A Machine Learning Method with Filter-Based Feature Selection for Improved Prediction of Chronic Kidney Disease

The high prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a significant public health concern globally. The condition has a high mortality rate, especially in developing countries. CKD often go undetected since there are no obvious early-stage symptoms. Meanwhile, early detection and on-time clinical intervention are necessary to reduce the disease progression. Machine learning (ML) models can provide an efficient and cost-effective computer-aided diagnosis to assist clinicians in achieving early CKD detection. This research proposed an approach to effectively detect CKD by combining the information-gain-based feature selection technique and a cost-sensitive adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) classifier. An approach like this could save CKD screening time and cost since only a few clinical test attributes would be needed for the diagnosis. The proposed approach was benchmarked against recently proposed CKD prediction methods and well-known classifiers. Among these classifiers, the proposed cost-sensitive AdaBoost trained with the reduced feature set achieved the best classification performance with an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.8%, 100%, and 99.8%, respectively. Additionally, the experimental results show that the feature selection positively impacted the performance of the various classifiers. The proposed approach has produced an effective predictive model for CKD diagnosis and could be applied to more imbalanced medical datasets for effective disease detection.

COVID-19 Diagnosis: A Review of Rapid Antigen, RT-PCR and Artificial Intelligence Methods

As of 27 December 2021, SARS-CoV-2 has infected over 278 million persons and caused 5.3 million deaths. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, different methods, from medical to artificial intelligence, have been used for its detection, diagnosis, and surveillance. Meanwhile, fast and efficient point-of-care (POC) testing and self-testing kits have become necessary in the fight against COVID-19 and to assist healthcare personnel and governments curb the spread of the virus. This paper presents a review of the various types of COVID-19 detection methods, diagnostic technologies, and surveillance approaches that have been used or proposed. The review provided in this article should be beneficial to researchers in this field and health policymakers at large.