ABSTRACT
In the last decades, the world population and demand for any kind of product have grown exponentially. The rhythm of production to satisfy the request of the population has become unsustainable and the concept of the linear economy, introduced after the Industrial Revolution, has been replaced by a new economic approach, the circular economy. In this new economic model, the concept of "the end of life" is substituted by the concept of restoration, providing a new life to many industrial wastes. Leaves are a by-product of several agricultural cultivations. In recent years, the scientific interest regarding leaf biochemical composition grew, recording that plant leaves may be considered an alternative source of bioactive substances. Plant leaves' main bioactive compounds are similar to those in fruits, i.e., phenolic acids and esters, flavonols, anthocyanins, and procyanidins. Bioactive compounds can positively influence human health; in fact, it is no coincidence that the leaves were used by our ancestors as a natural remedy for various pathological conditions. Therefore, leaves can be exploited to manufacture many products in food (e.g., being incorporated in food formulations as natural antioxidants, or used to create edible coatings or films for food packaging), cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries (e.g., promising ingredients in anti-aging cosmetics such as oils, serums, dermatological creams, bath gels, and other products). This review focuses on the leaves' main bioactive compounds and their beneficial health effects, indicating their applications until today to enhance them as a harvesting by-product and highlight their possible reuse for new potential healthy products.
ABSTRACT
[Formula: see text]-Thalassemia is one of the dangerous causes of the high mortality rate in the Mediterranean countries. Substantial resources are required to save a [Formula: see text]-Thalassemia carriers' life and early detection of thalassemia patients can help appropriate treatment to increase the carrier's life expectancy. Being a genetic disease, it can not be prevented however the analysis of several indicators in parents' blood can be used to detect disorders causing Thalassemia. Laboratory tests for Thalassemia are time-consuming and expensive like high-performance liquid chromatography, Complete Blood Count (CBC) with peripheral smear, genetic test, etc. Red blood indices from CBC can be used with machine learning models for the same task. Despite the available approaches for Thalassemia carriers from CBC data, gaps exist between the desired and achieved accuracy. Moreover, the data imbalance problem is studied well which makes the models less generalizable. This study proposes a highly accurate approach for [Formula: see text]-Thalassemia detection using red blood indices from CBC augmented by supervised machine learning. In view of the fact that all the features do not carry predictive information regarding the target variable, this study employs a unified framework of two features selection techniques including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Singular Vector Decomposition (SVD). The data imbalance between [Formula: see text]-Thalassemia carrier and non-carriers is handled by Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and Adaptive Synthetic (ADASYN). Extensive experiments are performed using many state-of-the-art machine learning models and deep learning models. Experimental results indicate the superiority of the proposed approach over existing approaches with an accuracy score of 0.96.
