An Automated Decision Support System to Analyze Malignancy Patterns of Breast Masses Employing Medically Relevant Features of Ultrasound Images

An automated computer-aided approach might aid radiologists in diagnosing breast cancer at a primary stage. This study proposes a novel decision support system to classify breast tumors into benign and malignant based on clinically important features, using ultrasound images. Nine handcrafted features, which align with the clinical markers used by radiologists, are extracted from the region of interest (ROI) of ultrasound images. To validate that these elected clinical markers have a significant impact on predicting the benign and malignant classes, ten machine learning (ML) models are experimented with resulting in test accuracies in the range of 96 to 99%. In addition, four feature selection techniques are explored where two features are eliminated according to the feature ranking score of each feature selection method. The Random Forest classifier is trained with the resultant four feature sets. Results indicate that even when eliminating only two features, the performance of the model is reduced for each feature selection technique. These experiments validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the clinically important features. To develop the decision support system, a probability density function (PDF) graph is generated for each feature in order to find a threshold range to distinguish benign and malignant tumors. Based on the threshold range of particular features, a decision support system is developed in such a way that if at least eight out of nine features are within the threshold range, the image will be denoted as true predicted. With this algorithm, a test accuracy of 99.38% and an F1 Score of 99.05% is achieved, which means that our decision support system outperforms all the previously trained ML models. Moreover, after calculating individual class-based test accuracies, for the benign class, a test accuracy of 99.31% has been attained where only three benign instances are misclassified out of 437 instances, and for the malignant class, a test accuracy of 99.52% has been attained where only one malignant instance is misclassified out of 210 instances. This system is robust, time-effective, and reliable as the radiologists' criteria are followed and may aid specialists in making a diagnosis.

A Computer-Aided Diagnostic System to Identify Diabetic Retinopathy, Utilizing a Modified Compact Convolutional Transformer and Low-Resolution Images to Reduce Computation Time

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the foremost cause of blindness in people with diabetes worldwide, and early diagnosis is essential for effective treatment. Unfortunately, the present DR screening method requires the skill of ophthalmologists and is time-consuming. In this study, we present an automated system for DR severity classification employing the fine-tuned Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) model to overcome these issues. We assembled five datasets to generate a more extensive dataset containing 53,185 raw images. Various image pre-processing techniques and 12 types of augmentation procedures were applied to improve image quality and create a massive dataset. A new DR-CCTNet model is proposed. It is a modification of the original CCT model to address training time concerns and work with a large amount of data. Our proposed model delivers excellent accuracy even with low-pixel images and still has strong performance with fewer images, indicating that the model is robust. We compare our model's performance with transfer learning models such as VGG19, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50. The test accuracy of the VGG19, ResNet50, VGG16, and MobileNetV2 were, respectively, 72.88%, 76.67%, 73.22%, and 71.98%. Our proposed DR-CCTNet model to classify DR outperformed all of these with a 90.17% test accuracy. This approach provides a novel and efficient method for the detection of DR, which may lower the burden on ophthalmologists and expedite treatment for patients.