Clinical applications of artificial intelligence in cardiology on the verge of the decade

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been hailed as the fourth industrial revolution and its influence on people’s lives is increasing. The research on AI applications in medicine is progressing rapidly. This revolution shows promise for more precise diagnoses, streamlined workflows, increased accessibility to healthcare services and new insights into ever-growing population-wide datasets. While some applications have already found their way into contemporary patient care, we are still in the early days of the AI-era in medicine. Despite the popularity of these new technologies, many practitioners lack an understanding of AI methods, their benefits, and pitfalls. This review aims to provide information about the general concepts of machine learning (ML) with special focus on the applications of such techniques in cardiovascular medicine. It also sets out the current trends in research related to medical applications of AI. Along with new possibilities, new threats arise — acknowledging and understanding them is as important as understanding the ML methodology itself. Therefore, attention is also paid to the current opinions and guidelines regarding the validation and safety of AI-powered tools

An intelligent support system for automatic detection of cerebral vascular accidents from brain CT images

Objective: This paper presents a Radial Basis Functions Neural Network (RBFNN) based detection system, for automatic identification of Cerebral Vascular Accidents (CVA) through analysis of Computed Tomographic (CT) images. Methods: For the design of a neural network classifier, a Multi Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) framework is used to determine the architecture of the classifier, its corresponding parameters and input features by maximizing the classification precision, while ensuring generalization. This approach considers a large number of input features, comprising first and second order pixel intensity statistics, as well as symmetry/asymmetry information with respect to the ideal mid-sagittal line. Results: Values of specificity of 98% and sensitivity of 98% were obtained, at pixel level, by an ensemble of non-dominated models generated by MOGA, in a set of 150 CT slices (1,867,602 pixels), marked by a NeuroRadiologist. This approach also compares favorably at a lesion level with three other published solutions, in terms of specificity (86% compared with 84%), degree of coincidence of marked lesions (89% compared with 77%) and classification accuracy rate (96% compared with 88%). (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.FCTIDMECLAETA [UID/EMS/50022/2013

DSNN: A DenseNet-Based SNN for Explainable Brain Disease Classification

Aims: Brain diseases refer to intracranial tissue and organ inflammation, vascular diseases, tumors, degeneration, malformations, genetic diseases, immune diseases, nutritional and metabolic diseases, poisoning, trauma, parasitic diseases, etc. Taking Alzheimer's disease (AD) as an example, the number of patients dramatically increases in developed countries. By 2025, the number of elderly patients with AD aged 65 and over will reach 7.1 million, an increase of nearly 29% over the 5.5 million patients of the same age in 2018. Unless medical breakthroughs are made, AD patients may increase from 5.5 million to 13.8 million by 2050, almost three times the original. Researchers have focused on developing complex machine learning (ML) algorithms, i.e., convolutional neural networks (CNNs), containing millions of parameters. However, CNN models need many training samples. A small number of training samples in CNN models may lead to overfitting problems. With the continuous research of CNN, other networks have been proposed, such as randomized neural networks (RNNs). Schmidt neural network (SNN), random vector functional link (RVFL), and extreme learning machine (ELM) are three types of RNNs.Methods: We propose three novel models to classify brain diseases to cope with these problems. The proposed models are DenseNet-based SNN (DSNN), DenseNet-based RVFL (DRVFL), and DenseNet-based ELM (DELM). The backbone of the three proposed models is the pre-trained "customize" DenseNet. The modified DenseNet is fine-tuned on the empirical dataset. Finally, the last five layers of the fine-tuned DenseNet are substituted by SNN, ELM, and RVFL, respectively.Results: Overall, the DSNN gets the best performance among the three proposed models in classification performance. We evaluate the proposed DSNN by five-fold cross-validation. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1-score of the proposed DSNN on the test set are 98.46% +/- 2.05%, 100.00% +/- 0.00%, 85.00% +/- 20.00%, 98.36% +/- 2.17%, and 99.16% +/- 1.11%, respectively. The proposed DSNN is compared with restricted DenseNet, spiking neural network, and other state-of-the-art methods. Finally, our model obtains the best results among all models.Conclusions: DSNN is an effective model for classifying brain diseases.Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, UK RM60G0680Royal Society International Exchanges Cost Share Award, UK RP202G0230Medical Research Council Confidence in Concept Award, UK MC_PC_17171British Heart Foundation Accelerator Award, UK AA/18/3/34220Sino-UK Industrial Fund, UK RP202G0289Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), UK P202PF11LIAS Pioneering Partnerships award, UK P202ED10Data Science Enhancement Fund, UK P202RE237Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software kx20190