Heart Disease Prediction: A Comparative Study of Optimisers Performance in Deep Neural Networks

Optimization has been an important factor and topic of interest in training deep learning models, yet less attention has been given to how we select the optimizers we use to train these models. Hence, there is a need to dive deeper into how we select the optimizers we use for training and the metrics that determine this selection. In this work, we compare the performance of 10 different optimizers in training a simple Multi-layer Perceptron model using a heart disease dataset from Kaggle. We set up a consistent training paradigm and evaluate the optimizers based on metrics such as convergence speed and stability. We also include some other Machine Learning Evaluation metrics such as AUC, Precision, and Recall, which are central metrics to classification problems. Our results show that there are trade-offs between convergence speed and stability, as optimizers like Adagrad and Adadelta, which are more stable, took longer time to converge. Across all our metrics, we chose RMSProp to be the most effective optimizer for this heart disease prediction task because it offered a balanced performance across key metrics. It achieved a precision of 0.765, a recall of 0.827, and an AUC of 0.841, along with faster training time. However, it was not the most stable. We recommend that, in less compute-constrained environments, this method of choosing optimizers through a thorough evaluation should be adopted to increase the scientific nature and performance in training deep learning models.

Invisible Attributes, Visible Biases: Exploring Demographic Shortcuts in MRI-based Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the gold standard for brain imaging. Deep learning (DL) algorithms have been proposed to aid in the diagnosis of diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) from MRI scans. However, DL algorithms can suffer from shortcut learning, in which spurious features, not directly related to the output label, are used for prediction. When these features are related to protected attributes, they can lead to performance bias against underrepresented protected groups, such as those defined by race and sex. In this work, we explore the potential for shortcut learning and demographic bias in DL based AD diagnosis from MRI. We first investigate if DL algorithms can identify race or sex from 3D brain MRI scans to establish the presence or otherwise of race and sex based distributional shifts. Next, we investigate whether training set imbalance by race or sex can cause a drop in model performance, indicating shortcut learning and bias. Finally, we conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of feature attributions in different brain regions for both the protected attribute and AD classification tasks. Through these experiments, and using multiple datasets and DL models (ResNet and SwinTransformer), we demonstrate the existence of both race and sex based shortcut learning and bias in DL based AD classification. Our work lays the foundation for fairer DL diagnostic tools in brain MRI. The code is provided at https://github.com/acharaakshit/ShortMR

Symmetry Interactive Transformer with CNN Framework for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Using Structural MRI

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) combined with deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in the prediction and diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Existing studies have used CNN and transformer to build a well-performing network, but most of them are based on pretraining or ignoring the asymmetrical character caused by brain disorders. We propose an end-to-end network for the detection of disease-based asymmetric induced by left and right brain atrophy which consist of 3D CNN Encoder and Symmetry Interactive Transformer (SIT). Following the inter-equal grid block fetch operation, the corresponding left and right hemisphere features are aligned and subsequently fed into the SIT for diagnostic analysis. SIT can help the model focus more on the regions of asymmetry caused by structural changes, thus improving diagnostic performance. We evaluated our method based on the ADNI dataset, and the results show that the method achieves better diagnostic accuracy (92.5\%) compared to several CNN methods and CNNs combined with a general transformer. The visualization results show that our network pays more attention in regions of brain atrophy, especially for the asymmetric pathological characteristics induced by AD, demonstrating the interpretability and effectiveness of the method.

General Demographic Foundation Models for Enhancing Predictive Performance Across Diseases

Demographic attributes are universally present in electronic health records and serve as vital predictors in clinical risk stratification and treatment decisions. Despite their significance, these attributes are often relegated to auxiliary roles in model design, with limited attention has been given to learning their representations. This study proposes a General Demographic Pre-trained (GDP) model as a foundational representation framework tailored to age and gender. The model is pre-trained and evaluated using datasets with diverse diseases and population compositions from different geographic regions. The GDP architecture explores combinations of ordering strategies and encoding methods to transform tabular demographic inputs into latent embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that sequential ordering substantially improves model performance in discrimination, calibration, and the corresponding information gain at each decision tree split, particularly in diseases where age and gender contribute significantly to risk stratification. Even in datasets where demographic attributes hold relatively low predictive value, GDP enhances the representational importance, increasing their influence in downstream gradient boosting models. The findings suggest that foundational models for tabular demographic attributes can generalize across tasks and populations, offering a promising direction for improving predictive performance in healthcare applications.

EfficientNet in Digital Twin-based Cardiac Arrest Prediction and Analysis

Cardiac arrest is one of the biggest global health problems, and early identification and management are key to enhancing the patient's prognosis. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that combines an EfficientNet-based deep learning model with a digital twin system to improve the early detection and analysis of cardiac arrest. We use compound scaling and EfficientNet to learn the features of cardiovascular images. In parallel, the digital twin creates a realistic and individualized cardiovascular system model of the patient based on data received from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices attached to the patient, which can help in the constant assessment of the patient and the impact of possible treatment plans. As shown by our experiments, the proposed system is highly accurate in its prediction abilities and, at the same time, efficient. Combining highly advanced techniques such as deep learning and digital twin (DT) technology presents the possibility of using an active and individual approach to predicting cardiac disease.

XSRD-Net: EXplainable Stroke Relapse Detection

Stroke is the second most frequent cause of death world wide with an annual mortality of around 5.5 million. Recurrence rates of stroke are between 5 and 25% in the first year. As mortality rates for relapses are extraordinarily high (40%) it is of utmost importance to reduce the recurrence rates. We address this issue by detecting patients at risk of stroke recurrence at an early stage in order to enable appropriate therapy planning. To this end we collected 3D intracranial CTA image data and recorded concomitant heart diseases, the age and the gender of stroke patients between 2010 and 2024. We trained single- and multimodal deep learning based neural networks for binary relapse detection (Task 1) and for relapse free survival (RFS) time prediction together with a subsequent classification (Task 2). The separation of relapse from non-relapse patients (Task 1) could be solved with tabular data (AUC on test dataset: 0.84). However, for the main task, the regression (Task 2), our multimodal XSRD-net processed the modalities vision:tabular with 0.68:0.32 according to modality contribution measures. The c-index with respect to relapses for the multimodal model reached 0.68, and the AUC is 0.71 for the test dataset. Final, deeper interpretability analysis results could highlight a link between both heart diseases (tabular) and carotid arteries (vision) for the detection of relapses and the prediction of the RFS time. This is a central outcome that we strive to strengthen with ongoing data collection and model retraining.

BDPM: A Machine Learning-Based Feature Extractor for Parkinson's Disease Classification via Gut Microbiota Analysis

Background: Parkinson's disease remains a major neurodegenerative disorder with high misdiagnosis rates, primarily due to reliance on clinical rating scales. Recent studies have demonstrated a strong association between gut microbiota and Parkinson's disease, suggesting that microbial composition may serve as a promising biomarker. Although deep learning models based ongut microbiota show potential for early prediction, most approaches rely on single classifiers and often overlook inter-strain correlations or temporal dynamics. Therefore, there is an urgent need for more robust feature extraction methods tailored to microbiome data. Methods: We proposed BDPM (A Machine Learning-Based Feature Extractor for Parkinson's Disease Classification via Gut Microbiota Analysis). First, we collected gut microbiota profiles from 39 Parkinson's patients and their healthy spouses to identify differentially abundant taxa. Second, we developed an innovative feature selection framework named RFRE (Random Forest combined with Recursive Feature Elimination), integrating ecological knowledge to enhance biological interpretability. Finally, we designed a hybrid classification model to capture temporal and spatial patterns in microbiome data.

Predicting effect of novel treatments using molecular pathways and real-world data

In pharmaceutical R&D, predicting the efficacy of a pharmaceutical in treating a particular disease prior to clinical testing or any real-world use has been challenging. In this paper, we propose a flexible and modular machine learning-based approach for predicting the efficacy of an untested pharmaceutical for treating a disease. We train a machine learning model using sets of pharmaceutical-pathway weight impact scores and patient data, which can include patient characteristics and observed clinical outcomes. The resulting model then analyses weighted impact scores of an untested pharmaceutical across human biological molecule-protein pathways to generate a predicted efficacy value. We demonstrate how the method works on a real-world dataset with patient treatments and outcomes, with two different weight impact score algorithms We include methods for evaluating the generalisation performance on unseen treatments, and to characterise conditions under which the approach can be expected to be most predictive. We discuss specific ways in which our approach can be iterated on, making it an initial framework to support future work on predicting the effect of untested drugs, leveraging RWD clinical data and drug embeddings.

WarpPINN-fibers: improved cardiac strain estimation from cine-MR with physics-informed neural networks

The contractile motion of the heart is strongly determined by the distribution of the fibers that constitute cardiac tissue. Strain analysis informed with the orientation of fibers allows to describe several pathologies that are typically associated with impaired mechanics of the myocardium, such as cardiovascular disease. Several methods have been developed to estimate strain-derived metrics from traditional imaging techniques. However, the physical models underlying these methods do not include fiber mechanics, restricting their capacity to accurately explain cardiac function. In this work, we introduce WarpPINN-fibers, a physics-informed neural network framework to accurately obtain cardiac motion and strains enhanced by fiber information. We train our neural network to satisfy a hyper-elastic model and promote fiber contraction with the goal to predict the deformation field of the heart from cine magnetic resonance images. For this purpose, we build a loss function composed of three terms: a data-similarity loss between the reference and the warped template images, a regularizer enforcing near-incompressibility of cardiac tissue and a fiber-stretch penalization that controls strain in the direction of synthetically produced fibers. We show that our neural network improves the former WarpPINN model and effectively controls fiber stretch in a synthetic phantom experiment. Then, we demonstrate that WarpPINN-fibers outperforms alternative methodologies in landmark-tracking and strain curve prediction for a cine-MRI benchmark with a cohort of 15 healthy volunteers. We expect that our method will enable a more precise quantification of cardiac strains through accurate deformation fields that are consistent with fiber physiology, without requiring imaging techniques more sophisticated than MRI.

Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

Medical vision-language models (Med-VLMs) have shown impressive results in tasks such as report generation and visual question answering, but they still face several limitations. Most notably, they underutilize patient metadata and lack integration of clinical diagnostic knowledge. Moreover, most existing models are typically trained from scratch or fine-tuned on large-scale 2D image-text pairs, requiring extensive computational resources, and their effectiveness on 3D medical imaging is often limited due to the absence of structural information. To address these gaps, we propose a data-efficient fine-tuning pipeline to adapt 3D CT-based Med-VLMs for 3D MRI and demonstrate its application in Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis. Our system introduces two key innovations. First, we convert structured metadata into synthetic reports, enriching textual input for improved image-text alignment. Second, we add an auxiliary token trained to predict the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score, a widely used clinical measure of cognitive function that correlates with AD severity. This provides additional supervision for fine-tuning. Applying lightweight prompt tuning to both image and text modalities, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two AD datasets using 1,500 training images, outperforming existing methods fine-tuned on 10,000 images. Code will be released upon publication.