Niloufar Delfan

Niloufar Delfan, Mohammadreza Shahsavari, Sadiq Hussain et al.

Parkinson's disease (PD), a severe and progressive neurological illness, affects millions of individuals worldwide. For effective treatment and management of PD, an accurate and early diagnosis is crucial. This study presents a deep learning-based model for the diagnosis of PD using resting state electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. The objective of the study is to develop an automated model that can extract complex hidden nonlinear features from EEG and demonstrate its generalizability on unseen data. The model is designed using a hybrid model, consists of convolutional neural network (CNN), bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU), and attention mechanism. The proposed method is evaluated on three public datasets (Uc San Diego Dataset, PRED-CT, and University of Iowa (UI) dataset), with one dataset used for training and the other two for evaluation. The results show that the proposed model can accurately diagnose PD with high performance on both the training and hold-out datasets. The model also performs well even when some part of the input information is missing. The results of this work have significant implications for patient treatment and for ongoing investigations into the early detection of Parkinson's disease. The suggested model holds promise as a non-invasive and reliable technique for PD early detection utilizing resting state EEG.

Niloufar Delfan, Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam, Mohammadreza Modaresi et al.

Segmentation of lung tissue in computed tomography (CT) images is a precursor to most pulmonary image analysis applications. Semantic segmentation methods using deep learning have exhibited top-tier performance in recent years, however designing accurate and robust segmentation models for lung tissue is challenging due to the variations in shape, size, and orientation. Additionally, medical image artifacts and noise can affect lung tissue segmentation and degrade the accuracy of downstream analysis. The practicality of current deep learning methods for lung tissue segmentation is limited as they require significant computational resources and may not be easily deployable in clinical settings. This paper presents a fully automatic method that identifies the lungs in three-dimensional (3D) pulmonary CT images using deep networks and transfer learning. We introduce (1) a novel 2.5-dimensional image representation from consecutive CT slices that succinctly represents volumetric information and (2) a U-Net architecture equipped with pre-trained InceptionV3 blocks to segment 3D CT scans while maintaining the number of learnable parameters as low as possible. Our method was quantitatively assessed using one public dataset, LUNA16, for training and testing and two public datasets, namely, VESSEL12 and CRPF, only for testing. Due to the low number of learnable parameters, our method achieved high generalizability to the unseen VESSEL12 and CRPF datasets while obtaining superior performance over Luna16 compared to existing methods (Dice coefficients of 99.7, 99.1, and 98.8 over LUNA16, VESSEL12, and CRPF datasets, respectively). We made our method publicly accessible via a graphical user interface at medvispy.ee.kntu.ac.ir.

Mohammadreza Shahsavari, Niloufar Delfan, Mohamad Forouzanfar

Idiopathic ventricular arrhythmia (IVAs) is extra abnormal heartbeats disturbing the regular heart rhythm that can become fatal if left untreated. Cardiac catheter ablation is the standard approach to treat IVAs, however, a crucial prerequisite for the ablation is the localization of IVAs' origin. The current IVA localization techniques are invasive, rely on expert interpretation, or are inaccurate. In this study, we developed a new deep-learning algorithm that can automatically identify the origin of IVAs from ECG signals without the need for expert manual analysis. Our developed deep learning algorithm was comprised of a spatial fusion to extract the most informative features from multichannel ECG data, temporal modeling to capture the evolving pattern of the ECG time series, and an attention mechanism to weigh the most important temporal features and improve the model interpretability. The algorithm was validated on a 12-lead ECG dataset collected from 334 patients (230 females) who experienced IVA and successfully underwent a catheter ablation procedure that determined IVA's exact origins. The proposed method achieved an area under the curve of 93%, an accuracy of 94%, a sensitivity of 97%, a precision of 95%, and an F1 score of 96% in locating the origin of IVAs and outperformed existing automatic and semi-automatic algorithms. The proposed method shows promise toward automatic and noninvasive evaluation of IVA patients before cardiac catheter ablation.

Mehdi Hosseini Chagahi, Saeed Mohammadi Dashtaki, Niloufar Delfan et al.

Osteoporosis is a common condition that increases fracture risk, especially in older adults. Early diagnosis is vital for preventing fractures, reducing treatment costs, and preserving mobility. However, healthcare providers face challenges like limited labeled data and difficulties in processing medical images. This study presents a novel multi-modal learning framework that integrates clinical and imaging data to improve diagnostic accuracy and model interpretability. The model utilizes three pre-trained networks-VGG19, InceptionV3, and ResNet50-to extract deep features from X-ray images. These features are transformed using PCA to reduce dimensionality and focus on the most relevant components. A clustering-based selection process identifies the most representative components, which are then combined with preprocessed clinical data and processed through a fully connected network (FCN) for final classification. A feature importance plot highlights key variables, showing that Medical History, BMI, and Height were the main contributors, emphasizing the significance of patient-specific data. While imaging features were valuable, they had lower importance, indicating that clinical data are crucial for accurate predictions. This framework promotes precise and interpretable predictions, enhancing transparency and building trust in AI-driven diagnoses for clinical integration.

Niloufar Delfan, Pardis Ketabi Moghadam, Mohammad Khoshnevisan et al.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most widespread liver disorders on a global scale, posing a significant threat of progressing to more severe conditions like nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Diagnosing and staging NAFLD presents challenges due to its non-specific symptoms and the invasive nature of liver biopsies. Our research introduces a novel artificial intelligence cascade model employing ensemble learning and feature fusion techniques. We developed a non-invasive, robust, and reliable diagnostic artificial intelligence tool that utilizes anthropometric and laboratory parameters, facilitating early detection and intervention in NAFLD progression. Our novel artificial intelligence achieved an 86% accuracy rate for the NASH steatosis staging task (non-NASH, steatosis grade 1, steatosis grade 2, and steatosis grade 3) and an impressive 96% AUC-ROC for distinguishing between NASH (steatosis grade 1, grade 2, and grade3) and non-NASH cases, outperforming current state-of-the-art models. This notable improvement in diagnostic performance underscores the potential application of artificial intelligence in the early diagnosis and treatment of NAFLD, leading to better patient outcomes and a reduced healthcare burden associated with advanced liver disease.

Mehdi Hosseini Chagahi, Md. Jalil Piran, Niloufar Delfan et al.

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) refers to the leakage or accumulation of blood within the skull, which occurs due to the rupture of blood vessels in or around the brain. If this condition is not diagnosed in a timely manner and appropriately treated, it can lead to serious complications such as decreased consciousness, permanent neurological disabilities, or even death.The primary aim of this study is to detect the occurrence or non-occurrence of ICH, followed by determining the type of subdural hemorrhage (SDH). These tasks are framed as two separate binary classification problems. By adding two layers to the co-scale convolutional attention (CCA) classifier architecture, we introduce a novel approach for ICH detection. In the first layer, after extracting features from different slices of computed tomography (CT) scan images, we combine these features and select the 50 components that capture the highest variance in the data, considering them as informative features. We then assess the discriminative power of these features using the bootstrap forest algorithm, discarding those that lack sufficient discriminative ability between different classes. This algorithm explicitly determines the contribution of each feature to the final prediction, assisting us in developing an explainable AI model. The features feed into a boosting neural network as a latent feature space. In the second layer, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based fuzzy integral operator to fuse information from different CT scan slices. This operator, by accounting for the dependencies between consecutive slices, significantly improves detection accuracy.

Mehdi Hosseini Chagahi, Niloufar Delfan, Behzad Moshiri et al.

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a critical medical emergency caused by the rupture of cerebral blood vessels, leading to internal bleeding within the skull. Accurate and timely classification of hemorrhage subtypes is essential for effective clinical decision-making. To address this challenge, we propose an advanced pyramid vision transformer (PVT)-based model, leveraging its hierarchical attention mechanisms to capture both local and global spatial dependencies in brain CT scans. Instead of processing all extracted features indiscriminately, A SHAP-based feature selection method is employed to identify the most discriminative components, which are then used as a latent feature space to train a boosting neural network, reducing computational complexity. We introduce an entropy-aware aggregation strategy along with a fuzzy integral operator to fuse information across multiple CT slices, ensuring a more comprehensive and reliable scan-level diagnosis by accounting for inter-slice dependencies. Experimental results show that our PVT-based framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning architectures in terms of classification accuracy, precision, and robustness. By combining SHAP-driven feature selection, transformer-based modeling, and an entropy-aware fuzzy integral operator for decision fusion, our method offers a scalable and computationally efficient AI-driven solution for automated ICH subtype classification.