The process of manual species identification is a daunting task, so much so that the number of taxonomists is seen to be declining. In order to assist taxonomists, many methods and algorithms have been proposed to develop semi-automated and fully automated systems for species identification. While semi-automated tools would require manual intervention by a domain expert, fully automated tools are assumed to be not as reliable as manual or semiautomated identification tools. Hence, in this study we investigate the accuracy of fully automated and semi-automated models for species identification. We have built fully automated and semi-automated species classification models using the monogenean species image dataset. With respect to monogeneans' morphology, they are differentiated based on the morphological characteristics of haptoral bars, anchors, marginal hooks and reproductive organs (male and female copulatory organs). Landmarks (in the semi-automated model) and shape morphometric features (in the fully automated model) were extracted from four monogenean species images, which were then classified using k-nearest neighbour and artificial neural network. In semi-automated models, a classification accuracy of 96.67 % was obtained using the k-nearest neighbour and 97.5 % using the artificial neural network, whereas in fully automated models, a classification accuracy of 90 % was obtained using the k-nearest neighbour and 98.8 % using the artificial neural network. As for the crossvalidation, semi-automated models performed at 91.2 %, whereas fully automated models performed slightly higher at 93.75 %.
Automated artificial intelligence (AI) systems enable the integration of different types of data from various sources for clinical decision-making. The aim of this study is to propose a pipeline to develop a fully automated clinician-friendly AI-enabled database platform for breast cancer survival prediction. A case study of breast cancer survival cohort from the University Malaya Medical Centre was used to develop and evaluate the pipeline. A relational database and a fully automated system were developed by integrating the database with analytical modules (machine learning, automated scoring for quality of life, and interactive visualization). The developed pipeline, iSurvive has helped in enhancing data management as well as to visualize important prognostic variables and survival rates. The embedded automated scoring module demonstrated quality of life of patients whereas the interactive visualizations could be used by clinicians to facilitate communication with patients. The pipeline proposed in this study is a one-stop center to manage data, to automate analytics using machine learning, to automate scoring and to produce explainable interactive visuals to enhance clinician-patient communication along the survivorship period to modify behaviours that relate to prognosis. The pipeline proposed can be modelled on any disease not limited to breast cancer.
Breast cancer survival prediction can have an extreme effect on selection of best treatment protocols. Many approaches such as statistical or machine learning models have been employed to predict the survival prospects of patients, but newer algorithms such as deep learning can be tested with the aim of improving the models and prediction accuracy. In this study, we used machine learning and deep learning approaches to predict breast cancer survival in 4,902 patient records from the University of Malaya Medical Centre Breast Cancer Registry. The results indicated that the multilayer perceptron (MLP), random forest (RF) and decision tree (DT) classifiers could predict survivorship, respectively, with 88.2 %, 83.3 % and 82.5 % accuracy in the tested samples. Support vector machine (SVM) came out to be lower with 80.5 %. In this study, tumour size turned out to be the most important feature for breast cancer survivability prediction. Both deep learning and machine learning methods produce desirable prediction accuracy, but other factors such as parameter configurations and data transformations affect the accuracy of the predictive model.
The reliable classification of benign and malignant lesions in breast ultrasound images can provide an effective and relatively low-cost method for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. The accuracy of the diagnosis is, however, highly dependent on the quality of the ultrasound systems and the experience of the users (radiologists). The use of deep convolutional neural network approaches has provided solutions for the efficient analysis of breast ultrasound images. In this study, we propose a new framework for the classification of breast cancer lesions with an attention module in a modified VGG16 architecture. The adopted attention mechanism enhances the feature discrimination between the background and targeted lesions in ultrasound. We also propose a new ensembled loss function, which is a combination of binary cross-entropy and the logarithm of the hyperbolic cosine loss, to improve the model discrepancy between classified lesions and their labels. This combined loss function optimizes the network more quickly. The proposed model outperformed other modified VGG16 architectures, with an accuracy of 93%, and also, the results are competitive with those of other state-of-the-art frameworks for the classification of breast cancer lesions. Our experimental results show that the choice of loss function is highly important and plays a key role in breast lesion classification tasks. Additionally, by adding an attention block, we could improve the performance of the model.