Street cocaine is often mixed with various substances that intensify its harmful effects. This paper proposes a framework to identify attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) intervals that best predict the concentration of adulterants in cocaine samples. Wavelengths are ranked according to their relevance through ReliefF and mRMR feature selection approaches, and an iterative process removes less relevant wavelengths based on the ranking suggested by each approach. Gaussian Process (GP) regression models are constructed after each wavelength removal and the prediction performance is evaluated using RMSE. The subset balancing a low RMSE value and a small percentage of retained wavelengths is chosen. The proposed framework was validated using a dataset consisting of 345 samples of cocaine with different amounts of levamisole, caffeine, phenacetin, and lidocaine. Averaged over the four adulterants, the GP regression coupled with the mRMR retained 1.07 % of the 662 original wavelengths, outperforming PLS and SVR regarding prediction performance.

UNASSIGNED: To develop an advanced determination technology for detecting COVID-19 patterns from chest X-ray and CT-scan films with distinct applications of deep learning and machine learning methods.
UNASSIGNED: The newly enhanced proposed hybrid classification network (SVM-RLF-DNN) comprises of three phases: feature extraction, selection and classification. The in-depth features are extracted from a series of 3×3 convolution, 2×2 max polling operations followed by a flattened and fully connected layer of the deep neural network (DNN). ReLU activation function and Adam optimizer are used in the model. The ReliefF is an improved feature selection algorithm of Relief that uses Manhattan distance instead of Euclidean distance. Based on the significance of the feature, the ReliefF assigns weight to each extracted feature received from a fully connected layer. The weight to each feature is the average of k closest hits and misses in each class for a neighbouring instance pair in multiclass problems. The ReliefF eliminates lower-weight features by setting the node value to zero. The higher weights of the features are kept to obtain the feature selection. At the last layer of the neural network, the multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify the patterns of COVID-19, viral pneumonia and healthy cases. The three classes with three binary SVM classifiers use linear kernel function for each binary SVM following a one-versus-all approach. The hinge loss function and L2-norm regularization are selected for more stable results. The proposed method is assessed on publicly available chest X-ray and CT-scan image databases from Kaggle and GitHub. The performance of the proposed classification model has comparable training, validation, and test accuracy, as well as sensitivity, specificity, and confusion matrix for quantitative evaluation on five-fold cross-validation.
UNASSIGNED: Our proposed network has achieved test accuracy of 98.48% and 95.34% on 2-class X-rays and CT. More importantly, the proposed model\'s test accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 87.9%, 86.32%, and 90.25% for 3-class classification (COVID-19, Pneumonia, Normal) on chest X-rays. The proposed model provides the test accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 95.34%, 94.12%, and 96.15% for 2-class classification (COVID-19, Non-COVID) on chest CT.
UNASSIGNED: Our proposed classification network experimental results indicate competitiveness with existing neural networks. The proposed neural network assists clinicians in determining and surveilling the disease.

BACKGROUND: Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) is a malignant tumor with a high degree of malignancy, invasiveness, and metastasis rate. Radiotherapy, as an important adjuvant therapy for HNSCC, can reduce the postoperative recurrence rate and improve the survival rate. Identifying the genes related to HNSCC radiotherapy resistance (HNSCC-RR) is helpful in the search for potential therapeutic targets. However, identifying radiotherapy resistance-related genes from tens of thousands of genes is a challenging task. While interactions between genes are important for elucidating complex biological processes, the large number of genes makes the computation of gene interactions infeasible.
METHODS: We propose a gene selection algorithm, RGIE, which is based on ReliefF, Gene Network Inference with Ensemble of Trees (GENIE3) and Feature Elimination. ReliefF was used to select a feature subset that is discriminative for HNSCC-RR, GENIE3 constructed a gene regulatory network based on this subset to analyze the regulatory relationship among genes, and feature elimination was used to remove redundant and noisy features.
RESULTS: Nine genes (SPAG1, FIGN, NUBPL, CHMP5, TCF7L2, COQ10B, BSDC1, ZFPM1, GRPEL1) were identified and used to identify HNSCC-RR, which achieved performances of 0.9730, 0.9679, 0.9767, and 0.9885 in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC, respectively. Finally, qRT-PCR validated the differential expression of the nine signature genes in cell lines (SCC9, SCC9-RR).
CONCLUSIONS: RGIE is effective in screening genes related to HNSCC-RR. This approach may help guide clinical treatment modalities for patients and develop potential treatments.

In the rapidly advancing field of biomedical engineering, effective real-time control of artificial limbs is a pressing research concern. Addressing this, the current study introduces a pioneering method for augmenting task recognition in prosthetic control systems, combining a ReliefF-based Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) approach. This paper has leveraged the MILimbEEG dataset, a comprehensive rich source collection of EEG signals, to calculate statistical features of Arithmetic Mean (AM), Standard Deviation (SD), and Skewness (S) across various motor activities. Supreme Feature Selection (SFS), of the adopted time-domain features, was performed using the ReliefF algorithm. The highest scored DNN-ReliefF developed model demonstrated remarkable performance, achieving accuracy, precision, and recall rates of 97.4 %, 97.3 %, and 97.4 %, respectively. In contrast, a traditional DNN model yielded accuracy, precision, and recall rates of 50.8 %, 51.1 %, and 50.8 %, highlighting the significant improvements made possible by incorporating SFS. This stark contrast underscores the transformative potential of incorporating ReliefF, situating the DNN-ReliefF model as a robust platform for forthcoming advancements in real-time prosthetic control systems.

The microscopic diagnostic differentiation of odontogenic cysts from other cysts is intricate and may cause perplexity for both clinicians and pathologists. Of particular interest is the odontogenic keratocyst (OKC), a developmental cyst with unique histopathological and clinical characteristics. Nevertheless, what distinguishes this cyst is its aggressive nature and high tendency for recurrence. Clinicians encounter challenges in dealing with this frequently encountered jaw lesion, as there is no consensus on surgical treatment. Therefore, the accurate and early diagnosis of such cysts will benefit clinicians in terms of treatment management and spare subjects from the mental agony of suffering from aggressive OKCs, which impact their quality of life. The objective of this research is to develop an automated OKC diagnostic system that can function as a decision support tool for pathologists, whether they are working locally or remotely. This system will provide them with additional data and insights to enhance their decision-making abilities. This research aims to provide an automation pipeline to classify whole-slide images of OKCs and non-keratocysts (non-KCs: dentigerous and radicular cysts). OKC diagnosis and prognosis using the histopathological analysis of tissues using whole-slide images (WSIs) with a deep-learning approach is an emerging research area. WSIs have the unique advantage of magnifying tissues with high resolution without losing information. The contribution of this research is a novel, deep-learning-based, and efficient algorithm that reduces the trainable parameters and, in turn, the memory footprint. This is achieved using principal component analysis (PCA) and the ReliefF feature selection algorithm (ReliefF) in a convolutional neural network (CNN) named P-C-ReliefF. The proposed model reduces the trainable parameters compared to standard CNN, achieving 97% classification accuracy.

Serum miRNAs are available clinical samples for cancer screening. Identifying early serum markers in lung cancer (LC) is essential for patients\' early diagnosis and clinical treatment. Expression data of serum miRNAs of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) patients and healthy individuals were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). These data were normalized and subjected to differential expression analysis to obtain differentially expressed miRNAs (DEmiRNAs). The DEmiRNAs were subsequently subjected to ReliefF feature selection, and subsets closely related to cancer were screened as candidate feature miRNAs. Thereafter, a Gaussian Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) classifier were constructed based on these candidate feature miRNAs. Then the best diagnostic signature was constructed through NB combined with incremental feature selection (IFS). Thereafter, these samples were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) based on miRNAs with optimal predictive performance. Finally, the peripheral serum miRNAs of 64 LUAD patients and 59 normal individuals were extracted for qRT-PCR analysis to validate the performance of the diagnostic model in respect of clinical detection. Finally, according to area under the curve (AUC) and accuracy values, the NB classifier composed of miR-5100 and miR-663a manifested the most outstanding diagnostic performance. The PCA results also revealed that the 2-miRNA diagnostic signature could effectively distinguish cancer patients from healthy individuals. Finally, qRT-PCR results of clinical serum samples revealed that miR-5100 and miR-663a expression in tumor samples was remarkably higher than that in normal samples. The AUC of the 2-miRNA diagnostic signature was 0.968. In summary, we identified markers (miR-5100 and miR-663a) in serum for early LUAD screening, providing ideas for developing early LUAD diagnostic models.

Gene selection (GS) is an important branch of interest within the field of feature selection, which is widely used in cancer classification. It provides essential insights into the pathogenesis of cancer and enables a deeper understanding of cancer data. In cancer classification, GS is essentially a multi-objective optimization problem, which aims to simultaneously optimize the two objectives of classification accuracy and the size of the gene subset. The marine predator algorithm (MPA) has been successfully employed in practical applications, however, its random initialization can lead to blindness, which may adversely affect the convergence of the algorithm. Furthermore, the elite individuals in guiding evolution are randomly chosen from the Pareto solutions, which may degrade the good exploration performance of the population. To overcome these limitations, a multi-objective improved MPA with continuous mapping initialization and leader selection strategies is proposed. In this work, a new continuous mapping initialization with ReliefF overwhelms the defects with less information in late evolution. Moreover, an improved elite selection mechanism with Gaussian distribution guides the population to evolve towards a better Pareto front. Finally, an efficient mutation method is adopted to prevent evolutionary stagnation. To evaluate its effectiveness, the proposed algorithm was compared with 9 famous algorithms. The experimental results on 16 datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the data dimension and obtain the highest classification accuracy on most of high-dimension cancer microarray datasets.

Atrophic gastritis (AG) is commonly caused by the infection of the Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) bacteria. If untreated, AG may develop into a chronic condition leading to gastric cancer, which is deemed to be the third primary cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Precursory detection of AG is crucial to avoid such cases. This work focuses on H. pylori-associated infection located at the gastric antrum, where the classification is of binary classes of normal versus atrophic gastritis. Existing work developed the Deep Convolution Neural Network (DCNN) of GoogLeNet with 22 layers of the pre-trained model. Another study employed GoogLeNet based on the Inception Module, fast and robust fuzzy C-means (FRFCM), and simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) superpixel algorithms to identify gastric disease. GoogLeNet with Caffe framework and ResNet-50 are machine learners that detect H. pylori infection. Nonetheless, the accuracy may become abundant as the network depth increases. An upgrade to the current standards method is highly anticipated to avoid untreated and inaccurate diagnoses that may lead to chronic AG. The proposed work incorporates improved techniques revolving within DCNN with pooling as pre-trained models and channel shuffle to assist streams of information across feature channels to ease the training of networks for deeper CNN. In addition, Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) feature fusion method and ReliefF feature selection approaches are intended to revamp the combined techniques. CCA models the relationship between the two data sets of significant features generated by pre-trained ShuffleNet. ReliefF reduces and selects essential features from CCA and is classified using the Generalized Additive Model (GAM). It is believed the extended work is justified with a 98.2% testing accuracy reading, thus providing an accurate diagnosis of normal versus atrophic gastritis.

Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic element that can accumulate in edible plant tissues and negatively impact human health. Traditional Cd quantification methods are time-consuming, expensive, and generate a lot of toxic waste, slowing development of methods to reduce uptake. The objective of this study was to determine whether hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and machine learning (ML) can be used to predict Cd concentrations in plants using kale (Brassica oleracea) and basil (Ocimum basilicum) as model crops. The experiments were conducted in an automated phenotyping facility where all environmental conditions except soil Cd concentration were kept constant. Cd concentrations were determined at harvest using traditional methods and used to train the ML models with data collected from the imaging sensor. Visible/near infrared (VNIR) images were also collected at harvest and processed to calculate reflectance at 473 bands between 400 to 998 nm. All reflectance spectra were subject to the feature selection algorithm ReliefF and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to generate data and provide input to evaluate three ML classification models: artificial neural network (ANN), ensemble learning (EL), and support vector machine (SVM). Plants were categorized according to Cd concentrations higher or lower than the safety threshold of 0.2 mg kg-1 Cd. Wavelengths with the highest ranks for Cd detection were between 519 and 574, and 692 and 732 nm, indicating that Cd content likely altered the plants\' chlorophyll content and altered leaf internal structure. All models were able to sort the plants into groups, though the model with the best F1 score was the ANN for the validation subset that utilized reflectance from all wavelengths. This study demonstrates that HSI and ML are promising technologies for the fast and precise diagnosis of Cd in leafy green plants, though additional studies are needed to adapt this approach for more complex field environments.

Brain tumors are among the deadliest diseases in the modern world. This study proposes an optimized machine-learning approach for the detection and identification of the type of brain tumor (glioma, meningioma, or pituitary tumor) in brain images recorded using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The Gaussian features of the image are extracted using speed-up robust features (SURF), whereas its non-linear features are obtained using KAZE, owing to their high performance against rotation, scaling, and noise problems. To retrieve local-level information, all brain MRI images are segmented into an 8 × 8 pixel grid. To enhance the accuracy and reduce the computational time, the variance-based k-means clustering and PSO-ReliefF algorithms are employed to eliminate the redundant features of the brain MRI images. Finally, the performance of the proposed hybrid optimized feature vector is evaluated using various machine learning classifiers. An accuracy of 96.30% is obtained with 169 features using a support vector machine (SVM). Furthermore, the computational time is also reduced to 1 min compared to the non-optimized features used for training of the SVM. The findings are also compared with previous research, demonstrating that the suggested approach might assist physicians and doctors in the timely detection of brain tumors.