contribute equally, yet acquiring expert labels is expensive. Active learning reduces annotation cost through iterative querying, but assumes repeated access to an oracle and requires multiple rounds of model training. One-shot geometry-based methods such as facility location avoid retraining but operate on pairwise distances that ignore the local structure of the data manifold. We propose a graph-based one-shot selection method that operates entirely on frozen foundation model embeddings. Given embeddings from a pretrained encoder, we construct a k-nearest neighbor graph over all training samples and derive a two-term coverage kernel from the heat diffusion kernel, capturing both direct and two-hop neighborhood relationships. Greedy facility location on this kernel selects class-balanced subsets that maximize coverage of the data manifold. The two-term kernel matches the full spectral heat kernel in selection behavior while reducing computation to sparse matrix operations with a single hyperparameter. We evaluate on five MedMNIST datasets spanning histopathology, radiology, and microscopy, comparing against both training-dynamics and geometry-based baselines. Our method achieves the highest balanced accuracy on nine of ten dataset-ratio conditions, with the largest gains on class-imbalanced datasets where global graph construction captures cross-class structure that per-class methods miss, all without any model training during selection. Code is available at https://github.com/zahiriddin-rustamov/graph-coverage-selection.

5.8AIJun 17
Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

Sherzod Turaev, Mary John, Saja Aldabet et al.

Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.