Preemptive Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia Using Computational Intelligence Techniques.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a silent disease that causes the brain cells to die progressively, influencing consciousness, behavior, planning ability, and language to name a few. AD increases exponentially with aging, where it doubles every 5-6 years, causing profound implications, such as swallowing difficulties and losing the ability to speak before death. According to the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia, AD patients will triple by 2060 to reach 14 million patients worldwide. The rapid rise of patients is caused by the silent progress of the disease, leading to late diagnosis as the symptoms will not be distinguished from normal aging affect. Moreover, with the current medical capabilities, it is impossible to confirm AD with 100% certainty via specific medical examinations. The literature review revealed that most recent publications used images to diagnose AD, which is insufficient for local hospitals with limited imaging capabilities. Other studies that used clinical and demographical data failed to achieve adequate results. Consequently, this study aims to preemptively predict AD in Saudi Arabia by employing machine learning (ML) techniques. The dataset was acquired from King Fahad Specialist Hospital (KFSH) in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, containing standard clinical tests for 152 patients. Four ML algorithms, namely, support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), were employed to preemptively diagnose the disease. The empirical results demonstrated the robustness of SVM in the pre-emptive diagnosis of AD with accuracy, precision, recall, and area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) of 95.56%, 94.70%, 97.78%, and 0.97, respectively, with 13 features after applying the sequential forward feature selection technique. This model can assist the medical staff in controlling the progression of the disease at low costs.

A Novel Ensemble-Based Technique for the Preemptive Diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia Using Clinical Data.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease caused by numerous genetic and environmental factors leading to musculoskeletal system pain. RA may damage other tissues and organs, causing complications that severely reduce patients' quality of life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 1.71 billion individuals worldwide had musculoskeletal problems in 2021. Rheumatologists face challenges in the early detection of RA since its symptoms are similar to other illnesses, and there is no definitive test to diagnose the disease. Accordingly, it is preferable to profit from the power of computational intelligence techniques that can identify hidden patterns to diagnose RA early. Although multiple studies were conducted to diagnose RA early, they showed unsatisfactory performance, with the highest accuracy of 87.5% using imaging data. Yet, imaging data requires diagnostic tools that are challenging to collect and examine and are more costly. Recent studies indicated that neither a blood test nor a physical finding could early confirm the diagnosis. Therefore, this study proposes a novel ensemble technique for the preemptive prediction of RA and investigates the possibility of diagnosing the disease using clinical data before the symptoms appear. Two datasets were obtained from King Fahad University Hospital (KFUH), Dammam, Saudi Arabia, including 446 patients, with 251 positive cases of RA and 195 negative cases of RA. Two experiments were conducted where the former was developed without upsampling the dataset, and the latter was carried out using an upsampled dataset. Multiple machine learning (ML) algorithms were utilized to assemble the novel voting ensemble, including support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and adaptive boosting (Adaboost). The results indicated that clinical laboratory tests fed to the proposed voting ensemble technique could accurately diagnose RA preemptively with an accuracy, recall, and precision of 94.03%, 96.00%, and 93.51%, respectively, with 30 clinical features when utilizing the original data and sequential forward feature selection (SFFS) technique. It is concluded that deploying the proposed model in local hospitals can contribute to introducing a method that aids medical specialists in preemptively diagnosing RA and stopping or delaying the course using clinical laboratory tests.

Early diagnosis of thyroid cancer diseases using computational intelligence techniques: A case study of a Saudi Arabian dataset.

In recent times, researchers have noticed that chronic diseases have become more common. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the number of patients with thyroid cancer (TC) has become a concern, necessitating a proactive system that can help cut down the incidence of this disease, where the system can assist in early interventions to prevent or cure the disease. In this paper, we introduce our work developing machine learning-based tools that can serve as early warning systems by detecting TC at very early stages (pre-symptomatic stage). In addition, we aimed at obtaining the greatest possible accuracy while using fewer features. It must be noted that while there have been past efforts to use machine learning in predicting TC, this is the first attempt using a Saudi Arabian dataset as well as targeting diagnosis in the pre-symptomatic stage (pre-emptive diagnosis). The techniques used in this work include random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), and naïve Bayes (NB), each of which was selected for their unique capabilities. The highest accuracy rate obtained was 90.91% with the RF technique, while SVM, ANN, and NB achieved 84.09%, 88.64%, and 81.82% accuracy, respectively. These levels were obtained by using only seven features out of an available 15. Considering the pattern of the obtained results, it is clear that the RF technique is better and, hence, recommended for this specific problem.